Literature Doesn't Burn Its Bridges — It Builds on Top of Them
Why the most subversive writers in history never destroyed what came before — and what that means for how we think about progress
Subversion is a lie we keep telling ourselves.
Or, to be more precise — we've turned the word inside out so many times it barely means what we think it does. Every book jacket, every breathless review, every undergraduate essay reaches for "subversive" the way a drowning person reaches for air. And I say this as someone who spent years studying the physics of stars and galaxies, where we don't get to casually throw around words like "revolutionary" unless something has genuinely changed the math.
In science, when your model replaces the old one, the old one is gone. Literature, it turns out, plays by a completely different set of rules.
I'm simplifying a bit, and I'll keep doing that throughout this piece — complex ideas deserve to be accessible, not locked behind jargon.
The old isn't razed; it's swallowed whole, digested, and made part of something new.
That's not destruction. That's something far more interesting.
A Word That Changed Its Own Meaning
Here's a little history. The word "subversion" entered English through the Wycliffe Bible, and for centuries it meant exactly what it sounds like: to raze, to destroy, to overthrow, to corrupt.
In 1956, the Canadian critic Hugh Kenner became the first person to use it as a literary-critical term, writing in The Sewanee Review that W. B. Yeats had "subverted" a tradition. But Kenner was still reaching back to that older, demolition-flavoured definition.
The distinction Ericson draws is sharp enough to cut yourself on. A revolution is an inversion — Hierarchy No. 1 falls, Hierarchy No. 2 rises, and everyone knows it happened. You can't have a secret revolution.
Subversion, on the other hand, succeeds precisely because it's hard to spot. It implies corruption so subtle it escapes notice, even when you think you're paying attention.
That difference — between the visible overthrow and the invisible infiltration — changes everything about how we read.
Dante's Hell: Where the Dead Still Breathe
To show us how literary subversion actually works, Ericson takes us to the one place that exists purely in the imagination: Hell.
Think about it. Hell is the only location that appears across centuries of literary traditions but never shows up — at least for the living — outside of fiction.
Theologians describe it as a position of infinite distance from the Divine, which, terrifying as it is, leaves a lot of creative real estate for poets to argue over. You can smell the sulphur already, can't you?
Dante Alighieri's Inferno is the most famous literary Hell ever built. He walks us through circles of eternal punishment alongside his guide — Virgil himself, the Roman poet, right there on the page. Dante keeps Cerberus guarding the gates.
He borrows the idea that punishments match the crime. He takes the scaffolding of Greco-Roman Hades and wraps it in Christian theology.
And here's where it gets personal.
Dante arranged the architecture of Hell according to his own priorities. His sympathy for lovers like Paolo and Francesca placed them in the gentler upper circles.
His fury at the political schemers — the Guelph factions whose machinations determined the course of his exile — pushed them deep toward the Pit. He even reserved a spot in the Eighth Circle for Pope Boniface VIII.
That's not neutral theology. That's revenge. Beautiful, eternal, literary revenge.
The Trick Is: He Didn't Destroy Anything
Here's what struck me hardest about Ericson's argument. If Dante had actually destroyed the older ideas of Hell — if he'd corrupted them in the old sense of the word — then modern readers would open the Inferno and find something familiar.
Our idea of Hell would simply be Dante's vision. There'd be nothing surprising about it.
But that's not what happens. We still carry older, pre-Dante ideas of the underworld in our heads. Dante influenced our assumptions, yes — enormously.
But his Hell retains so many features of Greco-Roman Hades that it doesn't fully align with what 21st-century readers expect from divine punishment. The presence of Cerberus and King Minos proves the point: Dante didn't erase the past. He folded it into something new.
This is what I think about when people tell me that my condition, my wheelchair, means I've lost some version of a "normal" life. I didn't destroy the person I was before dystonia.
I absorbed that experience — the surgeries, the pain, the DBS implant and its eventual removal — and built something different on top of it. The old Gerd is still in there, the way Virgil is still in Dante's Hell.
Milton's Satan: A Monarch Made of Words
John Milton took the literary Hell and did something even more pointed.
Paradise Lost opens in a "dungeon horrible" where flames throw "no light, but rather darkness visible" — a phrase so good it makes your skin prickle four centuries later. Satan wakes up, gathers his fallen angels, and builds Pandaemonium.
Not just a palace. A parliament.
Milton is writing after the English Restoration, and he's furious. He styles Satan as Hell's monarch, and the demonic parliament becomes a biting critique of monarchical power.
Satan's authority over his fellow demons is entirely rhetorical. Opinion is the source of his power, not Divine Right. He convinces the other demons he's doing them a favour by personally travelling to Earth to corrupt mankind — and they buy it, the way voters buy campaign promises they know won't be kept.
But Ericson won't let us settle into a simple reading. The same passage that criticises monarchy also takes aim at parliament. The fallen angels who sit debating in Pandaemonium — a word that has since come to mean "chaotic cacophony" — are even worse than Satan, because they don't even have the nerve to make the dangerous journey themselves.
