“Society is a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism.” — Ernest Becker (1924-1974), The Denial of Death
I. New Haven, 1980
The room is warm and the radiators knock. Outside the snow comes down on the Old Campus and the brick goes black with wet. Inside, the seminar runs the way it always runs. A text goes up on the table. The close readers take it apart. Paul de Man (1919-1983) is the presiding spirit of the place, and Geoffrey Hartman (1929-2016) reads with the patience of a watchmaker, and the conclusion arrives on schedule. Meaning fails. The author is a fiction. The human subject dissolves into language and leaves no residue.
Heather Mac Donald (b. 1956) has come back to Yale for the doctorate. She loves the language. She came to it through the canon, through the long sentences and the bright particulars, and she sat in these rooms believing the close reading was a discipline that honored the text. Within a semester she sees the machine. Whatever goes in, the same thing comes out. Every poem, every novel, every letter resolves to the same verdict. The verdict is that nothing holds.
She walks out. She does not walk back in.
She tells the story for the rest of her life, and she tells it as an intellectual conversion. It is that. It is also something underneath that, something she does not name, because naming it would cost her the thing the story protects. The deconstruction seminar handed her the terror of meaninglessness in academic dress, and she fled the room the way a man flees a fire.
II. The Two Terrors
Becker’s claim is plain. Man knows he will die, and the knowledge is unbearable, and so he builds a hero system, a cultural recipe for counting in the universe past the span of the body. Every society hands out roles that promise significance. Play the role well and you transcend the worm. The heroism can run through God, through children, through nation, through art, through a name on a building. The structure varies. The work is constant. The work holds off two terrors at once. The first is death, the literal end. The second is insignificance, the suspicion that the life adds to nothing and the death subtracts nothing, that the man was a noise the universe did not hear.
Place Mac Donald against the two terrors.
She is an atheist. She finds the idea of a benevolent God irreconcilable with what she reads as divine indifference to human outcomes. She keeps one impulse from the religious life, the wish to give thanks for a privileged existence, and she has no being to thank, so the wish hangs in the air with nowhere to land. The first terror, then, comes to her without a sedative. No afterlife waits. The bowl of light she describes from her California childhood, the brilliant white light bouncing off the ocean and filling the open hills, goes dark and stays dark.
The second terror is the one she fights in public, every week, for thirty years. Deconstruction was its first face. The doctrine that the subject dissolves into language is the terror of insignificance written as a theory of reading. She did not refute it with a counter-theory. She left the building and went looking for solid ground, and she found it in the things a screen audition or a board exam or a crime statistic could measure.
III. The Subtraction Story
The hero system shows in what a man removes from his life and what remains standing.
Mac Donald removes God. She removes the academy, walking out of the doctorate and the literary career it promised. The Robin Finn profile in The New York Times in November 2000 catches the rest of the subtraction without pressing it. Finn pushes on her hostility to divorce and learns that her own parents divorced when she was twelve. Mac Donald says children are very conservative little creatures. Then she notes that she is childless, that she never married. The reporter does not follow the thread. The reader does the work.
Set the removals in a line. No God. No academy. No marriage. No child. Each removal closes a standard route to the denial of death. The believer outlasts the grave through Him. The scholar outlasts it through the discipline he joins. The father and the mother outlast it through the body that carries the name forward. Mac Donald has shut every one of these doors, some by argument, some by circumstance, and the closing is not a series of accidents. It describes a person who trusts only what can stand on its own without faith, without a guild to certify it, without an heir to carry it.
What remains standing after the subtractions is the canon and the standard. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). The Latin classics. The audition behind the screen. The surgeon whose patient lives. The patrol officer who goes where the crime is. These carry her whole freight. For the religious conservative the canon is penultimate, a good thing under God, who is the real permanence. For Mac Donald there is nothing behind the canon. The canon is the permanence. This is why she cannot treat a lowered standard as a policy question. A lowered standard tells her that excellence was a construction after all, that the deconstruction seminar was right, that she will die and leave nothing because there was never anything that lasted. The intensity readers mistake for ideology is the intensity of a person defending the only afterlife she has allowed herself.
IV. One Word, Many Houses
Take her sacred word and watch it change shape as it passes between hero systems. Her set defines merit as a thing you can measure and rank, a property that exists in the world apart from anyone’s opinion of it. A surgeon and a violinist can be better or worse, and the difference is not a social construction. Hold that meaning steady and carry it into other rooms.
A Benedictine in choir at four in the morning lives by a standard as exacting as any board exam, and he would not call it merit, and he would refuse to rank it. The Rule asks that in all things God may be glorified. The chant must be right. The chant must also be offered up and forgotten, the singer effaced, the self dissolved into an order older than the man and continuing past him. To measure his excellence and post the ranking is pride, a deadly sin, the one move that voids the whole enterprise. He denies death by vanishing into Him. Mac Donald denies death by building a monument with her name legible on the base. Same care, same exactness, opposite architecture.
