The original Pentecost came at a dark time, and things aren’t so great at the moment as we look at the ravages of climate change and gun violence and the rise of authoritarianism. In this simple but profound poem by the 10th century female Japanese poet Izumi Shikibu, however, there’s a glimmer of moonlight, even as the wind batters our ruined house.
Indeed, it is because our house has leaks that the light is able to get through. Often we are most open to the Holy Spirit when things are falling apart. Here’s the poem, which I found in a Poetry Foundation article where poet Jane Hirshfield has assembled “22 poems about spirituality and enlightenment.” Hirshfield translated the poem with the help of Mariko Aratani:
Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.
A wind reportedly blew through the hall on the original Pentecost as well, bringing about its own light (tongues of fire). Into this ruined world came divine hope, as Luke informs us:
When the day of Pentecost had come, the disciples were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
May our battered hearts open themselves to the moonlight that wants to leak in, filling all with its radiance.
The heart attack suffered by the husband of one of Uvalde’s victims is one of many instances of the massacre’s collateral damage. Along with all the children who were killed, three more were orphaned when first their mother and then their father died.
MSNBC commentator Malcolm Nance tweeted out the following note after hearing about the incident:
To new widows/widowers: When I lost my wife my mother-in-law called me the next day and warned me to wake up to life because Takotsubo Myocardia aka Broken Heart Syndrome is REAL. It can kill you…with a heart attack. I could feel it coming too. I started running…in Paris.
Henry Fielding mentions the danger in Tom Jones. In this case, the broken heart is caused by a sibling betrayal but the outcome is the same:
The doctor went directly to London, where he died soon after of a broken heart; a distemper which kills many more than is generally imagined, and would have a fair title to a place in the bill of mortality, did it not differ in one instance from all other diseases—viz., that no physician can cure it.
Welsh poet W. H. Davies has a wonderful poem to usher in the month of June. Here in Appalachian Tennessee we are currently experiencing our own version of the “gold-dust” pollen that he mentions on his shoes
All in June
A week ago I had a fire To warm my feet, my hands and face; Cold winds, that never make a friend, Crept in and out of every place.
Today the fields are rich in grass, And buttercups in thousands grow; I’ll show the world where I have been– With gold-dust seen on either shoe.
Till to my garden back I come, Where bumble-bees for hours and hours Sit on their soft, fat, velvet bums, To wriggle out of hollow flowers.
It sounds like someone else spends hours and hours sitting on his soft, fat, velvet bum. Indeed Davies, who spent years as a train-hopping hobo and then as a tramp, was famous for not letting the world’s cares get in the way of observing nature. We see this especially in his poem “Leisure”:
What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.
No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare
This is a good month to pay attention to the natural beauty that surrounds us. Take time to stand and stare.
To stay up to date on Ukraine’s resistance to the Russian, I follow several military experts on twitter, including Mick Ryan, a retired Army Major General from Australia. Ryan’s observations about the Russian army’s lack of discipline and professional ethics match something that a character (ironically, a Russian) says in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, which I’m currently listening to. For his part, Ryan says that, all else being equal, “ethically corrupt and criminal armies” are more likely to lose wars than those who follow a strict code of ethics.
I find Ryan’s twitter thread on this matter so interesting that I quote from it at length before turning to Hemingway. Commenting on Russia’s war crimes, Ryan observes,
Bucha shows the Russian Army is not “professional” nor do they deserve the term “soldiers.” The Russian military transformation since 2008 has clearly not transformed anything at a human level. Beneath the shine of fancy equipment and clever slogans (like ‘active defense’) lies a rotten core of a sloppy and corrupt Russian military culture. But, as the saying goes, fish rot from the head. If the military serves a self-interested class of corrupt authoritarians, why would its military culture be any different?
Ryan elaborates on the importance of the military having a healthy relationship with both society and with the military profession. First, society:
It is important that democracies have a theory of how military organizations interact with elected governments and with the people they defend…This theory of civil-military relations will vary slightly from country to country, and there is more to it than I can put in one thread. But each nation will need their own that they can educate their military (as well as politicians, public servants and citizens) about.
