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Friday
When the founding fathers insisted on freedom of the press, could they have foreseen how billionaires would take over the news, bending it to their own purposes? Much of what has gone wrong with America in recent decades can be traced to Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” Fox News, which amplified a steady stream of rightwing lies, and to Elon Musk’s X, which opened its doors to hate speech and Russian trolls while helping reelect Donald Trump. Founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin must be rolling in their graves.
I mention Franklin because today is his birthday (January 17, 1706) and because, as a printer, he was an outspoken advocate of a free press. He even wrote a poem, “On the Freedom of the Press,” arguing its necessity. It begins with the contention that virtue and freedom are the results of a press “free from force.”
On the Freedom of the Press By Benjamin Franklin
While free from force the press remains, Virtue and freedom cheer our plains, And learning largesses bestows, And keeps unlicens’d open house. We to the Nation’s public mart Our works of wit, and schemes of art, And philosophic goods, this way, Like water carriage, cheap convey. This tree which knowledge so affords, Inquisitors with flaming swords From lay-approach with zeal defend, Lest their own paradise should end.
The press from her fecundous womb Brought forth the arts of Greece and Rome; Her offspring, skill’d in logic war, Truth’s banner waved in open air; The monster superstition fled, And hid in shades in gorgon head; And awless pow’r, the long kept field, By Reason quell’d, was forc’d to yield.
This nurse of arts, and freedom’s fence, To chain, is treason against sense: And liberty, thy thousand tongues None silence who design no wrongs; For those who use the gag’s restraint, First rob, before they stop complaint.
To our jaded sensibilities, the idea that reason and logic could frighten “monster superstition” (let’s call it fabricated news) and “awless power” (power that doesn’t think it can be awed) seems quaint and naïve. But for an Enlightenment thinker like Franklin, it was an article of faith that to chain “this nurse of arts and freedom’s fence” would be to commit “treason against sense.” Would that we still had his faith that Truth’s banner will be waved in open air.
Whether it’s the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and L.A. Times pulling their papers’ endorsements of Kamala Harris or billionaire Musk driving from his platform people who don’t agree with him, we’re seeing plenty of efforts to apply “gag’s restraint.” These media owners are robbing and then stopping a free press.
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Thursday
I’ve just finished reading James Shapiro’s fascinating Shakespeare in a Divided America, a book that explores how people have relied on the plays at critical points in American history. “For well over two centuries,” Shapiro writes, “American of all stripes—presidents and activists, writers and soldiers—have…turned to Shakespeare’s works to give voice to what could not readily or otherwise be said.” The Bard, he notes, is one of the few areas where partisans have been able to find common ground—although that being said, they have used Shakespeare to advance widely divergent and often conflicting agendas.
To demonstrate how this has been the case, Shapiro focuses on seven moments in American history where historical players invoke Shakespeare’s plays:
–in 1833, Othello played a role in tensions between pro- and anti-slavery forces, especially when it came to characterizing and performing the protagonist. There were also unexpected responses: for instance, former president John Quincy Adams, even though he opposed slavery, was horrified by Desdemona’s passion for Othello and felt that she was asking for trouble when she married him. Miscegenation (or amalgamation, as they called it back then) was regarded as an abomination.
–in 1845, Othello also played a historical role but for reasons of gender more than race: forces sent to Corpus Christi, Texas to fight an expansionist war against Mexico were drawn to the play’s handling of infidelity, which was a concern of their own. In the army production, incidentally, the part of Desdemona was almost played by an effeminate-looking Ulysses S. Grant, who only later would grow the beard we see on the $50 dollar bill (perhaps to appear more masculine). From this mention of cross-dressing, Shapiro goes on to discuss how Shakespeare’s plays raised multiple gender issues at the time, especially Romeo and Juliet, where cross-dressing actresses would sometimes play the part of Romeo.
–in 1849, bloody class warfare was triggered by two competing versions of Hamlet: a British actor who portrayed an introspective Hamlet drew the fire of nativist, anti-British, and anti-elitist forces, who preferred the macho Hamlet of an American actor. The crowd attacked the Astor Theater when the play was being performed there, and it took the militia firing into the mob to disperse them.
–in 1865, a Shakespeare-loving Lincoln was assassinated by Shakespearean actor John Wilkes Booth. Whereas Booth identified with Brutus in Julius Caesar, Lincoln—in an eerie premonition of his death—saw himself in Duncan, murdered by Macbeth. Lincoln had a lifelong love for Shakespeare, could recite long passages by heart, and often debated with producers and actors about their artistic decisions. This love was acknowledged at his funeral, where Macbeth’s words about Duncan were read and were also used to comfort the grieving public:
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against The deep damnation of his taking-off.
