Cooper and Cumming as plotters Antonio and Sebastian
Tuesday
My faculty book group just finished discussing The Tempest, the last play in our Shakespeare binge, undertaken before Sewanee’s Shakespearen, Pamela Macfie, moves to Maine. For years a beloved professor, Pamela previously led us in discussions of Hamlet, King Lear, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night. As we talked about the drama that many consider to be the Bard’s farewell to theater, I recalled teaching itat the University of Ljubljana only hours after learning that Trump had defeated Kamala Harris.
In the course of election night, I kept changing the post I was writing on Shakespeare’s play. When it was fairly clear that Trump would emerge victorious, I introduced my essay with the following (slightly amended) note:
If today’s essay is a bit uneven, it’s because–writing it from Slovenia–I started it fairly confident that Kamala Harris would win the election, only to begin realizing we were witnessing 2016 redux as the night wore on. What Shakespeare designed as a comic if somewhat disturbing subplot in Shakespeare’s final play–inept insurrectionists trying to overthrow Prospero, destroy his magic book, and seize Miranda–suddenly became our central action. It was as if The Tempest had transmuted into Richard III. (Think of Prospero’s book as the Constitution, Miranda as reproductive freedom.) In the course of the night, my headline changed from “Caliban vs. Prospero” to “Can Caliban Defeat Prospero?” to (sadly) “Caliban Defeats Prospero.” Following Trump’s victory, white nationalist Nick Fuentes gloated, in a tweet that received 22,000 likes, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Or as Caliban fantasizes after Prospero reminds him that he “didst seek to violate the honor of my child,”
O ho, O ho! would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans.
When I walked into class the following morning, I noticed that every one of my students was scrutinizing me for my reaction. How would an American respond to the dreadful news? Because I have always been careful to keep my politics out of my classes—after all, I have conservative as well as liberal students—I didn’t say much, but the students could tell my heart wasn’t in my teaching. Halfway through the class, I discovered I couldn’t go on and ended early, something I never do.
Reexamining the play a year and a half later, I find it more relevant than ever, despite its being a comedy. As Trump and various Republicans look for ways to steal the upcoming Congressional elections, it’s useful to remember that the play features a string of coups and attempted coups. First there is Antonio, Prospero’s brother, overthrowing him with the aid of Alonso, king of Naples. Prospero is cast adrift with his daughter Miranda, and only with the aid of his magical books, provided him by the kindly Gonzalo, is he able to survive.
Then Prospero himself seizes the island from Caliban. Although the monster claims ownership, however—“This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me”—it is worth noting that Sycorax herself stole the island from Ariel, whom she imprisoned in a tree. Caliban is like those white supremacists who contend that their America is being stolen from them without acknowledging others who have equal or even prior claim.
Shakespeare is not done with takeover attempts. First, Antonio suggests to Sebastian that they kill Alonso, Sebastian’s brother, in a repeat of Antonio’s seizure of power. That way Antonio will free himself of the debt he owes to Naples. Then there’s Caliban plotting with jester Trinculo and butler Stephano to kill Prospero and wed Miranda. Caliban has a variety of different plans for doing this, just as Trump has multiple ideas about stealing the next election, from seizing voter rolls and voting machines to creating racist gerrymanders to posting ICE agents at polling places to having the postal service intervene. Note how Caliban too fantasizes about the many ways he can overthrow Prospero.
Perhaps we can think of Prospero’s books as the Constitution, without which America is “but a sot, as I am, nor hath not one spirit to command.” Indeed, democracy rests upon the Constitution.
Fortunately for Prospero, the insurgents are as inept as those who stormed the Capitol on January 6. As I noted in my original post, when Stephano and Trinculo get to Prospero’s cave, they behave like those who wandered around the building taking selfies, trashing Nancy Pelosi’s office, and looting souvenirs. In this case, they put on Prospero’s garments, infuriating Caliban, who understands Prospero’s power:
The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean To dote thus on such luggage? Let’s alone And do the murder first: if he awake, From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, Make us strange stuff.
Caliban himself is like those MAGA fanatics whose cult-like devotion to their leader blind them to his buffoonery. Caliban has attached himself to Stephano in part because he is intoxicated with his liquor—”I’ll swear upon that bottle to be thy true subject; for the liquor is not earthly”—and Trump’s supporters experience a similar high. Only at the end does Caliban realize that he has sworn allegiance to an idiot:
We’ve been praying for a while that Trump voters will experience their own remorse.
The character of Prospero is worth examining further given our own situation. He has taken his eyes off the ball once already, failing to anticipate Antonio’s coup, and he may be naïve in thinking that all will work out in the future if he simply forgives his enemies. Here he is with his usurping brother:
One can see some of the same naiveté in his daughter. When she delivers her best-known line—“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t!”—three of the four she is looking at are coup plotters. One also sees such naiveté in Gonzalo, who believes that they have landed in an Edenic paradise but fails to acknowledge—as Sebastian and Antonio do–the power dynamics that are always present in human society.
Will all go well once Prospero magnanimously breaks his staff and drowns his book? To this point, he has been able to maintain social order because he can in fact command a spirit. In a way, Prospero is like those who believe our Constitutional democracy has sufficient safeguards to ward off threats. But without Ariel orchestrating a happy ending, Sebastian and Antonio would kill Alonso and Gonzalo and the Caliban crew would kill Prospero.
Although Caliban won the 2024 election, it remains an open question whether he will prevail in 2026 and 2028. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Prospero famously says, and America’s Constitutional democracy is also made on a dream. In the play, rightful rulers Ferdinand and Miranda represent a new hope. Whether our own usurpers will be defeated by people committed to democracy is the question of the hour.
A recent Tempest citation: Blogger Phil Williams, in his column Hate Comes to Main Street, borrows the line “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” to describe a disturbing attempt by neo-Nazis to assume control of the Southern Baptist Convention. and neo-Nazis. Apparently William Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, is push blood and soil politics, KKK genetic theories, and a Baptist version of Sharia Law. Although the group has not yet taken over the SBC, they are making a concerted push.
The “strange bedfellows” reference, which originated with Shakespeare, is to the strangest scene in the play. Trinculo, to escape the rain, crawls under the gaberdine under which Caliban is hiding, even though he smells strongly of fish. Stephano, coming upon the pair, thinks he is witnessing “some monster of the isle with four legs.” When he hears the voice of a companion he believes he has drowned, he is utterly confused. As are those of us who see a man quoting Christ in the cause of cultural genoicide.
It sounds like the SBC has not yet joined forces with Wolfe as Caliban does with Trinculo and Stephano. “Strange bedfellows,” however, already describes Trump’s alliance with Christian evangelicals, so Williams’s warning should not be taken lightly.
Reaffirming our wedding vows after 50 years (and in our original—albeit slightly altered—wedding garb!)
