Clara Mokri

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LARB Quarterly, no. 40: Water

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Melina Moe is the curator of literature at Columbia University’s Rare Book &amp; Manuscript Library.

Melina Moe

“I FOUND IT extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but also “very ‘down,’ depressing, spiritually abrasive.” Whatever the merits of the writing, Morrison’s colleagues predicted, the potent mix of dissatisfaction, anger, and mournfulness would limit the book’s commercial appeal—and Morrison reluctantly agreed. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” her letter concludes, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.” 
 
During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book &amp; Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States. 
 
Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism. The letters themselves—generally one, two at most, exchanged with a given writer—constitute an asymmetrical archive. On one end of each communiqué is the ghost of a submitted manuscript (absent from the archive after being returned to the sender, although in some cases survived by a cover letter). On the other is a rejection from Morrison, sometimes brusque yet typically offering something more than an expression of disinterest—notes on craft, character development, the need for more (or less) drama. But also: Autopsies of a changing, and in many ways diminishing, publishing industry; frustrations with the tastes of a reading public; and sympathies for poets, short story writers, and other authors drawn to commercially hopeless genres. 
¤ 
Most of Morrison’s surviving rejection letters date to the 1970s, a period that saw rapid changes in New York book publishing. This was especially true at Random House: a decade after going public in 1959, the company used the influx of cash to fuel a wave of acquisitions and two mergers, purchasing Alfred A. Knopf and Then, in 1965, Random House itself was acquired by RCA, an electronics company, only to be sold a few years later to a media conglomerate owned by the Newhouse family. Under this aegis, Random House went on to acquire a slew of imprints that expanded the company’s global footprint and generic range. 
 
In short, like Pangaea breaking up in reverse, the publishing industry underwent the dramatic, global consolidation that produced today’s “Big Five”: Simon &amp; Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. Recently, this would have shrunk to the Big Four had <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/industry-deals/article/85004-bertelsmann-to-buy-s-s-for-2-2-billion.html">an attempt by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann</a> (owner of Penguin Random House, the largest US publisher) to buy Simon &amp; Schuster from its parent company, ViacomCBS, not been blocked by a US federal judge on antitrust grounds. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/penguin-random-house-simon-schuster.html">celebrated the collapse of the deal,</a> claiming: “The proposed merger would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth, and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.” 
 
Kanter’s statement may seem grandiose, but the underlying anxiety is and was real; Morrison herself voiced similar concerns 40 years earlier. In her 1981 keynote speech at the American Writers Congress, she warned that the business had already tipped too far away from the work of writers and editors, so that “the vitality in the arts which promoters like to talk about is false. Beneath the headlines of blockbusters and bestsellers, underneath the froth of the book fairs,” she averred, “something is terribly wrong.” 
 
It’s perhaps unsurprising that the conditions of for-profit cultural production tend to reward the precisely honed, predictable commodity. Literary scholar Dan Sinykin recently argued that the conglomerate era in publishing has transformed the fictional works that get acquired, published, and placed (strategically) on store shelves. “Conglomerate fiction,” which is often genre fiction—that is, more or less easily labeled as mystery, romance, or science fiction—is less distinguishable by its formal characteristics than by its origins within a “conglomerate superorganism” of marketers, acquisitions editors, dust-jacket designers, and many others whose jobs are on the line and therefore have a stake in a given book’s success. The shift hasn’t been unique to fiction. If the conglomerate era produced corporate authors, <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=21461">the studio system</a> churned out Hollywood blockbusters, while <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674062092">creative writing programs</a> shaped a distinctly reflexive MFA style. Even so, Morrison’s warning about the state of publishing in 1981 didn’t advocate a return to the solitary, romantic toiler. Instead, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1981/10/10/arts/writers-congress-opens-with-calls-for-solidarity.html">her keynote address called for movement building</a>: “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement—assertive, militant, pugnacious.” 
¤ 
Morrison’s letters are unexpectedly forthcoming. Often, she supplements her rejections with diagnoses of an ailing publishing business, growing frustrations with unimaginative taste, the industry’s aversion to risk-taking, and her own sense of creative constraint working at a commercial press (especially in the late 1970s and early ’80s; Morrison left editorial work to be a full-time novelist in the early 1980s). They sketch a “road not taken” in mainstream publishing, as experimental volumes, poetry, and short story collections were increasingly treated as suspect investments of editorial time and publishing house resources. Current market conditions made for “a losing proposition for the publisher and a hopeless one for short story writers,” Morrison informed one author, and unless they were penned by famous novelists, short story collections were “almost like the publication of poetry”—that is, “practically impossible to make a profit from.” In another, lengthy letter from 1977, Morrison outlined how the economics of a book project depended on the mechanisms of distribution. It wasn’t just that casual readers didn’t buy short story collections, but that the major institutions responsible for generating widespread enthusiasm and name recognition were also uninterested: “Book clubs do not make offers for collections of short stories; mass paperback houses do not make offers for collections of short stories by single authors and so we are left with the hope that ten or fifteen thousand people will go into a bookstore and ask for a particular author by name.” The rejection concludes with Morrison’s admission that “[t]here is no point in my being other than honest with you, you should continue to publish in magazines and if you ever decide to write a novel, I’d be delighted to look at it.” 
 
