Muscle Man
by jordan castro
catapult, 272 pages, $27
Harold, the protagonist of Jordan Castro’s new novel Muscle Man, is a Gulliver who doesn’t travel. Or a Gulliver whose travels only take him back and forth across the campus of Shepherd College, where he teaches, encountering moral pygmies and moral giants, all of whom seem to lack something essential to the human perspective. Harold’s liberal arts lifeworld is unvital and strangely gray. His thoughts are “sludge-like.” He wants nobility, strength, purity, but sees only “spiritual malady” in the “scrunched and squinty countenance” of the people around him.
Shepherd College, Castro’s creation located in the “north of the south,” “opened in 1859 as the town of Bly’s first agriculture school, purchased from a slave-owning farmer and built on ancestral Piscataway land.” It is a typical captured institution: Progressive ideology suffuses every object, every social interaction, and every thought.
The college is liberal, but it generates, like a turbine, a deep illiberalism and a desire for a Nietzschean, aristocratic heroism and masculinity in Harold. The “sludge” that Harold moves through is the accumulation of dead or false idealisms of progressive modernity.
Harold feels that the campus is “concealing something frightfully duplicitous,” a duplicity “personified” by Shepherd’s “administrative system.” Shepherd, though technically in the south, is kept inside the operating system of progressive modernity only by bureaucratic fiat; the “administration” keeps the university from drifting from its mission of liberation and social justice.
Harold feels that Shepherd College “only pretends to present something dead and dug up from its depths,” because “in reality it is presenting something scarily still alive.” Learning the past, the world of the great and dead, is a projection. Shepherd College only teaches the endless scroll of the present, recirculating the stale air of the monochromatic contemporary.
Privately, Harold wants to be “like a priest” who teaches his liberal students about the “most important aspects of life: literature, culture, philosophy.” But he fails to transmit his passion for reading and writing; he isn’t charismatic enough to convert his students. Like many priests, Harold is from the working class; also like many priests, he’s “awkward,” unsettled in the world, too aware of “the uneasiness of his freedom.”
Harold “travels” from the classroom to the committee meeting to the gym, but he’s never at home anywhere. He is aware of his spiritual exile, but he has no thought of agency. He is always drifting because he has no anchor—no family, no church, no love affair. But Harold is a Millennial, his standards are low, and he has nowhere else to go. He feels lucky to be there; Shepherd College allows him to read and write, so he clings to it despite his misgivings.
And the misgivings are many and profound. For instance, Harold despises a colleague, Dolly, a Southerner who disavows the gentility and noblesse oblige of the South, and who has embraced the Northern spiritual frigidity of Shepherd College. Harold is disgusted by Dolly, who he thinks is performing “Southernness” while disavowing it. And yet Harold is like Dolly, too. He also hates the South and thinks it has a “loser spirit.” Dolly is a “middling urban elite disguised as a Southerner,” who “grew up in a large coastal city of her heart and brain while pretending to be from a small Southern town.”
On some level, Harold hates Dolly for performing “Southernness” while teaching at a very liberal college, just like he hates himself for reading Mishima and weightlifting while teaching at a very liberal college. He too wants to “destroy the South” simply because he wasn’t allowed, or hasn’t allowed himself, to participate in the kind of honor culture that the Old South represents. Like Dolly, Harold’s moral instincts are at odds with his social and intellectual paradigm; he still lives in the “coastal city of the heart and mind.”
Harold hates, violently at times, his meritocratic, elitist colleagues and his brain-dead students. Most of all he hates his pale, sludge-like lifeworld. But nobody knows Harold’s thoughts. They don’t realize how much of a violent, aristocratic “rebel” he is inside. On the outside, he appears to be just like them: a meritocratic elitist, a “lib” (albeit with strange tastes in Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and weightlifting).
Harold has also written a novel that was received by reviewers as a comic satire of the “reactionary right.” For him, this is “a total misunderstanding.” He has hidden his real thoughts beneath a thin coating of satire—maybe not even intentionally. This is his spiritual problem: He can’t unironically inhabit and live his own values. In the modern world, they are automatically converted into a joke.
Harold’s only relief from progressive modernity and from his own contradictions, the only place where he’s happy, is the gym. Weightlifting is transcendence. Harold thinks about the wisdom of esoteric legendary weightlifter Mike Mentzer, the philosopher’s weightlifter. Mentzer guides Harold, Virgil-like.
Harold’s experiences in the gym are the closest he comes to sincerity and truth. The language of Muscle Man borrows from Castro’s own personal essay in Harper’s last year, “Getting the Pump”:
I experience a sensation I think of as “opening up.” I receive new eyes. When blood flows into your muscles it changes your eyes—like wearing glasses. It starts in your blood and stretches out over the world, where everything remains the same, but different. It’s as if each color contains a deeper, richer layer of itself, invisible during the rote machinery of life—working on my laptop, making food, driving my car—which only gets revealed when blood makes muscle thick and full.
Similarly, in the novel, weightlifting “opens up” Harold’s body and his brain. Blood courses through him and he becomes joyful. And yet, when Harold is called in by the apparatchik English department to speak on behalf of a colleague suspected of wrongthink, he finds himself unable to truly defend him, because his crimes are Harold’s crimes. Outside of the gym, Harold isn’t a “muscle man,” but a coward—a small man who takes secret pleasure in watching his memetic rival get dispatched by the soulless university surveillance system that he himself deplores and wants to see violently destroyed.
While the prose style—the repetition of Harold, Harold, Harold, for example—sometimes put me off the book, Muscle Man succeeds as a sociological allegory and rewards re-reading. At its best, Muscle Man is Swiftian, in that it shows there’s no true spiritual infection that is not the common property of all men. Harold is a loathsome, flat, not-so-muscular man. But the spiritual forces that work upon him work upon us as well. His myriad contradictions are produced by the very structures that bind anyone who would find Muscle Man in a bookstore, or indeed, read this review.
