Melendy Avenue Review 2022-11-18
Hello! Pretty standard MAR today, I’ve got two reviews of pretty good books and a picture of a very pretty cat. I think I’ve picked up a few subscribers recently- welcome! Obligatory substack pitch: consider paying some money and becoming a Citizen, you get to vote on my reading and see exclusive content, most notably my fiction (which, truth be told, I’ve been slow producing these days, but I plan on doing more). I understand these subscribers might have come from me asking impertinent questions of a more successful (and at least ten years younger lol) substack writer, so, maybe I’ll do more of that!
CONTENTS
Reviews
Jonas, The Gnostic Religion
Felker-Martin, Manhunt
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: The Lady Seated
REVIEWS
Hans Jonas, “The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity” (1958) - It’s a commonplace, and a true one, that a lot of the tropes we assign to villains in fiction coincide with stereotypes that Christians often hold of Jews: sneaky, treacherous, cunning, possessed of a combination of physical weakness and ugliness with danger and a certain allure. I’d add another set of villainy-tropes that map onto an essentially religious divide, and these are associated with Gnosticism, or anyway, European culture’s memory of Gnosticism. Secret cults, underground in both social and geological senses, dedicated to esoteric (but not overly complicated, so as to overwhelm the reader!) belief systems at odds with orthodoxy, intimations of weird sex and other lifestyle practices, convinced something is essentially wrong with the world and, moreover, that maybe we ought to act accordingly… we see plenty of all that in bad guys in fiction, film, comic books, etc.
We don’t know that much about Gnosticism because its opponents, the Christian Church (this was before it split off into Catholic and Orthodox branches and well before the Reformation), eradicated pretty much all Gnostic groups from the face of the Earth. For centuries, most of what we “knew” about them came from whatever inquisitors chose to jot down about their victims before destroying them. About a decade before philosopher Hans Jonas began writing this book, the Nag Hammadi corpus, discovered by archaeologists in Egypt, had started filtering out, providing us with almost all of the direct primary sources on Gnosticism we have. Seeing as Nag Hammadi was just one respectable cache of documents, it was a huge find but not comprehensive. We’re still missing a lot, texts but also, crucially, context to a lot of what we do have about Gnosticism.
Arguably, the whole category of “Gnosticism” is more of an artifact of orthodox Christian persecution, the ideas and practices they lumped together as they proscribed them, than of anything having to do with the beliefs of those they persecuted. Indeed, the literature these days seems to be in a place where they almost regard the term “Gnostic” as more trouble than it’s worth, a lump where there ought to be splits (admittedly, I get this impression mostly from one (1) podcast, but hey, I’m a modernist).
Well… I gotta admit… there is a part of me that thinks that the “reception history” of the Gnostics is almost more important than whether or not they were truly a unitary group. Note, I do think it’s important to try to understand what they actually believed. But… they’re gone. Gone, gone, gone. All those sects with all those odd and vaguely sinister-sounding names – Valentinians, Basilideans, Sethites, Marcionites, Manicheans, on and on – are gone, and even if some internet weirdos say they’re going to adopt their beliefs, get the band back together again, it’s not the same. In most respects, Gnosticism is more important as a shadow of Christianity than it is in its own right.
Hans Jonas was a student of Heidegger’s in pre-WWII Germany, one of a group of Jewish students of the loathsome dwarf master and who went on to big careers, including Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse (I read a book by a skillful but pedantic intellectual historian yelping about how they were illiberal, illiberal all, tainted by the master! “Well, duh! Who cares?” It was the nineties, or anyway the eternal nineties of the liberal mind…). He left when the Nazis took power, swore he’d only come back to Germany as part of an army to defeat them- and lived up to his promise as part of the Jewish Brigade in the British army. He may have denounced Heidegger, but he didn’t denounce all of the dimensions of the philosophical explorations Heidegger called for, encouraged his students towards.
Practically speaking, this means that Jonas makes much broader analyses than is common in ancient history today, and one gets the idea was becoming common back then, too. Thank god! Yes, there’s a need for the cautious, carefully source-bound histories that are now de rigeur, the more so the further you get from the presence. But there are readability and relevance questions involved, and history that’s too tightly tied to primary sources — especially when there’s not a lot of them in a given area, and some of them of indirect relevance — risks turning into pointless antiquarianism.