With other projects, Morrison tried to tap into available marketing networks. She wrote to Good Housekeeping in the hopes they would select Lucille Clifton’s Generations (1976) for their book club, as well as to dozens of Black cultural organizations to see if they would organize reading clubs for Angela Davis’s autobiography. Despite being met with middling success, these campaigns—as well as Morrison’s work on the genre-bending Black Book (1974)—fueled an increase in queries from West Coast, experimental voices. Morrison was humane even with the most hopeless of proposals, like those she received from aspiring crossover academics. In 1978, Morrison told a Berkeley professor that the “commercial requirements of Random House are such that literary research and criticism does not figure in its plans.” Still, Morrison’s letter suggests that she’d read the entire manuscript, providing suggestions and the consolation that “unless you have some very ‘hip’ (and probably inaccurate) sociological view to tag on to the literary criticism, it is received with very little enthusiasm.” Similarly, Morrison wrote an apologetic note to Wayne Daniels and Ishmael Reed after passing on a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/01/archives/four-yardbirds-the-guest-word.html">Yardbird</a> reader in 1974, explaining that “the financial crisis that has swept the country has now gripped everybody in publishing and any project on which there is a modicum of risk is heavily discouraged.” She nonetheless offered to “do whatever [she could] to promote it,” asking for copies she could use to “generate some enthusiasm on this coast.” 
 
Morrison was keenly aware that the publishing world, like other areas of business, is a place where it helps to have friends and connections, industry contacts and people who may owe you (or someone you know) a favor. To that end, she occasionally ended a rejection by offering her name as a kind of passport with which hopeful authors might navigate the borders erected by other cultural gatekeepers. In 1977, she advised one young writer to find an agent and directed him toward the legendary literary agents Georges Borchardt and Peter Matson, adding, “When you write to them you may say that although I could not take your manuscript myself, I was very much in love with it, and I’m willing to put it in writing.” She pointed another young radical in the direction of Jules Geller, a former colleague of Morrison’s who went on to work at the Monthly Review, and sent yet another to Charles Harris—a Black editor who overlapped with Morrison briefly at Random House before leaving to become a founding editor at Howard University Press. Even in her rejections, Morrison was building a network of Black writers and editors who might, one day, work to redraw the contours of commercial publishing. 
¤ 
Above all else, Morrison’s rejection letters focus on craft—that is, on the experience of reading a work under review. In one 1978 rejection of a modern Western, she wrote that “it simply wasn’t interesting enough—the excitement, the ‘gut’s, just weren’t there. I am returning it to you herewith.” This sustained desire to explain her rejections elicits a decades-long, fragmentary discourse on style, on how to advance a plot, on when a manuscript’s structure needs to be more unexpected, or—more commonly—on when it needs to be simplified. Readers are needy creatures, Morrison’s letters suggest, demanding both drama and organization, the space and information to make discoveries themselves yet a clear enough path so as not to feel lost. In 1975, she described one manuscript as “put together in a way that made it difficult to enjoy. The scenes are too short and packed too tightly. Motives were lacking.” She forestalled any possible rejoinders about the virtues of avant-garde abstraction by professing her awareness that “the subject itself is about disorder and confusion” but maintaining that “the book should create order for the reader, to help him understand more than simply what happened. He needs to know why.” In other words: Attempts to capture the condition of modern life are no excuse for leaving readers miserable, directionless, or bored. 
 
Editorial advice often boils down to show don’t tell, and literary critics like Ted Underwood, Andrew Piper, and Sinykin have argued that the language of sensory and embodied perception sets fiction apart from other genres, like biography. Morrison’s letters often bear this out. In 1979, she informed one writer that their “story is certainly worth telling,” but they “describe people and events from a distance instead of dramatizing them, developing scenes in which the reader discovers what kind of people they are instead of being told.” Vivid scenery and precise details offer readers room to maneuver, a way to discover a world that resonates. A couple of months earlier, she gave similar advice to a young Bebe Moore Campbell (who went on to become a best-selling author). And, addressing one colorful character who had evidently dropped by the Random House offices unannounced to pitch their memoir, Morrison warned about conflating an eventful life with a well-crafted story. “Your manuscript was no less interesting than you were,” she noted; however, to make it publishable, “you would have to add the artifice (or art) that you said you decidedly would not do.” 
 