If monarchy is too fragile, too reliant on rhetoric, then parliament is where rhetoric alone reigns supreme.
Milton isn't tearing anything down. He's stabilising monarchy and parliament as objects of critique, making them available to the kind of tacit understanding that lets a culture process its own contradictions.
Science Has Revolutions — Literature Has Subversions
This is the observation that, as a physicist, I can't stop chewing on.
Ericson writes that the ability to accommodate contradiction is what separates literary thinking from scientific or philosophical thinking. When a scientist arrives at a new answer, the old answer is wrong — full stop. Einstein didn't coexist with Newton in the way McCrae coexists with Dante.
Philosophers can't claim one model of the mind is valid while also accepting all the competing models. Science has revolutions. Philosophy has arguments.
Literature has subversions.
And the beauty of it is this: literary subversion only requires internal coherence. If the opening pages say murderers occupy the deepest pit of Hell, but we arrive to find politicians there instead, we need an explanation — even if that explanation is just "politician and murderer is a false distinction." This low bar of coherence allows competing, contradictory ideas to live side by side across centuries without cancelling each other out.
I find this deeply moving. In my own life, contradictions coexist all the time — the joy of founding FreeAstroScience with tens of thousands of followers alongside the grinding reality of a body that doesn't cooperate.
The triumph of graduating from the University of Bologna alongside the loneliness of hospital rooms in Italy, far from Albania. These things don't cancel each other. They layer.
A Robot Seagull Named Law
Ericson's essay takes a sharp turn into the present with Shane McCrae's 2025 poem New and Collected Hell. Where Dante had Virgil as his guide through the underworld — sometimes friendly, sometimes stern — McCrae is guided by a robot seagull named Law who calls him "shithead."
I laughed out loud at that. There's something so honest about replacing a gentle Roman poet with an abusive mechanical bird.
McCrae places bank executives at the heart of Hell, forced to queue eternally for their turn to be "popped, exploding into a pink mush." Satan becomes "the boss" and God becomes "the boss boss." The poem criticises American corporate culture with the same pointed precision Milton aimed at monarchy.
But Ericson insists that these broad structural moves are less interesting than the poem's finest details — the moments where language itself starts to break down and meaning becomes slippery.
There's a passage near the end where the narrator's dream of Hell and Law's dream become entangled. McCrae refuses to place a clear break between the lines, so we can't tell whose imagination is producing whom. If Law is dreaming the narrator — rather than the other way around — then the end of Hell's punishment is, from Law's perspective, the end of the world.
In a few lines, McCrae captures the complex guilt of complicity: we feel relief that Hell only "seemed" to stop.
Sound, Not Subversive
The essay closes with a thought from H. L. Mencken, who once argued that Henrik Ibsen's power as a writer came from having no ideas that wouldn't occur to an average middle-class person of his time. Ibsen's genius wasn't in radical novelty — it was in being "sound."
Ericson takes this deflation of literary ambition and applies it to our obsession with subversion. Literature's job isn't to constantly replace itself.
McCrae doesn't take Dante's place the way Einstein shouldered Newton off the podium. Writers have enough of a job wrapping the insights of their generation around the frames and traditions they've inherited.
That task — the wrapping, the absorbing, the building — forces writers to find new modes of expression that can hold the weight of history. Dante invented terza rima for the job.
McCrae uses idiosyncratic line breaks and repetitions. The form itself carries the argument.
What a Physicist Learns from Poets
I've spent most of my adult life in fields where the old gets replaced. In astrophysics, a better model wins and the previous model goes to the textbook's footnotes.
That's clean. That's elegant. But it's also a little cold.
What Ericson's essay taught me — and what I want to share from here in Tirana, from this wheelchair, from this strange and wonderful life of mine — is that some forms of progress don't require demolition. Some of the most powerful changes happen when you absorb what came before, carry it with you, and build something that contains the full weight of the past without pretending the past never existed.
That's not just a literary principle. It's a human one.
I didn't choose this body, but I chose what to do with the life it carries. Every surgery, every Erasmus semester in Istanbul, every late night running the FreeAstroScience pages — none of it cancelled what came before. It all layered.
It all accumulated. The way Dante's Hell still holds Virgil's Hades inside it. The way McCrae's robot seagull still, somehow, echoes a Roman poet walking through fire.
Never give up isn't about destroying obstacles. It's about absorbing them into the story you're building.
And if you're going to write that story — well, as Mencken and Ericson suggest, maybe aim less for subversive and more for sound.
Gerd Dani is the President of Free Astroscience — Science and Cultural Group, an astronomy graduate from the University of Bologna, and a master's student in physics from the University of Milan. He writes from Tirana, Albania. You can follow FreeAstroScience for more reflections where science meets everything else.
Post a Comment