Monday
Today Julia and I celebrate our 53rd wedding anniversary. When I asked her if I could share something she wrote about bringing up our sons, she suggested the poem below instead. “If I Go First” was penned a little over a year ago, shortly after Julia. experienced a stroke that put her in the hospital for three days. Although she emerged relatively unscathed, her brush with mortality led her to pen this love note. She imagined me finding it on her computer if she suddenly passed away.
While there are other reasons to survey and reflect on one’s marriage, the rattle of bones gives a special urgency to the exercise. The poem begins with our meeting at Carleton College (our senior year I edited the Carletonian while Julia was the arts editor); journeys on to graduate school in Atlanta; mentions a trip to France (Julia’s first venture abroad); and then takes us to our jobs, first at Morehouse College (for me) and a Decatur middle school (for her) before ending up in southern Maryland, where I and then eventually she taught for St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In both Atlanta and Maryland we lived in Black communities, and one of the caregivers with the voice of an angel was William Boyd, a music major from inner city Baltimore who lived with us for four years. He then journeyed with us to Yugoslavia, where he sang gospel in major concert halls in Zagreb and Sarajevo.
Of course, losing our eldest son is mentioned. (The secret society is parents who have lost a child.) The poem ends with the two of us paired one-on-one, as we were in the beginning, our other sons having departed to form families of their own.
To borrow a Philip Larkin image but using it very differently than he does, a good marriage deepens like a continental shelf. The passage of years has worn away various sharp edges and there comes a time when (now I’m stealing from Ezra Pound) “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours/ Forever and forever, and forever.” Not that we’re in the dust state yet (I hope). Just very good friends and essential supporters as well as lovers.
If I Go First By Julia Bates
If I go first Then here in some small way I want to tell you about All you have given me
We began our relationship As a team on a weekly college paper You as editor Me following the arts| We learned to listen To guide To create a small community Of creatives, the first of many
We followed family As we always would Even those times when Our neglected parents Sent fill in the blank Post cards to establish That we still lived
We studied We taught We played scrabble And held weekly Supper clubs Another community of Twenty somethings who Were grimly unsure that We could save the world But would not give up trying
You took me across oceans and into The thicket of a language I thought I knew from School. HAH! But we garnered Chocolates and cheese And I finally knew what Abroad meant.
And then children As a choice Though my father groaned He would never see his grandchildren And died to prove his point I had played him the sound Of the heartbeat of my first son A month before he died.
Big graduations And first jobs In places Where white skin Stood out And finally a place that Anchored us firmly in the south In a neighborhood that taught us how to Raise children in diversity With caregivers who had voices of angels
Children grow up They grow away With varying degrees of Anger, resistance, and distaste And at a river’s edge The oldest died In cold sunshine And in the following weeks The four of us stood alone Together
And we haunted poems For warmth and Assurance that whether We wanted to or not We would live Part of a secret society No one wants to join
Healing has come As guilt has weathered away. What we did or did not do Is beside the point We turned to love And the sons who Stood beside us Through it all. And you continued to shower Us with words in that Magic way you have of finding A thought here, an event there, Connected to a past writer All loops threaded in that sweet mind Of yours.
In joy our sons have Formed families Of their own And we are back to Two table settings Two suitcases for travel Not twelve Navy duffels Two for walks Two for the pew in church
And if you are reading this At some point You will be sitting alone But surrounded by all who We have touched By the web of love That still holds And I send you my deepest Love from whatever new Place I occupy To keep you warm To let you know you were Always the greatest gift You could have given me.
I’m very glad that I didn’t have to wait for Julia to die to read this. It has led us to reminisce together, perhaps the best thing one can do to celebrate an anniversary.
It’s no surprise that the Christian right is losing its mind over Texas senate candidate James Talarico. Liberals aren’t supposed to quote Jesus when they campaign (or, for that matter, ever). Still, even I was taken aback when Mike Lee, a vitriolic Mormon senator from Utah, accused him of being in thrall to Moloch, the Palestinian god to whom babies were supposedly sacrificed. The accusation sends me back to Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” written in 1955-56, where Moloch stands in for an America that is destroying “the best minds of my generation.” From the poet’s perspective, the real Moloch is the America that Trump & Co. want to return us to.
The Moloch accusation arises from Talarico’s support for a woman’s right to an abortion. As Talarico said to Stephen Colbert in an interview that CBS banned after pressure from Trump,
[T]he religious right … convinced a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage, two issues that aren’t mentioned in the Bible. Two issues that Jesus never talked about. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and … our fellow believers [are] going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church. Nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people.
Talarico believes that creation is a matter of freedom and consent and that abortion is consistent with Christian values. After all, he argues, God asked for, and received, Mary’s permission to impregnate her. John Stoehr at Editorial Board, to whom I owe this information, notes that this used to be taken for granted by Protestants. And although Catholics have always been against abortion, Pope Leo recently made the same point, that Christians make a mistake when they prioritize abortion over the Sermon on the Mount or Matthew 25:40-45 (“whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”).
In my opinion, the right wing’s “right to life” obsession has more to do with controlling women than with honoring life, for which they show little interest. As Stoehr observes, they believe they must slime Talarico in every way possible since, if he “is allowed to explain himself and his theological views, free of the slander against him, the most conservative religious voter might come to the conclusion that despite being a Democrat, he’s still a good Christian.” Stoehr adds,
As was the case during Donald Trump’s three campaigns, what matters to many voters isn’t leadership or policy or character. What matters is the collective desire to punch down on people whom the mob believes are deserving of it. (In this case, Talarico is associated with LGBTQ folks.) GOP campaigns are now like Vegas: what’s done there stays there. They are vacations from morality, excuses to indulge in deviance and depravity. That Texans would suffer by electing [Republican candidate Ken] Paxton doesn’t change the fact that they think slandering “Soy Boy” is fun.
Given that Trump and rightwing Christians want to return America to their idealized view of the 1950s, it’s interesting to look at Ginsberg’s depiction from that period. As he saw it, the machinery of modern America consisted of money, war, government and soul-crushing conformity. In his long howl of a poem, he gives us images that we recognize:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!… Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
What with the Trump family’s boundless greed and pay-to-play corruption, along with the president’s love of bombing, his attacks on environmental regulation, his promotion of fossil fuels (smokestacks that “crown the cities”), his paving over the rose garden and the White House lawn, his soulless skyscrapers and other “cement and aluminum” temples to himself (“granite cocks” sounds about right), his “crossbone soulless”prisons, his desecration of national parks and other hallowed institutions, his “Congress of sorrows,” Ginsberg could well be describing the aspirations of Project 2025.
“Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!” Check and check.
