Bangs and Whimpers: On Matthew Gasda's The Sleepers, Regret, and Redemption

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

(T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”)

In Chapter 5 of Matthew Gasda’ s The Sleepers, Eliza, a New School student, worries that her attempt to seduce former professor Dan hasn’t worked as she intended:

What was Dan doing right now? He hadn’t texted her. Eliza didn’t mind not hearing from him, but it wasn’t good for her confidence: the whole point was to have him wrapped around her finger, even if she never saw him again (152).

Eliza, who took Dan’s class during the semester previous, contacted him through Facebook on a momentous night prior to this rumination. Dan—with live-in girlfriend Mariko asleep in the next room—responded. In fact, he took a car from his Greenpoint apartment to the East Village to meet his student, popping a Cialis in expectation of sex with the 21-year-old. Although they hook up in a typically fumbling way—for Dan—Eliza refuses consummation. (Mariko similarly cheats with her much older mentor, Xavier, the next day as I will explore further below).

Dan, a New School literary studies professor and self-described Marxist blogger who intermittently publishes pieces in N+1 and Jacobin—the house organs of the Brooklyn millennial left at its post-Occupy peak—is partly a figure of fun, especially when viewed from our own vantage point today. Dan is one of the several urban quasi-bohemian millennial “sleepers” who occupy center stage in a novel that offers a post-mortem on this generational cohort, or, more specifically, that left-identified subset of millennial intellectuals and “creatives” at the forefront of culture and cultural production during the 2010s. These were the people and this was the moment that gave us: wokery, virtue signaling, nomenclature policing, cancel culture, and #metoo; poptimism and the ascendancy of the now ubiquitous fan; also Bernie bros and the ostensible return of socialism, entirely evacuated of its working class component and largely confined to the internet hologram. Too many Dans repurposed socialism as a digital media status-seeking vehicle for the downwardly mobile segments of the professional-managerial class who labored in various declining culture industries.

One reader recently described Gasda’s novel as a millennial version of The Sun Also Rises—something like the definitive portrait of a generation and its obsessions:

This is recognizable by some of the familiar beats and themes, such as the hellbent obsession with going to college, emphasizing meaning over salary in career selection, and the perpetual postponement of adulthood. Annoying or not, in other words, we have our story to tell, our characters and archetypes, and our own myths and legends about coming of age in 21st century.

Rather than straight depiction, definitive or no, The Sleepers is more satire and indictment in my estimation. And the force of its indictment isn’t confined to the self-obsessed millennial somnambulists who occupy the bulk of the narrative. I would instead contend that the interpretive key to this novel of ideas, and its implicit critique of our historical moment, is to be found in its non-millennial bookend characters—Boomer Xavier and (proto?) Zoomer Eliza—whose respective affairs with Mariko and Dan effectively end their already comatose romance.

Gasda uses these characters—representative men and women so to speak—to trace the deterioration of the educated middle class, a synecdoche, in the United States from a post-sixties culture of narcissism through our own cyborg borderline society. Rather than reifying generational differences, Gasda underlines the ties that bind several successive waves of hollow men and women over the last fifty years.

Both Dan and Mariko, unhappy in their long-term relationship, cheat on each other with age gap representatives of other generations: Dan clumsily hooks up with his Gen Z student, as noted, while Mariko ends up reuniting with Xavier, an old mentor and former lover in his mid-sixties, dying of cancer.

Xavier suddenly desires the company of his old protégé in the face of his diagnosis. Xavier, a well-known theater director in his fifties, dated Mariko as a newly minted Tisch graduate of 22. But he never intended to stay with her as she recalls his break-up line: “I’m too old for you Mari—it’s for the best”(167).

But lest we think that Xavier leaves his young lover due to some gauche bit of scruple, we also learn that he likes “‘living alone,’” which is the “only basis for a genuinely sophisticated connection.’” When this same Xavier, ten years later, discovers he will soon die of a terminal illness: “fucking was all he could think about: thousands of fucks between the ages of sixteen and fifty-seven split between hundreds of lovers” (168).

When faced with his own death, this aging boomer recalls nothing so much as the new narcissism, or the mutant post-modern form of bourgeois individualism that increasingly marks post-60s US culture according to social critic Christopher Lasch:

[The narcissist] is “acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire.” Despite a popular misunderstanding that equates secondary narcissism (we’re all born narcissists, according to Freud, since infants can’t distinguish where they and their needs end and the mother who satisfies those needs begin—but this primary narcissism is just a phase) with egotism or selfishness, the pathological narcissist has an undeveloped ego and cannot distinguish his self from others; in fact, he uses others to both validate himself and regulate his own, often primitive, emotions, even as he is unable to recognize other people as human beings with independent lives of their own. The narcissist is incapable of love as a result. He is also pathologically underequipped to deal with age—and the waning of attention that often comes with it—and death.