What Morrison repeatedly stressed, trusting her exceptional acuity as both a reader and writer, is that writing is a skill of its own—one that doesn’t automatically follow from intellectual brilliance, nor from simply being an interesting or important person. She told one young writer that his ideas were good, but warned that concept was the first and lowest hurdle he would face: 
Your work needs force—some manner of making these potentially powerful characters alive and of giving texture to the setting. Giving details about the people—more than what they look like—what idiosyncrasies they have, what distinguished mannerism—and details about where the action takes place: what is in the room, what is the light like, the smells, etc.—all of that would give us texture and tone. 
Characteristically, this detailed rejection ends with encouragement, as Morrison told the author, “I hope you are able to work on [your manuscript] to give it the vitality it certainly deserves.” 
¤ 
Morrison left Random House in 1983. In the years leading up to her departure, she sought to make more time for her own writing by commuting to the office only once a week. Yet she continued to read unsolicited submissions. She apologized to one author for responding almost a year after her manuscript landed on her desk. (She found the submission “messy and disjointed” and had “no idea what or where a novel might be,” but nevertheless concluded that “there is such power and grit and a funny kind of lyricism that I have to tell you to try to make something of it”—and instructed the author to send it back to her when she had.) To an unpublished writer from South Webster, Ohio, Morrison observed that “there is a great deal of vitality in your writing and a freshness that is welcoming,” though, she warned, “it needs a lot of work with structure and dialog.” Even so, she promised to “give the entire manuscript a reading” if he finished. 
 
Remarkably, this was an offer Morrison extended repeatedly, to unpublished, unknown writers—some of whom had sent only a handful of what she believed to be promising pages. Unsurprisingly, her rejection notes are a practiced repertoire of graceful ways to say “no” and “goodbye”: “Enclosed herewith”; “I decline”; “Please accept my genuine regrets”; “Best of luck”; “With regards and regrets.” But they’re an archive of Morrison’s faith in and sheer love for the written word—and of her kindness. 
 
Throughout her career, Morrison balanced her literary commitments, her commercial responsibilities, and her concerns about the industry overall. The increasing friction between these likely contributed to her eventual decision to leave publishing entirely. Morrison’s rejection letters represent perhaps her clearest articulation of this tension, often for the benefit of young authors who had no claim on her attention other than throwing a piece of writing over the Random House transom. Such writers, she warned, faced uphill battles to get their words into print. “The material is interesting,” she concluded in one letter, “but not the writing: it needs a lot of work to give it the energy a story must have.” 
¤ 
Featured image: Alfio Giuffrida, <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wandtoepfe_A-exp11_Alfio_Giuffrida-AG_Sinnwerke.jpg">Wandtöpfe A-exp11</a>, 2020, is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en">CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed</a> by the creator. Accessed February 26, 2024.

There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters

Christopher T. Fan teaches at UC Irvine. He is also a co-founder of Hyphen magazine.

Christopher T. Fan

The Red Shredding: On Netflix’s “3 Body Problem”

<h4 class="tb f173">David Hering is a critic, novelist and senior lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool. His writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, Guernica, The Point, The London Magazine, and others. He is currently writing a book on haunting in contemporary culture.</h4>

David Hering

A MAN IS being murdered outside a child’s window. A prisoner of Auschwitz, he was caught fighting with another captive. As punishment, he’s being drowned in a river. We can’t see the incident, but the child can. He moves over to the window and looks out beyond our field of vision. Almost immediately, he withdraws back into the room, and utters a gnomic phrase: “Don’t do that again.” 
 
To viewers watching this scene, it’s unclear to whom this is directed: to the prisoners, to the toy soldiers with which the boy has been playing, or to himself. If it’s the prisoners, he has inculcated the values of the murderers who live in his house; he is the son of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, whose home lies on the other side of the camp wall. If it’s the toys, his revulsion at the murder has been redirected to miniature avatars of those outside his window. Most likely, he is talking to himself, and the thing he must not do again is look at what’s happening next door. Better to stay indoors, on the other side of the wall, and withdraw into the make-believe narrative of his toys. The window, as so often occurs in The Zone of Interest (2023), the film from which this scene is taken, is a blinding white square covered by a gauzy curtain. Something awful we cannot see is happening, just out of sight. 
 
The Zone of Interest focuses on the everyday lives of the Höss family. We never see what happens inside Auschwitz, which appears only as a backdrop. Its towers loom above the concrete garden wall, the smoke from its chimneys spreads upwards into the sky, and human bones are washed downstream into the nearby river. We hear sounds of gunfire, screams, barked orders, and machinery, all of which play out over the Höss family’s domestic lives. Each day, Rudolf Höss leaves his house, murders countless prisoners, and comes home to read his children a bedtime story. There’s a word we might use for this juxtaposition of the domestic idyll and the death camp: “obscene.” But the word captures more than the camp’s utter depravity. It derives from the Greek, “ob-skeen,” which means offstage or out of sight, and Glazer’s film relies as a structural principle on a strict division between what is on- and off-screen. There is no on-screen act of violence in the film. Instead, its mise-en-scène is suffused with the horror of the systematic genocide taking place just out of sight, and Glazer uses the dramatic language of the “ob-skeen” to view the Holocaust—a historical obscenity whose visual depiction has been fraught with difficulty—from a new position, one in which viewers are unavoidably enmeshed. 
 