–in 1916, Shakespeare became a symbol of Anglo-Saxon superiority and was used to push forward anti-immigrations laws and racial quotas, even though he himself—in his play Thomas More—had written passionately and empathetically on behalf of immigrants. (See my post here on the passage.)
–in 1948, Taming of the Shrew became popular, in part because returning veterans’ anxiety over the women who had taken over their jobs during the war. Shapiro goes into depth about the creation of the musical Kiss Me Kate, which found a way to thread the needle between outright misogyny and what the age regarded as strident feminism.
–in 1998, Shakespeare in Love won multiple Oscar because it managed to thread its own set of needles, these involving same-sex love and adultery. The question of whether Shakespeare has fallen in love with a man is suggested but quickly withdrawn in the movie, and he is also described as having been “banished” by his wife, thereby making his adultery acceptable. The film came out when the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair was blowing up. And indeed Lewinsky used a passage from Romeo and Juliet, run in a Washington Post Valentine’s Day ad, to reconnect with Clinton. Addressed to “Handsome” and signed “M, the passage was Romeo’s declaration to Juliet that true lovers cannot be kept apart:
With love’s light wings did I o’er perch these walls For stony limits cannot hold love out And what love can do that dares love attempt.
Lewinsky later reported that “the President said he had seen her Valentine’s Day message,” “talked about his fondness for Romeo and Juliet,” and gave her a book of poetry. After which history was made.
–Shapiro concludes his book, which was published during Trump’s second year in office, with an account of the Delacorte Central Park Theatre’s production of Julius Caesar. Because Julius Caesar was modeled on Trump. Trump supporters falsely claimed that audiences cheered when Caesar is murdered and took to threatening everyone connected with the production. Although the director thought that the production could lead to nuanced debates about how to respond to authoritarianism—after all, Brutus and Cassius’s belief that violence can be used to save democracy is proved to be spectacularly wrong—America isn’t doing nuance very well these days.
And because of this, Shapiro worries about the future of Shakespeare in America, which he says
is as precarious as it ever has been in this nation’s history. There has always been a tug-of-war over Shakespeare in America; what happened at the Delacorte suggests that this rope is now frayed. When one side no longer sees value in staging his plays, only a threat, things can unravel quickly.
Lest we think that Shapiro’s fears are overblown, he points out that the Puritans closed all British theatres only a few decades after Shakespeare had packed the Globe.
Shapiro’s historical examples challenge a premise that underlies both this blog and my book, which is that great literature is good for us. Can one really assert this confidently when Shakespeare is used to argue both for and against slavery, American imperialism, immigration, women’s rights, gay rights, etc. While I myself would argue that Shakespeare read rightly always expands the possibilities of human liberation—and that the devil can cite the Bard as well as Scripture to his purpose (to quote from Merchant of Venice)—it is unsettling to see Shakespeare’s Brutus as the inspiration for the assassination of Lincoln. For that matter, the depiction of Shylock (so Harold Bloom believes) has done more damage to Jews than the noxious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, used to justify the Holocaust.
In any event, Shapiro confirms another point that I make regularly: that in the toolkit we need for dealing with life, Shakespeare is a necessary accessory. One is just never sure how the tools will be used.
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Wednesday
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith has just announced that Donald Trump, had he not been just reelected president, would have been prosecuted for the January 6 coup attempt. One of Donald Trump’s special powers has been his ability to escape accountability, which he has accomplished by abusing the law in the manner of his mentor Roy Cohn, stacking the Supreme Court, and playing a special brand of resentment politics. So are we to conclude that he has gotten away with everything?
In Anthony Trollope’s Small House at Allingham, which I’ve just finished, the author addresses this very question. Although young and stylish Crosby has promised to marry the wonderful but penniless Lily Dale, a week later, blinded by the lights of high society, he makes a second marriage proposal, this time to the daughter of a peer. While Lily’s friends and families are infuriated at the way Crosby appears to escape all punishment, Trollope points out that he doesn’t escape at all.
That’s because Crosby is miserable in his mercenary marriage, with a wife that doesn’t love him and an aristocratic family that bullies him. How much more joyous his life would be, he thinks, had he married the loving and caring Lily, despite her lack of money. While Lily’s friends are described as “wretched in thinking that this man was escaping without punishment,” Trollope assures us that he’s suffering “as much as they could desire.” They just don’t realize it:
Those who offend us are generally punished for the offence they give; but we so frequently miss the satisfaction of knowing that we are avenged! It is arranged, apparently, that the injurer shall be punished, but that the person injured shall not gratify his desire for vengeance.
