{"id":99192,"date":"2016-06-10T15:00:46","date_gmt":"2016-06-10T19:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=99192"},"modified":"2016-06-15T12:35:46","modified_gmt":"2016-06-15T16:35:46","slug":"the-trouble-of-rational-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trouble of Rational Thought"},"content":{"rendered":"

How Helen DeWitt\u2019s <\/em>The Last Samurai cultivates ambition in its readers.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

The first edition of The Last Samurai<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Watch Helen DeWitt discuss\u00a0<\/em><\/a>The Last Samurai<\/a> in our My First Time video series.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

In the late nineties, Helen DeWitt, a then-unpublished writer with a Ph.D. in classics from Oxford, got an offer on her first novel, The Seventh Samurai<\/i>. It had been seventeen months since her agent had indicated she would be able to get an advance based on the first six chapters of the manuscript\u2014which, in the absence of a contract, DeWitt had diligently been attempting to finish. After she received the offer, she wrote to her agent; she felt she was likely to commit suicide if she had to continue working with her. Looking over her editor’s comments, she scarcely felt more hopeful. When a contract arrived, she decided not to sign it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some time later, a friend showed the manuscript to Jonathan Burnham, then at Talk Miramax Books; he immediately offered her $70,000. At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the novel caused what can fairly be called a sensation; but the enthusiasm of foreign houses did not make English-language publication any easier. DeWitt spent months battling her copy editor, who had ignored DeWitt\u2019s edits and imposed hundreds of standardizing changes of her own. It was, DeWitt told the <\/span>Observer<\/em><\/a> in 2011, as if they were trying to \u201ckill the mind that wrote the book.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2000, DeWitt\u2019s novel was released as The Last Samurai<\/a><\/em>. (DeWitt was forced<\/a> to change the title, only to see its Google results buried, three years later, beneath the Tom Cruise movie of the same name). In The New Yorker<\/em><\/a>, A.\u2009S. Byatt hailed it as \u201ca triumph\u2014a genuinely new story, a genuinely new form.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then, in 2005, the imprint that had published DeWitt\u2019s novel was absorbed by Disney\u2019s Hyperion Books. By the time The Last Samurai<\/em> was excitedly recommended to me, in 2007, by an ex-boyfriend I was still eager to please, it was out of print\u2014which only, of course, added to its allure. This was not a book for just anyone, was the implication. News of it traveled by word of mouth\u2014and if that word reached you, it said something about the kind of reader you were: attracted to the recondite, undaunted by formal difficulty, unconventional in your tastes.<\/p>\n

Now that the novel has been reissued by New Directions<\/a>, my hope is that its cultish sheen will dull. Of course The Last Samurai <\/em>is not<\/em> a novel for everyone\u2014no novel is\u2014but it is a novel for many people. It is deliberately\u2014proudly\u2014erudite and intertextual; it is, like the mind of its author, stubbornly idiosyncratic. But also, importantly: it is a novel less interested in being ambitious for ambition\u2019s sake, than it is in cultivating ambition in its readers.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\\\"<\/a>

The New Directions reissue.<\/p><\/div>\n

Near the beginning of The Last Samurai<\/em>, the protagonist, Sibylla, buys a copy of Arnold Schoenberg\u2019s Theory of Harmony<\/em>. Sibylla is a secretary at a small British publishing house. Before that, she was on scholarship at Oxford, where she became disillusioned with her research after spending forty-seven hours struggling through an untranslated German text by an academic whose so-called textual discoveries turned out to be no more than self-justifying logical fallacies. She had come to Oxford to \u201clive among rational beings\u201d; her disappointment was extreme, if plainly evoked. \u201cI put,\u201d DeWitt writes, in Sibylla\u2019s voice, \u201cmy head on my hand.\u201d The secretarial post has allowed her to abandon her research but stay in England. Sibylla, who spent her childhood being shuffled from one town to the next (her father was a precocious scholar turned bitter motel developer) and lied her way into university by faking letters of recommendation, refuses to return to the dead end the States represents.<\/p>\n

Sibylla is also brilliant. She spends her time at Oxford \u201cinfiltrating classes on Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Hittite, Pali, Sanskrit and Dialects of the Yemen (not to mention advanced papyrology and intermediate hieroglyphics).\u201d The sections of the novel she narrates are littered with allusions: to Glenn Gould and Homer and Kurosawa, whose film The<\/em> Seven Samurai <\/em>inspired both of the novel\u2019s titles. She has no patience for art that\u2019s sentimental or illogical or purposelessly beautiful.<\/p>\n