Then, the military profession:
The second issue is that military institutions must see themselves as part of the profession of arms. Only this mindset can prepare large organizations, the sole elements of society legally able to kill, maim and destroy at scale, for the responsible use of those powers.
Understanding that “one is part of the profession of arms,” Ryan writes,
imposes the responsibility to lead people ethically and with purpose, to use force responsibly, to protect those who can’t protect themselves, and live the values of the society they serve.
And he adds,
All of these characteristics are conspicuously absent from the Russian military, given its performance over the past 6 weeks. They lack the vital mindset of a professional, which is very clear from the appalling leadership and behavior on display throughout their campaign.
Ryan concludes that,
at heart, the best and most successful military forces are built on smart, connected, ethical and well-led humans. This is the core of military advantage in this century, and every other age.
Protagonist Robert Jordan’s mentor as he fights for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War is a Russian journalist named Karkov. Unlike those who surround Vladimir Putin, Karkov tells the truth as he sees it, even when it’s bad. One cannot win a war, he says, when you have to rely on undisciplined conscripts, especially when (as is the case with Russia’s current army) they don’t understand why they are fighting. Jordan has just asked how bad Karkov thinks the situation is:
It is better now than it was. We are getting rid of some of the worst. But it is very rotten. We are building a huge army now and some of the elements, those of Modesto, of El Campesino, of Lister and of Durán, are reliable. They are more than reliable. They are magnificent. You will see that. Also we still have the Brigades although their role is changing. But an army that is made up of good and bad elements cannot win a war. All must be brought to a certain level of political development; all must know why they are fighting, and its importance. All must believe in the fight they are to make and all must accept discipline. We are making a huge conscript army without the time to implant the discipline that a conscript army must have, to behave properly under fire. We call it a people’s army but it will not have the assets of a true people’s army and it will not have the iron discipline that a conscript army needs. You will see. It is a very dangerous procedure.
We see, earlier in the novel, what lack of discipline looks like. Pablo, a peasant leader, captures a fascist-held town and then enrolls the peasants in the execution of the fascists. The men are to line up in two lines with flails, at the end of which is the edge of a cliff, and their fascist prisoners are to walk between them, beaten before being tossed off the cliff. In this way Pablo hopes to implicate every town resident in the rebellion, with the intention of ensuring their loyalty when the fascists counterattack.
Instead, the whole affair spirals out of control and becomes a frenzied blood bath. There is no sign of the iron discipline that will be required to fight off the fascists when they counterattack. I’m not far enough into the novel to know if the town experiences fascist payback, but it’s not difficult to imagine something horrific, with the peasants unable to effectively defend themselves.
In his twitter feed, Ryan notes that those Russian soldiers who are raping, pillaging and murdering will not stand firm when the Ukrainians counterattack. Thus, although they are currently making incremental advances in Eastern Ukraine—in large part because Russia is now concentrating all its firepower there—those advances may be temporary. For one thing, according to a recent New York Times article, Russian pilots are exhibiting
the same risk-averse behavior they did in the early weeks of the war: darting across the border to launch strikes and then quickly returning to Russian territory, instead of staying in Ukrainian air space to deny access to their foes. The result is that Russia still has not established any kind of air superiority, officials said.
The article quotes Frederick W. Kagan, a senior fellow and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, who observes that the invasion is not
proceeding particularly differently in the east than in the west because they haven’t been able to change the character of the Russian army. There are some deep flaws in the Russian army that they could not have repaired in the last few weeks even if they had tried. The flaws are deep and fundamental.”
We have yet to know how the war will turn out. But unlike the Russians, who declare victory in towns and cities they have reduced to rubble, the Ukrainians know what they’re fighting for.
This past Sunday I shared a number of poems from Lucille Clifton’s Book of Days to reflect on how Christian nationalists, many of them wielding weapons of war, work against Jesus’s goal to bring the kingdom of God to Earth. One poem from the collection particularly stands out in the wake of the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde.
