An Interview With Tara Isabella Burton

Self-Making, Ideal Selves, and Magic

Dear Republic,

It’s that sacred day of the week! Please do give / switch to a paid subscription. Our essays this week have included Mary Flannery’s ode to medieval manuscripts, Blake Nelson’s ode to travel writing, Dwight Cathcart’s piece on the Civil Rights Trail, Patrick Cavanaugh Koroly’s reflection on James Joyce and autofiction, John Julius Reel’s review of Henchman, and David Roberts’ exoneration of Gen Z.

For our interview, we talk with Tara Isabella Burton. Tara is one of these annoyingly smart and talented people, who’s written several novels, written several non-fiction books on (loosely-speaking) magic, and is also totally cool and low-key. The main work we talk about here is her Self-Made, a history of identity creation.

-ROL

AN INTERVIEW WITH TARA ISABELLA BURTON

1.My main reaction to Self-Made was annoyance that you stole, stole, my idea — largely through writing it down first and publishing it — which is that the real key to understanding human relations is through the concept of ‘ideal selves.’ That in a society at a given time we have different models of who we want to be — that this shapes the psychology of the society in fundamental ways and that history is largely about how one model passes into another. Is that the kind of frame you would use for the analysis you do in Self-Made?

I think our sense of self has always been mediated through imitation — whether we're talking classical heroes, or the lives of the saints. And I think one way of looking at Self-Made's argument is, in essence, the creation of distinctly secular hagiographies: narratives of the lives of (mostly) men held up as examples of those who are the best at being human — where, increasingly, being “good at” being human was understood as synonymous with self-creation and self-fashioning, of both the aesthetic and economic kind. And there's times where that's literally true — I'm thinking in particular of nineteenth-century accounts of Representative or Self-Made Men we find in, say, Emerson (or Harriet Beecher Stowe): which are very much structured like hagiographies: models of self-starters to imitate.

2.How did the idea of Self-Made come to you? I think I saw that you began by writing about dandies?

Self-Made is a very, very loose adaptation of my doctoral thesis, which was about the theology of artistic creation in French "decadent-dandyist" novels — a term I borrowed from Rhonda Garelick to refer to both early "dandy" texts (like those by Baudelaire, Gautier, Balzac, and Barbey D'Aurevilly) and, a generation later, the fin de siècle decadent novels that deal with artistic creation and self-creation as part of a fascination with the distinction between the “artificial” and the “natural” in a seemingly secular world. (To complicate matters, many of these writers, including JK Huysmans and, across the Channel, Wilde, also were or became deeply Catholic). Years ago I wanted to write a group biography of the French decadents, who were all dabbling in the occult and sleeping with one another's mistresses. But instead, I'd separately started writing about the Internet and self-creation — partly downstream of my first novel, Social Creature. And I wanted to write a more explicitly historical follow-up to Strange Rites, my first non-fiction book, basically trying to work out what, if any, is the “religion of modernity.” And so Self-Made came out all of all of those parallel motivations.

3.And what's been the general reaction to the book? I assume that, thanks to what you've written, the idea of ‘ideal selves’ has permeated the society and reshaped everybody's conception of the relationship of the individual to the collective?

I wish! I do feel lucky — the reaction to the book was very positive and not (as I feared) polarized. I was a little worried that my broader historical argument about self-making and chosen identity — especially the idea that desire is constitutive of who we truly are — might be reduced to culture-war talking points, particularly around gender and sexuality. And I very much didn't want to write a culture-wars book. But I was relieved that most of the reaction ended up being about what I personally am most interested in — the relationship of celebrity culture to transhumanist ideas of technological self-improvement to the American capitalist work ethic. Today's ideas about “manifesting” — that we can will, or meme, ourselves into a different existence — are so deeply rooted in American New Thought, and in turn to a kind of spiritualization of “energy” (often conceived in tandem with then-novel scientific ideas of electricity and evolution). But that's more a subject for the book I'm working on now, a follow-up to both Strange Rites and Self-Made.

4.Let's talk about a few of the few highlights in the book. Can you describe their significance a bit? You have an interesting entry point into modernity, which is that you start with how irresistibly hot Albrecht Dürer was — and how his hotness basically changed the course of history. Can you explain what happened with him — and with theorists like Pico della Mirandola, who were active around the same time?