I suspect Sibylla would object to being called brilliant. I suspect she does not believe that she has access to truths unavailable to others; that she believes merely that others usually prefer to avoid traveling the sometimes-arduous path to those truths. \u201cThe fact is,\u201d she explains early in the novel, \u201cthat 99 out of 100 adults spare themselves the trouble of rational thought 99% of the time.\u201d Sibylla seems like the kind of person who\u2019d only admit to being the one out of the hundred who doesn\u2019t. (Though if this is true, what else could brilliance consist of but refusing to be one of the ninety-nine?) Regardless, Sibylla is a woman confident in her convictions. Immediately after her declaration about adults\u2019 general reluctance to engage in rational thought, she concedes, parenthetically, \u201cstudies have not shown this, I have just invented the statistics so I should not say The fact is, but I would be surprised if the true figures were very different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sibylla buys Theory of Harmony<\/em> and, being either brilliant or just rational, begins to apply Schoenberg\u2019s twelve-tone compositional technique to literature. She\u2019s always thought that \u201cbooks should be more like the film The Godfather<\/i>, in which at one stage Al Pacino goes to Sicily and the Italian is all in Italian,\u201d but now she sees the possibilities expand. In the future, she muses, \u201cPerhaps a writer would think of the monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese, and of how this would sound next to lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases or lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes, & having first thought of that would then think of some story about Hungarians or Finns with Chinese.\u201d The recalibration Sibylla imagines goes beyond the mere linguistic. If one is thinking first of tonal contrast\u2014of a lack of grammatical inflection alongside double letters and long vowels and words that are all prefixes and suffixes\u2014one is not thinking primarily, or perhaps at all, about content or meaning.<\/p>\n

This all seems designed to make one wonder: Why, then, is The Last Samurai<\/em> written in English? Why is it a novel, with characters and a plot and psychologically appropriate backstories, at all?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

As it turns out, DeWitt\u2014being either brilliant or just rational\u2014has anticipated this query and its implied critique by putting a similar question in the mouth of Ludo, Sibylla\u2019s ten-year-old son. (Ludo is precocious, but the fact of his age nevertheless stings.) The pair is\u00a0discussing a magazine article by a writer Sibylla finds facile. (This conversation is also, tangentially, about Ludo\u2019s father, a travel writer Sibylla calls \u201cLiberace\u201d because his prose resembles the pianist\u2019s playing: all \u201cslick, buttery arpeggios\u201d and \u201cself-regarding virtuosity\u201d and \u201cprofessional sincerity\u201d; Sibylla won\u2019t tell her son his father\u2019s name until Ludo can explain to her what is wrong with three pieces of bad art, the magazine article among them.)<\/p>\n

Ludo points out that the writer is regarded by \u201cone reviewer \u2026 as the greatest writer in English in the world today.\u201d \u201cAnything follows from a false premise,\u201d she snaps. \u201cIf you accept that American novels should be written in English then it also follows that the Pope is a Jew.\u201d \u201cWell in that case,\u201d Ludo replies, \u201cSeven Samurai<\/i> can\u2019t be any good because it\u2019s in black and white and Japanese.\u201d Sibylla\u2019s response reads like a defense of DeWitt\u2019s own endeavor: \u201cThere is an obvious difference,\u201d she tells her child, \u201cbetween someone who works within the technical limitations of his time which are beyond his control and someone who accepts without thinking limitations which are entirely within his own power to set aside.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

If DeWitt could not set aside the limitations of her time, The Last Samurai <\/em>certainly struggles against them. Narrative trains of thought are interrupted, mid-sentence, and then picked back up, pages later. Font size varies wildly (initially, and to great effect, to indicate a younger Ludo\u2019s ever-louder shouts of impatience). Ampersands abound, and punctuation reflects the rhythms of speech rather than the strictures of traditional grammar. (Liberating, on the page; yet one cannot help but think, with a small pang, of the copy editor DeWitt battled, and the proofreaders that followed.) Blocks of text are reproduced from Gesenius\u2019 Hebrew Grammar<\/em> and a book on aerodynamics. Though the book is primarily written in English, several other languages do appear: Japanese, Greek, Icelandic (all helpfully translated).<\/p>\n

Novelistic conventions prove slightly harder to overthrow. The Last Samurai<\/em> is fragmented and episodic, yes; but in its later two-thirds, the novel, now narrated by Ludo, becomes a kind of quest narrative. Inspired by the plot of The Seven Samurai<\/em>, the eleven-year-old tests various men for paternal suitability after learning the identity of, and being thoroughly disappointed by, his biological father.<\/p>\n

