November 5, 2020 27
plantation novel in which Kossar serves
as the Old South. Readers are being
pointed in the direction of some alle-
gory of American history.
But the parable is quite demented.
First, although the slaves have to call
their masters “massa,” and although the
book’s title is an obvious pun on “race
relations,” the subject of race creeps
very slowly into the novel. It literally
comes, halfway through the story, as
a revelation: “Craig noticed that a sur-
prisingly large number of young slaves
were dark- skinned and thought he
would ask... about it some day.”
Second, Craig is not just a slave—he
is a sex slave. And he greatly enjoys it.
His owner is Lady Morgan Sidney,*
“heiress of the great fens of Treghast”
and possessor too of “high breasts and
long thighs.” Craig (or Barr) becomes
particularly obsessed with “Her Lady-
ship’s winsome fundament” and even
writes a sonnet (the book is peppered
with Barr’s attempts at verse) in praise
of her “suave posteriors.” The slave
takes a frankly erotic joy in becoming,
in thrall to Her Ladyship, a “male con-
cubine, village bull, masochist.” The
joyous ending to Space Relations is that
Craig, returned to Kossar in his pomp as
an emissary from Earth, gets to marry
Lady Morgan and live happily ever
after. Being a sex slave is obviously the
best thing that ever happened to him.
Such, perhaps, are the dreams of the
everyday authoritarian headmaster.
But the allegory becomes more polit-
ically explicit—and more resonant for
today—when a slave revolt breaks out
on Kossar during Craig’s return visit.
His mission is to admit Kossar into
the Man- Inhabited Planets Treaty Or-
ganization, but one of its rules is that
no slave owning society can join. The
slaves, getting wind of this demand that
they be emancipated, stage their own
anticipatory revolt.
This uprising is pure horror. The
slaves are interested primarily in grisly
murders and in planning the various
ways in which Lady Morgan will be
raped. Craig declares that “we can’t
let the slaves massacre the free- men,
or we’ll have chaos.” He calls in his in-
tergalactic strike force—made up, we
are told, of Ukrainians (presumably to
signal their whiteness)—to put down
the revolt. Slavery is abolished—but
by Craig and the interplanetary fed-
eration, with the reluctant consent of
the slaveowners, and the grand bargain
is sealed by Craig’s marriage to Lady
Morgan. It seems crucial, in the culmi-
nation of the novel, that emancipation
is granted from above by the federal
authorities, not won from below by the
oppressed.
For all its weirdness, this is oddly fa-
miliar. The author’s son is now the chief
embodiment of the law in the United
States. A revolt from below against
the continuing legacy of slavery is in
progress. And William Barr wishes to
ensure that, even if the protesters have
justice on their side, it is for the federal
government to decide in its own way
and in its own time how to deal with
their problems. Craig’s fear—“we’ll
have chaos”—is the rallying cry and
the primary electoral message of Barr’s
boss, Donald Trump. Barr has thrown
the full weight of the justice system be-
hind a focus not on the peaceful Black
Lives Matter protesters, but on those
he calls “the people out committing the
destruction and the chaos.” Barr has
sent armed federal strike forces into
US cities. There is more than a touch
of Space Relations in Barr and Trump’s
approach to race relations in 2020.
Another aspect of his father’s wacky
novel is highly relevant to William Barr’s
view of the world. Along with the mas-
ochistic sexual fantasies and the weird
allegory of slavery, Space Relations has
a third major theme: Catholic teaching
on sexuality and reproduction. Don-
ald Barr was not raised a Catholic, but
joined the church under the influence of
his Irish- Catholic wife, Mary Margaret
Ahern, a college professor, and became
a fervent upholder of its most hard- line
doctrines. The least lurid reflection of
this in the novel is at the end, when
Craig dramatically strikes out from his
marriage contract with Lady Morgan a
clause permitting a divorce—a practice
outlawed by the Catholic Church. The
attacks on homosexuality, transsexu-
als, abortion, and Planned Parenthood
are rather less gallant.
Characters are referred to as “the
old queen” or “the old queer.” Early
in the novel, Craig lures a male slaver
into beginning to have sex with him,
then stabs him and leaves him to bleed
out slowly. He celebrates the moment
with a poem. Later, Craig is revolted to
discover that one of the slave- masters
has created, for his pleasure, a min-
ion named Sugar-lips who has both
male and female sexual characteristics
and a “strong libido.” Lady Morgan,
meanwhile, has tried to force Craig to
become a stud at her slave- breeding
facility, which is called (naturally) the
Planned Parenthood Center. There,
the slave girl he is to “do” produces a
short lecture on abortion:Oh, many times when the women
have been done, they try to kill
the baby, you know? Inside. Be-
cause they say they don’t want to
bring a baby into the world if it’s
going to be a slave. But I say that’s
silly.... A slave could escape—
or something.... But if he wasn’t
even born, he couldn’t ever escape.
That’s even less of a chance, if you
see what I mean. I always need to
tell them, I’m a slave and I’d rather
be that than not even be there at
all.Abortion, in other words, is a worse
crime than slavery. And for William
Barr, Roe v. Wade, not slavery, is Amer-
ica’s original sin, the moment at which
the fall from “traditional moral order”
begins. It is what he called, in a highly
revealing speech in October 2019 at the
Catholic university Notre Dame, where
Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy
Coney Barrett both studied and taught
law, “the watershed decision.”
The literary sins of the father—es-
pecially ones as grave as Space Rela-
tions—should not be visited on the son.
There is, however, a very strong connec-
tion between Donald Barr’s hard-line
Catholicism and William Barr’s pres-
ent position as the main (perhaps the
sole) intellectual buttress of Trump’s
presidency. That connection lies in the
idea of authority. Authoritarian rule is
a defining feature of hierarchical insti-
tutional Catholicism. The magisterium
of the church flows from the pope,*This is presumably an homage to the
early nineteenth- century Irish novelist
Sydney, Lady Morgan.
“Remarkable... conclusively
demonstrates the absurdity of
preserving an institution that
has been so contentious
throughout US history.”
—The N ation
“ Keyssar’s lucid scholarship does justice to the
past while it forcefully informs the present.”
—Sean Wilentz, author of No Property in Man
“A rigorous historian of the institution.”
—New Yorker
“ A penetrating analysis
of contemporary politics,
especially the failures
of what Piketty calls the
‘Brahmin Left,’ along with
a radical new program of
socialist egalitarianism.”—Martin Wolf, Financial Timeshup.harvard.edu