So is Trump being punished in ways we cannot see? After watching Trump attack fire-ravaged California and direct a volley of hate tweets at Jack Smith, television comic Seth Meyers, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, I was struck by just how miserable he is. He appears shackled to those he attacks.
I borrow the image from a recent New Yorker article about Paradise Lost, which notes how Milton’s Satan is tied to his victims. I’ve compared Trump to Satan multiple times—they are both supreme narcissists—and author Merve Emre observes that, for all his success in making humans miserable, Satan never experiences the joy of true freedom. Emre describes Milton’s view of such freedom as follows:
In his 1654 treatise “The Second Defence of the People of England,” Milton wrote, “Know that to be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave.”
Satan, by contrast, has a debased version of freedom:
By the sun’s blinding rays, we can perceive how depraved Satan’s freedom is. By one hand, he is bound to himself, to his impiety, his recklessness, his envy and pride, his guilt and spite. “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell,” he laments. By the other hand, he is bound to the Almighty, whom, as the critic John Guillory has observed, Satan imitates. But God’s authority tends toward reason and grace; Satan’s is a poor, perverse copy. His every thought is shaped in reaction to God’s glory. It is as if God had never lifted Satan’s chains.
For his part, Trump is a slave to his resentment. Satan’s line “myself am hell”—which is inspired by Mephistopheles’s line in Doctor Faustus “why this is hell, nor am I out of it”—is Trump’s existential state. When Satan says, “The mind can make a heaven of hell or hell of heaven,” he accurately describes how both he and Trump have made perpetual hells for themselves.
One should note that Marlowe in his turn borrows from Dante to describe Mephistopheles’s condition. As the devil puts it,
Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God, And tasted the eternal joys of heaven, Am not tormented with ten thousand hells, In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?
Dante’s damned have consigned themselves to everlasting torment because they choose their compulsions over God’s love. Some are aware of what they have done, others just blindly writhe. For all the similarities between Satan and Trump, Satan appears more self-aware. Trump seems to be in hell without knowing it, more Grendel in this regard than Satan.
While I believe Trump is suffering, I draw no pleasure from it. That’s because I’m far more concerned about the effects of that suffering: those who are miserable often do all they can to make others miserable. “For only in destroying I find ease/ To my relentless thoughts,” Satan says, providing a profound insight into why Trump behaves as he does.
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Tuesday
Greg Olear of the Substack blog Prevail has written another wonderful essay on a literary work, this one on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a poem he ranks among Britain’s ten greatest lyrics. Before I go further, here it is:
The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night-air! Only, from the long line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Begin, and cease, and then again begin, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Find also in the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night.
While he admires the poem, Olear also points out how strange it is. The speaker, rather than using the occasion to focus all his love and attention on his love, instead laments the decline of western civilization. Even the most famous line of the poem doesn’t say what we normally think is says, Olear observes:
For a long time, I read the “let us be true” line as hopeful, where “true” means what it means when it modifies the word “love.” But then I realized I was wrong. He means “true” as in “brutally honest.” What Arnold’s really saying is, “Look, babe, let’s not bullshit each other.” And then: “I know it seems lovely that we are here in this beach house on this moonlit night, listening to the sound of the ocean that’s so relaxing, years from now Sharper Image will make it a standard setting on their noise machines. But I’ve taken the red pill, you see, and I know that’s just an illusion. In reality, the world is a dark, cruel, awful place, and we are all fucked.”
Olear doesn’t mention “Dover Bitch,” the Anthony Hecht parody of the poem, but Hecht makes a related point. Thinking of the scene from the woman’s point of view, he remarks,
To have been brought All the way down from London, and then be addressed As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort Is really tough on a girl…
Olear finds genuine power in the final eight lines, however, regarding them as
all too relevant to the current climate in the United States—a country Arnold much admired, incidentally. We may as well swap “America” for “this world” in the final stanza. Our second largest city and cultural capital is on fire, our media has willfully rejected truth, our so-called leaders have capitulated one by one to the returning despot, and we await the coming of Trump Redux a week from tomorrow.
To which Olear adds, “It’s not just at night when the ignorant armies clash.”
He then, however, manages to find a hopeful message to the poem:
While writing this “Sunday Pages,” I realized that I have misremembered one of the last lines of “Dover Beach.” I thought it was And we are here alone on a darkling plain, where “darkling” is a fancy way of saying “dark and growing darker.” But it’s actually And we are here as on a darkling plain. In Arnold’s darkling view of the world, joy and love and light and certitude and peace and the relief of pain do not…exist. But the one word he never uses is alone. The plain may be darkening, the confusion sweeping, the clashing armies of ignorance and artlessness and stupidity and hatred causing the rest of us to struggle and flee. But it’s we who are here on that plain. We, all of us good guys. We are not alone. And we will be true to one another.
