On Election Night 2024, The Tempest

By Robin Bates | Published: January 1, 2025
Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Caliban, Stefano and Trinculo

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Thursday

To those of us appalled at the prospect of another Trump presidency, the night of November 6, 2024 was our nadir. Applying Shakespeare’s Tempest to the moment, I wrote an introductory note in which I apologized for the way the essay swung back and forth between optimism and despair, culminating (in the end) with the latter. I noted that what Shakespeare designed to be a comic if somewhat disturbing subplot suddenly became, for me, the major drama. The three inept insurrectionists who try to overthrow Prospero, destroy his magic book, and seize Miranda emerge victorious. It was as if The Tempest had transmuted into Richard III.

Thinking of Prospero’s book as the Constitution and Miranda as reproductive freedom, I changed my headline several times in the course of the night: from “Caliban vs. Prospero” to “Can Caliban Defeat Prospero?” to (sadly) “Caliban Defeats Prospero.”

Following Trump’s victory in a tweet that received 22,000 likes, white nationalist and male supremacist Nick Fuentes gloated, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” When Prospero reminds Caliban that he was a kind master until the monster “didst seek to violate the honor of my child,” Caliban replies,

O ho, O ho! would’t had been done!
Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else
This isle with Calibans.

Visions of sexual assault danced in many heads following election night. Here’s the essay that finally emerged from my computer.

Reprinted from November 7, 2024

I taught The Tempest yesterday in my Ljubljana Shakespeare class and, as I await election results—it’s midnight on the east coast, early morning Central European Time—I’ve been having a fantasy based on the play. It involves many of Trump’s fanatical followers coming to see him as he really is.

Of course, this fantasy can only happen if he loses. If he wins, he will only build on the mythological status that he has assumed in their eyes.

I draw on one of the play’s subplots for the fantasy. Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax and a thoroughly disagreeable character, encounters two of the lesser survivors of the shipwreck, the drunken butler Stephano and court jester Trinculo. Thinking they are his key to overthrowing the magician Prospero and freeing him from servitude, Caliban links his fate with theirs.

Winning him over is the wine that Stephano is carrying, which I associate with Trump’s seductive rhetoric, whether it be his birther lie about Obama, his misogynist attacks on women, his xenophobic descriptions of Mexicans, his Muslim ban, or all his other countless invitations to become our worst selves. Caliban, like Trump’s ardent fans, is enthralled:

These be fine things, an if they be not sprites. That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor.
I will kneel to him.

“Hast thou not dropp’d from heaven?” Caliban goes on to ask breathlessly before going even further in his adulation. Thrice we see him kneel down to kiss Stefano’s foot:

I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island;
And I will kiss thy foot: I prithee, be my god.

Why obey the old norms and conventions when one can follow a leader such as this? “A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!” Caliban declares as switches masters from Prospero to Stephano:

No more dams I’ll make for fish
Nor fetch in firing
At requiring;
Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish
‘Ban, ‘Ban, Cacaliban
Has a new master: get a new man.
Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! freedom,
hey-day, freedom!

Caliban even has a version of the Right’s “America for Americans” declaration: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me.“ Of courses, he ignores the fact that his mother, the witch Sycorax, established control through her own violent takeover, imprisoning original inhabitant Ariel in a tree.

To be sure, Caliban appears a howling, drunken monster to Trinculo. But that’s often the way with cults: they seem crazed to outsiders, perfectly logical and sane to those caught up in them.

As every student of fascism understands, transitioning from blind adoration to violence is only a short step. Caliban’s plan is to overthrow Prospero and seize his daughter:

Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him,
I’ th’ afternoon to sleep: there thou mayst brain him,
Having first seized his books, or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
Or cut his wezand with thy knife. Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
One spirit to command: they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
He has brave utensils,–for so he calls them–
Which when he has a house, he’ll deck withal
And that most deeply to consider is
The beauty of his daughter; he himself
Calls her a nonpareil…

Stefano is as enthralled with the battle plan as were the January 6 insurrectionists with the idea of storming the Capitol. When he and Trinculo get to Prospero’s cave, however, they behave somewhat like those same intruders, 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.

Prospero, with the aid of the spirit Ariel, then sends in his version of the National Guard—“Stage direction: Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds”—hunting the three as relentlessly as the FBI and Justice Department have hunted those who attacked the Capitol:

Prospero: Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark!
Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o’ mountain.

Ariel: Hark, they roar!

In the end they are routed and tormented, after which comes the moment that I’m dreaming occurs with Trump cultists. Prospero having ordered Caliban to his cell—”As you look to have my pardon, trim it handsomely”—the monsters see butler Stephano for who he really is:

 Caliban: I’ll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!

A major theme of The Tempest is rising above our earthly selves to a spiritual vision. As a white magic magus, Prospero seeks to bring order and enlightenment to a world that is riven by dark impulses, including political insurrection and unlawful passion.

But Caliban too is an integral part of who we are. America, a nation founded both on Enlightenment optimism and bloody conquest + enslaved labor, has a history of swinging back and forth between progressive ideals and brute impulse. “This thing of darkness, [I] acknowledge him mine,” Prospero says at the end of the play.

Will our version of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy end in tragedy or comedy? We stand here, as if on as knife edge, as

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives.

The passage is from Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written at another time when the world faced a fascist threat.