In “armageddon,” God foresees men coming, “full armed,” into our lives, and of us all dying as a result. When Clifton mentions “ruby hearts still bleeding through in places,” I think of those Uvalde children who, reports tell us, were bleeding out, even as “good men with guns” dithered in the school hallway.
In an ironic conclusion, Clifton says that enemies who shoot each other will “lie here together then, intimate and quiet as lovers.” In Uvalde, the killer, shot himself, lay alongside his victims.
Our own ruby hearts, our most precious resource because they represent our capacity to love and care for others, are also at risk of bleeding dry from our repeated exposure to gun trauma. “Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,” W.B. Yeats writes in “Easter, 1916,” and Clifton uses the image of the bleeding heart to remind us that we can still feel and love and grieve.
We need the reminding because so many bodies littering this valley floor threaten to fry our circuits, overwhelming our ability to empathize. The day we completely shut down is the day when Armageddon will in fact have arrived. Here’s the poem:
armageddon By Lucille Clifton
i am all that will be left to them in that day.
men will come here, full armed, to make their last war.
their bodies will litter this valley floor.
they will lie here together then, intimate and quiet as lovers,
their ruby hearts still bleeding through in places.
Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Galileo before the Holy Office
Tuesday
There are few fallacies more toxic than the NRA’s mantra, “A good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun.” The fallacy was spectacularly exploded in Buffalo and Uvalde, where determined killers overwhelmed local law enforcement with their weapons of war—including the Uvalde killer, who at one point was shooting children while 17 armed cops stood in the hallway. But the mantra is also delivered in bad faith, ginning up fear and tapping into a wild west myth in order to sell guns. We saw Donald Trump invoking the myth when, after the Parkland shootings, he imagined himself running into gunfire to save students. Only fanatical Trump cultists can imagine that happening, and even for them it’s probably a stretch.
Bertolt Brecht provides a powerful counter to the mantra in his play Galileo. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes,” asserts the scientist late in the drama. Which is to say that, if we’re expecting heroic cops and gun enthusiasts to protect us from the epidemic of guns and loose regulations, then we are indeed screwed.
Galileo’s insight is hard won. Under the threat of torture, he has recanted his revolutionary discovery of Jupiter’s moons, thereby disillusioning some of his supporters. These want him to become a martyr to scientific truth, regardless of personal cost. It’s their version of wanting “good men” who, brandishing their guns, will always run towards the killer. (In this fantasy, these good men are always cool under fire, are always skilled marksmen, and never hit innocent bystanders.)
Here are Galileo’s followers and admirers praying that he will stay true to his beliefs and refuse to recant. The bell is supposed to ring at 5 if he recants:
Federzoni: Five o’clock is one minute. Andrea: Listen all of you, they are murdering the ruth. [He stops up his ears with his fingers. The two other pupils do the same….Nothing happens No bell sounds.] Federzoni: No. No bell. It is three minutes after. Little Monk: He hasn’t. Andrea: He held true. It is all right, it is all right. Little Monk: He did not recant. Federzoni: No [They embrace each other, they are delirious with joy.] Andrea: So force cannot accomplish everything. What has been seen can’t be unseen. Man is constant in the face of death. Federzoni: June 22, 1633: dawn of the age of reason. I wouldn’t have wanted to go on living if he had recanted. Little Monk: I didn’t say anything, but I was in agony. O ye of little faith!. Adea: I was sure. Federzoni: It would have turned our morning to night. Andrea: It would have been as if the mountain had turned to water….Beaten humanity can lift its head. A man has stood up and said No.
[At this moment the bell of Saint Marcus begins to toll.]