In other words, the main takeaway from the poem is that we don’t have to face this world all by ourselves. Olear concludes,
[I]f we rewind the poem and read it again, keeping all this in mind, we understand that the sea remains calm and the night-air sweet. The eternal note of sadness we let in can also be let out. The tide that withdraws also returns, replenishing the Sea of Faith. And if we stay together, the ignorant armies will expend all their energy attacking one another, and the world really can and will be new and beautiful and various, full of unironic sweetness and light: a land of dreams.
Olear makes one other point which I also make in the chapter I devote to Arnold in my recent book. For all the pessimism expressed in “Dover Beach,” Arnold believed that poetry can save us. As he writes in “Study of Poetry,”
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.
Arnold even had a plan for bringing this about: universal education. Arnold’s day job was a school inspector and he believed that, if teachers taught poetry in the schools, we would experience a new Renaissance. Describing poetry (and cultural generally) as sweetness and light, he writes that
we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light.
There’s only one point on which I differ from Olear. While he focuses on Arnold’s egalitarianism, emphasizing how culture should be extended to “as many as possible,” the poet also believed in class hierarchy. As Terry Eagleton points out in Literary Theory: An Introduction, Arnold wanted to use culture to maintain the existing class structure, with the middle class ascendent and the working class content with their lot in life. To quote from my book,
Each class will behave properly, he believes, if culture is the basis of the state. The aristocracy will act responsibly, giving up its ancient but now out-of-date privileges, while a cultured middle class will command the moral sway once held by the aristocracy. A cultured populace, finally, will refrain from “rowdy” behavior. In other words, all classes will read poetry, embracing its sensuous images (sweetness) and lofty sentiments (light) to create a more peaceful society.
“Notice who comes out ahead in this formulation,” I go on to say. “The upper class gives up power, the lower class ceases to strive for power, and the middle class takes power. Literature’s role is to make everyone happy with this situation.”
Or as Eagleton memorably sums up Arnold’s view, “If the masses are not thrown a few novels, they may react by throwing up a few barricades.”
But set that objection aside for the moment and think about the impact of every child being introduced to literature. While we may not have achieved Arnold’s Renaissance, I believe that literature requirements have succeeded in opening young minds to new possibilities that they may not have otherwise contemplated. There’s a reason why rightwing authoritarians are attacking English teachers and librarians. Thoughts are blooming in language arts classrooms that are beyond parental control.
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Monday
When it comes to horrific disasters like the California fires, one can focus on the big picture, like I did in Thursday’s post, or one can zero in on individual tragedies, as I do today. Applying Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind to the fires led me to focus on the corruption that has contributed to them since social rot is at the basis of hard-boiled detective fiction. The noir crime novels of the 1930s were fueled by the Great Depression’s devastating impact on urban life and the rise of organized crime in response to prohibition. The genre resonates with us today because we have our own corruption, what with the fossil fuel industry and flunky politicians willing to sacrifice the planet for their own gain.
At the same time, on a more personal level we are witnessing heart-rending tragedies as people see their houses and all their possessions go up in smoke. They can therefore related to the sorrow of Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet upon seeing her own home burn down.
Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666
Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of Our house, July 10th. 1666. Copied Out of a Loose Paper.
In silent night when rest I took, For sorrow near I did not look, I wakened was with thund’ring noise And piteous shrieks of dreadful voice. That fearful sound of “fire” and “fire,” Let no man know is my Desire. I, starting up, the light did spy, And to my God my heart did cry To straighten me in my Distress And not to leave me succourless. Then, coming out, behold a space The flame consume my dwelling place. And when I could no longer look, I blest His name that gave and took, That laid my goods now in the dust. Yea, so it was, and so ‘twas just. It was his own, it was not mine, Far be it that I should repine; He might of all justly bereft But yet sufficient for us left. When by the ruins oft I past My sorrowing eyes aside did cast And here and there the places spy Where oft I sate and long did lie. Here stood that trunk, and there that chest, There lay that store I counted best. My pleasant things in ashes lie And them behold no more shall I. Under thy roof no guest shall sit, Nor at thy Table eat a bit. No pleasant talk shall ‘ere be told Nor things recounted done of old. No Candle e’er shall shine in Thee, Nor bridegroom‘s voice e’er heard shall be. In silence ever shalt thou lie, Adieu, Adieu, all’s vanity. Then straight I ‘gin my heart to chide, And did thy wealth on earth abide? Didst fix thy hope on mould’ring dust? The arm of flesh didst make thy trust? Raise up thy thoughts above the sky That dunghill mists away may fly. Thou hast a house on high erect Frameed by that mighty Architect, With glory richly furnished, Stands permanent though this be fled. It‘s purchased and paid for too By Him who hath enough to do. A price so vast as is unknown, Yet by His gift is made thine own; There‘s wealth enough, I need no more, Farewell, my pelf, farewell, my store. The world no longer let me love, My hope and treasure lies above.