It is telling that Xavier, when faced with his own demise, imaginatively enumerates past sexual conquests as if they were talismans against finitude. But these talismans aren’t very effective at dispelling the shadow of death. While Xavier contacts Mariko in the wake of his diagnosis with sex on his mind, he feels “that he would feel comfort in her presence, her closeness.” Our old boomer libertine seeks connection—which he still doesn’t completely comprehend and ultimately doesn’t find after an empty bout of sex—with Mariko when confronted with his own mortality.

In Gasda’s telling, this species of spiritual bankruptcy or emptiness—intensified by technological prostheses such as “social” media—represents an intergenerational thread running from Xavier through the novel’s thirty something millennial sleepers to Zoomers or proto-Zoomers* Eliza and peers Parker and Nina.

(*Since the novel is set in 2016 and the oldest Zoomers were born in 1997, these characters are seemingly intended to be something like the first representatives of Gen Z—on the cusp—and read deliberately “contemporary,” and generationally distinct, in their depiction.)

Eliza describes notably describes her friends in the terms of her own split sensibility:

Parker and Nina, Eliza was beginning to understand, represented the two symbolic poles of her own moral development. Parker was outgoing, buoyant, sarcastic, cutting; Nina was demure, judgmental, insecure; Eliza herself, was all of those things, and shifted back and forth between modes more readiliy than her friends, who seemed to have a clearer, more fixed idea of what their personas should be, which Eliza was almost jealous of (159).

Borderline Personality Disorder (a variation on Narcissistic Personality Disorder)—both subsets of the Cluster B family of scrambled personalities—is a disorder of attachment. The borderline, like her narcissist boyfriend, uses others to regulate her often violent emotions, projecting sudden extremes of love and hate onto other people. For instance, favorite people remade as the enemy for no apparent reason. The BPD splits—from idealization to devaluation—hence there is only good mother or bad mother, good Dan or bad: what’s lacking is integration or the capacity for gray shaded negative capability in her strobe light world of swiftly alternating light and dark, as Eliza reveals:

It was amazing how quickly one’s feeling shifted from one extreme to another. It was like there was a system of weights, checks, and balances, in the brain. No feeling became too dominant; there was constant transformation (153).

In this case, BPD resembles the affective and cognitive “vibe” of social media scrolling, “liking,” and dating app swiping—note the prominence of dating apps in Gasda’s story: swiping left or right, rather than erotic communion, is an end in itself for various characters as if afflicted with a tic. And what is ghosting but splitting, with its discards, as techno-social artifact and etiquette? So perhaps it is more accurate to say that our digital hologram has made the borderline condition near universal. Are we all Eliza now?

But aren’t NPD and BPD norm-enforcing moralisms masquerading as diagnostic categories? And isn’t BPD in particular famously misogynistic, the psychiatric establishment’s grab-bag attempt to pathologize ostensibly typical “ female” behaviors in a way that is continuous with the “hysteria” of an earlier era? Isn’t this all so much kink shaming with the kinks here something like neurodivergent personality styles? Why he? Why she? These are the standard issue objections to the discourse around the personality disorder.

In an era when diseased behavior—from cutting to the hikikomori’s anime life—is typically refashioned as this or that subaltern identity to be defended, oftentimes via this or that subreddit thread, there is no better example of Cluster B thinking than this strange, but now pervasively symptomatic, flavor of anti-normative “protest.”

Lasch’s entire point is that the personality disorder represents a psychopathological form of dominant cultural norms:

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure. In Freud’s time, hysteria and obsessional neurosis carried to extremes the personality traits associated with the capitalist order at an earlier stage in its development—acquisitiveness, fanatical devotion to work, and a fierce repression of sexuality. In our time, the preschizophrenic, borderline, or personality disorders have attracted increasing attention, along with schizophrenia itself

The personality disorder isn’t psychotic deviation from the norm so much as an exaggerated form of that same norm. Hegel claimed to have witnessed world-spirit and zeitgeist on a horse in the form of Napoleon and his army outside Jena; in Xavier and Eliza, or the disordered personalities they depict, Gasda provides his readers with a characterological x-ray of an entire social layer during the postmodern historical moment we have yet to exit.

But this is exactly the the problem, according to Naomi Kanakia. Kanakia sees in The Sleepers “a book length dramatization of Lasch’s ideas,” about which she expresses some reservations. But Kanakia’s primary objection resides exactly in what she reads as the novel’s programmatic quality, which she identifies with a set of perceived stylistic deficiencies, for example: “the dialogue tends to take on a very stilted quality. It is extremely on the nose: every conversation has some purpose, and they talk exactly to the point.”

