Day: July 18, 2025

Andrew Doyle is a satirist and comedian, but also a serious writer, with a doctorate in Renaissance literature. His most famous creation, a stroke almost of genius, is the character of Titania McGrath, a young female woke fanatic who ascribes all the ills of the world, and many others besides, to the patriarchy, imperialism, colonialism, sexism, capitalism, etc. Titania is a self-righteous, humourless, intolerant, ignorant know-all, whose opinions are uttered with ironclad self-confidence. It was so brilliantly done, and unfortunately so plausible, that at first some people wondered whether Titania McGrath was a real person.

I regret to say that this present book is not wholly satisfactory. It is too long and unfocused. The problem begins with the title and the sub-title: is the end of woke here and now, to come, or already complete? If the culture war went too far, how far was far enough, and who declared it in the first place? Answers to these questions are not forthcoming. 

Those who are woke or anti-anti-woke claim that in essence wokeism was always a phantasm of the political right, that it never really existed, that it was a straw man conjured up by conservatives to reverse the social changes principally associated with the 1960s: but this is rather as if communists or anti-anti-communists were to claim that communism had never existed.

Wokeism is, of course, somewhat diffuse, but that does not prove its non-existence. A cloud exists, even if it cannot be precisely delimited, and the absence of precise delimitation is no reason for not referring to it. There may be no logical connection between climate catastrophism, for example, and the theory of gender, which denies the biological reality of sexual dimorphism, but it is a sociological fact that certain logically disconnected beliefs nevertheless tend to cluster together. It is not surprising that Greta Thunberg went straight from climate change activist to pro-Palestinianism, the main connection between these causes being that of her psychological need.

Doyle provides a succinct characterization of woke ideology. It is, he says, “An ideology underpinned by the postmodernist notion that our understanding of reality is produced in the context of linguistic and cultural frameworks, that knowledge is a construct of power wielded oppressively through language, and therefore censorship and other authoritarian measures are necessary to reshape society.”

This reshaping is, of course, to be carried out in the name of social justice, but entails the wielding of great, unopposed, and even totalitarian power by those who consider themselves enlightened—namely, the woke.

There is no central committee, or Lenin, of wokeism. It spreads not by overall design, but like an epidemic disease. Universities are foci of infection, and just as epidemics spare certain parts of the population, relatively speaking, so wokeism is like the measles of the educated. It is precisely because there are now so many of them that it affects every level from subeditor to government minister. 

Doyle is convinced that wokeism is in its death throes. He might be right, but I am not convinced. The whirligig of time brings in his revenges, and no political victory is final. Certainly, the election of Donald Trump was a severe blow to wokeism, but he will not be president forever, and if his presidency should end in disaster, whether caused by him or not, a president of a very different stripe might be elected. If so, some form of wokeism might be resuscitated (we have already seen Zohran Mamdani chosen as Democratic candidate for the mayoralty of New York). Like the reports of Mark Twain’s death, those of the death of wokeism might well be exaggerated—albeit Mark Twain did eventually die. 

The author does not explain why he thinks that wokeism is in its last throes, other than the election of Trump. Is it collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and is it its evident intellectual absurdities that will bury it?

An important question that the author does not address is whether wokeism has advanced as far as it has because of the opportunism or careerism of its supporters, or because of their true beliefs. Are the woke cynics or true believers? The two possibilities are not absolutely opposed because even opportunists may come truly to believe whatever doctrine suits their career. Most people, after all, are not out-and-out scoundrels, and few openly pursue their own interests by the conscious propagation of lies. Thus, they come in time to see the lies necessary for their personal advancement as abstract truths. 

I suspect also that we have raised a generation of educated people who believe that any difference in outcomes between identifiable groups of people can only be accounted for by prejudice and illicit discrimination. If they believe this, they will remain susceptible to the siren song of wokeism for years to come. Thus, any dismantling of the bureaucratic apparatus inspired by absurd doctrines might prove only temporary.