The titular zone, in the 2014 Martin Amis novel that Glazer adapted, is a space that incorporates the Höss residence and the death camp. However, as with his 2013 adaptation of Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Glazer has reworked the source material into something only tangentially similar. The film, most of which takes place in the Höss house, is viewed in mid and wide shots, and the focus on interpersonal relationships in Amis’s novel is abandoned in favor of a surveillance aesthetic. During filming, Glazer covered the house set with cameras, Big Brother–style, some hidden, some visible in every room. The actors moved around the house, aware they were being filmed but not which cameras were filming them. As a consequence, viewers feel as if they’re watching secretly. While the events taking place in the death camp are obscured from view, the house and garden are subjected contrapuntally to a radical visibility—everything the family does is on show, the very opposite of “ob-skeen,” hyper-visible. 
 
Glazer originally trained in theater design, but despite his stated dislike of films that simply stage drama, theater-like, in front of the viewer, the mise-en-scène of The Zone of Interest insists upon the formal idea of the stage, with Glazer calling the house an “arena.” The film is not stagy; rather, it’s acutely aware of the limits of its frame, and of the tension that derives from our awareness of what lies beyond it. Take the Hösses’ garden, a well-kept area directly next to the death-camp wall. The obsessive planting and cultivation of the space has a sickening counterpart in the unseen ethnic cleansing yards away; an early sequence has Rudolf Höss looking over plans for a circular incineration chamber, whose carefully delineated areas recall visually the garden’s layout. 
 
The Höss house and the death camp participate in a larger dynamic of putative cultivation. The film is well aware, to recall Walter Benjamin, that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But it resorts to a curious formal literalism when delineating its so-called civilized and barbaric spaces, one which becomes bound up with the psychological well-being of the Hösses, and the form of the film itself. When Höss is summoned back to Germany in the second half of the film for possible relocation, we find ourselves transported from a scene of mass murder to the scene where that murder is planned. Despite the acclaim that greets him, Höss appears uncomfortable in Germany, and his wife, Hedwig, who lives unfazed alongside genocide, is distraught at the prospect of leaving her house and garden. The closer Rudolf Höss gets to the original scene of the Holocaust’s conception, the weaker he gets physically. He sees a doctor for an unspecified medical problem; he stumbles around retching; he sits alone in his room. It’s as if the stability of the Hösses is reliant on the scrupulous maintenance of their home in Poland. At times, the form of the film itself can appear on the verge of collapse when its scenic integrity is under threat. As Hedwig Höss tends to her well-kept garden, a shot of a flower—one of the film’s few close-ups—is suffused suddenly with the color red, which obscures the entire screen. The sounds of murder and terror from behind the wall increase, and Mica Levi’s soundtrack judders abruptly in and out, as if coming in on the wrong cue. It’s as if someone has put the film in the wrong gear, and we can hear the grinding of the mechanism as it tries to reassert itself. Sure enough, a few seconds later, the original mis-en-scène abruptly returns. 
 
Glazer’s use of the obscene here occurs within a broader question of what one should or shouldn’t show when depicting this particular historical moment. Concerns about dramatizing the Holocaust on film have regularly come up against at least two objections. Firstly, that no dramatization can do justice to the scale of industrialized mass murder, and secondly, that to use the tools of cinema to dramatize Nazi genocide is to become implicated in the cinematic propaganda that was, of course, a key tool of those who propagated that genocide. Should these films embrace a therapeutic humanism, as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) does? Should they assiduously avoid the dramatic in favor of spoken testimony, as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) does? Juxtapose contemporary documentary footage and wartime images, as with Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955), or more recently Steve McQueen’s Occupied City (2023)? Or go beyond the camp wall, but keep most of the horrors around the protagonist out of focus, as in László Nemes’s Son of Saul (2015)? 
 
Critics of Holocaust films often cite Theodor Adorno’s admonition that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. But after watching Glazer’s film, I’ve been thinking about his later reconsideration of that statement: 
[I]t may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz [one] can go on living—especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz. 
The Zone of Interest adopts this position, specifically Adorno’s alignment of “bourgeois subjectivity” with both the perpetrators of Auschwitz and the position from which one moves on from it, looks back on it, views it. One of the most troubling elements of Glazer’s film is that the viewer is not allowed to withdraw from the film’s radically circumscribed scene. Much of what disturbs us in the film comes from our preexisting knowledge of the Holocaust, with which we fill in the information that takes place out of shot. We can imagine the death camps because we have already seen what happened inside them. But The Zone of Interest follows Adorno’s line further. It makes bourgeois subjectivity, which elides both survivors and perpetrators, the necessary frame from which “we” view the film itself. What a horrible prospect, this indivisible position. And it’s this horror that suffuses so much of the film, the idea that the bourgeois cultivation of the scene, and the unspeakable ob-scene, are somehow inextricable, one the obverse of the other, with the viewer the bloody thread that connects them. 
 