While Bradstreet is attempting to find consolation in her faith—what are worldly possessions compared to the celestial mansion that awaits?—I’m struck by how intimately she describes what she has lost. Some of the objects are infused with memory: “And here and there the places spy/Where oft I sate and long did lie.” Other points to communal fellowship–“Under thy roof no guest shall sit,/ Nor at thy Table eat a bit”—and to sacred rituals such as weddings–“Nor bridegroom‘s voice e’er heard shall be.”
Side note: This last regret brings to mind the line from Yeats’s “Prayer for My Daughter”: “And may her bridegroom bring her to a house/ Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious.” Here too the house is more than a house.
After expressing her deep sadness, Bradstreet chides herself for placing so much value in earthly possessions. “All’s vanity,” she says, quoting Ecclesiastes, and then, “Didst fix thy hope on mould’ring dust?/ The arm of flesh didst make thy trust?” I suspect many of the California wildfire victims will not find comfort in such a vision and perhaps Bradstreet herself isn’t entirely convinced. But they at least have in the poet someone else who feels their pain.
Further note: My friend and colleague John Gatta, an Anne Bradstreet expert, writes in to mention one loss she did not mention:
Once reading further into the background of the house fire that Bradstreet describes, I was struck to learn that it also wiped out the unusually ample (for this time and place) book collection that the Bradstreets had gathered for themselves out in the wilderness. They considered these books, as you can well imagine, to be a precious link to the Old World Culture that had formed their personal identities. And they could surely not hope to replace them quickly or easily with an order sent to Amazon!
We’re in Epiphany season, a special time to focus on those moments when the secular world glimpses the numinous. Which is to say, when it experiences an epiphany.
One of those moments is when Jesus, while being baptized by John, grasps in a new way that God dwells within. Think of the dove as his inner realization. Here’s the account that Luke gives of the moment, which comes right after John the Baptist announces, “I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire”:
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:21-22).
Milton provides a version of the story in the opening book of Paradise Regained. The “Great Proclaimer” is John:
Now had the great Proclaimer, with a voice More awful than the sound of trumpet, cried Repentance, and Heaven’s kingdom nigh at hand To all baptized. To his great baptism flocked With awe the regions round, and with them came From Nazareth the son of Joseph deemed To the flood Jordan—came as then obscure, Unmarked, unknown. But him the Baptist soon Descried, divinely warned, and witness bore As to his worthier, and would have resigned To him his heavenly office. Nor was long His witness unconfirmed: on him baptized Heaven opened, and in likeness of a Dove The Spirit descended, while the Father’s voice From Heaven pronounced him his beloved Son.
And now to the incomparable Malcolm Guite, who as always has a sonnet about the occasion:
The Baptism of Christ Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one; The river runs, the clouds are torn apart, The Father speaks, the Spirit and the Son Reveal to us the single loving heart That beats behind the being of all things And calls and keeps and kindles us to light. The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings ‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’ In that swift light and life, as water spills And streams around the Man like quickening rain, The voice that made the universe reveals The God in Man who makes it new again. He calls us too, to step into that river, To die and rise and live and love forever.
Jesus recognizes that the voice that made the universe delights in all his creatures and accepts it has his mission to communicate the truth that each of us is God’s beloved child. The voice that made the universe is calling out for us all to have this epiphanic breakthrough.
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Friday
I’ve just learned of a 1947 essay by George Orwell, “The Prevention of Literature,” which predicts that authoritarian societies will increasingly use AI (Artificial Intelligence) to produce prose. Orwell doesn’t use the phrase AI, of course, and he’s talking more about assembly-line production of writing than anything as powerful as our modern cyber systems. Still, he proves prescient about what we are seeing today.
When he talks of literature and the threats to literature, Orwell means all kinds of writing, not just Literature. “The destruction of intellectual liberty,” he writes, “cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order.” He predicts that “if the liberal culture that we have lived in since the Renaissance comes to an end, the literary art will perish with it.”
