Every story has a backstory. Often what happened before the story is left in deep shadows. Every storyteller also arrives with a backstory. Some freely share their backstory in books, blogs, essays, or interviews. Others leave their personal backstory sparse or blank. In this essay, I want to explore a link that shines a light into those shadows. The rats that scurry away from the light have been gnawing on a Greek cheese called thymos. In English we label it recognition.
My last essay, The Substack Hunger Game, visited Aristotle’s logos, ethos, and pathos. There is a fourth element from the Greek, thymos, which describes our need for recognition by other people. A writer’s work may powerfully execute the Aristotelian trilogy, which is necessary but not sufficient. The work and the author must also be recognised. Substack is a good example of a community built on the foundation of thymos.
I am borrowing Fukuyama’s gloss on Plato’s tripartite soul, where thymos is the part that neither reasons nor wants but lurks in the psyche and demands to be seen. That distinction is the insight into why someone devotes months or years to writing a novel. The writer typing at his keyboard knows a couple of things. Reason tells him the odds are catastrophic. He knows he has other alternatives that return less effort for more certain rewards. But the writer plunges ahead and writes into a wall of almost certain indifference. Only thymos accounts for that decision. Thymos is not decorating ambition with a Greek word. It names the specific faculty that anchors someone at the desk after reason and appetite have both filed their objections.
Fukuyama did not invent that faculty. He is refining Hegel, who made the need to be recognised the engine of self-consciousness. We become real to ourselves only when another sees us. Hegel built that on logic, not on biology.
A short detour through the weeds. First there is isothymia, a term Fukuyama uses for the desire to be seen and treated as an equal. Writers seek acceptance by their peers as one of them, someone who deserves to be considered the equal of other writers. Then there is megalothymia, which discards the notion of equality. Being equal is no longer the goal. Being judged superior as a writer is. When domination is the preferred cultural goal set for writers, equality of treatment is seen as weak, soft, and constraining. Gramsci’s idea of cultural hegemony suggests the human drive for recognition is captured by members of the cultural elite who embrace megalothymia. Why? Because the economic and political system has constructed an incentive structure that rewards the winners in the struggle for recognition. Those incentives are structured to hide the mechanism of control, so the manufacture of consent, in the phrase Herman and Chomsky made famous, stays invisible. This is accomplished with such skill that people believe their participation is a product of their own free will. While the desire for recognition is arguably part of being a human being, cultural benchmarks set the finish line where recognition is triggered.
Writing is a craft like painting or woodwork. As a skilled craftsman, a writer produces a story, finds a publisher, or self-publishes it with the hope that others will find it of value. The writer’s challenge has always been reaching a large enough audience to show his work has been recognised by others. There are a couple of things happening here. Writers, like anyone else, want to leave a legacy. In order to leave a legacy, somewhere someone is keeping your books and reading them.
Aside from this Darwinian urge to leave a mark on future generations, there is the status that comes with recognition. You are invited to speak at a conference, a seminar, or to address a graduation class, because your contributions to literature were recognised not only by your peers but by a large number of other people. A mark of that recognition is the day a writer hires a booking agent.
The desire to be recognised takes on a Darwinian dimension, because it grows out of struggle, the struggle of people with each other and with their environment. But Hegel’s version of that struggle does not rest on survival. Its winners are chosen by culture, and they are not the same people who prevail at the biological level, the level of population and descent. A writer can lose every biological wager, leave no line behind him, and still be recognised for a century. That is not Darwin. That is thymos in a different arena.
We’ve come to accept that a writer with a small audience is a failure. How can he make a living? is the question often asked. It’s a hobby, right? As everyone, or almost everyone, can write, there is a tendency to devalue the writing of others. How many times has a writer heard someone say, “I can write a better book than (fill in the blank).” Of course they never write that book. That’s beside the point. The fact they believe the book they’d write would be richer, funnier, more moving and exciting is a substitute for actually doing the work. Their belief serves as the proxy.
Metaphors can be dangerous. I’m going to run that risk. Visualise the Roman gladiator. The crowd roars, his adversary appears, the contest begins. The image is thrilling, but here’s the danger. Recognition is not zero-sum combat. One writer’s Nobel Prize or Booker Prize is not bestowed by the winner standing over another writer he has put to death. Writing quality is not zero-sum. The clash of gladiators is a warm-up for a reflection about war novels.