For all its apocalyptic despair, however, “Howl” ends on a note of hope as Ginsberg imagines America awakening to its potential. Although despair over the American dream has driven one of the “best minds”–his socialist friend Carl Solomon–to drugs and to incarceration at the Rockland Psychiatric Center, Ginsberg imagines that dream triumphing in the end. It will resurrect like Jesus “from the superhuman tomb” and we will “wake up electrified out of the coma.” In an inversion of war imagery, our “own souls’ airplanes” will drop angelic bombs,” the imaginary walls will collapse (what William Blake called “the mind forg’d manacles”), and we will run outside in our underwear, free at last. “O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here”:
I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I’m with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Although dreaming in the face of a suffocating reality (or, for that matter, Trumpism) may lead to madness, Ginsberg tells us that it can also lead to freedom. The poem ends with that archetypal journey, the western Odyssey, where new possibilities open up. The American dream doesn’t die just because there are setbacks.
My Ginsberg experience: I was invited to a dinner with Ginsberg when he came to St. Mary’s College of Maryland to see his friend Lucille Clifton and can report that he was interested in everything. When I told him that my research field was 18th century British literature, he rhapsodized about the mad poet Christopher Smart, author of the very Ginsbergian poem “Jubilate Agno.” (“For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry./ For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.”) When I mentioned that I was writing an article on Jean Renoir’s 1939 film Rules of the Game, he reported that he saw the film in the 1940s with Neal Cassady. Later that evening, he mesmerized a packed auditorium by having us sing a stanza from Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” repeatedly for 20+ minutes as he accompanied us on a harmonium.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 37th Installment
Note: For the purposes of this on-going memoir I am revising an essay I wrote three years ago. It has to do with a tinge of regret, one I have never been entirely able to overcome, that I chose a slightly wrong academic path. Marlon Brando’s lament in On the Waterfront–“I could have been a contender”—sometimes nags at me when I think about not having made a name for myself in literary studies.
I actually had a “what could have been” thrown at me when I was still a student at Carleton College, although it was then connected with history rather than literature. “If you hadn’t been so involved in running the paper [the Carletonian],” my advisor Carl Weiner said to me shortly before graduation, “you could really have been something.” Rather than taking on a year-long history project, I had chosen the short essay that everyone else wrote (although mine wasn’t short). My committee gave it an honors designation but I see what he meant.
I share this rumination, not only because it is self-revealing (a major goal of this memoir), but because I suspect we all have had regrets that we blow out of proportion. My real issue, I now realize, is anxiety over not having been perfect. It’s a form of pride that plagues Sir Gawain in the 14th century romance, one of my all-time favorite works, leading the Green Knight to intervene and bring him down to earth. Sure, you screwed up, but you’re still impressive, he essentially tells our hero in the poem’s finale, and I hear him saying the same to me. I find absolution, along with a deep sense of relief, in his words:
You are so fully confessed, your failings made known, And bear the plain penance of the point of my blade, I hold you polished as a pearl, as pure and as bright As you have lived free of fault since first you were born.
Why, after all, should I complain, having had a rich and fulfilling career teaching works that I love to students who came to care about them as well? The power of memoir writing, I’m discovering, is that one can dive into these thoughts and see them in an entirely new light. With that in mind, here’s that past post.
Reprinted from June 29, 2023 (slightly amended)
In his frequently quoted but often misunderstood “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost predicts that one day in the future he will look back at his life and regret a choice he made. (“I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence…”) While the poem is often read as a triumphant assertion of having made an unconventional choice—I have heard it quoted in this vein at a couple of valedictory addresses—I read it rather as someone who foresees that he will be so upset at having made that choice that he predicts he will try to rationalize it away: he will convince himself that he took the daring path, not the path that most people walk. In point of fact, however, he acknowledges that there wasn’t that much difference between the two paths, that they were worn more or less the same. (But maybe he’s misremembering this as well.)
In other words, although he would like to think he will look back with a contented sigh, he fears he will look back with a regretful sigh. The poem, after all, is entitled, “The Road Not Taken,” not “The Road Less Traveled.”
Having reached an age (72) where one looks back, especially after having just attended one’s 50th college reunion, I use today’s post to sort through one of my own career regrets. You’ll have to excuse me if I descend into the weeds of my profession—what has bothered me may will seem trivial to those in other walks of life.
I begin my self-examination with a professor that I mentioned in a PechaKucha talk I gave at the reunion. PechaKucha, of Japanese origin, allows the speaker 20 slides in just under seven minutes to make the presentation (20 seconds per slide, which change automatically so that the speaker can’t drone on). Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my subject, which was how Beowulfhelps us negotiate our gun-happy society. I contended that if we are to stand up to resentment-crazed trolls and counteract dragon depression, we need to “be like Beowulf.” The talk outlined the ways how.
The first slide mentioned Phil Niles’s Medieval History I class, which introduced me to the idea that the monsters in Beowulfrepresented the forces that threatened the stability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society. In the social contract between warrior and king, warriors were to be loyal, giving all their winnings to their king, and kings were to be fair and generous, redistributing those winnings to the warriors. If either side broke that contract—if warriors behaved like resentful trolls or if kings became greedy dragons—society could disintegrate, with death or slavery the end result for all its members.
I vividly remember writing my essay for the course, which I entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” Understanding came to me at around two or three in the morning in one of Carleton’s all-night study rooms. At that moment I grasped, in a deep way, that literature, including the literary fantasy that I loved, was not just for fun but articulated life and death issues. While I already knew the books I read were of immense importance to me, I now realized they were of immense importance to society as a whole. After all, Beowulfhad served as a blueprint to Anglo-Saxon warriors on how to literally survive.
Socially conscious as we all were in those days, what with the Black, Chicano and Indian liberation movements, the anti-war protests, and the feminist revolution all in full sway, this view that my literature, my personal passion, could help change the world hit me with seismic force. I determined that I would become a literature teacher.
Majoring in history rather than in English was not the way to go about this, however. By my junior year, however, I feared that I was too far along in history to make the transition. Furthermore, none of the English courses I was taking spoke to this new-found revelation. Whereas my English professors seemed more interested in confining themselves to the works rather than linking them to anything going on in the world, my history teachers were introducing me to thinkers who argued that ideas could have a transformational impact.
These thinkers included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukacs. In my French courses, meanwhile, I was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who thought the same. I wrote my thesis on the absurdly broad topic (but undergraduates are allowed to go big) of whether the French Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. I concluded that works like Rousseau’s On Inequalityand Diderot’s Letter on the Blindhad changed the framework in which reality itself was seen. This new reality, I argued, undermined traditional monarchical beliefs.
It helped that, as I was writing my thesis, I was also taking Barry Casper’s “Revolutions in Physics” class. (I had put off this science requirement to the very last moment.) Casper introduced us to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions,and I realized later that my thesis was essentially contending that the French Enlightenment had ushered in a significant paradigm shift.
But while my history major was speaking to issues that concerned me deeply, it wasn’t preparing me for graduate English programs. I was rejected by six of the nine schools I applied to, and I could understand why when I entered Emory University’s English program. After all, my fellow grad students could perform acts of literary interpretation that appeared magical to me. How were they detecting intricate image patterns beneath a work’s surface?
