64 pages • 2-hour read
Katabasis
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Themes
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of sexual violence and harassment.
Academia as an Infernal Structure
While Hell is a physical place Alice and Peter traverse, it is also an allegory for modern academia. The trials the Shades are put through also symbolically mirror the saying, “academia is hell,” depicting academia as an infernal structure riddled with toxic expectations, power dynamics, and futile ambitions.
The physical settings in Hell are fraught with parallels to academia, literally styling academia as an infernal structure. No matter who traverses it, the “Eight Courts of Hell reflected the world of the living” (76). This is why Dante’s Hell was populated with “all the poets and artists and politicians he was personally familiar with over his lifetime” (77). For Peter and Alice, thus, “Hell is a campus” (77). The first few Courts of Hell embody parts of a campus: A library, a student center, and the edge of campus. Even after these parallels drop away, many facets of academia remain scattered through the Courts. In Cruelty, Alice sees Shades trapped in cages that remind her of “carrels at exam time” (384). Later, Gradus explains that Shades in the final circle write a dissertation about “[w]hatever we’re in for” until it “passes muster” and they’re allowed to reincarnate (401). Like academic dissertations, the criteria for what makes a good dissertation in Hell are indistinct and difficult to obtain.
Hell’s resemblance to her old academic life initially makes Alice think that “this current Hell was rather pleasant” (81). However, as it becomes more apparent how the power disparities and abuses of academia truly affect Alice and Peter—elements they attempt to ignore with their romanticized versions of their experiences and ambitions—this comfort is exposed as an illusion, with the aesthetic similarities between Hell and an academic campus becoming more troubling.
In many ways, the novel presents the real academia as even more of an infernal structure than the novel’s version of Hell. For instance, Alice was “underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students, and no one cared much about it” (10). After this statement, Alice lists a series of increasingly alarming effects that being an exploited graduate student was having on her: Chronic insomnia, drinking so much coffee that the world “shimmered” and she could not write, and feeling “that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world” and like “she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea” (10). The things she had to do to find success in academia made Alice lose her sense of the real world.
By contrast, in Hell, Alice learns to appreciate the real world. She realizes that there is much joy to be found in simple pleasures and rejects her former isolation and insecurity to pursue a romantic relationship with Peter. In this way, both symbolically and literally, academia is a “hell” from which Alice and Peter must escape.
Ambition as Self-Damnation
Hell itself does not trap the Shades; the Shades trap themselves in Hell’s Courts by adhering to supposed hierarchies and the status quo. However, Shades are not always individually responsible for the cycle of self-damnation they find themselves in: Their ambition is oriented toward finding success in hierarchies plagued by inequality, inaccessibility, and corruption. This nuance invites readers to recognize toxic or problematic behaviors without victim-blaming or implying it is entirely within an individual’s power to control how their ambitions play out, with Alice and Peter caught in a system that turns ambition into self-damnation.
Several times, Alice states what she would give up for academic success: In addition to half her lifetime, “she would sacrifice her firstborn for a professorial post. She would sever a limb. She would give anything” (8). Later, when thinking about the possibility of a job in “alt-ac” (alternatives to academia), she thinks: “She became a tenured magician, or she died. She could envision no life worth living otherwise” (60). At all points, Alice feels like she is making the choice to enter academia, and thus willingly making the sacrifices necessary to do so. However, Alice is an unreliable narrator, and she immediately compromises this by admitting that “no one really means it when they said alt academia was just as prestigious” (60). Hints such as these indicate that Alice’s ambition, and those of other academics, are shaped by the expectations set up by the system itself, rather than an internal motivation for self-betterment. Self-driven ambitions do trap Alice and others in cycles of damnation, but these ambitions have multivalent origins that contain a complex mix of internal and external influences.