There is much in this book about the arcana of the disputes between feminists and the transsexual lobby, and between the latter and homosexuals, which I think will not interest most readers. What future generations (if there are any) will make of the energy expended on questions raised by transsexualism in societies that face so many serious threats, economic, political, and strategic, I hesitate to predict. Perhaps the expenditure of such energy is best thought of as a displacement activity, like that of a mouse that washes its paws when confronted by a cat. We create problems for ourselves in order to avoid other problems. 

Certainly, it is more difficult to avoid wokeness than might at first appear. The woke ideology, or sensibility, is inherently polarising and easily calls forth a mirror image of itself. The French television satirist, Cyril Hanouna, who has made a career of mocking woke sentiments, and who is therefore as dependent on the continuation of wokeism as Ibram X. Kendi, said, “I will defend all that is anti-woke,” as if any counterclaim to a false claim must therefore itself be true. And there is a temptation to respond to the 1619 Project by the elaboration of an official history equal and opposite to it, with an equal desire that it should be imposed. 

There is a certain lack of subtlety in the author’s argumentation. In a chapter titled Strangled Muses, he says that woke censorship has strangled artistic expression, or at least crowded out all that is not woke, and I am in sympathy with this view. It is certainly true that publishers, for example, seem to demand wokeness even, or perhaps especially, for books for young children. The curators of museums now badger visitors with woke sentiments, and drag them into the labels of exhibits, bleeding, kicking, and screaming, as it were. On a recent visit to the British Museum, I noticed the gay pride, not the British, flag fluttering from the flagpole. Homosexuality has become a love that dare not dare not speak its name. 

But it does not follow from the fact that woke censorship strangles artistic expression that all censorship does so. On the contrary, it is an awkward fact, seldom acknowledged, that the great majority of great art, including literature, has been produced under conditions of censorship. This does not by itself justify censorship, of course, for freedom is for freedom’s sake, not for great art’s sake. The end of society as a whole, moreover, is not only to produce great art.

But it is true that woke censorship strangles art in a peculiarly unpleasant and dangerous way, like North Korea’s, for it not only proscribes, it prescribes. Prescriptive censorship—the demand not only that some things must not be said, but that some things must be said—is the worst kind of censorship known. It leads not only to tedium, but to a sense of violence being done to one’s mind, because the things that must be said, and cannot be denied, are usually gross and obvious falsehoods. To be forced to accept and repeat falsehoods is worse than being merely prohibited from saying something. 

This brings us to the question, also not discussed in this book, though obviously germane to it, of self-censorship. The anti-woke now talk of self-censorship as if it were self-evidently undesirable. The most minimal reflection will, or should, demonstrate that this is not so (here I assume that other people’s minds are like mine). It is perfectly obvious that one should not always say the first thing that comes into one’s head—the world is not a psychoanalyst’s couch—and that there are many times when certain truths should not be uttered. The way to be a bore, said Voltaire, is to say everything; the way to be a boor is to say the first thing that comes into one’s head. Nor does it follow from the fact that one is permitted to say x that one should say x, or that it is wrong to refrain from saying x. 

There are difficult questions concerning publicly funded cultural institutions, which are subject to capture by woke ideology, that this book passes by. Of course, a purist might say that there should be no such institutions, that all should be privately funded, but this seems to me a counsel of ideology rather than of perfection. Besides, there will always be public monuments. 

There is the problem, however, that the very rich of today, for one reason or another, do not appear to have the discrimination necessary to create worthwhile cultural institutions (I speak gross modo). But who, on the other hand, is to decide what is to be publicly subsidised, and on what grounds? Is it to be by show of hands and popularity, in which case the lowest common denominator will usually win? Or is it to be by direction of the cognoscenti, a knowledgeable elite that sets itself up in distinction to the hoi polloi, that as we have seen, is susceptible to extreme ideological capture? 