So was my first wrong path choosing to major in history rather than English? Actually, fearing that this was indeed a mistake, at the beginning of my junior year I planned to tell my history advisor Carl Weiner—a brilliant if somewhat obstreperous intellectual—that I wanted to change majors. At the last moment, however, I lost my nerve. Some cowardice entered into my decision making.
Then again, I would not have taken Phil Niles’s Medieval History class if I had changed majors, nor all those intellectual history classes. And I would probably have experienced, in further English classes, the same frustrations that had sent me to study history in the first place.
Despite having taken only six English courses, I was accepted into a good graduate program. It so happens that my Emory mentor had chosen me in part because of my history background. J. Paul Hunter, a giant in the field of 18thcentury British Literature, liked my interdisciplinary interests, and he and I saw eye to eye about the importance of history.
I was also fortunate that Emory’s Victorianist, Jerome Beaty, was interested in the emerging field of reader response theory. When, my first semester, I heard Beaty talk about how readers in 1847 would have responded to Jane Eyre,I felt a shock of recognition. I tracked him down after the talk and got the names of the theorists he was referencing, including the German theorist Hans Robert Jauss.
Jauss argues that great works of literature expand readers’ “horizon of expectations”—a paradigm shift, if you will—which was exactly what I wanted to believe. I wrote an essay that semester in Beaty’s “Early Dickens Novels” class about how Dickens challenged and expanded traditional notions of the family in Martin Chuzzlewit—with the effect that the novel was a flop when it came out (it was ahead of its time) but one of Dickens’s most popular novels by the end of his life (third after David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers). Dickens had expanded his readers’ horizons so that, despite their early dislike, they later came to see his novel with new eyes.
If you’re keeping track, my decision to major in history turns out not to have been a mistake after all. It got me into a graduate school where people considered history an important part of literary study—unusual for the time as New Historicism had not yet come into fashion—and my Emory PhD helped me find what was for me the perfect job: a state school with a mission to introduce a liberal arts education to (among others) first generation college students.
But wait, I’m not done yet with regrets. When, still in grad school, I was discussing a possible dissertation topic with Hunter, I said something to the effect of wanting to study how novels could change lives. Unfortunately, I narrowed my articulation too much. I thought that I needed to study satire, having the impression that satire was more effective at changing lives than other genres. He, hearing this, suggested that I take on the work of an under-appreciated satiric novelist (and former ship surgeon) Tobias Smollett and I dutifully did so.
This in spite of the fact that I can’t stand Smollett, largely because he is such a cranky writer. In fact, fellow novelist Laurence Sterne referred to him as “Smelfungus” for the way he complains all the time. While I dutifully wrote on Smollett, producing an acceptable dissertation (“Smollett’s Struggle for a New Mode of Expression”), I could never return to him later. As one’s dissertation often serves as the source of one’s early scholarly articles, I cut myself off from that opportunity.
The path I wish I had taken was choosing a topic that focused on reader response issues. Rather than selecting a single author, I could have chosen a theoretical focus and explored a range of 18th century texts. I could, for instance, have followed more closely the kind of research Hunter himself was doing. For instance, he had recently written a brilliant article entitled “The Loneliness of the Long Distant Reader,” in which he talked about how novels were disrupting social order by introducing a new kind of solitude. Wives, for instance, would sometimes distress their husbands by disappearing for days into Samuel Richardson’s million-word novel Clarissa.
Had I said, “I want to do the kind of research that you did in that article,” I would have written a very different dissertation. I would have dived into 18th century reading journals, letters in which books are mentioned, and other documents and other forms of evidence as to the impact of works. I would have built a career in reader response theory, then in its infancy, instead of jumping between multiple fields.
I also would have become the kind of scholar my father was. More on this in a moment.
Instead, having written a dissertation more from the intellect than from the heart, I turned away from writing literary scholarship altogether (at least for a while) and instead started analyzing films. After all, I could see vividly the impact that cinema had on audiences—why, for instance (to cite my most widely cited article) Citizen Kaneshook 1941 viewers to the core. But I could have been doing the same with literature.
In short, I had committed a scholarly no-no: I left a field where I had considerable expertise to branch into something new.
Mentioning my father points to an Oedipal drama at work. Scott Bates, a French professor at the University of the South, was a world authority on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. During a Fulbright year when I was a year old, he had uncovered source material at France’s national library that upended previous interpretations, and he continued to do so for decades afterward. For 15 years I considered myself an impostor because I wasn’t doing something comparable.
I should add that I worshipped my father, seeing in him everything I wanted to be. I was even proud when, in seventh grade, I began wearing glasses because he wore glasses. You see what I mean.
But instead of becoming a recognized scholar, I became what some contemptuously dismiss as a generalist. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a small liberal arts college, allowed this so that, at any moment, I could be found teaching one of our three survey courses—everything from Beowulfto Margaret Atwood—or one of a wide assortment of theme courses. Over the years these included Minority Lit, African American Lit, Post-Colonial Lit, American Fantasy, British Fantasy, Magical Realism, American Film, Film Genre, Great Directors, Theories of the Reader,and The Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami. Although my two favorite courses were in my field (Restoration and 18thCentury Couples Comedyand Jane Austen), ranging as widely as I did was not a recipe for scholarly achievement.
Where I went deep was in responding to student essays. Figuring that everyone had the potential to undercover meaningful literary insights, I spent hours helping students choose their topics, develop their proposals, and draft and polish their essays.
Even after 35 years, this never got old. I reached the point where I could detect—sometimes from no more than a phrase—the topic that would yield an essay where the student had “something at stake” (the phrase I used in my syllabus). I’ve shared a number of these student reading stories on this blog.
While I flourished as a teacher, however, my traditional scholarship was mostly missing. Although I was to publish twenty academic articles, deliver a score of scholarly presentations, and self-publish a book on Beowulf, it’s not a resumé that would earn tenure at a research university. The book I’m proudest of was published at a small press after I retired.
Arguably, my greatest achievement is this blog. My audience is not composed of specialists in the field, however.
As I look back at this career, my version of Frost’s regretful sigh is that I didn’t produce the work that I thought I was supposed to.
Could I have gone as far as those of my stellar Carleton classmates who have had brilliant scholarly careers? One of them heads the Emory Philosophy Department while another received a rave review in The New York Review of Books. Reunions can alert us to roads we haven’t taken.
And yet, to reverse course once again, I have had students tell me that my teaching impacted them in ways that were life-changing, and this blog has reached a wider readership than I ever could have hoped for from scholarly work. While it’s not what my father did nor what various of my professors hoped from me, in the end I fulfilled my main professional mission, which was to put people in contact with literature that bettered their lives. When my old regrets flair up, I remind myself of this.
And to do justice to our 50th class reunion, what I carried away was a sense, not of expectations unfulfilled, but of lives lived fully and meaningfully. Professional goals seem less important now that many of us have retired.