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To Survive Trump, Be Like Lizzie

By Robin Bates | Published: December 31, 2024
Arthur Rackham, Lizzie under Assault in Goblin Market

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Wednesday – New Year’s Day

This past spring, when it was clear that Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee (and therefore potentially our next president), I turned to Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market for how to survive assaults on democracy. It’s not only one of my favorite poems but a powerful reminder to turn to others for help when we find ourselves in the grip of despair.

In other words, we are not without resources as we enter 2025. Happy New Year!

Reprinted from April 8, 2024

“What can an ordinary voter do to maintain engagement with the election while not turning their cerebral cortex into a wet, steaming mess of fused wiring?” asks Tom Nichols in an Atlantic article that speaks directly to many of us. Nichols points out that this is actually Trump’s strategy. To cause disillusion with democracy, “flood the zone with shit,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon colorfully puts it.

Among literary characters who show strength and resolve to stand strong in the face of relentless attacks, Lizzie in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market comes to mind.

First, however, here’s Nichols expanding on the problem:

By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil. His campaign’s goal is to turn voters into moral zombies who can no longer tell the difference between Stormy and Hunter or classified documents and personal laptops, who cannot parse what a “bloodbath” means, who no longer have the ability to be shocked when a political leader calls other human beings “animals” and “vermin.”

And further:

Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.

In Goblin Market, goblins seek to seduce Lizzie and Laura by appealing to their base desires, offering them forbidden fruit. Think of these tempters as “the best and most serious people” who currently surround Trump: Stephen Miller, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Jim Jordan, Jeffrey Clark, and others. Link them up with the following as you see fit:

One had a cat’s face,
One whisk’d a tail,
One tramp’d at a rat’s pace,
One crawl’d like a snail,
One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.

So what base desires does Trump appeal to? Well, resentment, sadism, fear, and the urge to dominate, among others. And what must they offer up in return? In Laura’s case, it’s a lock of her golden hair—which is to say, her innocence, her purity, her integrity. And at first, she is as exhilarated as Trump supporters upon first encountering him:

She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl,
Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red:
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flow’d that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck’d until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gather’d up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turn’d home alone.

Yes, there is a heady feeling when one has sucked upon Trumpian fruit. The problem , however, is that it leaves one a shell of one’s former self, a robot who can respond only to Trump’s trigger words. There are, in the United State, cultists who are so in thrall to the man that they have cut themselves off from their spouses, partners, children, grandchildren, relatives and friends, not to mention from humanity generally. We see in Laura the effects of such surrender:

But when the noon wax’d bright
Her hair grew thin and grey;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away.

Now to Lizzie, who refuses to succumb to the goblin men as she goes to the aid of her sister. What truly sustains us, we learn, is not forbidden fruit but love. But this love requires courage and Lizzie encounters the kind of hate that, as we have learned to our sorrow, Trump cultists are only too willing to dish out to anyone who disagrees with them:

Their tones wax’d loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbow’d and jostled her,
Claw’d with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,
Twitch’d her hair out by the roots,
Stamp’d upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.

And further on:

One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her,
Coax’d and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink,
Kick’d and knock’d her,
Maul’d and mock’d her,
Lizzie utter’d not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in…

And now to the passage I have in mind about standing up to Trumpist attempts to short-circuit our brains. It takes Lizzie’s resolve to stay firm and keep our eyes on the prize:

White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood,—
Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone
Lash’d by tides obstreperously,—
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire,—
Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee,—
Like a royal virgin town
Topp’d with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguer’d by a fleet
Mad to tug her standard down.

Compare this with Nichol’s advice on how we should respond to Trump:

The way to withstand Trump’s daily assaults on our senses is to regard them with fortitude, and even some stoicism. He’s trying to shake our confidence in democracy and basic decency; remaining engaged in civic life, calmly and without stooping to such tactics and rhetoric, is the superpower of every citizen in a democracy.

Plotwise, Lizzie allows Laura to lick the fruit juice she has accumulated off her face, where it works as an antidote to Laura’s addiction. In other words, love conquers base desire. Or in our case, love of “democracy and basic decency” can overcome (or so we can hope) fascistic temptation.

We dream that those Americans who have been led astray by this temptation will abandon the cult and return to the family and friends they have rejected. For her part, Laura, after having gone through an intense inner struggle, finds her way back:

Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laugh’d in the innocent old way,
Hugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks show’d not one thread of grey,
Her breath was sweet as May
And light danced in her eyes.

I have experienced a loved one who was once taken over by a cult. During his junior year in college my son Justin joined a rabid fundamentalist church, which made prickly his ties with his family (especially when he told one of his brothers that he was going to hell). Once he asked me if I “had been saved,” even though he knew I attend church weekly. Apparently Julia and I weren’t Christian enough for him.

He was still a lovely man, however, and he would still give out hugs. Whenever I saw him around campus (he was attending the college where I taught), I refused to argue with him but instead saw myself ducking beneath the branches to embrace the trunk. What was most important was the love I had for him.

That’s how Lizzie saves Laura, who years later tells her children,

For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.

I will never know if my love would have helped Justin to a more balanced perspective because he drowned on April 30 in a freak accident. (I take some consolation from his friends reporting that he was starting to soften not long before then, as if he had had to experiment with total religious immersion before arriving at his own faith.) Likewise, I don’t know whether our caring for family and friends who have sold out to Trump will ever bring them back. We can only control what we ourselves do, not how they will respond. Like Queequeg in Moby Dick, we throw our caskets into the sea and hope that our Ishmaels will find them in time.