Kanakia in this way reiterates several long-standing objections to the novel of ideas, according to Sianne Ngai, which include “direct speech by characters in the forms of dramatic dialogues or monologues,” “overt narrators prone to didactic, ironic, or metafictional commentary,” and “flat allegorical characters.” But, as Ngai also points out, these anti-realist generic elements are what distinguish romantic, modernist, and post-modernist narratives, as she goes on to list a historically and stylistically diverse set of novels--The Magic Mountain, Point Counter Point, Tomorrow’s Eve, Iola Leroy, Babel, but also The Man without Qualities, Tristram Shandy, and Elizabeth Costello—that could be classified as novels of ideas, all of which violate the canons of social and psychological realism.

Ngai traces a genealogy of this form, which, drawing on the work of Martin Puchner, significantly includes the philosophical dialogue and a certain dramatic tradition: “Reversing a more familiar account of the novel as a form uniquely capable of assimilating others, Puchner sees the novel of ideas as a subset of an older, larger tradition he calls ‘dramatic Platonism.’ In a sense, the novel’s desire for ‘ideas’ makes it not so much philosophical as dramatic.”

Gasda is at this point best known as the playwright who penned “Dimes Square,” a similarly coruscating satirization of the various pseudo-bohemian poseur poetasters and clout chasing groupies who make up the downtown New York literary scene. Keeping both Ngai and Puchner’s literary historical claima in mind, Grasda’s turn to the novel of ideas and its distinctive form of dramatization makes sense. But, while Kanakia finds the dialogue in Gasda’s dramatic work, motivated as it is by the various characters’ desire to succeed, persuasive, she objects to the way that the novel’s “strong, omniscient voice” “which renders “judgments on all the characters” also “seems to be the internal voice of all the characters. It’s like there is a group mind.”

But isn’t the criticism here—the uniformity of the characters’ interior monologues or the “group mind”—exactly the point of this novel of ideas? Here are sleepwalkers with attenuated interior lives and the interior lives they do possess are so many amalgams of respectably progressive approved opinions, think piece hot takes, and online chatter. It is indeed a portrait of a digitally enabled hive mind.

Where we do see a difference in tone and voice is between generational cohorts—so that chapter dedicated to Eliza and her friends in McCarren Park—or Gen Z— offers us a different, even more scrambled, cognitive and emotional style. In the age of the digital prosthesis, the only meaningful differences are found on the level of the cohort—along the lines of the focus groups or the product—each animated by a slightly different operating system like successive iterations of an I-Phone.

Gasda excerpts a stanza from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” at one point in the course of Dan’s ruminations, even as the author arguably strives to rewrite Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” in long form prose format, for our age of digital deterioration. This deterioration is, for Gasda—in an Eliotic vein—as much a sign of spiritual exhaustion and abasement as it is a socio-technical “development.” (and can the two be separated?).

We are facing a social and material crisis, which began in the 1970s, born of a rapacious global capitalism that has colonized and commodified every corner of our lives even while our means of living have become increasingly elusive for too many. This process finds its definitive form in the digital capitalist absorption of everyday life and desire; thinking, dating, and dreaming are now mediated and monetized by app and platform 24/7 as social critic Jonathan Crary argues in his book of the same name. This great transformation has been particularly hard on “symbolic workers,” or the artists, academics, and thinkers who are Gasda’s subjects in The Sleepers and elsewhere. Art and art-making have been reconfigured as content creation for hits, likes, and scrolls. Why the line between artists and “influencers”—charlatans, mountebanks, whores—harvesting aura is now porous.

The intersecting spiritual crisis that preoccupies Gasda in The Sleepers (and elsewhere) stems from the broader decline of belief, commitment, and those traditional structures which mark the modernization process as such. I don’t know that this work is advocating a return to traditional structures so much as their reinvention. What moderns and post-moderns alike lack is any sense of historical consciousness. Lasch made a similar point about those narcissistic personalities—awash in both the electronic media of the day and the new culture of affirmative therapy which arose among the ruins of the new left—during the late 1970s: they lived in a continuous present.

How much worse now when we all exist in the ever refreshed and repeating feed of our internet hologram, without past and future. Human beings are fundamentally social animals, as Aristotle long ago recognized; we are also historical beings who exist in a continuum that includes ancestors and those to come. Our digital technosphere—and the consumer capitalism it instantiates—isolates us from our fellows with its atomizing spells of pseudo-sociability while destroying any sense of living connection to yesterday—our traditions—and tomorrow. The 2010s represent a historical watershed for Gasda—that juncture when the tendencies Lasch and others first diagnosed in the Seventies--accelerated into our collective cyborg zombie slumber.

