An expert guide to the books appearing in ‘The White Lotus’
FREUD and Nietzsche may not be what you have in mind when thinking of pool-side reads, but they are among the books flipped through in The White Lotus – the tense, new Showmax drama about the lives of the rich and privileged as they overlap at a Hawaiian resort.
Are Paula and Olivia truly delving into the mind of the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, or indeed, into Camille Paglia’s deconstruction of the Western literary canon?
Or are they just books for show: an intellectual performance to hide secret glances and gossip?
Either way, frequent book covers speak loudly in the show. So here, then, is what the experts think you should know about these props and the stories they tell.
Maybe you will find one to pick up the next time you fly off for your island holiday. Just try to avoid the White Lotus resort.
The Interpretation of Dreams,
by Sigmund Freud
“If I cannot bend the heavens above, I will move Hell.” Freud quotes the poet Virgil to describe his aim in this book of explaining the meaning of dreams – by recourse to his theory of the unconscious mind.
Freud considered Interpretation of Dreams as his masterpiece, and ensured it would be published in 1900 to mark its significance. Dreams had traditionally been viewed as either senseless or vehicles of communication with the Divine. Freud instead contended all dreams involve the fulfilment of a wish. In adults, he wrote, many of the wishes we have are of such an “edgy” nature their fulfilment would wake us up if staged too directly.
So, in order to at once fulfil these unconscious wishes and stay asleep, the “dream work” of the sleeping mind distorts the wish, using mechanisms of displacement (making insignificant things seem important, and the other way around), condensation (bringing together multiple ideas in single images), and transforming words into
the seemingly random images.
Packed with striking dream analyses, and containing perhaps the best systematic statement of Freud’s theory of the mind, this book is an influential classic.
The Wretched of the Earth,
by Frantz Fanon
Psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique. After the World War II he studied in France. Later, in 1953, he moved to Algeria, joining the Algerian National Liberation Front.
The Wretched of the Earth (originally published as Les Damnés de la Terre in
1961) was written at the height of the Algerian War of Independence. Based on Fanon’s first-hand experience of working in colonial Algeria, it is a classic text of postcolonial studies, examining the physical and psychological violence colonised people experience.
Fanon’s book is a lucid and damning account of the impact of colonialism: the ways it irrevocably changes people, their societies and their culture.
A passionate call to resist colonisation and oppression, The Wretched of the Earth was seen as dangerous by colonial powers at the time of its publication. It is still an important anti-colonial work today.
Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia
Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) is a provocative survey of Western canonical art and culture.
On its publication, Sexual Personae was considered iconoclastic, groundbreaking and subversive for, as Paglia wrote, its focus on “amorality, aggression, sadism, voyeurism and pornography in great art”.
The book was lauded for its insights into sex, violence and power; and labelled anti-feminist and sinister in its views about gender and sexuality.
Sexual Personae discusses the decadence and enduring influence of paganism in Western culture.
Paglia connects sexual freedom to sadomasochism and argues that our self-destructive and lustful Dionysian impulses are in tension with our Apollonian instincts for order. Named after Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Paglia’s book charts recurrent types in the Western imagination, such as the “beautiful boy”, the “femme fatale” and the “female vampire”.
Through these personae, she discusses works such as the Mona Lisa, Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Particularly famous is the chapter on Emily Dickinson and Paglia’s analysis of the brutal and sadistic metaphors in Dickinson’s poetry.
Paglia’s Sexual Personae is electrifying and divisive; still one of the most important texts in 1990s sexual politics.
My Brilliant Friend,
by Elena Ferrante
The first volume of her Neapolitan Series, Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011) is a feminist coming-of-age story that begins with a mystery.
In the first few pages, a distinguished writer, Elena (known as Lenù), learns an old friend, Raffaella (or Lila), has disappeared without a trace.
Lila’s disappearance prompts Lenù to begin writing the story of her life, focusing on the pair’s complicated friendship.
Focusing on their childhood in 1950s Naples, she writes unsentimentally of poverty, violence, familial conflicts and organised crime.
The novel is densely plotted and written with unsparing accuracy about the characters of Naples, but Lenù’s candid narration makes for an utterly engrossing reading experience.
In plain, fast-paced prose she describes a grim childhood full of misogyny and domestic violence, but enlivened by her friendship with Lila.
Ferrante gives us a moving portrait of friendship. Over the course of the novel, both girls begin to see glimpses of how they might move beyond the limitations of the world they have inherited.