“I was insisting that my fantasies were true—that fantasy, in fact, could be a reality in itself.” So wrote Jan Morris in Conundrum, fifty-two years ago. The book was the first to appear under the byline of “Jan,” rather than Morris’s birth-name of James. It was also one of the first autobiographical accounts of sex change. A new biography of Morris by Sara Wheeler has just been published, but it is Conundrum itself that warrants rereading today.
Wheeler suggests that Morris “foreshadowed the gender fluidity of the twenty-first century.” In reality, Conundrum does not easily map onto contemporary notions of gender identity. To be sure, as the writer Juliet Jacques has noted, many of the conventions of contemporary trans life-writing, in particular being in the “wrong body,” were codified by Morris. But despite superficial similarities to poststructuralist accounts of identity, Conundrum does not argue that language creates reality. Morris’s conviction that he is, in some sense, a woman is older and more surreal than that, closer to mysticism than to theory.
From childhood, James, as he was then known, mythologized femininity, which for him was composed of tone, mood, literature, and an atmosphere of “wind and sunshine, music and imagination.” In this rendition, femaleness is not a biological, social, or psychological condition so much as an artistic style. Everything in Morris’s world is coded as either male or female: the church, the choir, cities like Oxford and Venice (but not Cardiff or London) are “female.” While The Guardian is feminized (in a joyless, sanctimonious mode, like a “martyred mother of ungrateful children”), The Times is coded as “very masculine”—and preferable. For Morris, the source of his sexed identity lies in “the spirit.” In this rendition, Morris’s system detaches from the fleshy reality of bodies which drop into second place or even fade into irrelevance.
As a choirboy, James prayed to God to make him a girl and later in life, as he prepares for a sex change operation, he sees it as an opportunity to recapture the spiritual purity of his psalm-singing days. But, being part of a fantasy schema, James’ conduct never has to be consistent. As a Times correspondent, Morris was the only journalist to accompany the successful 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, which included Edmund Hillary, and he wrote in Conundrum about the frank pleasure of inhabiting a male body as exemplified in this feat of athleticism. He pitied women for never getting to experience such a “machine of quality.” Likewise, in his domestic life, he describes a marriage of equality and independence on both sides, which nonetheless saw him going off adventuring, traveling, reporting from far afield, while his wife Elizabeth stayed at home with the children. Even after his sex change, Jan did no domestic work when back home.
“Underlying this account is a strong concern with self-distinction.”
Underlying this account is a strong concern with self-distinction. Morris presents himself as set apart from an early age: original, different, marked out from others. This sense of exception helps explain the form his symbolic world takes, often drawn from high culture or beautiful landscapes. Drawing inspiration from literature (in this case an Orientalist travelogue by Alexander Kinglake), he sees identity as something that can be acquired, assembled, and brought home. He describes his marriage as a possession and his children as “lovely objects” to which he responded as a patron. He treats femaleness, similarly, as a possession he wants to own. In each case, there is a distance from embodied relationships and a preference for aesthetic appreciation and observation, as if experience itself were filtered through symbolic relation.
The advantage of this mode is that it can slip under or glide over constraints that biological women (and men) cannot. For several years, Morris lived partly as a man and partly as a woman, changing clothes and identities at whim. He describes how he frequented exclusive gentlemen’s clubs to which women were denied entry and then, sometimes immediately afterwards, would walk out of them, tweak his costume, and go on down the road to women’s associations that also welcomed him. His account seems not to register any difference between femininity as something boys and men look towards and femininity as a set of standards to which girls and women are subjected.
Morris’s freedom was also enabled by a life of considerable privilege, largely untroubled by financial constraint. When he wanted to focus on transitioning, he had the means to give up paid work. Tellingly, Conundrum never mentions money at all.
We live through symbols, and language discloses a world, but it does so from within the body, as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted. New ways of seeing emerge through new embodied styles: a woman with a gun, a young man on a motorbike, each revealing something previously unavailable about femininity or masculinity.
Morris’s account is notable precisely because it does not do this. Rather than disclosing the world anew, it assembles a symbolic order that is increasingly detached from the conditions it seeks to illuminate. Instead, these aesthetic elements are put to work in the construction of a personal myth of femininity that is not borne out in practice. Ironically, femininity here is not discovered, but assigned, constructed through a network of associations that reflect personal meaning rather than shared reality. After his sex change, Morris talks about starting a new life much as a sonata might introduce a new key change in its recapitulation.
Sex change gives Morris the opportunity for a new kind of holism, the kind found in mythology, where all the symbols connect into a unique order. But the order his family expected was one rooted in everyday kindness, proximity, and understanding, something Morris’s children seldom found in him. They have described growing up in an environment where their needs were subordinated to those of their father, who even after his sex change seemed to demonstrate few of the qualities of femininity he had mythologized. Suki Morris, the youngest child, endured the cruelest treatment of all, her weight and appearance mocked, her abilities undermined. Yet when Suki published her account of that cruelty, after Morris’s death, she was obliged to assure Morris’s biographer that transphobia played no part in her feelings about him.
“Ultimately, a sex change is not sufficient to satisfy Morris’s quest.”
Ultimately, a sex change is not sufficient to satisfy Morris’s quest. Instead, Morris’s desire, by the end of Conundrum, is to “surpass” both male and female, to transcend both, and if not in life, “in art.” This conclusion does not resolve the tension between the symbolic elements on the one hand and the material and relational on the other so much as expose it. The symbolic system reaches beyond the conditions it can sustain.
The questions raised by Conundrum have taken on new urgency in the age of artificial intelligence. LLMs generate fluent, often striking, forms of meaning, drawing on vast corpora of human writing, the sediment of countless embodied experiences on which they are trained. In doing so, they extend, in an unexpected direction, Merleau-Ponty’s insight that meaning arises from embodied experience: Here, that experience is sedimented in language rather than lived directly. AI-generated content shows how far symbolic constructions can extend while still retaining coherence, because they draw on a wide field of shared experience.
“Morris’s symbolic world is narrower and more private.”
By contrast, Morris’s symbolic world is narrower and more private. Its strain becomes visible where it meets the lives of others. In this sense, today’s disembodied symbolic systems are, paradoxically, more grounded in embodied reality than Morris’s private mythology ever was—not because they live, but because they draw on the sediment of lives that did.
In retrospect, the uniqueness of Morris’s life is what stands out. It does not offer a new understanding of sex or identity, nor, despite its conclusion, does it attempt to dissolve the distinction between male and female. Suki said of Jan: “She wanted to be a woman different to any other woman in the world.” And yet in the decades since, narratives of this kind have increasingly been read not as unique instances, rooted in particular temperament or biography, but as evidence for the broader claim that sex itself is open to reinterpretation through symbolic or internal experience. In this shift, something is lost and the tension between symbol and embodiment is no longer acknowledged but resolved in favor of the former.
The question, then, is not whether human beings live through symbols—we always have—but how far they can be extended before they lose their connection to the realities they are meant to illuminate. Morris’s life story shows how such a system can hold within a single life, but also where it begins to buckle: where fantasies of gender float away from any mooring in bodily reality. By contrast, symbolic coherence can be sustained at scale, so long as it remains anchored, however indirectly, in the traces of many lives rather than the interpretation of one.