Shortly afterwards they hear the town crier calling,
I, Galileo Galilei, Teacher of Mathematics and Physics, do hereby publicly forswear this teaching with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith and detest and curse this and all other errors nd heresies repugnant to the Holy Scriptures
When Galeleo emerges, his followers first turn their backs before Andrea confronts him:
Andrea (in the door): “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.” Galileo: No, Andrea: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”
Everyone is angry at the Uvalde cops at the moment, but the right is particularly incensed because of how their lack of heroism makes NRA types look particularly bad. At first the authorities tried to make the facts fit their preferred narrative. They told us that cops engaged the killer and then that they breached the door and shot him. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, meanwhile, told us it could have been much worse. Only later did we learn that the cops hadn’t in fact engaged the killer and that they stood around for 45 minutes until someone found a key and unlocked the door. Abbott complained bitterly that he had been misled by the cops, but everyone was just giving him the narrative he wanted.
In Galileo, we see how powerful a preferred narrative can be. Several years after Galileo recants, he gives Andrea a copy of his Discourses to smuggle out. As the work will revolutionize science, Andrea revises his narrative: Galileo is a hero after all! Galileo, however, won’t allow him to hold on to his illusion:
Andrea: You gained time to write a book that only you could write. Had you burned at the stake in a blaze of glory they would have won. Galileo: They have won. And there is no such thing as a scientific work that only one man can write. Andrea: Then why did you recant, tell me that! Galileo: I recanted because I was afraid of physical pain. Andrea: No! Galileo: They showed me the instruments. Andrea: It was not a plan? Galileo: It was not. [Pause] Andre: But you have contributed. Science has only one commandment: contribution. And you have contributed more than any man for a hundred years. Galileo: Have I? Then welcome to my gutter, dear colleague in science and brother in treason: I sold out, you are a buyer. The first sight of the book! His mouth watered and his scoldings were drowned. Blessed be our bargaining, whitewashing, death-fearing community!
Brecht’s brilliance lies in his showing us how our preferred narratives win out over actual facts. In Andrea’s fantasy vision, heroic science wins out over a world of superstition, regardless of Galileo’s professed motives. In the NRA’s fantasy vision, a good man with a gun wins out over a bad man with a gun. In the world of facts, scientists and gunslingers alike are fallible, and the latter won’t save us in a state like Texas, which is inundated by weapons of war that anyone over 18 can buy, no questions asked.
Yes, unhappy indeed is the country where the only solution put forward by one of the two major parties is for us to rely on gun-toting heroes.
In observance of Memorial Day, I’m going with a John Greenleaf Whittier poem, written in the first full year of the Civil War (1862). The poem represents the interior struggle of someone who opposes war in general and yet sees the necessity of this one in particular. It is how I feel about Ukraine’s struggle against the Russian invasion—and for that matter, how I feel about the Civil War. Like Whittier, I believe that nothing short of war could have an ended a practice as evil and as deeply entrenched as slavery.
The names of the dead that Whittier mentions in the poem, I suspect, are young men that he either knew or who were from his community. In other words, war is not an abstraction to him. As an ardent abolitionist—one who was attacked by mobs and had his offices burned down for speaking against slavery in the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s—he saw the necessity of the conflict, but that doesn’t mean he overlooked the attendant horrors. When he mentions standing on a “stricken field,” it isn’t only the field that is stricken.
As he stands there he imagines being visited by two heavenly but discouraged watchers, the angels Peace and Freedom. Peace, who is losing hope, looks to Freedom for optimism, only to hear an exasperated Freedom complain about infighting and incompetence in the Union army, which he describes as “a senseless brawl.” Perhaps those more conversant with the Civil War than I am can tell me who he means by the one “who guards through love his ghastly throne” (cares more about his position than winning?); who is fearful of and overly reverential to the Confederates; and whose timidity is failing to speedily supply needed aid.
The war was going poorly for the Union in 1862—the tide would not turn until 1863 with Gettysburg—and Freedom tells the poet that this fight for freedom stands in marked contrast with heroic stands taken in the past, including: the reform-minded Husites against the forces of the established church (Ziska); the Haitian rebellion against the French (Toussaint); resistance to the French reign of terror (Sidney—Sydney Carton (?)—is guillotined in Tale of Two Cities); the forces of Parliament against the Royalists on the moor of Marston; George Washington in the Battle of Trenton after crossing the Delaware; and Piedmont freedom fighters against the Austro-Hungarian empire at the Battle of Magenta.