The sequence he sets up indicates that the more explicit a piece of writing is, the more likely it is to suffer censorship. That’s why journalism is first and poetry as last. And indeed, poets have generally been escaping wrath of our current book banners, with the exception of Amanda Gorman. Novels, on the other hand, are as much under attack as works of history.
Orwell imagines that, in the future, novels will be written by “a sort of conveyor-belt process that reduces human initiative to the minimum.” In fact, he saw the process already underway in his time with regard to “the production of short stories, serials, and poems for the very cheap magazines”:
Papers such as the Writer abound with advertisements of literary schools, all of them offering you ready-made plots at a few shillings a time. Some, together with the plot, supply the opening and closing sentences of each chapter. Others furnish you with a sort of algebraical formula by the use of which you can construct plots for yourself. Others have packs of cards marked with characters and situations, which have only to be shuffled and dealt in order to produce ingenious stories automatically.
He then examines how such processes could be operationalized by an authoritarian government:
It is probably in some such way that the literature of a totalitarian society would be produced, if literature were still felt to be necessary. Imagination — even consciousness, so far as possible — would be eliminated from the process of writing. Books would be planned in their broad lines by bureaucrats, and would pass through so many hands that when finished they would be no more an individual product than a Ford car at the end of the assembly line. It goes without saying that anything so produced would be rubbish; but anything that was not rubbish would endanger the structure of the state. As for the surviving literature of the past, it would have to be suppressed or at least elaborately rewritten.
The rewriting would be necessitated because of Literature’s commitment to truth. In the past I’ve described Literature as a “no bullshit zone,” an idea that was inspired by a powerful Salman Rushdie essay. In it, the Anglo-Indian author declares that great novels and poems are necessary because they push against the authoritarian urge to create its own self-serving reality:
[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.
AI, despite the growing sophistication of ChatGPT and Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms, will never be able duplicate what Literature does. Kazuo Ishiguro arrives at a parallel conclusion in his novel Klara and the Sun.
Klara, the narrator, is an AF or Artificial Friend, which is say a solar-powered care robot assigned to the sick girl Josie. When the girl’s mother, fearful of losing this child as she has lost her first, turns to an robotics engineer to start grooming the AF to take her place, the question arises whether this is in fact possible. Can something artificial become indistinguishable from the genuine article?
Dr. Capaldi, who has been creating a mock-up of Josie which Klara is to “inhabit” when the girl dies, believes that it’s possible. “You see what’s being asked of you, Klara,” he says. “You’re not being required simply to mimic Josie’s outward behavior. You’re being asked to continue her for Chrissie [the mother]. And for everyone who loves Josie.”
Addressing Chrissie, he then goes on to argue against her generation’s old-fashioned belief that
there’s something unreachable inside each of us. Something that’s unique and won’t transfer. But there’s nothing like that, we know that now….There’s nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that’s beyond the Klaras of the world to continue. The second Josie won’t be a copy. She’ll be the exact same and you’ll have every right to love her just as you love Josie now. It’s not faith you need. Only rationality. I had to do it, it was tough but now it works for me just fine. And it will for you.
At first Klara thinks she will be able to succeed. Even learning the complexities of Josie’s heart will not be beyond her, she believes. But by the end of her life—which is to say, when her batteries start to die—she thinks differently.
It so happens that the experiment never happens as Josie, thanks to Klara’s efforts, gets well and Klara is jettisoned. But from her position in the graveyard where old AFS are stashed, she concludes that it wouldn’t have worked anyway. Her explanation to the store manager who sold her—and who is looking up her former products—is akin the Rushdie’s argument for the necessity of Literature:
I did all I could to learn Josie and had it become necessary, I would have done my utmost. But I don’t think it would have worked out so well. Not because I wouldn’t have achieved accuracy. But however hard I tried, I believe now there would have remained something beyond my reach. The Mother, Rick, Melania Housekeeper, the Father. I’d never have reached what they felt for Josie in their hearts. I’m now sure of this, Manager.
And:
Mr. Capaldi believed there was nothing special inside Josie that couldn’t be continued. He told the Mother he’d searched and searched and found nothing like that. But I believe now he was searching in the wrong place. There was something very special, but it wasn’t inside Josie. It was inside those who loved her. That’s why I think now Mr. Capaldi was wrong and I wouldn’t have succeeded.
In short, the growing pervasiveness of AI-generated texts, and its usefulness to authoritarians, makes Literature more essential than ever. Because of its insistence on truth, those who crave dictatorial power will invariably attack it, along with the libraries that house it and the teachers that teach it. As I point out in my book Better Living through Literature, in the end no great author is safe, including Shakespeare himself and certainly not figures like Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood. Even 1984 has appeared on recent American banned book lists. And Rushdie, of course, had a fatwa issued for his assassination.