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A Florida County Targeted Paradise Lost

By Robin Bates | Published: December 30, 2024
Gustave Doré, Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost


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Tuesday

I will spend the rest of this week reposting essays from this past year that I particularly like. Of the issues that have most concerned me as a lover of literature is the outbreak of book banning. When these bans extend to Shakespeare and (as noted in the essay below) Milton, one realizes that no book of substance is safe.

The good news is that those attacking teachers and librarians are beginning to experience blowback. One of the most noxious aspects of Trumpism is how it provides bullies with a permission structure to engage in outrageous behavior, but standing up to bullies—grabbing Grendel in a strong handgrip, as it were—is the best response. Citizens have been seizing back school boards from MAGA bigots while recently a federal judge ruled—as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment—an Arkansas law seeking to create criminal liability for librarians for distributing content that state legislators consider “obscene” or “harmful to minors.”

Reprinted from January 12, 2024

In the early 1990s I became involved in a Toni Morrison controversy in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where I taught for 36 years. One of my former students, David Flood, was teaching a unit at Leonardtown High School in which he paired Huckleberry Finn with Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A student was offended by three pages in Morrison’s novel—probably the scene where Milkman trades trash talk with a man he meets in a country store—and his mother took the offending pages to the school superintendent. She in turn banned the teaching of the novel in all St. Mary’s County public high schools, a ban (I believe) that is still in effect.

I visited the superintendent’s office to complain—it didn’t do any good—but that’s not where I’m going with today’s post. Rather, I am recalling a response I wrote to someone who wrote a letter to the local newspaper claiming that Morrison was a mediocre author not worth studying. (The Nobel Prize, in his view, was not based on merit but was literary affirmative action.) At the time, the so-called canon wars were underway, and his argument was that teachers should be teaching great authors, not figures like Morrison.

Not only did I contend that Morrison had more than earned her place in the pantheon of great authors—I consider her comparable to Faulkner among America’s novelists—but I pointed out that there were other authors in the canon who had passages far more graphic than anything in Song of Solomon. Among the works I mentioned was Paradise Lost.

I had meant this as a dig at those who worship the canon without truly seeing it—there were many like this in those days, including Secretary of Education William Bennet and National Endowment of the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney—but I didn’t anticipate that, one day, someone would actually ban Paradise Lost for its salacious content. Thanks to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, however, that has now happened. Apparently Milton’s immortal epic is among the works pulled from school library shelves in Orange County, Florida.

According to the Orlando Sentinel,

A total of 673 books, from classics to best-sellers, have been removed from Orange County classrooms this year for fear they violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students.

The list of rejected books, which the district began compiling during the summer, will get another review from Orange County Public Schools staff, so some could eventually be put back on shelves. But for now, teachers who had them in their classrooms have been told to take them home or put them away so students cannot access them.

In addition to Paradise Lost, the books pulled include John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Morrison’s Beloved, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Alice Walker’s Color Purple, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Also on the list are popular novels by Stephen King, Sue Monk Kidd, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and John Irving.

According to dissenting Orange County School Board member Karen Castor Dentel, the books pulled represent “over censorship” by media specialists who fear they will be held responsible for every item on their shelves. Dentel said that the Florida law is “creating this culture of fear within our media specialists and even teachers who just want to have a library in their classrooms, so kids have access.”

The Sentinel article reports that the new state training required for all media specialists is warning them to “err on the side of caution” when approving books. If they approve inappropriate books, they “can face criminal penalties and the loss of their teaching certificates.”

So imagine a State Board confronting a media specialist who failed to remove Paradise Lost with the following passages from Book II. First there’s Satan having sex with his daughter Sin, who has sprung Athena-like from his head. Sin is describing to her father and lover how he got her pregnant:

…familiar grown,
I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won
The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft
Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing
Becam’st enamored, and such joy thou took 
With me in secret, that my womb conceived
A growing burden.

What happens next is a nightmarish birth scene in which their child, Death, tears through Sin’s birth canal. Sin describes this horrendous birth as she introduces Satan to his son:

At last this odious offspring whom thou seest
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way
Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transform’d…

Believe it or not, the worst is yet to come. After being born, Death doesn’t waste any time but straightway proceeds to rape his mother, engendering a pack of hell hounds that emerge from her now reptilian nether regions:

I fled, but he pursued (though more, it seems, 
Inflamed with lust then rage) and swifter far,
Me overtook his mother all dismayed,
And in embraces forcible and foul
Engendering with me, of that rape begot
These yelling Monsters that with ceaseless cry 
Surround me… 

Earlier we have gotten a depiction of these hounds. The hideous birth has transformed Sin’s nether regions into something snake-like:

The one seemed Woman to the waist, and fair, 
But ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent armed
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing barked
With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung 
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb
And kennel there, yet there still barked and howled
Within unseen.

These hounds, meanwhile, continue to interbreed so that more are

                                    hourly conceived
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howl and gnaw
My Bowels, their repast; then bursting forth [ 800 ]
A fresh with conscious terrors vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.

It’s a nightmare straight out of Dante’s Inferno (is that on the Orange County list?), a powerful image of how sin is perpetually breeding more sin.