Unfortunately for writers, this doesn’t end the story. The zero-sum remains in place, supported by the recognition economy that has grown up around writing. In a social-media-dominated culture, a reader’s attention is limited, fractured, and fragile, the idea of literary canon slots remains finite and quaint, and the big literary prizes honour one winner. The writer’s arena is real, but unlike the gladiator he stands beside his work, not inside it. The gladiator metaphor implies mortal combat. The reality is different. It is the market and the canon and the prize that are gladiatorial, while the act of writing well is not. That gap is more interesting than the metaphor, because it means the writer can win the fight and lose the war, or lose every fight and win posthumously.
Megalothymia (the second term Fukuyama coined), the hunger to be recognised as superior, is a real drive, but a great deal of the best writing comes from the exact opposite. Flaubert believed the author was everywhere present but nowhere visible. Keats prized the self that disappeared to re-emerge in its subject. The gladiator wanted spectacle, to be seen. The artist often wants the work seen and himself to disappear behind it. To celebrate the striving alone is to flatter it. To show the striving deforming the very talent it drives is to say something worth saying. Norman Mailer is an example: a writer with enormous native talent whose career was consumed by his need to be the biggest man in the room, up to and including a book literally titled Advertisements for Myself.
There is a name for what ate Mailer. Hegel called it the master. The master stakes his whole self on being crowned above the rest, and he will risk everything to get there. That is the trap. The crown, when it comes, is handed up by the very people he has already ranked beneath him. The crowd. The market. The prize jury that sits for one season and goes home. The only judges who can give the master what he wants are the ones he holds in contempt, and a verdict from below is worth nothing to him. Recognition from an inferior cannot feed a man who demanded to be called superior.
Flaubert and Keats took the other road. They bent to the work, served the material, and disappeared behind it. Call it the servant’s road. Fukuyama called it master and slave. That word has grown heavier since Hegel’s day, so I will use servant. The servant is not chasing after the crown. In Hegel’s philosophy it is the servant, the one who works, who reaches the freedom the master never touches. None of this says one writer cannot stand above another. The hierarchy is real. What is false is the master’s route to the top of heap.
I began with the term isothymia, and now is the time to make its distinction from megalothymia concrete. There is common ground between the two extremes. It is found in the struggle, conflict, or friction that all people confront. An extreme example of such struggle is war. A soldier at war faces directly the struggle to survive. When the war ends, and the soldier returns home to write the book he witnessed, the struggle is transferred to the writing, the publication and reception of his work. The combat novelists who put down their rifle and pick up their pen (most of the novels about the Second World War or Vietnam were written before the computer keyboard) face the new battle equipped with isothymic or megalothymic aspiration.
The literary battlefield is another war for survival. But the veteran novel is isothymic first. Before the grunt wants to be judged the best, he wants his testimony about the experience of war to count as much as the general’s who never saw members of his platoon killed in an ambush. Herr’s Dispatches is that claim in its purest form. He was in the mud beside the grunts, not working from dispatches, and the book endures because he saw with his own eyes the gap between the five o’clock briefing and the battlefield in front of him.
Isothymia in war fiction is to say, “recognise that I was there and my account is equal to the record.” The goal is not “I was here, Kilroy,” with the author’s name substituted for Kilroy’s. Megalothymia is to say, “recognise that no one rendered it better than I did.” Here the desire is to claim that where I was, what I experienced, what I suffered, and what it all meant is superior to others who served beside me. Most war novels run on both, and naming which is which at which moment gives structure to your reading.
There are a number of authors and books that illustrate the dual recognition at work in a war novel. Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, the Pacific), James Jones (From Here to Eternity, Pearl Harbor and Guadalcanal, actually wounded, the most literal soldier of the group), Heller (bombardier, roughly sixty missions), Vonnegut (Dresden as a POW), and Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried, Vietnam infantry).