In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges gives us an alternative to Frost’s yellow wood. Whereas the speaker in “Road Not Taken” agonizes over a single choice, Borges describes a garden where the choices are infinite. As a character tells the narrator,
The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.
And further on:
Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.
This image shows me I have been too one-dimensional in thinking about my life trajectory. Life indeed has “innumerable futures,” which are too complex to chart. I’m especially struck by the thought that sometimes a path that seems to diverge will then later converge, and that a path that bifurcates into two will then see those two intersect. A history class that I wouldn’t have taken had I majored in English gave me the literary insight that has guided my life. The history major that kept me out of a number of graduate schools got me into one that gave me the thinkers that I needed and helped me land my dream job.
Frost’s poem, which jumps back and forth in time, tells me the same thing. Don’t fixate on a single narrative about a wrong or right decision—don’t spend time regretting that you took this path rather than that one—because the very story you tell yourself about that choosing will change over time.
Better for me to focus on the rich interactions with people that teaching literature has made possible, which is a far more interesting story than that of a hypothetical path not taken.
One further thought. I didn’t mention another life choice I made which, while it ran counter to the path of a traditional literary scholar, has added immeasurably to my life. In 1987, inspired by recent Hungarian films, I applied for a Fulbright to go study them, even though I didn’t know any Hungarian. Although I had experienced early academic success with an article on the Czech New Wave—how film played a major role in the Czech Spring of 1968–jumping to another country made no scholarly sense.
In any event, the Hungary slot was not available so I ended up in Yugoslavia/Slovenia instead. This seemed like a worthy second choice since Yugoslavia itself was producing fascinating films. Unfortunately, those films were being produced in Serbia and Croatia, not Slovenia. My research plans fell through and, from outer appearances, the decision appeared to have been a bust.
Except that it wasn’t as I developed deep ties with people in the country. The relationship with Slovenia has led to some of the happiest moments of Julia’s and my life. We have been returning every two years for a six-week stint at the University of Ljubljana and recently received a special award from the university. We use these visits to refresh our many friendships. In addition, my understanding of literature grew immensely from this immersion in another country, enriching my stateside teaching.
Would I trade all this for a straight-line scholar’s path? On reflection, I don’t think I would.
With the NBA finals underway, I follow up the story, mentioned last week, about basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal writing “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the Lens of the Epic Poem The Odyssey.” The thesis was for LSU’s Sports Leadership program. Sadly, I don’t have more information so today’s post merely speculates about how he might have applied Homer’s poem.
Early in the poem we encounter two mentor figures, including Mentor himself (!), who are counseling young Telemachus. Actually, the mentors are Athena, who has taken the guise of first Mentes and then Mentor, but that’s the Greek way of saying that the two men are providing god-like advice. A 19-year-old rookie, Telemachus doesn’t know how to deal with his mother’s suitors, who have invaded the house and are squandering his inheritance. He botches his first confrontation with them—let’s call it his debut appearance on the basketball court—as they successfully threaten him and the sympathetic villagers after he calls a village council. At the end of the session, Telemachus cries in frustration.
Simply calling the council is a growth step for him, however, and Mentor seeks to build on this by essentially sending him to the B league. Figuring that he needs to practice leadership in an environment where he can succeed, Mentor advises him to gather a group of youngsters and take a somewhat challenging sea voyage. Telemachus passes the test and also gains confidence and inspiration after talking to two veterans, Nestor and Menelaus. Both confirm that he has promise, and he returns to Ithaka with a new stride in his step.
He also wins the reluctant admiration of the suitors, who have sent out a ship to intercept and kill him. “Friends,” says one of them,
face up to it; that young pup Telemachus, has done it; he made the round trip, though we said he could not.
Fortunately from him, his team has just acquired a superstar—his father—who takes over, pushing Telemachus into a secondary role. It’s what he needs, however, to develop his own talent. He recognizes this and embraces the occasion.
Odysseus brings with him a lot of hard-won wisdom. If we think of his journey home as his previous basketball career, everything starts off well before going off the rails. The Aeolus gives him a bag of winds that take him to within sight of Ithaka, but because he has failed to communicate adequately with his teammates, they open up the bag and are blow back to the now-angry wind god.
In the subsequent journey, Odysseus’s desire to try new things, which is the source of his greatness, also gets him in trouble with the cannibalistic Laestrygonians and Polyphemus the cyclops. In both instances, his teammates just want to grab some loot and go but Odysseus’s curiosity pushes him further, getting a number of them killed.
Lessons abound. On the plus side, this same intelligence gets Odysseus out of tight spots (Polyphemus’s cave). On the negative, his cocky trash talk—boasting to Polyphemus about what he’s done—provides bulletin board material for the opposition. Suddenly Poseidon is on his case.
Life in the NBA offers players many of the temptations (drugs, sex, loot) that show up in the poem, where we watch Odysseus struggle to keep his team focused. The Lotus Eaters tempt with drugs and Circe tends with bestial appetites (she turns men into pigs), and the men are fortunate that they have a leader who keeps his eyes on the prize. This trait also saves Odysseus from the Sirens. (“They got some hungry women there and they really make a mess outa you,” as Bob Dylan would say.)
Odysseus knows how to accept coaching, which he gets from Teiresias in the Underworld and from Circe. This allows him to negotiate situations where there are no good options, a situation basketball teams know well. When the Knicks take on the Spurs, will they collapse down on 7’4” Victor Wenbanyama, thereby leaving themselves open to three-point shooters, or defend him with a single player, in which case they will give up easy baskets. Do they go man-to-man or play zone? There will be costs in both cases, but the goal is to win the game. Odysseus chooses to sacrifice six men to the monster Scylla rather than giving up his entire ship to the whirlpool Charybdis.
And then there’s that part of the season where you sink into mediocrity (Circe’s island) and all appears lost. Do you just give up, sitting around moping, or do you do something dramatic. Odysseus, buoyed by a divine sense of mission—Zeus has decreed he must return home—builds a raft and risks the treacherous seas.
Sometimes at such moments we see teams make daring trades, which sometimes work out (Odysseus, after many struggles, reaches the island of the Phaeacians, who endow him with gifts and send him home), and sometimes not (teams sometimes mortgage their future to acquire players that fail to save them from drowning).
Back home, Odysseus must now prepare for the big game. The odds are formidable as Odysseus can field no more than four men (unless one counts Athena) while there are 108 suitors. Nevertheless, despite his age, he possesses remarkable fighting skills, along with the element of surprise. Telemachus, meanwhile, proves a worthy second–Scotti Pippen to his father’s Michael Jordan—and the underdogs win.
While this post has been fun to write, I would much rather have reported on the actual content of Shaq’s thesis. He may have encountered the poem in the many hours of interdisciplinary course work his program required, and I can see how he came up with the idea. I would love to know the specific games, coaches, players, and situations it brought to mind.