And yet, everywhere, DeWitt makes her suspicion of narrative pleasure clear. For example: Sibylla finds the study of foreign grammar soothing; rarely is she seen enjoying a novel. The most prominent novelist in The Last Samurai<\/em> goes unnamed; Sibylla snidely nicknames him \u201cLord Leighton\u201d after the \u201cHellenising late-Victorian painter.\u201d Like Leighton, the novelist\u2019s problem is not lack of skill, but its empty overabundance: \u201ca character,\u201d she remarks, \u201ccould not look, or step, or speak, without a gorgeous train of sentences swathing his poor stupid thoughts and unfolding in beautiful languor on the still and breathless air.\u201d (Trying to guess which contemporary novelist DeWitt might be eviscerating is one of the many delights of The Last Samurai<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

And then there is the fact that coincidence is the engine that sets The Last Samurai <\/em>going. A series of coincidences\u2014an atheist is sent to seminary school and while there happens to visit a synagogue and at the synagogue meets a Jewish guy who eventually introduces him to his youngest sister, the last in a line of thwarted musicians\u2014leads to the marriage that produces Sibylla. Ludo\u2019s own birth is the result of a chain of similarly unlikely events. (So, for that matter, was the novel\u2019s own publication and subsequent disappearance.) The recognition of coincidence anticipates the birth of a narrative: from an endpoint already invested with meaning, a set of preceding events are mentally linked. And what goes in as happenstance comes out looking a lot like fate\u2014or at least like a story. But if DeWitt cannot avoid employing this kind of machinery, she can call attention to it; the coincidences she describes are pointedly outlandish, and she never transforms them. They remain what they are: accidents of chance.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In a 2012 interview<\/a> with Mayday Magazine<\/i>, DeWitt explained that her use of Greek letters in The Last Samurai<\/em> was a bit of the old \u201cShow don\u2019t tell.\u201d Ludo begins learning Greek at the age of six; DeWitt thought that by spelling English words with Greek letters, she could demonstrate how easy it would be to teach a child Greek using precisely that method. \u201cYou will wonder,\u201d she said, \u201cwhy nobody bothered to teach YOU in first grade (and you will then think, OK, maybe first grade is a bit young, but surely by FOURTH GRADE . . . !!!!).\u201d<\/p>\n

This was not precisely the experience I had, when I read The Last Samurai<\/em>\u2014either for the first time, a little less than a decade ago, or for the second time, earlier this year. Or rather, it did indeed seem possible to teach a child how to spell English words in Greek by this method, but I thought pityingly of the instructor who might have tried to help me, at nine, make the leap from English-in-Greek to Greek-in-Greek. It was jarring, as a twenty-year-old whose personality could have been summed up as \u201cgood at learning things,\u201d to find she was dumber than both a fictional six-year-old and the book he inhabited. It was shaming to discover, at twenty-eight, that this remained true.<\/p>\n

And yet there was pleasure in the shock, and the shame: the pleasure that accompanies the possibility that these feelings eventually, through effort, will be overcome. We are all too dumb, I suspect, for Helen DeWitt, if only because we are too lazy to be the one out of the hundred who refuses to spare herself the trouble of rational thought. (If we weren\u2019t, perhaps DeWitt wouldn\u2019t have had to translate those passages of Japanese and Greek. Perhaps she would have written a different book entirely, filled with Hungarians and Finns and Chinese.) But discomfort is not, on its own basis, to be automatically rejected. It can be, in fact, a delicious spur. DeWitt pushes against the limitations of the novel as a form; reading her, one wants to push against the limitations of one\u2019s own brain.<\/p>\n

Miranda Popkey is a writer based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.<\/em><\/p>\n

Watch Helen DeWitt discuss\u00a0<\/em><\/a>The Last Samurai<\/a> in our My First Time video series.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