Peace, to reassure Freedom, counsels patience, to which Freedom gloomily replies, “Too late.” But then holy hope makes an entrance:
A rustling as of wings in flight, An upward gleam of lessening white, So passed the vision, sound and sight.
Asserting that “all is possible with God,” this vision alludes to the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: the image of the winepress that “must be trod” is (I think) an allusion to “He has trampled out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored”— which itself is an allusion to the Book of Revelation,which reads (14:19-20), ”So the angel swung his sickle to the earth and gathered the clusters from the vine of the earth, and threw them into the great wine press of the wrath of God.”
However necessary the war, however, the deaths themselves are terrible, and it is those who died that we memorialize today. As Peace puts it,
What price was Ellsworth’s, young and brave? How weigh the gift that Lyon gave, Or count the cost of Winthrop’s grave?
The Watchers By John Greenleaf Whittier
Beside a stricken field I stood; On the torn turf, on grass and wood, Hung heavily the dew of blood.
Still in their fresh mounds lay the slain, But all the air was quick with pain And gusty sighs and tearful rain.
Two angels, each with drooping head And folded wings and noiseless tread, Watched by that valley of the dead.
The one, with forehead saintly bland And lips of blessing, not command, Leaned, weeping, on her olive wand.
The other’s brows were scarred and knit, His restless eyes were watch-fires lit, His hands for battle-gauntlets fit.
“How long!”—I knew the voice of Peace, “Is there no respite? no release? When shall the hopeless quarrel cease?
“O Lord, how long! One human soul Is more than any parchment scroll, Or any flag thy winds unroll.
“What price was Ellsworth’s, young and brave? How weigh the gift that Lyon gave, Or count the cost of Winthrop’s grave?
“O brother! if thine eye can see, Tell how and when the end shall be, What hope remains for thee and me.”
Then Freedom sternly said: “I shun No strife nor pang beneath the sun, When human rights are staked and won.
“I knelt with Ziska’s hunted flock, I watched in Toussaint’s cell of rock, I walked with Sidney to the block.
“The moor of Marston felt my tread, Through Jersey snows the march I led, My voice Magenta’s charges sped.
“But now, through weary day and night, I watch a vague and aimless fight For leave to strike one blow aright.
“On either side my foe they own: One guards through love his ghastly throne, And one through fear to reverence grown.
“Why wait we longer, mocked, betrayed, By open foes, or those afraid To speed thy coming through my aid?
“Why watch to see who win or fall? I shake the dust against them all, I leave them to their senseless brawl.”
“Nay,” Peace implored: “yet longer wait; The doom is near, the stake is great: God knoweth if it be too late.
“Still wait and watch; the way prepare Where I with folded wings of prayer May follow, weaponless and bare.”
“Too late!” the stern, sad voice replied, “Too late!” its mournful echo sighed, In low lament the answer died.
A rustling as of wings in flight, An upward gleam of lessening white, So passed the vision, sound and sight.
But round me, like a silver bell Rung down the listening sky to tell Of holy help, a sweet voice fell.
“Still hope and trust,” it sang; “the rod Must fall, the wine-press must be trod, But all is possible with God!”
Among the many things that confuse me about rightwing Christian fundamentalists is their love of guns. “God, guns, and gays” was the way their voting obsessions were characterized for a while, and if “gay” is expanded to LBGTQ and if one adds abortion and Critical Race Theory to the list, it still pretty much captures many of them. As this weekend’s Christian-inflected NRA Convention reminded us, gun love continues as strong as ever, despite the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. How God and weapons of war can come together in a religion that supposedly has love at its core is unfathomable to me.
It starts to make more sense, however, if one sees gun-loving Christians driven by an Armageddon-level of fear. Sarah Posner, who studies the fundamentalist right, notes that many believe in the Great Replacement Theory, which white supremacists, rightwing authoritarians, pundits on Fox News (especially Tucker Carlson), and various mass killers (including the one in Buffalo) also ascribe to. As Posner explains,
Replacement theory is not so much a “theory” as a racist ideology used to stoke rage that white Christian culture is under threat by an invasion, engineered by Jews, of non-white foreigners who will both pollute and dilute a nation’s heritage and culture.