First Lady Olena Zelenska visits Kyiv’s annual book fair in 2024
Wednesday
Why have a book festival in the middle of a war? Why have a war in the middle of a book festival?
So begins an inspiring essay by historian Timothy Snyder on a Ukrainian book fair held in the face of ongoing Russian attacks. On May 24 alone, Snyder reports, Russia launched more than six hundred missiles and drones at the capital city of Kyiv and environs. Nevertheless, Book Arsenal, Kyiv’s annual festival, continued on.
Book publishing apparently is currently undergoing “an extraordinary renaissance” in Ukraine. Over 100 book publishers showed up for the fair and tens of thousands visited the 240 events. This year’s motto was “Bear your freedom.”
As for the missiles, Snyder’s contact informed him that one waits for them to pass and then goes on as usual:
Air raids are an interruption; when they are finished, participants in Book Arsenal go back to talking about books. People in Kyiv are frustrated by these interruptions, or angry, or sleepless; but after four years these Russian war crimes become a part of life, to which one adapts.
Snyder says that the danger can be judged and navigated thanks to apps and Telegram channels, which alert people to impending air raids. Nevertheless, four were killed and a hundred injured in the May 24 bombings. On June 1 another 18 died as Russia fired 700 missiles and drones at Dnipro and Kyiv.
Russia has particularly targeted cultural sites, publishing houses, archives, libraries, and museums. In occupied zones, Russians collect and burn Ukrainian books, and the 2024 Arsenal Festival featured an exhibit on “Books Destroyed by Russia.” “Genocide,” Snyder observes, “is about eliminating a people, and it includes the attempt to eliminate their ability to think for themselves, as themselves, in their own language.” Therefore, book publication is seen as self-defense and reading as a form of resistance. The historian states that
good books liberate us from the obvious and prepare us for the real. It might seem like, at the edge, where life meets death, we should put the books down; this is not what one sees in Ukraine. The last time I went to the front I rode with soldiers who were bringing books to other soldiers.
The Roman stoic philosopher Seneca is particularly popular at the moment, especially his essay “On the Shortness of Life.” In it he argues that life is long enough if we do what is important.
Along these lines, blogger Matt Labash recently alerted me to a poem about those who do what is important in the face of death. It takes a poem to do justice to these “Local Heroes” because, Labash says, poetry stands up “when prose fails to answer the call.” Author Thomas Lynch, who is a Michigan undertaker, has a particular perspective on “what matters and what doesn’t.”
Local Heroes By Thomas Lynch
Some days the worst that can happen happens. The sky falls or weather overwhelms or The world as we have come to know it turns Towards the eventual apocalypse Long prefigured in all the holy books — The end times of floods and conflagrations That bring us to the edge of our oblivions. Still, maybe this is not the end at all, Nor even the beginning of the end. Rather, one more in a long list of sorrows, To be added to the ones thus far endured, Through what we have come to call our history: Another in that bitter litany That we will, if we survive it, have survived. Lord, send us in our peril, local heroes, Someone to listen, someone to watch, Someone to search and wait and keep the careful count Of the dead and missing, the dead and gone But not forgotten. Sometimes all that can be done Is to salvage one sadness from the mass of sadnesses, To bear one body home, to lay the dead out Among their people, organize the flowers And casseroles, write the obits, meet the mourners at the door, Drive the dark procession down through town Toll the bell, dig the hole, tend the pyre. It’s what we do. The daylong news is dire — Full of true believers and politicos Old talk of race and blame and photo ops. But here brave men and women pick the pieces up. They serve the living tending to the dead. They bring them home, the missing and adrift, They give them back to let them go again. Like politics, all funerals are local.
Ukrainians undoubtedly know well what Lynch is talking about. Thousands of them are local heroes.
MSNOW legal commentator Barbara McQuade, the Michigan lawyer fired by DJT after successfully prosecuting the underwear bomber and a Detroit mayor, has just published The Fix: Saving America from the Corruption of a Mob-Style Government. In her interview about the book with Rachel Maddow, McQuade used a literary analogy to succinctly sum up what has happened to Trump’s Department of “Justice”: “The Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic.”
The allusion, of course, is to the final book in the Harry Potter series and captures how dire our situation has become. The Ministry of Magic is the governing body for the magical community, and while frequently inept and sometimes corrupt, it nevertheless provides some protection against the forces of evil. Harry, Dumbledore, and Hogwarts can wrestle with their immediate challenges without worrying about Voldemort seizing executive authority. Even Vernon Dursley, upon suddenly finding his family pulled into the wizards’ war, shares this view:
“I thought there was a Ministry of Magic?” asked Vernon Dursley abruptly. “There is,” said Harry, surprised. “Well then, why can’t they protect us? It seems to me that, as innocent victims, guilty of nothing more than harboring a marked man, we ought to qualify for government protection!” Harry laughed: he could not help himself. It was so very typical of his uncle to put his hopes in the establishment, even within this world that he despised and mistrusted. “You heard what Mr. Weasley and Kingsley said,” Harry replied. “We think the Ministry has been infiltrated.”
And so in fact it has. We learn in the opening chapter of Deathly Hallows that a Voldemort henchman has placed an Imperius Curse on Pius Thicknesse, the Ministry’s Head of the Department of Magical Law, thereby making him Voldemort’s puppet. The goal, now, is for Thicknesse to convert other ministers so that they can overthrow Minister Rufus Scrimgeour. Voldemort warns that the coup must be successful as “one failed attempt on the Minister’s life will set me back a long way.”
The signs of infiltration have been there for a while as Harry, the Weasleys, and others see Voldemort making inroads. “Harry,” Hermione says at one point as his scar begins giving him visions of Voldemort, “he’s taking over the Ministry and the newspapers and half the Wizarding world! Don’t let him inside your head too!” Still, the news comes as a thunderbolt, akin to America’s election night news on November 8, 2016 and again November 5, 2024: “The Ministry has fallen. Scrimgeour is dead. They are coming.”
Having already lost Dumbledore, now Harry, Hermione, and Ron have lost the protection of Hogwarts and are on their own as Voldemort seizes the instruments of governing. Putting it in our own terms, he now controls Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the military. Because Trump has made significant inroads into all four, we can relate to what life is like under Voldemort, which we learn when Neville reports on life at Hogwarts.
First of all, he tells them about Death Eaters who have joined the faculty. We can think of the Carrows as ICE agents with free use of the detention system:
The other teachers are all supposed to refer us to the Carrows if we do anything wrong….We supposed to practice the Cruciatus Curse on people who’ve earned detentions.
While Neville sustains a deep gash in his cheek for refusing to do so, the Carrows, like the Department of Homeland Security, find willing accomplices. “Some people are into it,” Neville notes. “Crabbe and Goyle love it. First time they’ve ever been top in anything, I expect.”