The first really hot guy —Dürer at 26

One of the points I make in Self-Made is that Albrecht Dürer was basically the first modern celebrity. His self-portraits double as self-promotion — this idea, particularly in his 1500 self-portrait, that Dürer is worthy both as a painter and as a subject of painting — he basically depicts himself in poses traditionally associated with Jesus. He's defining himself as analogous to God, and analogous to God, specifically, because of his creative power and potential (and, sure, because of his incredibly beautiful curly hair). But Dürer doesn't exist in a vacuum. He's very much working against this broader humanistic background — especially on the Italian peninsula — of scholars and writers and philosophers (many of whom are self-made themselves — what we would consider, in modern terms, knowledge-workers) who are trying to theorize “true” nobility: basically, nobility of talent or intelligence, rather than blood or title (rather self-servingly, I might add). Pico is a little bit of a counter-example here — he was from an aristocratic background, and was a bit of a boy wonder (he even tried to fund his own academic conference to discuss his ideas). But his Oration on the Dignity of Man is basically the philosophical counterpoint to Dürer, where he essentially re-writes the Book of Genesis (heavily indebted to Hermeticism, Kabbalah, NeoPlatonism and esoteric magical tradition, but that's another story) so that God runs out of energy upon making human beings, and turns over the authority to self-define to Adam:

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.

5.And then the next great turning point in history — in a sense — is Beau Brummell weight-shaming Prince George. What happened there?

Oh man. If Dürer was the first celebrity, Beau Brummell was the first influencer. Because Dürer, self-promoter though he was, had an actual talent for painting (and print-making). Whereas Brummell was....very good at being Beau Brummell. His public persona — as a friend and later enemy of the Prince of Wales — was all that he had, but it was sufficient to allow him to garner an entire notorious wardrobe (to say nothing of racking up gambling debts) on the grounds that, if he bought something, or wore a suit in a particular style, everyone else would want one too. His choice to wear a beaver-skin hat directly caused the beaver population in North America to plummet. And the fact that he even managed to outclass his royal rival — that people cared more about what this person with no quality except what we might today call “it” thought than they did about the views of the heir to the throne — I think was another pivotal watershed moment in the history of celebrity. Brummell may have been middle-class. But he belonged to a higher aristocracy: the aristocracy of style.

The first influencer — Beau Brummell

6.You create a very interesting division between Americans and Europeans — which I've very much noticed and has actually been a significant feature in my life — that Europeans see value in the notion of being ‘touched by divinity,’ of being, as the French say, “super-cool,” where Americans tend to ascribe the same value to ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.’ Can you talk about how that split came to pass, and some of the key figures — Frederick Douglass, etc — who contributed to the divergent modes of self-making.

In my book, I draw a distinction between what I call the aristocratic (European) and democratic (American) models of self-making. The European ideal is far more rooted in analogies for aristocracy — from Renaissance “true nobility” to Beau Brummell's “ton” — this idea that some people belong to an invisible class of superior beings. The American model, as you note, seems to hold that membership in this class can be earned through hard work, and certainly you find the more quixotic version of this “bootstraps” ideology in the virtue ethics of Frederick Douglass. But, that said, I think the differences are largely of emphasis and degree rather than kind. Particularly by the late nineteenth century, the American ideology of self-making is predicated not just upon hard work but upon desire as an internal, affective force — as in New Thought, where you can envision or meditate or will yourself into material success. And I think this becomes clear, in parallel, in Europe, in Nietzsche and the valorization of the will as the driving force behind “ton” or “true nobility”: want something badly enough, and it'll be yours. Desire makes reality run. And I think that both pictures of self-maker, the entrepreneur and the dandy, are ultimately pictures of people who are able to harness their own desire for something, and harness other people's desires, in the sense either of the capitalist economy, or attention, or (increasingly), both at the same time: if you can get people to pay attention to you, and spend money on you, you can create yourself as an economic and social being.

7.And just to hammer home kind of the guiding thesis of your book, and I believe your work in general, the point is that this whole history is theological. That divinity shifts, in the modern period, from being externalized, and connected to the community and tradition, to being rooted in the self, and particularly in the domain of our individual aspirations. Is that a fair summation?

Absolutely! A rejected title for Self-Made was WE ARE AS GODS — quoting from the 1960's counter-cultural futurist Stewart Brand — and a huge through-line through the work is the idea of self-divinization: that self-creation is understood not merely as a constitutive part of what makes us human but also appropriating the divine act of creation: to make ourselves is to do the work of God, whether we’re co-creating with God (as in Pico) or whether we're straight-up replacing him, a motif you find in, say, Brand, or in Extropians like Max More. And I do think that what I'm increasingly comfortable calling ‘magical transhumanism’ — the idea that you can harness desire as an energy of the universe in order to become divine — is at the core of a distinctly modern shared theological sensibility. I joke a lot that Strange Rites, Self-Made, and my current untitled magic book are a trilogy attempting to work out what, exactly, that theological sensibility is, but I think the historical narrative of self-making can help us see that transition particularly clearly.