I was struck by this sense of indivisibility during two scenes that take place at night, depicting a young Polish girl, a neighbor of the Hösses, discreetly leaving food for the prisoners by secreting apples in the trenches where they labor during the day. These scenes are shot without lighting and in infrared, so the girl’s body appears as white against the sheer black of her surroundings. It’s a startling, uncanny reversal of the daytime scenes, and the only act of compassion we witness in the film, which must necessarily take place out of sight. It’s hard here not to be reminded of the famous scene in Schindler’s List in which Schindler sees a young child visually distinguished from a crowd of people, her red coat the only color in an otherwise black-and-white scene. We learn nothing about the child as a person, but this is the point. She could be anyone and stands for everyone. In Spielberg’s film, the gesture is fundamentally humanistic. By isolating one individual through the subjectivity of the film’s “hero” as he views the scene, Schindler’s List centers a viewer’s understanding of common humanity, one fulfilled dramatically by a moment of human success: Schindler’s climactic rescue of Jews from the death camps. Aligned with Schindler’s vision, viewers ally themselves with humanist action: I view like him, and I would do as he does. With The Zone of Interest, we’re not permitted this position. As the illuminated girl plants apples equal distances apart in the dirt, we realize what we’re viewing is an inversion of the planting of Hedwig’s garden. One scene is the twin of the other. The implication in these matched, intertwined gestures—that good and evil are qualities of which any human is, in the right circumstances, capable—is considerably more discomfiting than Spielberg’s assumption of the viewer’s separation from the atrocities taking place on-screen. 
 
These night sequences are made more discordant by the soundtrack that plays under them. The film has no music other than at the opening and closing credits, but during these infrared scenes, the action is accompanied by a loud guttural sound, almost like a belch but deeper and less identifiably human. Watching these scenes, I felt as if I was hearing some vast repressed thing erupting, pushing up and out and into the world of the film. It’s a deliberately incongruous noise, clearly not coming from anything on-screen. It’s messy and untidy; it’s at odds with the scrupulousness of the mise-en-scène, and it appears when things oppose or undercut Höss’s vision. Later, these noises, which initially accompany only the night-vision scenes, increase in frequency and recur when a clearly uncomfortable Höss is in Germany. He’s examined by a doctor, and their dialogue suggests that his problem is digestive, that something is not breaking down properly, is threatening to explode out of Höss’s body. It feels as if the film is moving not toward resolution but cataclysm, eruption, and breakdown. 
 
Sure enough, in the final sequence of Zone, this tension cracks the film open. Höss, drunk and stumbling out of a party, walks down a stairwell. When he reaches a landing, he starts to physically retch, but doesn’t vomit. He walks down another set of stairs to an identical landing, and dry-retches again. He looks down the corridor and sees a tiny point of light in the darkness. A door opens, flooding the room with light; we’re in Auschwitz, 2023. For 10 minutes, we see workers entering and cleaning the museum that now stands on the site of the camp. The effect is startling, uncanny. That tiny point of light is a portal through which we see the future, a scene out of time. This breakdown of time and space is the eruption that’s been coming, and for the first time, we find ourselves on the other side of the camp wall. We view this scene through a different mode: documentary. The sequences in the museum play out in long fixed takes. We see the ovens being cleaned, the gas chambers being swept, piles of clothes and shoes from dead prisoners, and a corridor lined with photographs of those murdered in the camps. What has been concealed from us, the ob-scene, is now visible. The cleaning and cultivation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum creates a new scene, one of remembrance and testimony, in which the lives of those millions murdered are brought into sight. 
 
Is this abrupt shift to documentary an admission of the failure of Zone’s dramatic form? No, because the juxtaposition is the point, and in these final moments Glazer opens and extends the scene of Zone to something larger: the visual representation of other historical scenes of mass murder (“It’s about now,” he said of the film in a recent interview at the British Film Institute). This climactic breakdown recalls the endings of two recent films, Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), in which a final change of viewing position, a bringing-into-view of something previously unseen, is revelatory to an understanding of an atrocity. Folman’s animated film ends with the simultaneous realization by Folman of his complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon, and the removal of the film’s animation filter to show real, uncensored footage of the killing. Oppenheimer’s film ends with war criminal Anwar Congo watching a reenactment of tortures he himself carried out, only now he plays the torture victim. Viewing, Congo appears to undergo a moment of realization, and—exactly like Höss in Glazer’s film—repeatedly retches but is unable to vomit. In these formal shifts, these films acknowledge that the obscenity of the act of mass killing can only be fully rendered through a hybridized way of seeing, one in which the documentary form catalyzes a clarity of vision. What’s unsettling about the end of Glazer’s film, though, is the continuation of that entwining of those preceding acts of cultivation, of staging and scene creation, from atrocity to act of kindness to memorial. The viewer isn’t allowed to step outside of this entanglement. Instead, the film asks, against the abominations of the contemporary world, what do we bring into view and what do we push out of sight? What scene would we make? What scene are we making right now? 
 
But The Zone of Interest doesn’t end there. Instead, it cuts back to Höss, staring down the corridor toward the camera, before he turns and walks down the stairwell into total darkness. It’s impossible to read Höss’s reaction—whether he sees and doesn’t care, or whether he attains some understanding of his actions, of what has erupted into his vision. Ultimately, though, what we witness is Höss leaving the scene. His disappearance into darkness prefigures his infamy and execution, while the lives of his victims are illuminated with ever more clarity. And we watch, implicated. The credits roll, over darkness.