And now let’s turn to the Adam and Eve episodes. The two wander around naked, engaging first in good sex (this before the fall) and then bad sex (this after the fall). Milton was controversial in having them engage in sex before the fall but his point is that sex itself isn’t bad. In fact, it’s a gift that God “declares pure and commands to some, leaves free to all.” Those who think otherwise—who bid us abstain from sex—are parroting Satan. His words apply well to the Orange County School Board:

Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence, 
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain
But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?

Where sex goes wrong, in Milton’s eyes, is when it becomes bound up with power and ego. Lustful sex, he would say, is what the Chairman of the Florida Republican Party and his wife, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, were having with a third party, a relationship that ultimately culminated in a rape. Here’s Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s bad sex:

                 …but that false Fruit
Far other operation first displayed,
Carnal desire enflaming, he on Eve
Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him
As wantonly repaid; in Lust they burn: 
Till Adam thus ‘gan Eve to dalliance move…

And a little later:

So said he, and forbore not glance or toy
Of amorous intent, well understood 
Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire.
Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank,
Thick overhead with verdant roof embowered
He led her nothing loath; Flowers were the Couch,
Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel, 
And Hyacinth, Earth’s freshest softest lap.
There they their fill of Love and Love’s disport
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the Seal,
The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep
Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play.

The thrill that Adam and Eve experience comes from their disobedience. As Norman Mailer once wrote, guilt gives sex an existential edge. Whether or not one agrees with Milton, he includes sex in his work because, like all great authors, he is exploring all that goes with being human, which includes the sexual component. It’s what those other great works banned by Orange County—East of Eden, Madame Bovary, Beloved, Color Purple, Love in the Time of Cholera—are also doing.

The real perverts are not the authors who explore sex and the teachers and librarians who teach their works. The real perverts are those who, like Pentheus in Euripides’s The Bacchae, refuse to see sex as a gift and a joy. When Pentheus is condemning the women of the city, who have joined Dionysus to dance in the countryside, the prophet Teiresias tells him,

I am sorry to say it, but you are mad. Totally mad.
And no drug could help you, even though you’re as sick
as if you had been drugged.

Think of how many MAGA politicians and activists this describes.

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Unexpected Responses to a Murder

By Robin Bates | Published: December 29, 2024
Stand-Up Comic Josh Johnson

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Monday

I was watching a clip of African American comedian Josh Johnson reflecting on the shooting death of HealthCare CEO Bryan Thompson, and one thing he said reminded me of a passage in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While Johnson decried the murder, he said his first response was relief over the fact that the shooter was not Black. Or as he put it,

When I saw it happen, when I saw that video footage that they played, when I saw that dude walk up and pull out that gun and point it at the CEO, when I saw that I thought to myself, “Thank God, those are white hands.” When I saw those lily white hands…When I saw those pearly white hands, I thought to myself, “What a white sight! What a beautiful White thing to happen that doesn’t have anything to do with me, that should not blow back on me at all. What a White moment in America!”

We can well understand his response given how so many American Whites readily associate African American men with violent crime. In fact, the association is so automatic that, as Johnson went on to point out, CBS News couldn’t altogether break with past habits. Instead of identifying the killer as White, it… But here’s Johnson:

And they said on CBS, “a light-skinned man…No! No, no, not! Light skinned! When has the News ever said, “light skinned.” Light skinned! I was horrified! Now, you know that if it had been a Black person they would have said “Black” because they love saying “Black.” They like saying, “This Black was last seen at the scene of the crime.” If you’ve seen this Black, call this number so you can report him for this blackety-black crime.

The key dividing line in Midnight’s Children is between Hindu Indians and Muslim Indians (and then Muslim Pakistanis). When Hindu Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated, the Muslim community in the novel, worried that the assassin is Muslim, goes into immediate lockdown:

The audience had begun to scream before [the television announcer] finished; the poison of his words entered their veins—there were grown men rolling in the aisles clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying, Hai Ram! Hai Ram! -and women tearing their hair: the city’s finest coiffures tumbling around the ears of the poisoned ladies-there were film-stars yelling like fishwives and something terrible to smell in the air—and Hanif whispered, ‘Get out of here, big sister-if a Muslim did this thing there will be hell to pay.’

…[F]or forty-eight hours…our family remained within the walls of Buckingham Villa (‘Put furniture against the doors, whatsitsname!’ Reverend Mother ordered. ‘If there are Hindu servants, let them go home!’); and Amina did not dare to visit the racetrack.

The killer, however, was a right-wing Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, who considered Gandhi too pro-Muslim and too soft on Pakistan. This leads to the following version of Josh Johnson’s response:

[F]inally the radio gave us a name. Nathuram Godse.

‘Thank God,’ Amina burst out, ‘It’s not a Muslim name!’

And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi’s death had placed a new burden of age: ‘This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!’

Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief. . . ‘Why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!’

Gandhi’s killing and Thompson’s killing are both tragedies, as both Rushdie and Johnson make clear. But we can understand why vulnerable populations would first think of themselves in the wake of such events.

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The Real Story of Christmas

By Robin Bates | Published: December 28, 2024
Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Adoration of the Shepherds

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Sunday

I’m traveling today, visiting sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren in Buford, Georgia, so you’ll have to settle for one of my father’s poems that I’ve shared before. When rightwing politicians accused cultural elites of waging a war against Christmas, my father liked to point out that Christmas’s most iconic symbols have actually been imported from other religions.