How Helen DeWitt\u2019s The Last Samurai cultivates ambition in its readers. Watch Helen DeWitt discuss\u00a0The Last Samurai in our My First Time video series. In the late nineties, Helen DeWitt, a then-unpublished writer with a Ph.D. in classics from Oxford, got an offer on her first novel, The Seventh Samurai. It had been seventeen months […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":62,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[8892,17067,2099,12709,71,16982,19084,22744,687,14826,22748,22743,1572,747,3137,22745,9771,22747,22749,22680,22746],"class_list":["post-99192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-childhood","tag-copyediting","tag-education","tag-fatherhood","tag-fiction","tag-greek","tag-helen-dewitt","tag-kurosawa","tag-language","tag-learning","tag-ludo","tag-miramax","tag-motherhood","tag-novels","tag-oxford","tag-rationality","tag-research","tag-schoenberg","tag-sibylla","tag-the-last-samurai","tag-theory-of-harmony"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nDeWitt\u2019s \u201cThe Last Samurai\u201d Cultivates Ambition in its Readers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Miranda Popkey on the cult novel, now reissued by New Directions.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Trouble of Rational Thought by Miranda Popkey\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"June 10, 2016 \u2013 How Helen DeWitt\u2019s The Last Samurai cultivates ambition in its readers.Watch Helen DeWitt discuss\u00a0The Last Samurai in our My First Time video series.In\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2016-06-10T19:00:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2016-06-15T16:35:46+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1920\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"942\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Miranda Popkey\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Miranda Popkey\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Miranda Popkey\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce0eda6d8fbee7c043c0a2e79cd57004\"},\"headline\":\"The Trouble of Rational Thought\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-06-10T19:00:46+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-06-15T16:35:46+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/\"},\"wordCount\":2206,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png\",\"keywords\":[\"childhood\",\"copyediting\",\"education\",\"Fatherhood\",\"fiction\",\"Greek\",\"Helen DeWitt\",\"Kurosawa\",\"language\",\"learning\",\"Ludo\",\"Miramax\",\"motherhood\",\"novels\",\"Oxford\",\"rationality\",\"research\",\"Schoenberg\",\"Sibylla\",\"The Last Samurai\",\"Theory of Harmony\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Books\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/\",\"name\":\"DeWitt\u2019s \u201cThe Last Samurai\u201d Cultivates Ambition in its Readers\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png\",\"datePublished\":\"2016-06-10T19:00:46+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2016-06-15T16:35:46+00:00\",\"description\":\"Miranda Popkey on the cult novel, now reissued by New Directions.\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png\"},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"The Trouble of Rational Thought\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"description\":\"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":{\"@type\":\"PropertyValueSpecification\",\"valueRequired\":true,\"valueName\":\"search_term_string\"}}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"The Paris Review\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png\",\"width\":696,\"height\":696,\"caption\":\"The Paris Review\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\",\"https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview\"]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce0eda6d8fbee7c043c0a2e79cd57004\",\"name\":\"Miranda Popkey\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/1f51b33ebf285792e2ca73a336aa4dc2e389805f5d955d83ab113d48937695f0?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/1f51b33ebf285792e2ca73a336aa4dc2e389805f5d955d83ab113d48937695f0?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"Miranda Popkey\"},\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/mpopkey\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"DeWitt\u2019s \u201cThe Last Samurai\u201d Cultivates Ambition in its Readers","description":"Miranda Popkey on the cult novel, now reissued by New Directions.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Trouble of Rational Thought by Miranda Popkey","og_description":"June 10, 2016 \u2013 How Helen DeWitt\u2019s The Last Samurai cultivates ambition in its readers.Watch Helen DeWitt discuss\u00a0The Last Samurai in our My First Time video series.In","og_url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/","og_site_name":"The Paris Review","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","article_published_time":"2016-06-10T19:00:46+00:00","article_modified_time":"2016-06-15T16:35:46+00:00","og_image":[{"width":1920,"height":942,"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png","type":"image\/png"}],"author":"Miranda Popkey","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@parisreview","twitter_site":"@parisreview","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Miranda Popkey","Est. reading time":"11 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/"},"author":{"name":"Miranda Popkey","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce0eda6d8fbee7c043c0a2e79cd57004"},"headline":"The Trouble of Rational Thought","datePublished":"2016-06-10T19:00:46+00:00","dateModified":"2016-06-15T16:35:46+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/"},"wordCount":2206,"publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png","keywords":["childhood","copyediting","education","Fatherhood","fiction","Greek","Helen DeWitt","Kurosawa","language","learning","Ludo","Miramax","motherhood","novels","Oxford","rationality","research","Schoenberg","Sibylla","The Last Samurai","Theory of Harmony"],"articleSection":["Books"],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/","name":"DeWitt\u2019s \u201cThe Last Samurai\u201d Cultivates Ambition in its Readers","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png","datePublished":"2016-06-10T19:00:46+00:00","dateModified":"2016-06-15T16:35:46+00:00","description":"Miranda Popkey on the cult novel, now reissued by New Directions.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/lastsamurai.png"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/06\/10\/the-trouble-of-rational-thought\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"The Trouble of Rational Thought"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","name":"The Paris Review","description":"The best prose, interviews, poetry, and art. Since 1953.","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization","name":"The Paris Review","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/tpr-hadada-roundell-logo-square.png","width":696,"height":696,"caption":"The Paris Review"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/","https:\/\/x.com\/parisreview","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/parisreview"]},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/ce0eda6d8fbee7c043c0a2e79cd57004","name":"Miranda Popkey","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/1f51b33ebf285792e2ca73a336aa4dc2e389805f5d955d83ab113d48937695f0?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/1f51b33ebf285792e2ca73a336aa4dc2e389805f5d955d83ab113d48937695f0?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Miranda Popkey"},"url":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/author\/mpopkey\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/62"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99192"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99338,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99192\/revisions\/99338"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}