Viewing the Ob-scene: On Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest”

Melinda Cooper is a professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. She is the author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2017).

Melinda Cooper

Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance

Sarah Brouillette is a professor in the Department of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of three books: Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2007), Literature and the Creative Economy (Stanford University Press, 2014), and UNESCO and the Fate of the Literary (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Sarah Brouillette

A Tax Haven in a Heartless World: On Melinda Cooper’s “Counterrevolution”

Miguel Esteban has diverse and worldwide experience in the production and promotion of live events. Born in Los Angeles of Cuban heritage and raised in Glendale, he obtained his Bachelor’s Degree of Music (Vocal Arts) from the University of Southern California and his Teaching Diploma in Voice from the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève. Alongside Martin T:son Engstroem, he co-founded the Verbier Festival, with which he was associated from 1992 to 2005, as well as the Verbier Festival Orchestra (1999 to 2001). From 2001 to 2011, he was a client advisor for UBS Wealth Management in Switzerland. At the invitation of Ingrid Sutej, he joined Universal Music’s live event subsidiary in London, U‑Live (2012 to 2016). Miguel helped co-produce the musicals White Christmas (2015) and Elf (2015) at the Dominion Theatre in London’s West End. He also managed the five-city, European tour of the fully staged, Salzburg production of Norma featuring Cecilia Bartoli (2015 to 2016).

Since 2016, he and Ingrid formed and manage Idili Live, a global producer and promoter of live events. They co-produced the UK tour of Rent the Musical (2016 to 2017) as well as oversaw the nine city, Asian-Australian concert tour with soprano Anna Netrebko and tenor Yusif Eyvazov (2017). From 2016 to 2020, Miguel was Associate Producer of the London and international productions of Mamma Mia! The Party, an immersive theatrical and dining experience launched by ABBA, as well as of ABBA: Super Troupers, the official international ABBA exhibition. In collaboration once again with Martin Engstroem, he is Associate Artistic Director of the Riga Jurmala Music Festival, which launched in 2019.&nbsp; He recently produced the exhibition The Stars are Bright: Zimbabwe through the eyes of its young painters from Cyrene (1940-1947) in London and will be co-editing an art book about the show.

Miguel Esteban

SCIENCE FICTION WRITER Octavia Estelle Butler, who passed away 15 years ago, would have celebrated her 74th birthday on June 22 of this year. She was a prolific author of 15 novels and the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.” I knew Octavia when I was a teenager. Although my behavior with her was appalling at times, the result of our brief interaction turned out to be more meaningful and enduring than I could have imagined. 
 
In 1979, when I was 14, I was determined to publish a biweekly, 24-page magazine of and about science fiction entitled Transmission. I commissioned Octavia, who was 32, to write an essay. (I do not believe I ever told her my age.) On July 28 of that year, I had heard her speak at the Fantasy Faire convention in Pasadena, California, where she participated in a panel debating the topic “How Science Fiction Handles Social Change.” <a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a> Pasadena was Octavia’s hometown. 
 
<figure id="attachment_330234" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-330234" style="width: 480px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img class="wp-image-330234 size-featured" src="/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/97B4F127-0CC6-4C48-B47E-F82D24446BC5-480x270.jpeg" alt="" width="480" height="270"><figcaption id="caption-attachment-330234" class="wp-caption-text">Photo by Dan Watson</figcaption></figure> 
 
As a first-generation Cuban American living with my divorced mother and two siblings in a small bungalow that few friends were invited to visit, perhaps I felt liberated from conventions. In any case, I was precocious. 
 
I was a seasoned cold-caller, having organized a “Star Wars Seminar” in early 1978 at my junior high school in Glendale, California, when I was 12 or 13. My sole credential was that I had watched Star Wars 21 times at the cinema. As guest speakers, I corralled Star Trek scriptwriters D. C.&nbsp;Fontana, David Gerrold, and George Clayton Johnson, all compliant victims of my telephone skills. 
 
I developed an early passion for journalism: when I was 13, my first article appeared in the January 1979 issue of the nationally distributed Future Magazine. 
 
By the time I contacted Octavia, she boasted Doubleday, Signet/New American Library, and Avon among the publishers of her first novels. The bio she provided for the Fantasy Faire program read: 
Octavia Butler is a hermit, living in the middle of Los Angeles, a pessimist (if she isn’t careful), a feminist, a quiet egotist, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty and drive. She has written “Patternmasters,” “Mind of My Mind,” “Survivor,” “Kindred,” and “Wild Seed.” “Kindred,” among other things, is a rather shocking novel of slavery in early America, which probably should be read by every white American. 
It was only in 1979 that Octavia made the leap to devote herself to writing full-time. In a letter in November 1980, she wrote, “I am the only black woman writing science fiction (there are three black men). I believe my work would be of interest to general readers as well as sf fans, but my problem has been reaching people outside the genre.” Octavia did not live to see one of her novels — Parable of the Sower — finally reach the New York Times Best Seller list in 2020, to witness NASA naming a landing site on Mars after her, or to learn that her novels Dawn and Wild Seed were being developed for Amazon Prime Video by Ava DuVernay and Viola Davis, respectively. 
 