Connected with this rage is the conviction that the End Times are near. In a parody of Jesus’s message that love is more powerful than death, these believers think that they need not worry about either death or this world because God will lift them up as everyone else burns in a fiery conflagration. Among my many problems with this belief is how God gets used as a life insurance policy. We need not grapple with the problems of living because death will give us everything we need or want. Or to shift analogies, dismissal of this world’s importance seems to give one the freedom to abuse the world like a rental car: you think you can walk away from it, consequence free, when you’re done with it.
In my view, this is a misreading of Jesus’s mission, which was to establish the kingdom of heaven in life, not in death. Lucille Clifton ascribes to this mission in her final collection of poetry, entitled Book of Days (2006), in which she reflects on spiritual matters.
The book begins with a poem I considered sharing next week for Pentecost given its vision of a born-again relationship with the world. Like many of the lyrics in Book of Days, it is grounded in Garden of Eden imagery.
birth-day
today we are possible.
the morning, green and laundry-sweet, opens itself and we enter blind and mewling.
everything waits for us:
the snow kingdom sparkling and silent in its glacial cap,
the cane fields shining and sweet in the sun-drenched south.
as the day arrives with all its clumsy blessings
what we will become waits in us like an ache
Yet instead of cherishing this garden and its, we desecrate it. Or as Clifton puts it in “godspeak: out of paradise,”
what more could you ask than this good earth, good sky? you are like mad children set in a good safe bed who by morning will have torn the crib apart and be howling on a cold floor among the ruins.
Along the same lines, in a very Dante-esque message, Clifton’s God points out that we don’t need Her to castigate us for our sins. We’re all having too much fun punishing each other, thank you very much:
godspeak
little ones small and treacherous, why would you believe that I punish you who punish each other relentlessly and with such enthusiasm
A passage from Richard Wright’s autobiography Black Boy comes to me when I read this poem:
There were more violent quarrels in our deeply religious home than in the home of a gangster, a burglar, or a prostitute, a fact which I used to hint gently to Granny and which did my cause no good. Granny bore the standard for God, but she was always fighting. The peace that passesunderstanding never dwelt with us. I, too, fought; but I fought because I felt I had to keep from being crushed, to fend off continuous attack. But Granny and Aunt Addie quarreled and fought not only with me, but with each other over minor points of religious doctrine, or over someimagined infraction of what they chose to call their moral code. Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.
Back to Clifton, who observes that we don’t need God to condemn us to hell. We’re already finding our way there on our own:
man-kind: digging a trench to hell
did i go deep enough?
i’ve exhausted the earth, the plentiful garden, the woman, myself.
i’ve exhausted even the darkness now.
are you not done with me yet?
The last poem in Book of Days calls out—once again as though with the voice of God—those who indulge in righteous fury, even as they squander the precious gifts they have been given:
godspeak: kingdom come
you, with your point-blank fury, what if i told you this is all there ever was: this earth, this garden, this woman, this one precious, perishable kingdom.
Or to continue with the Jesus allusion, “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (emphasis mine).
I recently came across an article in GQ (Gentleman’s Quarterly, for those of you not in the know) contending that “men need to read more novels.” Needless to say, you’ll get no disagreement from me, although I do have some questions about the article.
Comparing reading lists with her boyfriend, Ash Sarkar was struck by the absence of “literary fiction”:
I flick through the tomes on his e-reader; it’s science fiction, politics, or politics in space. He’s halfway through Kim Stanley Robinson, following hot on the heels of China Mieville, Vincent Bevins, and Ursula K. Le Guin. He peers over at the pages of my Jane Austen, and wrinkles his nose. “It’s all chitter-chatter.” I ask him to explain what he means. “Well, there’s just a lot of talking.” He hunkers back down with the expanse of Red Mars and leaves me in the drawing rooms of Mansfield Park.