Author John Horne Burns is a case study inside the belly of the thymos beast. Burns’s 1947 novel The Gallerywas based on his wartime experience in occupied Naples. The novel was a critically acclaimed bestseller praised by Hemingway and Dos Passos and nominated for the Pulitzer. The Gallery lost to James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific. Before Burns died at thirty-six in self-exile in Italy, his novel had fallen almost entirely out of the canon. That alone is the “recognition not sustained” example made flesh. What seals the verdict is an unexpected expert witness. Decades after Burns’s death, Michener wrote that he thought of Burns every week of his life and imagined they would have competed honourably throughout their careers. The victor, in old age, naming the rivalry with the man history forgot. You could not invent a cleaner illustration of thymos.
The literary gladiatorial arena does not only forget its dead, it kills some of its living. Burns drank himself to death. The recognition he staked everything on was the perishable kind. A season granted it. The next season moved on. When it went there was no laboured, work-built self underneath to hold him up. Thomas Heggen wrote Mister Roberts, a huge success, and was dead at thirty by his own hand. Recognition is not safety.
If war novels are a battlefield, the casualty rate is horrific. Michael Paris’s annotated bibliography lists over two thousand English-language novels published between 1939 and 1988 that take the Second World War as their central theme, and that is only the ones that reached print in one language stream. Nobody has counted the manuscripts that were submitted and rejected. Nobody counts the veteran-authored drafts that died in a drawer, or the novels written by veterans from other cultures in a language other than English.
Think about your own memory of reading novels. The survivors, the names of authors an average reader can recall unprompted, number perhaps a dozen. So the ratio between the published and the recognised can’t be stated precisely, and that impossibility is the point. The literary arena keeps no register of the fallen. The vanished leave the thinnest possible trace, which is why the writer’s fear is not defeat but erasure, the sense that his fight will not even be passed to the next generation. That absence carries the whole moral weight.
The sports analogy has some value for writers. Swimming and golf and volleyball have millions of players and a handful of household names, and that alone makes my point about the ratio in the thymos arena. But there is a deeper truth where sport and literature diverge. Sport’s arena has a clock and a closing whistle. It is a finite game with defined rules, referees, and schedules. The verdict in a finite game is objective, contemporaneous, and mostly stays settled in the athlete’s own lifetime. Literature’s arena has no clock, a jury not yet born, and rules that keep getting revised on appeal. Some authors play the infinite game. Melville died a failure and Moby-Dick was exhumed seventy years after his death. Kafka instructed his executor Brod to burn all of his papers. Fortunately for us, Brod failed to carry out Kafka’s wish.
The writer competes in the one arena where the decisive judges have not been born, which makes recognition both harder to confirm (no whistle ever blows to tell you that you won) and uniquely available after death. The dead sprinter’s record can only be broken. The dead novelist’s book can only rise. In sport, the gap is between a champion, someone who once held a title, and an all-time great, someone whose name outlives the people who saw them play. Every sport is a graveyard of forgotten champions. That is the history of Burns, translated into sport.
Recognition scales along a ladder: the conference or seminar room where twelve people applaud, the local newspaper, the gate-of-one (an agent, an editor, a patron, the CEO of an AI company, any single figure who controls a door), the nation and the cultural assumptions that underlie its literary prizes, and finally the empire of unborn readers we call posterity. Every rung is a real form of recognition. When we examine that ladder, something leaps out. Our culture has collapsed the ladder into a single rung and called it fame. The follower count. The viral hit. In doing so it has quietly devalued every other kind of being seen, so that the respect of one peer or the verdict of time no longer register as recognition at all.
Isothymia is satisfied by a single reader whose judgement you trust. A family friend, a work colleague, a neighbour are often chosen by writers as their first reader. And the writer reads the recognition from an equal. The deepest literary megalothymia has always been certified by the fewest, most expert judges, or by time itself, almost never by the crowd. Fame and recognition have drifted apart without anyone paying much attention to what that means. For me, it means our literary culture no longer understands the implication of that separation. How many Substack writers are worrying about their subscriber count? How many are chasing isothymia, hoping this platform will provide equal visibility? And how many, while professing isothymia, are chasing megalothymia, to be recognised for their superior worth? These are questions I can’t answer for you. My advice, as you reflect on this essay, is not to confuse the desire for equal recognition with the desire to be viewed as superior. Once you understand the distinction, you can be honest with yourself about why you are writing.
I look forward to reading this soon.