In my mind, that impassioned but rigorous — really, more impassioned and rigorous, in the best of this sort of work, the two don’t detract from each other — multidimensional analysis that characterizes the best German (and German-inspired) historical thought is probably the best approach we moderns can take to the history of Gnosticism (outside of straight up fiction approaches, maybe). Jonas begins with a discussion of the Greek Mediterranean in which Gnosticism arises, a meeting place of cultures from India to Spain and which participants reached well beyond. Among other things, the Greek Mediterranean became the cockpit where competing ideas not just about religious content, but what religious form — what religion constitutes, how it regulates action and thought — would look like for vast swathes of the human planet going forward.
Christianity was one product of this setting. So too was its shadow, Gnosticism (Gnosticism deserves to be seen as Christianity’s shadow, much more than the bad joke of Satanism, half of which is just misappropriated, garbled Gnostic ideas and tropes anyway), even as Gnostic movements would become important in places well away from the Mediterranean. Beyond whatever errors antiquarians might ding him for, Jonas comes closest to intellectual traps when he ascribes ideas as uniquely belonging to given cultures- this a Greek idea, this Persian, that Babylonian, etc. But by and large, he avoids essentializing, which you’d fucking well better in the insane stewpot of peoples and cultures that was the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East at the time. Rather, better to think of these ideas as forms, structures of thought molded in given environments that came into contact with each other, combined, re-formed.
Then we get that favorite German intellectual pastime: classification. We go through the various Gnostic subgroups based on their attitudes towards where their central concern — error, imperfection, evil — comes from. Persian-inflected Gnosticism, like Manichaeism, which understands evil as primordial, a darkness always coexisting with good, what Jonas sees as Syriac Gnosticisms which hold that a germ of imperfection comes from iterative layers of creation by increasingly imperfect spiritual creators, Marcion’s Christian-ish Gnosticism, etc etc.
Jonas doesn’t stint from showing off what primary sources were available, giving us bits of Gnostic poetry, scripture, and lore from Nag Hammadi or from Christian polemicist accounts. And what lore it is! Alongside the questions the Gnostics asked — pretty fundamental ones that Christian apologists, to my mind, really don’t answer that well — it’s the lore that has attracted such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, whose essay on Basilides the False probably helped launch more interest in Gnosticism than any other document of the twentieth century. What Jonas calls “Syriac Gnosticism” especially had colorful, strange, uncanny stories attached, made all the more dreamlike by how fragmentary they, and our knowledge of their contexts, are and is. Multiple layers of creation guarded by the spawn of a blind idiot god, where you needed to memorize thousands of passwords to let your soul ascend to its true home beyond anything like the ken of this world; the incarnation of Wisdom as a woman tempted into creating a fallen material world out of a desire to imitate her impossibly remote, perfect father, only to fall further and further into the world’s degradation (including incarnations as Helen of Troy and as a Tyrian sex worker) who must be rescued and restored to free humanity from this false, wicked world…
Because, let’s face it- how the Gnostics fit in to the world of late antiquity, what happened to them, all the ins and outs and specifics… they’re important, no doubt, and we should encourage work that is more granular than what Jonas does, attentive to material culture, linguistic analysis, etc etc, stuff that Jonas either didn’t have access to or care to do in his broad analysis of Gnosticism. But unless we’re gonna invent time travel any time soon, those gritty details are less important for the general historical writer than the things the Gnostics represent. There’s the aspect where they represent the dark, the shadowy, the other, the villainous, all those tropes we talked about earlier… but there’s also a way in which they articulate, arguably more than any other cultural force in western, maybe in human, history something important. Common to all Gnostic faiths is the idea that this world is not our home- that there is something essentially wrong not (just) with people, but with Creation. Christianity puts original sin on a lady, an apple, and a snake- Gnostics ask the obvious question: why ladies, snakes, apples, etc., if an all-powerful all-good being had a say in the matter? Why any of this? Something stinks.