A jazz player at a two in the morning session means something else again. Excellence is feel, the thing that happens in the room between the horn and the drums, unrepeatable, gone when the set ends. Put the player behind a screen and you have destroyed the music, because you have to see the sweat and hear the room and know who taught him. His permanence is the recording and the line of players he sat in with, the story passed down of the night John Coltrane (1926-1967) did the thing no one has done since. Merit lives in the moment and dies with it, and the death is part of the beauty. Mac Donald wants merit to be the part that does not die.
A founder in a South of Market office means the near reverse of what she means. Merit is the ship date and the traction and the willingness to break the inherited thing. The canon is technical debt. Standards are what you disrupt on the way to the dent in the universe. His denial of death is the product that scales past him, the company that runs when he is gone. Tell him a thing is excellent because it has been done this way for two hundred years and you have told him it is dead weight. He and Mac Donald use the same word and point it in opposite directions, she at the preservation of the old form, he at its demolition.
A flamenco singer in a back room in Andalusia carries a standard no panel can score. The word is duende, the dark sound, the spirit that Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) called the spirit of the earth. The technically flawless cantaor without duende fails, and every man in the room knows it before the second line. Merit here measures proximity to death, not distance from it. The great singer sings with death standing in the corner, and the wound in the voice is the proof. Mac Donald’s standard holds death at arm’s length by raising something clean and permanent against it. The cantaor’s standard invites death into the room and sings to it. Both men are doing the same human work. They have chosen opposite terms.
Run her word through these houses and the lesson lands. Merit is not a single thing waiting in the world to be measured. It is a family of practices, each one a different bid for permanence, each one true inside the house that holds it. Mac Donald needs her version, the measurable and rankable and screen-protected version, because it is the only version an atheist with no heir can trust. Feel dies with the body. Obedience belongs to a God she has rejected. Duende courts the death she means to outrun. The collective school owns the dancer and she distrusts the collective. What is left is merit as a fact in the world, a thing as indifferent to opinion as the light off the Pacific, and a fact of that kind outlasts the woman who named it. Her metaphysics chose her politics. The screen audition is her cathedral.
V. Why the Argument Never Ends
The document that surrounds this one keeps returning to a puzzle. Mac Donald produces better data for thirty years, and the institutions she targets move the other way, and the evidence never closes the case. The puzzle has been answered through coalition signaling, through tacit knowledge, through trauma narrative. Becker supplies a different answer, and it sits beneath the others.
A man does not trade his denial of death for a statistic.
The administrators she fights run a hero system of their own. Their permanence is justice, the long arc, the redeemed future, the standing on the right side as their coalition draws the sides. To that hero, Mac Donald’s standards are the device by which the same people win for another century, oblivion fitted out as neutrality, a death sentence for his children written in the language of fairness. He cannot read her crime figures as facts about offending. He reads them as the enemy’s liturgy. To Mac Donald the language of equity is the dissolution of the one structure that survives the grave, the deconstruction seminar come back wearing a diversity lanyard, the announcement that nothing holds.
Each looks at the other and sees the face of death. Not error. Death. You can refute an error with evidence. You cannot refute a man’s defense against annihilation by handing him a better number, because the number does not speak to what the belief is for. The belief keeps the terror off. To give it up is to die before dying. So he does not give it up, and neither does she, and the better argument changes nothing, because the fight was never about who reasoned well. It was about whose monument gets to stand.
She senses this and cannot say it in her own frame. Her frame requires that her side speak for reason and the other side for unreason. The moment she grants that her opponent is not confused but is guarding his own immortality with the same grip she brings to hers, the clean contrast collapses, and the clean contrast is her product.
VI. Three Closings
The atheism is the key and not the footnote. Watch the work as she ages with no God and no heir. The defense of the canon might grow more urgent rather than less, because the canon is the only thing of hers with a chance of outliving her, and the time left to secure it gets shorter each year. What reads from outside as late-career hardening might be the narrowing of the window. A believer can afford patience. She cannot.
The childlessness routes the whole project through the symbolic. The students she invokes, the young surgeons, the inner-city residents she names as the true casualties of disorder, these are her line of descent, the only one she has. Her quarrel with the equity regime is in part a quarrel over inheritance, over who receives the standards when she is gone and whether they arrive intact or hollowed out. She is fighting for the legitimacy of her heirs, and she has no other heirs.
The truth she cannot afford sits one inch past her reach. Her merit is her way of not dying, and her opponent’s justice is his, and the standard she calls a view from nowhere is a view from a particular woman in a particular terror who made particular subtractions and built what remained into a wall against the dark. The day she could write that sentence she would have a larger and stranger book than any she has written. She will not write it. To call your hero system a hero system is to watch it stop working while you look.