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Thursday
The horrific fires that are devastating parts of Los Angeles, spread by wind gusts of up to 60 mph, are prompting some to invoke Raymond Chandler’s 1938 novella Red Wind. You need only to read the famous opening paragraph to understand why:
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.
Just as anything has been happening to Santa Monica homeowners, so does anything happen on the novella’s first page, when detective Philip Marlowe, enjoying a quiet beer in a cocktail lounge, witnesses another patron casually gun down another man who comes in looking for a woman. Chandler uses the wind as atmospherics for a story that involves deception, betrayal, blackmail, murder, police corruption, and various sordid relationships. In other words, modern life in America, at least according to Chandler and the noir genre.
Today, the corruption involves the fossil fuel industry and their bought politicians. The oil companies have long known that their products were resulting in the climate change that is leading to these wildfires. Columnist Heather Digby Parton Digby, who alerted me to the Chandler quote, points to a 2015 article in Rolling Stone that explains the science:
The national data is as clear as it is troubling: “Climate change has led to fire seasons that are now on average 78 days longer than in 1970,” according to a Forest Service report published in August. In the past three decades, the annual area claimed by fire has doubled, and the agency’s scientists predict that fires will likely “double again by midcentury.”
The human imprint on the bone-dry conditions that lead to fire is real — and now measurable. According to a major new study by scientists at Columbia and NASA, man-made warming is increasing atmospheric evaporation — drawing water out of Western soil, shrubs and trees. In California alone, the epic drought is up to 25 percent more severe than it would have been, absent climate change. And this impact doesn’t respect state borders. The study’s lead author, Columbia scientist Park Williams, tells Rolling Stone, “There’s the same effect in the Pacific Northwest.”
Now, thanks to the GOP, there’s a concerted effort to make sure the hydrocarbons keep on coming. Trump looks poised to reverse the fight against climate change and his followers appear to be fully on board. To cite one instance, forces in Oklahoma are trying to prevent further attempts to develop green energy there, even though the state has made impressive strides in recent years.
So imagine you’re viewing these attacks on the environment with Chandler’s red wind blowing in the background. Here are a few of his passages to capture the mood:
–The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.
–When I went in with the drinks she had a gun in her hand. It was a small automatic with a pearl grip. It jumped up at me and her eyes were full or horror. I stopped, with a glass in each hand, and said: “Maybe this hot wind has got you crazy too.”
–The hot wind boomed against the shut windows. Windows have to be shut when a Santa Ana blows, heat or no heat.
–Perhaps the hot wind did something to him. It was booming against my shut windows like the surf under a pier.
–Then I went out to the kitchenette and poured a stiff jolt of whiskey and put it down and stood a moment listening to the hot wind howl against the window glass. A garage door banged, and a power-line wire with too much play between the insulators thumped the side of the building with a sound like somebody beating a carpet.
–“Goddam, thees hot wind make me dry like the ashes of love,” the Russian girl said bitterly.
–I blew cigarette smoke jerkily. The wind pounded the shut windows. The air in the room was foul.
–[Marlowe is about to be shot by a corrupt cop]: My mouth felt suddenly hot and dry. Far off I heard the wind booming. It seemed like the sound of guns.
Trumpism is an ill wind that blows nobody good (except for the fossil fuel industry). With global warming, the winds will only increase in intensity.
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Wednesday
The latest novel in my Kate Atkinson binge is Transcription, which is about a British operation during World War II designed to track German sympathizers. It seems eerily relevant given the rise of rightwing militias and the influence of Vladimir Putin over segments of the GOP. In fact, the in-depth ProPublica account of a man who infiltrated AP3 (American Patriots Three Percent) and the Utah Oath Keepers reads a lot like an Atkinson novel, with the added benefit that it’s true.
An extended side note on my Atkinson enthusiasm: How could I not fall in love with an author who has her characters routinely cite literature? My favorite is Reggie, who appears as a genius-level orphan in When Will There Be Good News? and as a cop in Big Sky and who at one point applies a Doctor Faustus line to a sunset: “See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.” She turns to Christopher Marlowe’s play again when she finds herself in an explosive situation involving two rescued trafficking victims, their two traffickers, and an unhinged man with a gun seeking revenge. “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it,” she says to herself.
Meanwhile Atkinson’s recurring hard-boiled private eye, Jackson Brodie, goes on an Emily Dickinson kick in Started Early, Took My Dog. (The title itself is taken from a Dickinson poem.) One of his life’s motivators is the murder of his teenage sister when he was a child, which leads to such lines as, “His sister couldn’t stop for death, so he had, very kindly, stopped for her.” We learn that Brodie, having barely survived a train accident (Reggie, still a child at the time, saves his life), feels compelled to catch up “with some of the things he had missed out on in his impoverished education. Like culture, for example.”