To me, this suspicion is an ineradicable part of the human inheritance. We can imagine other worlds, and we can reflect on this world, and we can see gaps between the two, for better and for worse. Gnosticism is, whatever else it is as a specific phenomenon of Mediterranean antiquity, the expression of that gap… and you can argue that Christianity was the channeling of the thoughts that result from the gap into a set of channels that various people understood as theologically and, dare I say it, socially and politically acceptable, shutting off dangerous lines of enquiry. It’s way too much of a stretch to attribute real revolutionary potential to Gnosticism. As it existed, it seemed to oscillate between ascetic withdrawal and hedonistic excess. Google contemporary Gnostics and you’re in the world of new age nonsense, a notch or two away from QAnon, complete with online grifters- and there was always a carnival barker element to Gnosticism, as seen in the career of Simon Magus.
Amusingly, one major right-wing thinker of the twentieth century, Eric Voegelin, did try to attribute the rise of more or less every ideology to the left of, say, Alexis de Tocqueville, to a sub rosa embrace of Gnosticism! But pay any sustained attention to what actually successful revolutionaries are like, and you don’t see much Gnosticism there- which, indeed, seems to disappoint some of my more… aesthetically-inclined friends. For the revolutionary, like it or not, we’re stuck with this world. And part of this world are the feelings and thoughts Gnosticism expressed, and a truly ruthless criticism of all existing has to take it into account. You’ll find few better ways to take it on board, in my opinion, than reading Jonas. *****
Gretchen Felker-Martin, “Manhunt” (2022) - This book has made quite a splash! It’s a post-apocalyptic horror novel where the three most prominent characters are all trans (two trans women and one trans man) who have to make their way in a world ravaged by “T-Rex,” a disease which causes anyone with enough testosterone to turn into ravaging mindless mutants. A lot of the reviews of this book put their emphasis on the bloodiness and violence in it. Surely, a story where two of the main characters hunt zombified men and cut their testes off to extract the estrogen they need for them and other trans women to avoid turning into said zombies (I’m enough of a dummy about endocrinology I didn’t even know you got estrogen from testes! Learning!) can be said to be pretty choice as far as violence is concerned. I’m a dude who doesn’t quail from written, or most visual, depictions of violence, especially violence in the heat of combat, so that didn’t bother me too much. Body horror does gross me out more, and Felker-Martin, herself a trans woman, does fine work with the particulars of the T-Rex disease, the semi-conscious cancers, the way it deforms men (and trans women who cannot get what they need in time).
Considerably more interesting to me than the blood-and-guts horror elements are the political and interpersonal horrors of the world Felker-Martin makes. She says she wanted to dramatize – she uses the word “melodrama” as a compliment – what trans women face in the world, the ways their bodies can turn against them in visceral, horrifying ways, and the ways others seek to harm them. With the others, there’s a quite strict gender line in terms of how the cis express that sadism: men are mindless mutants who rape, kill, cannibalize- you can almost feel bad for them, they just can’t help themselves. Women, for their part, have chosen to imitate pre-T-Rex men, their exclusions, their hierarchies, their militaries and religions, their secret police, and aim all of that towards trans women. The real villains in the piece are TERFs, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who form fascist militias who look to make themselves queens of the wasteland. Felker-Martin, in the fine tradition of Sun Tzu (and Tony Soprano’s reading of same!), has found the most choleric opponent of all time, the online “gender critical” types, and has irritated the shit out of them. They’re mad, folks! I’m not sure if we’ve heard about the book from the other type of woman Felker-Martin paints in vivid, spiteful (in the most complimentary sense of the word) colors, rich, vaguely-progressive, kind of Elizabeth Holmes-style girl-boss types, but they probably don’t read the same social media feeds that TERFs do.
For most of the book we follow Beth and Fran, a pair of trans women who used to know each other in high school, and who now wander the New England countryside trying to survive. Beth is a big tough former jock type who’s handy with a bow, Fran is a pretty, petite gal with the medical training to help keep them alive and find the stuff they need. The body horror can be gross, the horror of being hunted is tough, but really, the grimmest stuff for me was the inter-trans interpersonal stuff, the fraught relationship between working-class Beth, who cannot pass as a cis woman, and the more middle-class Fran, who can. Everybody talks about doing the right thing, being there for each other, respecting each other’s identities until the chips come down, and then it turns into gender essentialism, heartbreak, people getting brained by falling air conditioners, and other things no one wants to think about. Things get more complicated still when Robbie, a trans man who’s been wandering around sniping rampaging cis men, and Indira, a cis woman who’s their friend and a skilled scientist (she turns the balls into estrogen), enter the picture. It’s “found family” but not in the lame Joss Whedon sense- it has all of the claustrophobia and barely-suppressed despair of real found family, found under the circumstances such families are generally found: a struggle for survival. People pair off, off and on, in ways that make some happy and some less so, all in the context of this awful situation.