The incident that triggered this poem was a legal battle over a Texas county that erected a nativity scene outside its courthouse in 2011. Scott Bates starts with the fact that Christianity, like all religions, is syncretistic—which is to say, it is an amalgamation of rituals and symbols from all over, some articulated by inspired individuals (Jesus and his followers), some taken from earlier religions.  Another way of putting this is that every religion is a symbol system that human beings employ to come as near as they can to the (ultimately unknowable) mind of God. The universe will always have mysteries that we cannot penetrate, and humans use whatever materials—whatever symbols—are at hand to do what they can.

Devout followers may deny the affinities between the crucifixion of Jesus and the dismemberment of the Egyptian god Horus or overlook the fact that Jesus was probably not born in December, the time of the winter solstice and the Roman feast of Saturnalia. After all, they like to believe their religious symbols are “pure.” Examined carefully, however, Christmas proves to be more inclusive than they think.

Christmas at the Courthouse
By Scott Bates

The wise-men are Egyptian,
The virgin birth, Antique;
The evergreen is Roman
The manger scene is Greek;

T’is the Saturnalian Season
When solar gifts are cool,
So Happy Birthday, Horus!
From our Multiculture School.

If those beating the war drum over Christmas were to embrace such an open version of the Christmas story, maybe we wouldn’t be having all these battles. Then again, maybe they want people of other faiths to feel excluded.

Fa la la la la.

Other Christmas Poems by Scott Bates
Christmas Bird Count from Santa’s Sleigh
Where are the Games of Yesteryear 
Moving towards Death’s Doorway 
No Room for Them in the (Holiday) Inn 
The Animals Are Trying to Warn Us
Holly & Ivy Dance to the Music of the Moon
Night before Christmas on the Moon
Move with the Wind, Sleep under the Snow
Midwinter Transformation: A Poem
An ABC of Children’s Books
The Divine Comedy, Doggerel Version
Books Unleashed in Christmas Carrels
Epiphany Sunday and the Arabian Nights
Epiphany from a Camel’s Point of View
A Roc for Christmas (Annual Bird Count)

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Blog Fragments Shored against My Ruins

By Robin Bates | Published: December 26, 2024

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Friday

I owe to novelist Kate Atkinson a major self-insight which I touched on in Tuesday’s post and which I elaborate on today. This blog, which I launched on April, 2009 and have been maintaining faithfully six days a week ever since (for one exhausting spell, it was seven days a week), is not unlike the poetic project that T.S. Eliot describes in The Waste Land. I too use cultural and poetic fragments to “shore up against my ruins.”

I hope you’ll indulge me as I engage in a bit of navel-gazing. To see myself as doing anything remotely like what Eliot does in his signature poem astounds me as Waste Land has frustrated me ever since I encountered it in a Carleton College survey class. Despite great lines like “April is the cruelest month” and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” it utterly baffled me and made me feel stupid.

And it wasn’t only Eliot doing this. A lot of poetry from this era struck me as inaccessible. For me to conclude that my Better Living through Beowulf blog is a Modernist project, therefore, is like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman waking up one day to discover that all his life he has been speaking in prose:

MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Oh, really? So when I say: Nicole bring me my slippers and fetch my nightcap,” is that prose?

PHILOSOPHY MASTER: Most clearly.

MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!

I can’t explain the rationale behind Modernism in a short space but suffice it to say that it was characterized by intense experimentation where poets were prepared to throw out all previous rules of what people normally thought of as poetry. No longer did people confidently assert, as they had in the 19th century, that one day they would formulate theories that explained whole fields (think Mark, Darwin, and Freud). Instead, everything seemed to be fragmented. As a short piece in Poetry Foundation reports, figures like Gertrude Stein

explored the possibilities of creating literary works that broke with conventional syntactical and referential practices” while Ezra Pound’s guiding star was to “make it new” and “break the pentameter.” The essay notes that Waste Land became the “archetypical Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages.”

Many people were angry at the Modernist movement, feeling that it was taking poetry away from them. Where, they wondered, were the regular rhythms, the rhyming, the clear themes? Not that earlier poetry was necessarily self-explanatory, but Modernist poets seemed to be taking poetry to new levels of obscurity. Or that’s how it seemed to me. As a scholar specializing in the 18th century—famous for the Age of Reason—I was accustomed to more direct discourse.

Once, when discussing this with my St. Mary’s colleague Bruce Wilson, a brilliant literary mind who taught courses on “Dante and Eliot” and “Yeats and Japanese Noh Theatre,” I told him that Modernism was the one period that “I just don’t get.” To which he replied that the 18th century was that way for him.

Nor is he alone. In the semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s protagonist explains that the 18th century literature requirement is what kept her from majoring in English:

There were lots of requirements, and I didn’t have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I’d skipped it. They let you do that in honours, you were much freer. I had been so free I’d spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.

I wouldn’t characterize Dryden and Pope, the foremost practitioners of the heroic couplet, as smug, but I get Plath’s point. They are nowhere near as elliptical and confessional as she is in her poetry. And for whatever reason, I like their poetry better. Which explains further my shock at discovering my kinship with Eliot.