Like many school systems in the American south, Hogwarts has also changed its curriculum, with “Defense Against the Dark Arts” becoming “the Dark Arts.” Meanwhile, now that the school is no longer constrained by DEI, Critical Race Theory, or Black History Month, Muggle Studies (i.e., the study of humans) is taught in a whole new way:
“We’ve all got to listen to [the teacher] explain how Muggles are like animals, stupid and dirty, and how they drove wizards into hiding by being vicious toward them, and how the natural order is being reestablished. I got this one,” [Neville] indicated another slash to his face, “for asking her how much Muggle blood she and her brother have got.”
When Ron worries that Neville is taking unnecessary chances, he replies with words that we’re hearing these days from protest leaders: “The thing is, it helps when people stand up to them, it gives everyone hope. I used to notice that when you did it, Harry.”
The Death Eaters even have a version of going after the immigrant parents of American citizens. Neville again:
The only people in real danger are the ones whose friends and relatives on the outside are giving trouble. They get taken hostage. Old Xeno Lovegood was getting a bit too outspoken in The Quibbler, so they dragged Luna off the train on the way back from Christmas.
For a while, the Hogwarts rebels resort to graffiti until it becomes too dangerous. “We used to sneak out at night and put graffiti on the walls: Dumbledore’s Army, Still Recruiting, stuff like that.” Now, they are in hiding, awaiting the best moment to strike.
For years the American right has had fever dreams about a leftwing takeover, making movies like Red Dawn, complaining incessantly about big government, and pushing for increased accessibility to firearms. Who knew that, when they themselves took over, they would engage in wholesale roundups of brown people, extrajudicial killings without accountability, and a black helicopter attack on a Chicago tenement? The left may have “policed” racially insensitive speech, but “police” for them was only a metaphor, not actual militias with access to lethal weapons, pepper spray, armored vehicles, extrajudicial warrants, and virtually unlimited power to arrest, detain indefinitely, and sometimes send to foreign prisons.
So yes, the Death Eaters have taken over the Ministry of Magic. But we can share Neville’s hope that resistance isn’t altogether futile and Rowling’s vision that Harry’s non-violent response to Voldemort will triumph in the end. The weapon that the Dark Lord hurls at Harry rebounds upon him so that he is brought down by his own machinations.
For that to happen, however, Harry must enter the dark wood and stand up to him. The King’s Cross episode shows Harry wrestling with his doubts—when all seems lost, should he continue on?—and his decision to return to action is the decision before us all. As the ghost of Dumbledore tells him in this netherworld,
By returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart. If that seems to you a worthy goal, then we say good-bye for the present.
In this moment, Potter also discovers that behind the face of evil is an unloved, whimpering toddler. Or put another way, the Great and Powerful Oz is a little man behind a curtain, even if his face and name are plastered all over Washington.
Sol Eytinge, Jr., Mr Carker, the smiling sycophant from Dombey and Son
Monday
I’ve just finished listening to Dombey and Son, thereby completing my life list of Dickens novels. (I exempt the Mystery of Edwin Drood, which Dickens didn’t finish. And yes, I’ve read Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit.) While Dombey is far from the author’s best work, its depiction of a tyrannical boss and his smiling enabler pretty much captures what we’re seeing in the White House these days.
Dombey is the proud and autocratic head of a thriving business. After his first wife dies, he essentially buys a second, a beautiful woman who is just as proud, and sparks fly when she refuses to cater to his whims. Not confident of handling her himself, he turns to his sycophantic manager to sort out matters. Imagine Dombey as Trump and James Carker as Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, or, well, pretty much anyone in his current administration:
“Now, Carker,” said Mr Dombey, “I do not hesitate to say to you that I will carry my point. I am not to be trifled with. Mrs Dombey must understand that my will is law, and that I cannot allow of one exception to the whole rule of my life. You will have the goodness to undertake this charge, which, coming from me, is not unacceptable to you, I hope, whatever regret you may politely profess—for which I am obliged to you on behalf of Mrs Dombey; and you will have the goodness, I am persuaded, to discharge it as exactly as any other commission.” “You know,” said Mr Carker, “that you have only to command me.” “I know,” said Mr Dombey, with a majestic indication of assent, “that I have only to command you.”
Dombey goes to complain that Edith does not adequately appreciate him for having elevated her to the eminent position of his wife:
“[A]t present I do not conceive that Mrs Dombey does that credit to it, to which it is entitled. There is a principle of opposition in Mrs Dombey that must be eradicated; that must be overcome: Mrs Dombey does not appear to understand,” said Mr Dombey, forcibly, “that the idea of opposition to Me is monstrous and absurd.”
Compare this to how Trump is prepared to punish those in his own party who do not fully acknowledge his importance (Tom Massie, Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn). The results, as we have seen, are cabinet meetings that function like North Korea-style groveling sessions.
But enough of Trump as I’m more interested in the Carkers of the world. The manger, whose “two unbroken rows of glistening teeth” are always “on parade,” gets more than a paycheck and prestige from his association with Dombey. Like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and numerous others, he gets an opportunity to carry out his own sadistic fantasies.
In this instance, Dombey has instructed him to humble his wife, and Carker points out that his being employed as intermediary will itself be a form of humiliation as Edith detests him. When Dombey queries whether Carker will feel degraded in his role, the manager responds that degradation is impossible when he is carrying out his boss’ wishes. Dombey first:
“But I have not supposed, I confess, that any confidence I could entrust to you, would be likely to degrade you—” “Oh! I degraded!” exclaimed Carker. “In your service!” “—or to place you,” pursued Mr Dombey, “in a false position.” “I in a false position!” exclaimed Carker. “I shall be proud—delighted—to execute your trust. I could have wished, I own, to have given the lady at whose feet I would lay my humble duty and devotion—for is she not your wife!—no new cause of dislike; but a wish from you is, of course, paramount to every other consideration on earth.”
He goes on to assure Dombey that Edith is sure to be “converted from these little errors of judgment,” which I suspect has its modern equivalent in Trump’s sycophants assuring him that the public will be brought around to seeing that we are indeed enjoying the greatest economic boom in American history.
One wonders whether they also harbor Carker’s secret resentment: his assumption that everyone in the office is hypocritical when they express concern at Dombey falling from a horse reveals his own hypocrisy. Inwardly, he seethes over how Dombey makes him bow and scrape and is only sorry that his boss doesn’t die in the accident. He gets his revenge, or so he thinks, when he kisses Edith and persuades her to run away with him, thereby thoroughly humiliating her husband. His own side hustles, made without Dombey’s knowledge, have given him financial independence.
Many note that standing up to Trump is the best response, and it is an effective way to handle his enablers as well. In an immensely satisfying scene, Edith faces down Carker, putting him in his place at the very moment when he thinks he has achieved power over her. He thinks she has run away from Dombey to be with him, but she sets him right:
“In every vaunt you make,” she said, “I have my triumph. I single out in you the meanest man I know, the parasite and tool of the proud tyrant, that his wound may go the deeper, and may rankle more. Boast, and revenge me on him! You know how you came here tonight; you know how you stand cowering there; you see yourself in colors quite as despicable, if not as odious, as those in which I see you.”