The greatest harm done by wokeism is its destruction of cultural unselfconsciousness and its transformation of so many of us into ideologists or counter-ideologists. Henry Clay Frick, for example, did not have to agonise over what great art was, or under what conditions it was produced; he collected it, to the great benefit of New Yorkers and others. And this was true, pace the multiculturalists who complain of Eurocentrism, of the collectors of non-European art.

The author is not over-optimistic about a post-woke world. He says, “A happy ending is out of the question, but perhaps we might settle for a tolerable one”: that is to say, a world in which ignorant (and ideologised) armies do not clash by night.

Death came to Edgar Allan Poe much as it had to the doomed characters who haunted his tales of the grotesque: strangely, symbolically, and shrouded in ambiguity. It is fitting that we should begin there, in that Baltimore setting where the mystery still clings like fog to the facts. “The subject [of Poe’s death] is famously fraught,” writes Richard Kopley. Within that careful academic phrase lies the whole terrible admission of our inability to grasp the ultimate meaning of a man who lived always at the edge of meaning itself.

Kopley, distinguished professor emeritus at Penn State DuBois, has given us Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, a monumental biography spanning 714 pages, nearly a quarter of them devoted to endnotes, as if even these might contain buried clues. The final details, however, are as enigmatic and horrible as Poe’s greatest stories.

Poe died on October 7, 1840, at forty years old, that fatal age when a man’s devils either claim him or release their hold forever. On September 26, he had parted company with two fellow writers, John M. Daniel and John R. Thompson, reportedly in “high spirits.” At half past nine that evening, he encountered Dr. John F. Carter; then he dined with relations who claimed he was sober when midnight struck, and he took his leave. Next, the steamboat at four in the morning carried him into the void.

“At this point, on board the vessel,” Kopley says, “Poe needed someone with him—a friend and protector, someone who would watch out for him. He should not have been alone.” But alone he was, just as in many ways he had ever been. “We lose sight of Poe for several days,” Kopley writes. “There is uncertainty; there is mystery.” Poe, in his last hours, lived out the genre he had perfected, stepping across that threshold between the teller and the told.

What followed seems like a collaboration between Poe and his inner demons. Kopley’s chronology staggers under the weight of conflicting testimonies, but a recognizable plot emerges: On October 3, witnesses beheld a man stupefied and struggling, stripped of his clothes like the victim of theft, semiconscious and delirious. The hospital received him in the grip of apparent mania. Tranquilized, he surfaced briefly into consciousness only to speak incoherently to his doctor, his mind already half-departed. The vigil lasted four days, his condition spiraling downward until October 7 brought his last words: “Lord help my poor soul.”

Here, Kopley offers his most penetrating observation: “For years, Poe had integrated his life in his work—perhaps now, at the end, Poe was integrating his work in his life.” This is a creative way of saying what every astute reader of Poe already knows: that the boundary between the man and his creations had long since dissolved, that he had written himself into existence as surely as he had written his characters, and that his demise was simply the conclusive revision of a text he had been composing his entire career.

Poe represents a peculiar Southern type who wears the mask of gentility while something altogether more desperate writhes beneath: Andrew Jackson with his dueling pistols, Jesse James with his bank robberies that were somehow rituals of honor, Doc Holliday coughing blood into his cards, Faulkner drowning his demons in bourbon and prose, Walker Percy stalking purpose through the ruins of Christendom. These figures carried a distinct burden: the knowledge that civilization is a thin veneer, that beneath the courtly manners and code of honor lies an abyss that no amount of breeding can fill. They were refined men who peered into the darkness and found it looking back at them.

Poe’s origins, however, were far from privileged, despite the education he would later receive. Born in Boston to thespian parents—his mother a gifted actress, his father considerably less talented—Poe was orphaned at the age of three. He was subsequently raised by John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant who provided him with a gentleman’s education but never legally adopted him.