So how is my blog a Modernist project? In my early days as a scholar, I sought to come up with a universal theory about literature’s impact upon audiences. Knowing that novels, plays, and poems had shaped my own life in profound ways, I thought I could use the emerging fields of reception theory and reader response theory to provide significant answers to the question “Why literature?” I soon came to realize, however, that there are far too many variants at play, variants involving both multiple definitions of literature and multiple responses from audiences, to arrive at anything comprehensive.

Blogging provided an Eliot-like solution, however. If, on a daily basis, I recorded ways that this or that work—let’s call them fragments of the larger field—were shoring up my life, then I was partially answering the question I had set out to answer. Even if I couldn’t generalize, I could offer personal testimony.

I’m sounding almost confessional when I say this—not unlike a confessional poet such as, say, Sylvia Plath. And while I hastily add that I haven’t been recording only my own responses to literature but have been collecting examples from literary history, my students, and other sources, still a daily blog is a fairly random and haphazard way to explore literary impact. Whatever is happening from one day to the next prompts me to search for relevant literary works. One day I will discuss Donald Trump, another day a sick friend, another a recent book I’ve stumbled across.

Which is to say, I have been responding as Eliot responded to his confusing, chaotic world, only I do so as a scholar rather than as a poet. When this world resisted Modernist attempts to formulate tidy generalizations, they grabbed whatever was around them. A character in Kate Atkinson’s God in Ruins refers to the process as “scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now.” Eliot sometimes appears to be throwing literary passages, like spaghetti, at the wall to see what will stick. In any event, we all of us seem to be perfoming a kind of bricolage, which is to say attempting to create something out of anything that comes to hand.

I tried to be more systematic in my other large scale attempt to explore literary impact, which was to write a book on the subject. Although Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History was not able to come up with a single answer to how literature changes lives, by surveying what major thinkers throughout history have said on the subject, I hoped that readers would at least get a sense of the possibilities.

To be sure, many of the thinkers–even when they are disagreeing with each other–don’t have my level of doubt. Aristotle, for instance, seems certain that everyone experiences the catharsis he does while watching Oedipus Rex, and Sir Philip Sidney is absolutely convinced that works like The Aeneid will cause people to become more virtuous. But if I have not been able to achieve their level of certainty—that’s why I don’t settle on just one of them—I hope that by putting their various ideas in the hands of contemporary readers, these readers will be able to choose the ones that speak most directly to them.

As for myself, my two favorite theorists are Percy Shelley, who I find compelling with regard to the great authors changing collective humanity, and Wayne Booth, with regard to literature changing individuals. Others may find a guide in Plato or Matthew Arnold or W.E.B. Du Bois or Rachel Blau DuPlessis. In the end, perhaps we can do no other than adopt the explanations that resonate with us most.

Which is largely how the Modernists saw things.

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Resurrection Stories from All Over

By Robin Bates | Published: December 25, 2024
Eugene Alexis Girardet, Flight to Egypt

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Thursday

My father loved Christmas—we had elaborate Dickensian celebrations every year until he died at 90—and Christmas poems such as the one of his I shared yesterday were part of that. Interestingly, my father wasn’t Christian, but he loved the creativity of religious symbolism and the way that different religions freely borrow from each other in their efforts to touch the divine.

As Scott Bates saw it, the Christmas nativity story was particularly powerful because it has embedded within it narrative elements borrowed from Roman, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian religions (Zoroastrianism). In “Flight into Egypt,” about Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to escape Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, my father imagines the holy family picking up other influences along the way.

Flight into Egypt
By Scott Bates

The falcon’s eye above the pyramid
Moves with the weary travelers far below,
The queen, her consort, and the solar god,
And through the desert on their beast they go

Beneath the sphinx of Gizeh guarding the dead,
Past Isis in her temple nursing her child,
Her silver serpent turning his diamond head
To see them riding westward, into the wild

Land of Mithra and Dionysus, far
from the stable and the kings of Bethlehem,
No dove above them like a guiding star—
But Hathor on the horizon watching them,

Her forehead crowned with stars and double horn,
As they ride towards her on their unicorn.

The falcon’s eye belongs to Horus, the Egyptian god of kingship, healing, protection, the sun, and the sky. He is looking down at the holy family, described as the queen (Mary), her consort (Joseph), and the solar god (Jesus, the son and sun).

The resurrection, Egyptian style, is captured through the sphinx of Gizeh, who looks over the dead, and the mother goddess Isis, who resurrected her slain brother and husband Osiris. The family is also traveling through the lands of Mithra, the Zoroastrian divinity associated with light, the sun, justice and truth, and of Dionysus, a Greek fertility god. And instead of the star of Bethlehem, they are traveling under the watchful eye of Hathor, a sky deity who was mother or consort of Horus and of the sun god Ra.

The ass they ride on, meanwhile, Scott Bates describes as a unicorn because of that beast’s special symbolism for early and medieval Christians. As the Brittanica informs us, the early Christian bestiary Physiologus states that

the unicorn is a strong, fierce animal that can be caught only if a virgin maiden is placed before it. The unicorn leaps into the virgin’s lap, and she suckles it and leads it to the king’s palace. Medieval writers thus likened the unicorn to Christ, who raised up a horn of salvation for mankind and dwelt in the womb of the Virgin Mary.