Although novels don’t do much for him, poetry does:
Fiction had never been Jackson’s thing. Facts seemed challenging enough without making stuff up. What he discovered was that the great novels of the world were about three things—death, money and sex. Occasionally a whale. But poetry had wormed its way in, uninvited. A Toad, can die of Light! Crazy. So that here he was, thinking of his long-dead, long-lost sister, bolstered by a woman who felt a funeral in her brain.
But back to our current problem with rightwing militias and those higher-ups besotted with foreign autocrats. In Transcription, mole Juliet finds herself hobnobbing at ritzy parties with ladies in pearls who enthuse about Hitler, talk of international Jewish conspiracies, and load her with anti-Semitic tracts. Here’s a sampling:
It was a Saturday afternoon and here they were, Juliet thought, Englishwomen doing what English women did best wherever they were in the world—taking tea and having cozy chats, albeit the topic of conversation on this occasion was treason, not to mention the destruction of civilization and the British way of life, although no doubt Mrs. Scaife would have claimed to be a vigorous defender of both.
And:
“It’s all part and parcel of one and the same plan,” Mrs. Scaife explained assiduously to Juliet. “The plan is secretly operated and controlled by world Jewry, exactly on the lines laid down by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Do you have a copy, dear?”
“I don’t” Juliet said, although she did. Perry had lent her his own copy so that she could “get the measure of what these people believe.”
“Let me find you one,” Mrs. Scaife said, ringing a little bell on the tea tray.”
And one more passage:
“I wish to save Britain,” Mrs. Scaife declared, adopting a rather heroic pose over the teacups.
“Like Boadicea,” Mrs. Ambrose suggested.
“But not from the Romans,” Mrs. Scaife said. “From the Jews and the communists and the Masons. The scum of the earth,” she added pleasantly….
Mrs. Ambrose had begun to nod off, and if she wasn’t careful, Juliet thought, she would too. Mrs. Scaife droned on, her proselytism soporific. Jews here, Jews there, Jews everywhere. It sounded quite absurd in its wrongheadedness, like a mad nursery rhyme.
There were no English maids or clinking teacups in the AR3 meeting that Williams secretly recorded, but there were American equivalents:
Over six hours, the men set goals and delegated responsibilities with surprisingly little worry about the federal crackdown on militias. They discussed the scourges they were there to combat (stolen elections, drag shows, President Joe Biden) only in asides. Instead, they focused on “marketing” — “So what buzzwords can we insert in our mission statement?” one asked — and on resources that’d help local chapters rapidly expand. “I’d like to see this organization be like the McDonald’s of patriot organizations,” another added. To Williams, it felt more like a Verizon sales meeting than an insurrectionist cell.
And:
“We’re making progress locally on the law enforcement,” Coates added. He said that at least three of them can get “the sheriff” on the phone any time of day. Like the last time, Coates didn’t give a name, but he said something even more intriguing: “The sheriff is my tie-in to the state attorney general because he’s friends.” Williams told me he fought the urge to lob a question….
Closing out the day, Kinch summarized their plan moving forward: Keep a low profile. Focus on the unglamorous work. Rebuild their national footprint. And patiently prepare for 2024. “We still got what, two more years, till another quote unquote election?” He thanked Williams for coming and asked if they could start planning training exercises.
Atkinson provides the charged context in which the British collaborators operate:
Denmark had just surrendered and the Germans had taken Oslo and set up a government under Quisling. Poland, Norway, Denmark—Hitler was collecting countries like stamps. How long before he had the full set?
And then, in a passage that applies to the man we just re-elected and to his billionaire sidekick:
The future was coming nearer, one relentless goose step after the next. Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. (“The clowns are the dangerous ones,” Perry said.)
Will we be hearing goose steps from people like this? We’ll know soon enough if Trump pardons the leaders of January 6 and if a Kash Patel-led FBI gives the green light to paramilitary groups, providing Trump with his own Brown Shirts or SS troops.
Then again, our own rightwing yahoos may prove to be as inept as the Nazi sympathizers in Atkinson’s book. At the end of Transcription, some in the administration are wondering whether too much attention was paid to these people, most of whom were arrested. That’s certainly what I hope.
But I’m not complacent on the matter. After all, in Atkinson’s novelWinston Churchill is heading the country, not a Putin-directed Donald Trump. In our case, the enemy has penetrated higher levels than Atkinson’s Hitler fans could ever dream.