On the run from the TERFs, led by an enforcer with a bad habit of sleeping with trans sex workers, the foursome take a job with a “bunker brat,” the aforementioned girl-boss, who took her family money and built a GOOP-ified survival bunker into the New Hampshire hillsides. Naturally, the bunker turns out to suck pretty bad, but equally naturally, it also dangles the sorts of promises that such setups do to get people involved- money, safety, acceptance (for some). In the end, the characters need to battle both the bunker brats and the TERF militia for survival and for a potential future where they could thrive.
So… this is “taking the eagles to Mordor” level criticism, but my cis self did wonder the whole time… Beth and Fran are worried that if they don’t get enough estrogen, they will get T-Rex and face a fate worse than death. They’re trans women. Why don’t they remove their testes? Fran is at least partially motivated to do some bad things when the bunker brat holds out genital replacement surgery to her. Removing testes is a lot easier, people did it all the time back when before antibiotics etc. We learn that at least some people do that, and that the TERFs actually make boys who are young enough not to have enough testosterone to get T-Rex either get castrated or get killed. I figure that’s a hint- that the TERFs do it, they create a kind of caste of jannissaries out of emasculated boys, so it’s probably bad. I’m not sure I get why? I’m a cis man. I want to have my male genitalia. If it were a choice between not having them and still having them but becoming a disgusting mindless zombie, I’d choose the former! I’d straight up Thomas Aquinas the situation. But then again if I have to live in a shitty post-apocalyptic world, I’d probably just choose a quick death before either…
So, we run into the limits of experience, here. I do not know what it's like to be trans. And I try to learn about it without asking a bunch of specific, prying questions, so, I tend to learn things in kind of an indirect way, among other things by trying to listen to trans people (and other people with radically different life experiences) in my life. I wonder if that’s what makes people mad about Felker-Martin’s work- an unapologetically trans voice, one that conjures a world where trans people are at the center, not marginal figures for pathos or diversity points, and not needing to over-perform — to avoid tweaking the irritable, for instance, or to answer every question a dumb cis dude reader might come up with — to establish validity. It doesn’t make me mad- I like to see it. Some of what comes with it leaves me wondering, but that’s not too bad, and it’s an inevitable companion of the limits of experiential knowledge.
We also run into the limits of horror, or, horror and me. I’m not a big horror guy! Like anime, video games, and numerous other cultural touchstones of the people around me, horror and me passed like ships in the night. At the end of the day, any type of writing is selling something. Nonfiction tends to sell a thesis. Fiction tends to sell feelings. Probably, due to a mixture of scaredy-cat-ness and pedantry, I often don’t buy the feeling of horror, at least not in a thrilling way. I’m a reasonably smart boy, dealing with this stuff at a remove, so I can say stuff like, “well, plenty of eunuchs got along just fine back in the day, I’d just lop my balls off!” A bit like a golden age scifi hero of instrumental rationality (except their authors usually were anything but- you figure a Heinlein hero would torch galaxies rather than slip that girdle over his oat tote), and ultimately just as out of tune with what anybody wants to hear… but, here I sit.
But that’s not to say that nothing in books scares me. Maybe this is trite, but the interpersonal (and, to an extent, the political/social collapse stuff) is scary, and Felker-Martin does as well with that as the writers whose stuff in that vein makes up part of my personal canon. Felker-Martin loves melodrama more than John Kennedy Toole, Charles Portis, James Cain, Doris Lessing, and other favorites of mine who explored the impossibilities and imprisonments of communication, desire, the condition of being human with other humans… but then again, Toole and Cain surely weren’t strangers to a more grand guignol style of emotional failure and cruelty… anyway! A fine, compelling work, even if it’s a genre the offerings of which I’m less receptive to than others. ****’
LAGNIAPPE
Mithra Pic: The Lady Seated
Just look at her