Bill Pregnall, a former rector, once told me—this when I was wrestling whether to join the church—that there are many roads to the top of the mountain. Christianity is far from the only religion to set important renewal celebrations in the heart of bleak midwinter, when the sun appears to be dying a slow death. These powerful symbols point towards hope in the darkest of times.

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Memories of Being Read To

By Robin Bates | Published: December 24, 2024
Arthur Boyd Houghton, Mother and Children Reading (c.1860)

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Wednesday – Christmas

Every Christmas my father would write a poem, which was published in Sewanee’s local newspaper and also sent out as the family Christmas card. Over the years I’ve shared a number of these poems in my blog—you can go here to find them—but I don’t believe I’ve ever included the one below, taken from the “Letters from the North Pole” series.

The letters, composed by my father in his later years, were supposedly written by Mrs. Santa Claus, who my father imagined bore the name Aurora Borealis. Aurora is an environmental warrior and supporter of both the activist group Greenpeace and the feminist National Organization of Women. For Christmas, however, she’s taking a break from fighting the good fight, choosing instead to settle down with some good books.

Only these books, as my father makes clear, have an environmentalist theme so Aurora isn’t leaving her activism after all. My father read all of these to my three brothers and me (except for Animal Farm) when we were growing up.  The works mentioned are George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books, A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, Syd Hoff’s Sammy the Seal, Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle, Robert Lawson’s Story of Ferdinand, the Grimm Brothers’ “Frog Prince,” Felix Salten’s Bambi, Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Hobbit, Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince.

When, in the poem, my father talks of settling down by a fire and “reading our favorite books from our library shelves,” I am taken back to our Sewanee living room after supper. There I felt safe and loved and in thrall to stories.

D. H. Lawrence describes something similar when a piano recital brings back memories of sitting under his mother’s piano as a child:

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

I sought to recreate the evening reading experience with my children and have seen them doing the same with their own. Here’s the poem:

Dear Friends

I wish I had time
To tell you of how
I’m riding with Greenpeace
And working for NOW

With our Reindeer Warrior
In the arctic night
How we’re fighting for whales
And for women’s rights

But I’ll tell you instead
Of our new reading kick…
When the factory work
Gets too hairy for Nick

And he gets really tired
From making the toys
He comes to the castle
With Blitzen and the boys

And we sit by the fire
As the blizzard blows
Reading aloud
With the fawns and the does

We eat cookies and hay
As we read to ourselves
Our favorite books
From the library shelves

Here are the things
We especially like

            In Animal Farm
            When the animals strike

            When Mowgli lets in the jungle
            And Tigger finds Winnie the Pooh
            When Sophie the seal gains her freedom
            And Dolittle opens his zoo
            When Ferdinand stages his sitdown
            And the Princess beds down with the Frog
            And Faline I courted by Bambi
            And Bard puts an arrow through Smaug

            When the Snark turns into a Boojum
And Toad is cured of his cars
            When the Who’s get rescued by Horton
            And The Little Prince travels to stars

We’re having a ball
And we wish you the same
May the Animals win
In the Whole Earth Game

And may all of you have
A big book-reading year

Best wishes
Aurora
and the Rainbow Reindeer

When I wish you “good reading” in my weekly newsletter, you now know the source. (“Good reading” is also meant to be an echo of Mowgli’s “Good hunting,” which the Bastable children use in the E. Nesbit Treasure Seekers series.) My love of literary enchantment comes from a deep place and, like my father, I want to pass it on to you.

Merry Christmas.

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Atkinson Uses Lit to Explore Dying

By Robin Bates | Published: December 23, 2024
Novelist Kate Atkinson


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Tuesday

Yesterday I wrote about how Kate Atkinson, a writer I’ve just discovered and have fallen in love with, scatters literary allusions throughout her works. In A God in Ruins, her use of past literature gives her a powerful way to explore the mystery of dying, a daunting subject to say the least. Perhaps Leo Tolstoy handles the subject best in The Death of Ivan Ilych, but Atkinson does a pretty good job herself.

In my post I said that her handling of literary fragments reminds me of how T.S. Eliot relies on such fragments in The Waste Land. In that confusing and complicated poem, Eliot draws on Dante, Andrew Marvell, William Shakespeare, James Joyce, William Blake, Thomas Kyd, and many others in an attempt to counteract what he sees as the disintegration of culture following the horrors of World War I and the chaos of modernity. He reveals his project towards the end of the poem when he writes, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

Perhaps Atkinson had this passage in mind when she came up with the title A God in Ruins. Its predecessor, Life after Life, begins in Victorian England and the two novels proceed to describe the horrors of both world wars and their impact on English life. The “God” in the title is in part a deity that people have a trouble believing in following the carnage, in part a faltering belief in the old English ways that have been disrupted. In other words, Atkinson—who sets much of her action in Eliot’s time period—is responding as he does to the same state of affairs.

God in Ruins reaches a kind of crescendo at the end with the death of Teddy, who represents the old-fashioned decency and civility that seems to be disappearing. In his final hours, his granddaughter doesn’t turn to God but to literature. After reading Trollope to him (see yesterday’s post), she turns to passages from various poets. Or as she puts it, “scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now.”