When it comes to other people, Alice is able to recognize the undue influence of these expectations and encourage them to let go of them. When she and Peter meet Grimes’s undergraduates, they learn they do not want to reincarnate because they fear being reincarnated as something less prestigious than an academic-in-training. Alice calls this fear “rather prejudiced” (37), recognizing the racism and elitism of wanting to remain in Hell as a dead academic rather than be reincarnated “working rice paddies in China” or “[m]ilking cows in Arkansas” (37). In this way, the undergraduates’ ambition quite literally damns them to a longer time in Hell. While she is able to recognize this futile tendency in the undergraduates, she is unwilling to recognize the self-damnation in her own behavior toward academia, insisting, “That’s different […] That’s worth it” (38) when the undergraduates point out the similarities in their cases.
Throughout Hell, Alice notices people trapped in Courts by nothing other than their own impression that they have no other choice than to be there. In Desire, the Second Court, she notices, “Shades upon Shades sitting freely in their cells, repeating singular, rote activities” (134). The adverb “freely” juxtaposes with the image of “cells”: Usually, a cell is a room in which someone is trapped involuntarily. However, these Shades are free to leave but nevertheless trap themselves there, repeating activities, simply because that is the structure of the Court they are in.
This pattern repeats throughout the majority of Courts. Though the Shades’ ambition traps them there, the influence of institutional expectations also fuels self-damnation: Throughout Hell, they elect to remain because in some way, they believe they must.
The Mutability of Facts, Reason, and Logic
On the literal levels of plot and worldbuilding, as well as a metafictional level, the novel engages heavily with the idea that facts are mutable, and reason and logic can be manipulated to contradictory ends. On a literal level, this is reflected by the idea that magick works due to a reframing of fact in the magician’s mind. On a metafictional level, the mutability of facts iterates itself through Alice’s unreliable narration, as the facts she presents do not always turn out to be fully true.
Magick works by finding “a set of premises that, even if just for a split second, made the world seem other than what it really was” (17). This works by drawing an equation for a paradox, which works to “defy, trouble, or at the very least dislodge belief” (18). By creating a logical paradigm in which reasonable conclusions lead to an overturning of a seemingly established fact, the magician can create magick.
In the section in Chapter 1 titled “On Magick,” the information given about the relationship between untruths and magick hints at the fact that this theme is operating on a grander level than just worldbuilding for its magick system:
All it took was to tell a lie—and to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all the rules could be suspended. You held a conclusion in your head and believed, through sheer force of will, that everything else was wrong. You had to see the world as it was now. Now Alice, as she proceeded through her coursework, got very good at this. All skilled magicians were. (20)
These lines metafictionally foreshadow the fact that Alice is lying to herself. Alice does not seem to fully understand Grimes’s abuse of her and Peter until the end of the novel, and the narrative only gradually reveals that the facts of the plot, as Alice has laid them, are unreliable. For instance, she seems to be going to Hell to rescue Grimes’s soul so he can write her a recommendation letter. Only much later does she admit that this was never true: Alice is really going to bind his soul to his remains to exercise power over him the way he did to her.
Furthermore, Alice and Peter’s entire katabasis mirrors a paradox, in which every individual choice they take seems to make logical sense, until one looks at their journey in totality and sees that their trajectory does not make logical sense. This mismatch in logic is a grounding principle of a paradox like the “self-torturer problem” (252), which Elspeth explains to Alice. Someone is given the option to turn up a dial that increases their pain in an unnoticeable increment. In return, they receive a large reward. Since the difference is imperceptible, the decision appears rational. Eventually, the person will experience large amounts of pain: Even then, since the change in pain is imperceptible, it makes logical sense to continue to turn the dial. A paradox like this shows how individual choices that adhere to reason, and logic can result in a state that seems illogical overall.
Later in her katabasis, Alice “knew that she had erred” somewhere, but felt that “along every step of the way, from start to finish, each next move had in that very moment seemed the only rational thing” (389). The self-torturer’s paradox, by highlighting the mutability of logic, thus explains how someone can arrive in unambiguously negative circumstances without intending to do so, just as Alice and Peter do with their experiences in academia.
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