Dickens tells us that if Edith had faltered for an instant, Carker would have pinioned her but that “she was as firm as rock, and her searching eyes never left him”:
He would have sold his soul to root her, in her beauty, to the floor, and make her arms drop at her sides, and have her at his mercy. But he could not look at her, and not be afraid of her. He saw a strength within her that was resistless.
Carker dies when a nightmarish train runs him down, and, given the staggering levels of corruption we are seeing, a metaphorical train may have our current crop of sycophants in its sights. Rick Wilson’s maxim—“ETTD: Everything Trump Touches Dies”—has proved wondrously predictive so far.
Further thought: A friend of mine told me that her mother, raised in a fundamentalist household, was a book that provided examples from David Copperfield to teach her How To Be a Christian Woman. While David’s Dora was held up as positive in that she is ultra feminine, she was critiqued as being too infantile so that one should aspire instead to be like the more mature —and even more nurturing and self-sacrificing–Agnes. Both women, however, resemble the “angel in the house” celebrated in the Coventry Patmore poem of that period.
In Dombey and Son, I found myself wincing at how Dickens celebrates sweet Florence for essentially being, unlike her (more interesting) stepmother, a self-sacrificing doormat. The cloying portrayal helps explain why Dombey is not more highly regarded.
That being noted, however, I did find myself cheering characters who choose morality and sacrifice over convenience and self-gratification. I thought of all those civil servants who went into government because they love their country and now are being pressured to pledge allegiance to Trump. Dickens reminds us of what integrity under fire looks like and how one can choose to respond. Fundamentalists may hold up Dickens women as exemplars, but Dickens’s Christianity resembles that of Texas Democrat James Talarico much more than that of Trump’s fundamentalist idolaters.
Last week I mentioned how versions of the Holy Spirit’s descent appear in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian. Today I turn to C.S. Lewis’s handling of the Genesis creation story, which is often read on the first Sunday after Pentecost. I turn for assistance to The Green Worlds of C.S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm, written and just released by my friend and colleague John Gatta.
I’ve previously written about Gatta’s The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation and Green Gospel:Foundations of Ecotheology. In both he challenges those who insist on human dominion over or even stewardship of nature because such framings separate humans from nature. Rather, animals, plants, and minerals are also involved in God’s unfolding creation. Such a vision, Gatta says, is to be found in The Magician’s Nephew, where Aslan sings Narnia into existence. I start with the well-known opening of Genesis:
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good…
Through the use of magic rings Polly and Digory, along with several others, have been transported to a formless void of their own. Then Aslan appears:
In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it.
With the singing, stars begin to shine in the heavens, followed by much more:
The lion was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle, rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the Lion like a pool. It ran up the sides of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could now be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. Digory did not know what they were until one began coming up quite close to him. It was a little, spiky thing that threw out dozens of arms and covered these arms with green and grew larger at the rate of about an inch every two seconds. There were dozens of these things all round him now. When they were nearly as tall as himself he saw what they were. “Trees!” he exclaimed.
And:
Can you imagine a stretch of grassy land bubbling like water in a pot? For that is really the best description of what was happening. In all directions it was swelling into humps. They were of very different sizes, some no bigger than mole-hills, some as big as wheelbarrows, two the size of cottages. And the humps moved and swelled till they burst, and the crumbled earth poured out of them, and from each hump there came out an animal…. The panthers, leopards and things of that sort, sat down at once to wash the loose earth off theirhind quarters and then stood up against the trees to sharpen their front claws. Showers of birds came out of the trees. Butterflies fluttered. Bees got to work on the flowers as if they hadn’t a second to lose….And now you could hardly hear the song of the Lion; there was so much cawing, cooing, crowing, braying, neighing, baying, barking, lowing, bleating, and trumpeting.
To Gatta, Aslan singing Narnia into existence is the most memorable feature of Magician’s Nephew, something “beautifully consonant with the way other imaginative writers–ranging from the authors of the Book of Job, Dante, and Shakespeare to J.R. R. Tolkien, T.S. Eliot, John Muir and Wendell Berry –have expounded upon the music of creation.”
In both Genesis and Magician’sNephew, Gatta observes, creation stems “not from any intrinsic necessity, but in a spirit of pure, radically expansive love, exuberance, and joy.” Where the two stories diverge is that Aslan’s song “culminates in the birth not of our own human species, but of animals gifted with intelligible speech who will become the land’s central consciousness.”
This is important, Gatta says, because it moves us past the dominion/stewardship conversation. Although “humans from elsewhere” will play a role in Narnia’s future, the focus is initially on non-human creation. Gatta points out,
After Aslan as Singer sounds the keynote, other beings—including trees, stars, waters, horses, rabbits, moles, beavers, leopards, and sundry wild beasts–are drawn to join their voices in glorious harmony with that keynote, and with “the voice of the earth herself.” It’s a symphony that echoes the Book of Job and other biblical texts, wherein the morning stars join with countless other forms of being, both visible and invisible, to sing God’s hymn of ongoing creation.
By calling out, ‘“Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. . . . Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters,” all created beings are “called to consent to their full emergence.” Nor is that all. The Creator expects them to take an active part in their own being and becoming, as well as “in promoting the health of their larger community of creation.” Gatta explains the significance of this:
The creatures Aslan addresses here have already come to birth but still need to awaken to a fuller, second stage of their creation. That participatory stage calls for them to respond to the gift of life with a sign of their acceptance. It is phrased in strikingly direct, penetrating language.
“Creatures, I give you yourselves. . . . and I give you myself.”
Accentuating his point, Gatta says that Aslan is expecting his creatures “to develop an involvement and responsibility in their own creation, conceived as an ongoing process.” By the declaration, “I give you myself,” the creator lion “confirms his own sustained engagement in the process.” He further confirms it by touching noses with each of the animals.
God, in short, has “a personal, intimate investment in the process of Creation.”
Unfortunately sin has also entered Narnia in the form of Uncle Andrew, who dreams of monetizing the new world, and Queen Jadis, who wants to assert dominion over it (and ultimately will do so as the White Witch). They are incapable of hearing the voice of the Lion. As Aslan says of Andrew, “If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings,” before adding, “Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!”
For those humans who harken to the Lion’s song, however, a vision of heaven on earth opens. “Gawd!” says the cabdriver. “Ain’t it lovely?”
“Whoever has ears,” Jesus said, “let them hear.”
To sum up Gatta’s argument, Magician’s Nephew shows a divine Creator who is integrally involved in “the continuous creation of things” and a Creation that is called upon to play an active role in the process. Rather than thinking of God as one who has set up Creation and then ducked out, only to return disgusted when humans messed things up, Gatta says we should see God as an on-going, ever-changing, and never-ending journey. The question is whether we will get on board.