8.You have an amazingly cogent explanation of Fascism — and of what happened to Europe in the early part of the 20th century — that the ‘dandy,’ with the ineffable je ne sais quoi, drifted over into the ‘Ubermensch’ (this is particularly clear in the figure of somebody like D'Annunzio, but also Mussolini) with the Ubermensch having, basically, a greater right to exist than anybody who isn’t so similarly touched. Can you discuss this turn a bit?

I think the relationship between Nietzscheanism, decadent-dandyism, and fascism is profoundly under-theorized. D'Annunzio started out as a Decadent, after all — his first novel, The Child of Pleasure, is basically dandyism-by-numbers. I think the intellectual move goes something like this: to be a dandy is to be a “miniature god,” to use Barbey D'Aurevilly's phrase, and to be able to be utterly unaffected by others while having the power to affect others. In a world where nothing has any pre-existing meaning, where nature is formless and vacuous (a major recurring decadent theme), only the artificial — and particularly the perceived artificial — has any right or power to shape reality. And so you get the valorization of these different figures who have this power over nature — and over perception — that's coded as godlike, divine. And from there it's not difficult to see how fascism becomes the natural political outlet for dandyism: attention-capture and charisma as the “real” god-like forces behind the self-presentation of the strongman. (This leads, of course, into the question of how such fascism operates alongside democracy as two political systems in which the ability to channel/harness/capture the human imagination is paramount).

9.What muddies the picture a bit, then, is the convergence of the two conceptions of self-creation in ‘It,’ and Hollywood. So to what extent do the conceptions of selfhood remain distinct even after that trans-Atlantic convergence in the later part of the 20th century?

I make the case in Self-Made that Old Hollywood conceptions of “it” — the mysterious charismatic force behind stardom — mark the place where European and American self-making converge into a single Frankenstein's monster figure. Basically, the celebrity — particularly the classic Hollywood studio star, that simultaneously convinces us of their unique them-ness while having a whole studio marketing team behind that conception — marries the idea of the God-touched aristocrat, better than us mere mortals, and the hardworking ordinary person whose special personal (and implicitly moral) qualities lift them up to greatness. The star has personal magnetism — to use another phrase popular in the 1920s. And while personal magnetism was both the provenance JUST of the “star,” it was also something constantly sold through advertising — both in terms of beauty products or creams or what have you, and also books/courses/lessons intended to help a would-be starlet channel that magnetism. The idea was that if you could just tap into your fundamental you-ness, and learn to express it, you too could be a star — or at least have that kind of influence over people's attention. That if you can learn how to harness your own innate desires and urges and longings, you can ascend out of mere mortality. Which is what the dandies wanted to be able to do. And, for that matter, practitioners of New Thought — and practitioners of magical transhumanism more broadly...

10.In Self-Made, you sketch out this whole long history and then you seem to put a negative sign around it, to say that this hyper-focus on the individual pulls us out of our connection to communities and to one another, and you seem to want to return to more of a pre-modern — or Judeo-Christian idea — of divinity. Is that a fair description of the conclusion you reach?

Not exactly. I think I probably do have a conservative streak — and I am a practicing Christian, sure — when it comes to being suspicious of valorizing The Modern Approach as the right answer. And I think something that (broadly conceived) the pre-moderns got right is the necessity of a higher frame of reference beyond the self — having models of virtue, or heroism, or saintliness for our self-creation or imitation is preferable to the idea that choice and self-definition is right for its own sake. But I also think it's patently true that being defined by your caste or class or title or lack thereof is profoundly anti-human (and, for what it's worth, anti-Christian): that we can accept that there are elements to our selfhood that are unchosen, or even contrary to our desires, without denying that there's something to our individual, private, personal dignity, to our conscience, to our moral reasoning, to our interior life — and to our creative abilities (though not exclusively the abilities prized by self-making narrative, which tends towards mere attention capture). I'd say that I see Self-Made as a warning note — let's not overly valorize choice and desire at the expense of givenness; or else let's try and identify more clearly what, exactly, is the source (if any) of individual personal dignity and freedom outside the social collective — rather than a call to return.

11.I guess where I would argue with you slightly is that I like this idea of divinity in self-creation but I would tend to see both the dandyish and up-by-the-bootstraps version as debased popularizations of the main conception. For me, the main conception is ‘humanistic,’ and basically is that it's our choices that make us who we are, as opposed to our social roles. And the main figures would be a little different — it would be Hamlet stepping out of the social role he's expected to play and achieving a kind of vertiginous freedom, Whitman reaching something very much like transcendence where the self travels in a way that it can't in ordinary social interaction. Does that make sense? Curious how you would think about a view of self-creation that's not so much about success but about making fraught moral choices without the aid of tradition or received wisdom.