Poe’s academic promise was evident during his time at the University of Virginia, where he distinguished himself scholastically. However, financial troubles—stemming from his complicated relationship with his foster father—forced him to leave before completing his studies. The boy who had been raised in comfort but never security found himself back in Boston, the city of his birth and first exile, enlisting in the Army while his pen began to earn modest victories. Even then, as success beckoned however faintly, his relationship with Allan crumbled, one of many such collapses that would define his life.

For a man who passed away at forty, there is much to recount: the War of 1812, which impacted his early years, and the development of a young republic as he shaped his own identity. But the essential pattern was established early and never varied: death as his constant companion, loss as his most faithful muse. The toll call reads like a sad litany: not merely his parents in those first difficult years, but Jane Stanard, the young woman who awakened his poetic sensibilities, and then his older brother William, claimed by the same consumption that had taken his mother. But it was the passing of Virginia Clemm Poe that broke something in him beyond repair.

She had been both his wife and first cousin. Kopley highlights the much-discussed, troubling detail: “The printed document for the marriage bond stated that the bride was twenty-one years old, but she was actually thirteen.” Poe himself was twenty-six. For just over a decade, they lived as man and wife, until tuberculosis claimed her, too. After Virginia’s death, his drinking grew worse, his melancholy deepened, and the genius who had written so eloquently of premature burial began to live as if he had been buried alive himself.

We may think we know Poe from our schooldays. We can recall, if not recite, “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” “The Bells.” We remember the fiction that made us shiver: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Yet Kopley’s book inspired this reviewer to return to these familiar texts with adult eyes, and the shock of recognition was profound. What seemed merely odd during my youth appeared far more disturbing to the middle-aged me: the work of a suffering mind that had stared too long into the fundamental dread of existence and found there not chaos but a sickening order, not meaninglessness but a meaning too precise and pitiless to bear.

This claim may appear at odds with an earlier statement, since describing a sickening order and a meaning too precise and pitiless to bear seems to conflict with the claim that civilization is only a thin veneer concealing an abyss no breeding can fill. One vision presents the universe as grimly systematic, bound by terrifying determinism; the other suggests chaos, the void, nothingness itself. Yet in Poe, these are not opposites but twins, for the abyss reveals itself as sickening order, and both chaos and cruel systems alike serve as wellsprings of dread. The horrible chaos that pulses through Poe’s work demanded of him the most laborious plotting and organization; they are creatures of deliberate design even as they mime disorder.

Take Poe’s “The Visionary,” which Kopley dubs “a rich tale, comprising two sections.” Here, Poe shows civilization as a mask of elegance and ritual stretched thin over the abyss of despair and doom. The Marchesa Bianca (so named in the original version of the story) moves through Venetian nobility with grace, but her beauty and station are veils drawn over quiet suffering, emotional burial, and death’s approach. Her bond with the mysterious rescuer (aesthete and fatalist) unfolds not in open speech but through silent signs, missed moments, and a final meeting as formal as it is fatal.

The adorned setting—palaces, canals, ornaments—only deepens the mockery of human artifice before a universe ruled by merciless precision. The rescuer’s death by poison is no random despair but a calculated surrender to a fate he has long foreseen. His meeting with the Marchesa bears the weight of tragic inevitability, doomed not by chance but by the very architecture of Poe’s world, one where beauty, longing, and death are chained by inescapable, pitiless order. Beneath culture’s illusion lies decay’s certainty. The story thus works a double horror: civilization as brittle pretense, and the universe as a stage whose script was written before the curtain rose.

Kopley’s research is formidable. He’s assembled a vast chorus of primary sources, weaving quotations in and out of his narrative with such relentless thoroughness that his own voice sometimes disappears entirely beneath the accumulated testimony of witnesses, critics, and correspondents. His is scholarship by accretion, truth by documentary saturation, as if the sheer weight of evidence might pin down a man who spent his life eluding definition.

Yet perhaps this method is fitting for Poe, who was always more echo than substance, more shadow than flesh—a riddle best understood through the voices of others, the traces he left in letters and reviews, as well as the memories of those who knew him briefly and incompletely.