I had not saved any documents from that teenage venture. I still owned a single copy of the magazine only because my brother had offered me one decades later when he was cleaning out his garage. Fortunately, Octavia had kept our correspondence and the drafts of her essay, which I could access through her substantial archives at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. Coupled with additional research, this is how I reconstructed our more than 40-year-old exchange. 
 
On August 3, 1979, I spoke and then wrote to Octavia, inviting her to contribute a 3,000-word essay to the inaugural (and ultimately only) issue of Transmission Magazine. (Earlier in the year, I had published a four-page preview [“Volume 1, Number 0”], financed for $200 by a full-page ad for Omni Magazine that I sold by cold-calling Bob Guccione Jr.) 
 
Adopting a tone that, upon reflection, would have been shocking even at the time, I wrote, 
After hearing you speak at the Fantasy Faire convention, I wondered if you would be willing to write … an article giving the reader an insight on the who, what, where, when, why, and how of minorities in science fiction, with emphasis on blacks. I would like you to discuss things on the line of [sic] how writers can write believable characters into their stories, why they tend to ignore minorities, how they ignore minorities, why they tend to write unbelievable minority characters, etc. Possibly you want to use your novels as contrasting examples, since they excel all others in their manipulation of minorities, especially blacks (I found “Survivor” quite intriguing in that sense) … A minority (in this case, a black) is insulted when a writer introduces a black character in his/her story who is not believable and is based solely on infuriating stereotypes molded by the prejudiced society of the ’50s and ’60s. And I also think you’re the only person qualified (at this time) to write a definitive article on this subject. 
Although I own up to everything I wrote back then, my language today about racialized groups or Black people in particular would not be so blindly insensitive. Nor would I have suggested such a disgraceful title for the article, which Octavia gracefully ignored. 
 
I offered her $50, which she accepted on the condition that she retain the copyright and the right to resell the essay three months after publication. “Since I am the only black woman writing sf, I have a feeling I’ll be needing this article again,” she explained. 
 
At the end of the month, Octavia sent me her first draft, titled “Lost Races of Science Fiction.” We spoke over the phone, following which this cocky, 14-year-old editor sent his comments to an established and revered writer. 
After I spoke with you about changes in the manuscript, I sat down and read the article, I think, about five times. The first seven-and-one-fourth pages are excellent, for you present a strong and interesting argument. On the other hand, the last two-and-three-fourths pages (or there-abouts) do not belong in this article in the manner you included them. I tried a hundred times over (believe me!) to swallow your reason for its inclusion in the “me-to-you” fashion (that most readers are writing or have “that” desire to write and would appreciate being offered worthy advise [sic] by a pro). Sorry. TRANSMISSION will not speak to its readers directly ever (except in special cases, like my INTRO or in any special pieces involving the necessary attention by readers) [Octavia highlights the sentence up to this point and writes “Ass!” in the left margin]; on the other hand, I will allow use of the “first person” article structure. My reason for this is that I fear losing non-writers when the magazine (even if only a small portion of it) speaks to writers or would-be writers. I fear boring the reader who doesn’t give a damn about what writers can do to introduce minority characters. What I would like [sic] is how YOU would go about using minority characters in your stories using the hypothetical situation that you’re a white writer faced with the task of introducing a believable black character into her story (I’m holding my breath to see how you figure this one out!). 
I could not hold back, so I continued:&nbsp; 
Doing this, I know, would bring your article to the point of excellence. Another thing: don’t end with the paragraph, “Get a feel for the character…” It doesn’t work. (Any pertinent information in that paragraph can come earlier.) I want the article to end differently. Have you ever heard the theory on article writing that goes, “Tell the reader what you’re going to tell him; tell him; then tell him what you told him”? You’re [sic] article ends as if you are going to say more, but you don’t and the reader mentally trips. That’s a no-no. Use the theory. Tell an anecdote that captures the flavor of your article; a final note of hope — something like that. I would appreciate your calling me if any questions arise. If none, I need the rewrite by September 18. Thanks a bunch! 
“Ass!” indeed. 
 
On September 12, well before my random deadline (the unique issue of the magazine would not be published until the following year), Octavia wrote back. Not to give me the dressing down I deserved, but to send a revised and final version. She wrote: 
Enclosed are the changes in “Lost Races…” that you requested. I’ve gotten rid of the offending “yous” in the last three pages and added an anecdote at the end of the article. The anecdote I used, by the way, was one I had planned to use in the original version. I even went to the library and hunted out the novel in which Uncle appears, but for some reason (dislike?) I did not use him. I wish you the best of luck with TRANSMISSION. I can understand your eagerness to do the best job you can on it (though I think you must be a masochist to want to bring it out biweekly). 
I spent the summer of 1980 working full-time as a typist to raise the $1,200 necessary to professionally typeset and print 1,000 copies. A few specialized bookstores agreed to carry the publication, but sales were dismal despite a cover price of $1. This explains why I sounded so depressed in an interview on KPFK’s <a href="http://www.hour25online.com/">Hour 25</a>, the long-running, popular radio show devoted to science and science fiction. At the end of my segment, host Mike Hodel read Octavia’s entire essay, closing with this: “It appears in the first issue of Transmission Magazine. And if for no other reason than that article, I recommend that you think seriously about purchasing this magazine.” (Hodel had also contributed a short article to&nbsp;Transmission.) 
 