First she thinks of Edmund Spenser’s “The Ministry of Angels.” Although she herself is not religious, she is momentarily hopeful at the poet’s assurance that God sends angels to care for us:

How oft do they their silver bowers leave,
To come to succour us that succour want!
How oft do they with golden pinions cleave
The flitting skyes, like flying pursuivant,
Against fowle feendes to ayd us militant!
They for us fight, they watch, and dewly ward,
And their bright squadrons round about us plant;
And all for love, and nothing for reward…

Bertie wonders,

Were Spenser’s bright squadrons of angels waiting to welcome him? Were all the mysteries about to be revealed? They were questions that no one had ever answered and no one ever would.

The Spenser allusion is followed up with the “scraps” that Bertie shares with her grandfather, imagining them as coins that he could pay Charon to cross over the River Styx. The phrases, while they may seem to be randomly chosen, work together to form a kind of narrative. Or as Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream would describe it, “a great constancy.” Here’s the list:

Perhaps he could use them to pay the ferryman. Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold. The world is charged with the grandeur of God. Full fathom five thy father lies. Little lamb, who made thee? Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie. On that best portion of a good man’s life, his little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love. Farther and farther, all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

The first passage is from John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” and the second from Gerard Manley’s Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur.” These two capture the richness of the world, which Teddy has loved. Then there’s a shift to Ariel’s song in The Tempest, informing Ferdinand that his father has drowned. (Eliot also draws on the passage in the Waste Land.)

The passage from Tempest is followed by Blake’s assurance that God created the marvelous little lamb, which captures some of the same wonder at creation found in Keats and Hopkins:

Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice! 

Delight, however, is followed by grief as we get a second Hopkins poem (“Spring and Fall”), this one asking a young girl why she is grieving. The answer is that she has just realized that death will one day come for us all:

Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.

But though Teddy will die, while alive he has carried out many quiet acts “of kindness and of love,” which make up “that best portion of a good man’s life” (Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”). The list concludes with the mystical final lines of Edmund Thomas’s “Adlestrop,” where the speaker looks out at an empty train station in the middle of nowhere—the train stops for only a minute–and finds himself entranced and captivated by the surrounding countryside:

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

This has been Teddy’s life, which was like a momentary stop in a countryside that he loved and wrote about in a nature column. I love how the poem, through the mist, opens out to full-heartedly embrace all creation. The poet is well-chosen for this novel because he himself was killed in the Battle of Arras (1917), meaning that his own stop in life was short.

Atkinson is not finished with her poetic scraps. As the novel shifts from Bertie’s to Teddy’s perspective, we get again a line from Hopkin’s “God’s Grandeur,” with its amazing vision of the Holy Ghost hovering over God’s creation:

The air rippled and shimmered. Time narrowed to a pinpoint. It was about to happen. Because the Holy Ghost over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Although Teddy too is not a believer—the war has ruined God for him as well as for others—the power of Hopkins’s image suggests that the universe may not be an empty void after all.

Teddy’s thought processes continue:

Moments left, Teddy thought. A handful of heartbeats. That was what life was. A heartbeat followed by a heartbeat. A breath followed by a breath. One moment followed by another moment and then there was a last moment. Life was a fragile as a bird’s heartbeat, fleeting as the bluebells in the wood. It didn’t matter, he realized, he didn’t mind, he was going where millions had gone before and where millions would follow after. He shared his fate with the many.

Then there is an allusion to the old folk carol “The Holly and the Ivy”:

And now. This moment. This moment was infinite. He was part of the infinite. The tree and the rock and the water. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Now.

In the carol, the holly reenacts the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, blending nature’s life cycle and the Christ narrative into a single story. The words that Teddy recalls occur in the chorus:

The rising of the sun
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir.

Then Atkinson shifts to Prospero’s famous speech in The Tempest, regarded by many as Shakespeare’s own farewell speech to the theater. I’ll start with the speech so that you can see how Atkinson uses it to describe Teddy’s final seconds:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. 

Now Atkinson:

The trumpets sound the end of the revels. The baseless fabric begins to disintegrate. The stuff that dreams are made of starts to rend and tear and the walls of a cloud-capped tower tremble. Little showers of dusty begin to fall. Birds rise in the air and fly away.

In this final moment, Teddy is imagining himself back inside the plane that was shot down over Berlin—except that, in his imagining, he didn’t jump but was plunged with the plane into the North Sea:

Teddy sank to the silent sea-bed and joined all the tarnished treasure that lay there unseen, forty fathoms deep.

In an alternative ending where this in fact happens—Atkinson regularly imagines different narratives for her characters, thereby calling attention to their fictionality—Teddy’s mourning sister Ursula finds some comfort in quoting the follow-up line to the Ariel passage: “Those are pearls that were his eyes.” Here’s the passage in full, which turns death into a mystical transfiguration:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
[Distant bell rings]
Hark, now I hear them: ding dong bell.

Teddy having died, Atkinson then informs us that her own novel will suffer the same fate:

And with a massive roar the fifth wall comes down and the house of fiction falls, taking Viola and Sunny and Bertie with it. They melt into the thin air and disappear. Pouf!

Prospero’s “great globe itself” could be our world or it could be the Globe Theater. In the end, it’s impossible to tell the difference between life and literature given that we ourselves are such stuff as dreams are made on. Where does the physical Self end and the imagined Self begin? Where is the dividing line between body and soul? As Bertie notes, these are questions “that no one had ever answered and no one ever would.”

But we can use literature, which goes as far as language can go, to ask the questions. That’s a start.

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