The best part of that poem is its title. Nobodaddy’s syllables contain the shock of recognition. Sylvia Plath had a Nobodaddy. Maybe even Job had a Nobodaddy.

In the story of Job, we have this passage:

That last line also contains the shock of recognition. We don’t see God, but we can infer his Existence from the prisoner renditions.

There are other resonances with our time. Dostoyevsky gave us murderers, child molesters, suicides, devilish compulsions. Kirkegaard gave us fear and loathing unto death. Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the sentence that there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Faulkner gives us the psychopath Popeye and the ratlike Snopeses and Miss Emily for a lover. Robert Penn Warren, in his anatomy of the human heart called All the King’s Men, gives us the Big Twitch, a mindless reflex that passes for human connection in Louisiana and elsewhere. Hemingway gives us Our Nada Who Art In Nada. Margaret Atwood gives us Bluebeard. Fitzgerald gives us the soul of Gatsby twining with the souls of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and we watch as all those souls evaporate before our eyes. Eliot, in addition to showing us John Webster’s skull beneath the skin, gives us the irony of attempting to warm our metaphysics against breastless ribs. Ralph Ellison gives us an invisible man who lives between walls of bright-lit bulbs just so he can see enough of himself to believe in his own existence.

No wonder the surgeon’s son Foucault, who gives us a vision of our world as history’s prison and our social relationships as psychic cannibalism, is not so much philosopher but Philosopher’s Stone, the irreducible final substance that transforms whatever it touches. In his analyses of bondage and torture, in his delicate tracings of power relationships, in his simultaneous HIV positivity and promiscuity, in his chrome-skulled leather-clad shimmering between rage and reason, he gives us as final a vision of what it is to evolve beyond the human as we could hope for.

Borges, in his great short story The Garden of the Forking Paths, indicates that you cannot escape a labyrinth by going forward. Escape is behind you. So in my attempt to find a reason to write in the face of Foucault and his precursors I’d like to visit Stockholm on December 10th, 1950: William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Faulkner said the reason for his life’s work is “to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” But then he discusses writing in the face of an overwhelming question: When will I be blown up?

Because of this question, Faulkner says, “The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth... the agony and the sweat.”