After sending her a copy of the magazine, I do not recall having contact with Octavia ever again. 
 
Fast forward to 2018, when a childhood friend who had helped me with my teenage enterprises sent me a link to an <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlers-prescient-vision-of-a-zealot-elected-to-make-america-great-again">article </a>about Octavia. Appearing in the online edition of The New Yorker, it contained a non-assuming, subordinate clause that few readers would have noticed: “As she wrote in a 1980 essay for the magazine Transmission, titled ‘Lost Races of Science Fiction…’” 
 
Octavia’s essay had been reprinted for the first time in over 35 years in Gerry Canavan’s 2016 book,&nbsp;Octavia E. Butler&nbsp;(University of Illinois Press). Canavan writes, 
In 1980 Butler published a short essay in the science fiction magazine Transmission titled “Lost Races of Science Fiction.” The essay did not make an especially large splash, but it was very important to Butler — she often included copies of it in her letters to interviewers and to her fans as a way of explaining her attitude toward race and racism both within SF texts and within the real-world SF community. 
It “did not make an especially large splash” because seemingly no one had bought the publication in which it had originally appeared. And now, in a <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-252-08216-0">review </a>of Canavan’s tome, Publishers Weekly called the essay “groundbreaking.” In her <a href="https://www.wcwonline.org/Women-s-Review-of-Books-November/December-2017/the-genius-octavia-butler">review</a> for the Women’s Review of Books, Nisi Shawl writes about 
Butler’s long out-of-circulation 1980 essay, “Lost Races of Science Fiction.” A manifesto about the erroneousness of excluding black characters from SF because of the “messiness” involved in depicting nonwhites, “Lost Races” ends with a half-jubilant, half-deploring assessment of science fiction’s attitudes toward inclusivity and prejudice. “Times have changed,” Butler decrees. In the next sentence, though, she admonishes the field that “it still has a long way to go.” That her pronouncements on this matter hold true nearly forty years after they were first published speaks volumes about the slow rate of social change and Butler’s continuing centrality to our understanding of the fantastic genres. 
Octavia’s essay was reprinted this year in Octavia E. Butler: Kindred, Fledgling, Collected Stories (edited by Canavan and Shawl, Library of America). A <a href="https://www.bookforum.com/print/2801/octavia-e-butler-s-visionary-science-fiction-24379">review</a> in Bookforum calls it “a blunt 1980 essay on the absence of nonwhite characters in the genre.” Excerpts from the essay are included in a <a href="https://harpers.org/archive/2021/02/parable-of-the-butler-octavia-butler-kindred-fledgling/">review</a> in Harper’s Magazine. 
 
Over 40 years after the fact, I realized that something to which I contributed during my mid-teens had, quietly and consistently, lived on to arguably become an influential piece in this amazing writer’s oeuvre. As I reread my letters to Octavia, I came face-to-face with my 14-year-old self. It was painful to rediscover much of what I had written to her. It was remarkable to observe how Octavia filtered out everything that made me such an “Ass!” and did not let it prevent her from writing an incisive essay that still resonates today. I feel proud of the role I played in bringing “Lost Races of Science Fiction” to life. 
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<a href="/contributor/miguel-esteban/">Miguel Esteban has diverse and worldwide experience in the production and promotion of live events, including West End musicals, opera gala concerts and exhibitions. His teenage passion for nonfiction writing has never subsided.</a> 
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Featured image: “<a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Butler_signing_portrait.jpg">Butler signing portrait</a>” by Nikolas Coukouma is licensed under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/deed.en">CC BY 2.5</a>. 
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<a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a> Interview with Charlie Rose on June 1, 2000: 
 
OB: When I was just getting started — around ’79, I guess it was — my books were just starting to do reasonably well — I was on a science fiction convention panel and in order to start trouble — I think — I hope — the guy next to me — science fiction panels are known for, you know, start an argument and then you can, you know, mix it up and something interesting might happen — the guy next to me was an editor [David Houston] and he said that he thought it wasn’t really necessary to have black characters in science fiction because you could always make any racial statement you needed to make by way of extraterrestrials. And if he was trying to start trouble, he certainly succeeded. 
 
CR: You took it as trouble, didn’t you? 
 
OB: Oh yeah. 
 
CR: Or you made trouble. 
 
OB: Well, I wound up writing an article about it and about the idea of writing science fiction as if it were happening in your neighborhood.

VIDEO: Hunger Games

By Clara MokriApril 10, 2012

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