“The Hollow Men” was written in 1925, a few years after “The Waste Land.” Eliot employs bathos or comic deflation to depict the spiritual emptiness of the moderns—artists and intellectuals in places like London and New York—of the 1920s. Like the postmodern sleepers depicted in Gasda’s novel a century later:

Shape without form, shade without colour.
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men

Eliot’s work of the early 1920s, including his cultural criticism, had a significant impact on various novels of ideas, satirical and speculative, from that same period. Recall the work of Evelyn Waugh or Aldous Huxley. I would more closely identify Gasda’s project with Point Counterpoint, Brave New World, and Vile Bodies than The Sun Also Rises. It should also be noted that Eliot composed “The Hollow Men” two years before his conversion to Anglicanism. So many of the artists and thinkers from this same period turned from the anomie of the 1920s to various forms of religious and political commitment—right and left—in the 1930s.

Does this novel offer us any possibility of such a turn? The Sleepers concludes with a coda that details a near future a year or two after those few momentous days that dominate most of the novelistic action.

We learn that Eliza furtively dated Dan for a bit before reporting him to the school authorities—after she graduates of course. Dan’s academic career is ruined as a result, as is his relationship with Mariko (also cheating all the while). Dan, now reduced to tutoring, relies on his once estranged cardiologist father for financial support.

We learn that Mariko has finally found some success as a commercial actress, that she is now married, that she has a child. Sister Akari is visiting Mari and the new child, but this time with young girlfriend Suzanne. On the day that Akari and Suzanne are departing for Los Angeles, where they live, Mariko—who, despite her new life, is still haunted by her old relationship and its tumultuous dissolution—encounters Akari’s partner in the kitchen. Mari simultaneously advises and confesses to Suzanne:

Mariko brushes her hair, which is black and shiny, back, and sighs, then brushes her hair again, squares up, and looks her in the eye. “Do more than just survive, Suzanne, that’s my advice.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because that’s what I did. And even though I’m trying to change, the habit might be too strong for me.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Risk everything, constantly.”

“That’s so romantic” (270).

Mariko counsels Suzanne to find a truth that leads to transformation: a Damascene moment. When Suzanne asks her for an example of such a truth, Mariko tells her she is still seeking. But, it seems, to risk and commit—to love with the risk of catastrophe that such loving always entails, to commit to yesterday and tomorrow or the cycle of generation—is at least a first step in another, better, direction.

This scene follows an account of Dan and his one night stand—a Tinder date named Allison—or a day after aftermath which is equal parts sordid and pathetic:

“Can you cum with me?” she asked, letting slip a hint of vulnerability—an unfulfilled wish (replacing her ex). “Joseph—cum with me—”

Dan, self-enclosed, infinitely distant, was, in his solipsistic way, deeply turned on and ready to finish. Her fingers raked his chest; her hips dug into his hips.

“I’m cumming,” he whispered, as he imagined ejaculating into Eliza. “I’m cumming.”

Allison, completely unaware of what he was feeling, completely indifferent to it, completely hooked into her own physical needs (as was her right), slumped down, sweaty against his chest. “That was fun.”

“Yeah,” he said panting, opening his eyes, attempting to reconnect, “super fun.”

“Well, I should go,” she said, as she rolled off of him and gathered her clothing from the living room floor. “I’ve got stuff to do” (258)

Each trapped within his and her own subjective prisons—"We think of the key, each in his prison/Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”—rather than erotic communion, sex for Dan and Allison is a solipsistic variation on onanistic self-care. Here is another example of those (semi)autonomic bodily functions--like sexual arousal or the constant need to shit, especially on Dan’s part—that run like a brown Swiftian thread through the narrative. Eros, we should remember, is a form of elevation.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

***

How many of us knew guys like Dan? How many of us were guys like Dan? Remaking our radical scruples into self-serving justification for self-branding? In the 1990s, as the kids on the lip of the playground, we promised ourselves like so many suicidal or at least self-cancelling (anti) hero’s—real or imaginary—from Seymour Glass and Thomas Pynchon to Elliot Smith and DFW—that we would never sell out. But the clever ones—those of us who went to graduate school and learned that we are always already sold out while authenticity is a possibly fash thing—learned to compromise in too many sophisticated ways.

So by 2016 we get Gasda’s Dan, or every self-satisfied douchebag, creeping around Do or Dine and The Drink between 2011 and Trump’s first electoral victory, screeching about class struggle or real liberation while wondering if the Jacobin piece they authored on said class struggle or real liberation might move them from a renewable lectureship to the new unicorn category of the tenure track job. Has any group of people abandoned their professed principles in a more grotesquely tragicomic fashion than this cohort, of which I was one? To use the radical principles—which include integrity of the Walter Benjamin-Kurt Cobain sort—to market yourself in a dying market, to sell out?

I am ashamed of myself. And the power of Gasda’s characterization—regarding Dan—is how it holds the mirror to me and my cohort. What good regret now? And what of redemption? We weren’t genuine revolutionaries, nor good faith operators. We were PMC scavengers competing for a mess of pottage.

Du mußt dein Leben ändern.

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