I think I'm moving more towards a classical liberal (and maybe Protestant?) position on this — a book that really helped me think about this more clearly was Zena Hitz's Lost in Thought, and her work on the dignity of the interior intellectual life. I think “individual conscience” vs “wisdom” is a false binary — insofar as we think in language, even, we're thinking in received wisdom; we don't have and can't have immediate access to a kind of primordial state. (And I think maybe the illusion that we do, or that our desires are truly authentic to us rather than being mediated through other people — literal and figurative advertisements — is my problem with the modern divinization of desire.) But I'm increasingly interested in the idea that there is something vital to the idea that we can have a private moral accounting, a private self-conception, that there is non-socialized truth we have some limited access to, and desire (or at least investigated desire) gets us there. And that's where I think the idea of discernment becomes important — something I wrote about for Comment earlier this year. Discernment meaning: picking apart, say, your desires, or intuitions, or received notions — not assuming they're automatically authoritative or automatically dangerous but weighing them, carefully. And I think the exercise of discernment — old-fashioned though it may sound — is one of the ways that we can balance the freedom to make a choice with the received wisdom of how One Thinks One Ought to Choose.

12.Can you talk about your background, which seems to be really interesting. You were trained as a theologian?

I was! I did my doctorate in theology — with a focus on theology and French decadent literature, as I said — at Oxford, where I'd also done undergrad. But around the same time, I was also working as a travel writer and Caucasus journalist (see below), and working on the novel that became Social Creature. I ended up getting a job as Vox's first religion reporter in 2017, right when I was finishing my dissertation, and leaving academia to pursue full-time journalism. I ended up realizing I was happiest writing longform rather that online shortform — I left Vox to finish Strange Rites, and have been freelancing from then until last week; I've just joined the Catholic University of America as a Lecturer/Research Fellow to work on a Templeton grant on the relationship between beauty and spiritual transcendence. You could say I've had the same few obsessions since college — the relationship between art and life, art and God, novel-writing, and what it means to create yourself, magically or otherwise — and I’m finding different ways to get people to pay me to think about, and write about, that.

13.And then you lived in Tbilisi at one point?

I did! Off and on for almost a decade. My mother worked for USAID (RIP) when I was in college, and Oxford only offered you accommodation for a portion of the year, as they rented out your dorm to summer/vacation school students outside of term-time. So I spent, roughly, half the year in Tbilisi, and ended up making a part-time life for myself there even after my mother was reassigned, ghostwriting romance novels to fund grad school. I was just there for a month this summer — I have an incredible intellectual community over there; it’s a weird and wonderful place — and I think it might be the only place I could ever live other than New York City.

14.You've also written a number of novels. Can you talk a bit about writing fiction as opposed to non-fiction? What are the different sides of yourself that you activate in working in different forms? To what extent are the themes in your novels extrapolations of ideas that you're working out in your non-fiction?

Yes, I've written three novels, and am at work on a fourth. Fiction is absolutely my vocation, my passion, the thing I love most — writing novels, and trying to write really good novels, is the single most fulfilling part of the work I do. But it's also deeply personal, and terrifying, and lonely, and I’m not sure I love the life of a novelist outside of intense solitary work-periods. I’m happiest writing and debating and thinking about ideas in community — a musician friend of mine recently compared that world to “verbal jazz” — but then every so often I want to go away and turn off my internet and write fiction intensely. But I think my fiction is at its best when I'm exploring, from an emotional or intuitive level, the limits of what I can work out intellectually — realizing that these ideas and questions and concerns are ultimately unresolvable in a formal sense. And so my characters are constantly trying to work them out, or live them out, or balance what they're thinking with their own desires and distractions and non-ideological motivations. I think most of my novels are about sin — or at least sin as I understand it, where our sense of reality, and our desires, are constantly warped by wanting the wrong things, or thinking the wrong things, or internalizing the wrong things. And I think the relationships between people — rather than Ideas — are where reality plays out. When I'm writing fiction — I have to sometimes force myself to stop thinking in terms of ideas or even theology — it's a much more intuitive process. Sometimes it feels like I’m hearing, or transcribing the story, rather than inventing it. It's a totally different way of being, and one that requires a different sense of preparation and maybe even openness. I have to get out of my own head to write fiction, which is difficult, given that language is very much in my head.

15.What are you working on now — or, if that's an annoying question, what's currently exciting to you in the realm of ideas?

I'm working on far too many things at the moment. I'm working on my fourth novel, which is basically a Faust story about Cancelled (and, worse, overlooked) writers set in an obscure Adriatic village in Italy. I'm working on my third non-fiction book, an intellectual history of magic and modernity, which should hopefully come out from Forum in 2027. I'm starting this research work on beauty and spiritual yearning at Catholic University of America. And I've started a new Substack, The Lost Word, to write about the relationship between God, art, magic, technology, enchantment, writing, self-invention — basically all my usual obsessions — from the perspective of a novelist, a culture critic, and a theologian.