This surprises Sarkar because, as she notes, her boyfriend is not “a protein-powder-where-a-brain-should-be bro.” Indeed, she notes, “he bears all the hallmarks of a fully reconstructed man: NTS on the radio, bell hooks on the shelf, a yoga membership used at least thrice-weekly.” But, she adds,
literary fiction, as opposed to non-fiction, history, or sci-fi, just doesn’t interest him. Why prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart, when you can terraform planets, or dig into the CIA’s murky psy-ops in Indonesia
Now, it should be noted that, of the authors she sees on his e-reader, three of the four are novelists. Furthermore, one of those novelists—Ursula Le Guin—blazed new ground for science fiction by making it more about relationships than about Star Wars-style shootouts. The Left Hand of Darkness, to cite one of her novels, is a fascinating exploration of gender and gender roles. China Miéville’s Perdito State, meanwhile, is an amazing multicultural, steampunk fantasy involving fallen angels, tech wizards, insect humanoids, and prickly cactus people. The fact that her boyfriend is reading Le Guin and Miéville is entirely consistent with his yoga-practicing ways. And probably a sign that he’s the right man for her.
Oh, and I wouldn’t use Mansfield Park as a marker. I love the novel but it’s literally the last Austen work I would recommend to get someone interested in the author.
In fact, the more I think about it, the more confused I am about what Sarkar means by “literary fiction.” It’s important to know since she makes a big deal of the fact that “men account for only 20% of the audience for literary fiction, despite making up half the population.” To support this stat, she observes that reading fiction itself is regarded as mostly a female occupation and has been seen as such for a long time. As she observes, in the past
men who spend too much time indoors, reading novels and living their lives vicariously through the trials and tribulations of others, were widely considered cucks. A man’s literary interest had to be justified by ambition, linked to his masculine capacity for action, or contextualised in real-world exploration.
I’ll agree that men are more likely than women to pooh-pooh fiction. We see this prejudice voiced in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where the doltish John Thorpe expresses contempt for novel-reading. However, he makes an exception for Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1747) and Matthew Lewis’s gothic novel The Monk (1796), and then goes on to acknowledge that he also likes Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, the novel that has gripped protagonist Catherine:
“Have you ever read Udolpho, Mr. Thorpe?”
“Udolpho! Oh, Lord! Not I; I never read novels; I have something else to do.”
Catherine, humbled and ashamed, was going to apologize for her question, but he prevented her by saying, “Novels are all so full of nonsense and stuff; there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except The Monk; I read that t’other day; but as for all the others, they are the stupidest things in creation.”
“I think you must like Udolpho, if you were to read it; it is so very interesting.”
“Not I, faith! No, if I read any, it shall be Mrs. Radcliffe’s; her novels are amusing enough; they are worth reading; some fun and nature in them.”
“Udolpho was written by Mrs. Radcliffe,” said Catherine, with some hesitation, from the fear of mortifying him.
It’s not that men don’t read novels. It’s just that real men are not afraid to admit they like reading. Henry Tilney proves to be the right man for Catherine by being an unapologetic Radcliffe fan. Catherine starts a conversation with Tilney expecting him to echo Thorpe’s contempt for novels:
“But you never read novels, I dare say?”
“Why not?”
“Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”
“Yes,” added Miss Tilney, “and I remember that you undertook to read it aloud to me, and that when I was called away for only five minutes to answer a note, instead of waiting for me, you took the volume into the Hermitage Walk, and I was obliged to stay till you had finished it.”
And later:
But I really thought before, young men despised novels amazingly.”
“It is amazingly; it may well suggest amazement if they do—for they read nearly as many as women. I myself have read hundreds and hundreds. Do not imagine that you can cope with me in a knowledge of Julias and Louisas. If we proceed to particulars, and engage in the never-ceasing inquiry of ‘Have you read this?’ and ‘Have you read that?’ I shall soon leave you [ ] far behind me…
But would Sarkar count gothics as literary fiction? Maybe the real difference she has in mind is not between novels and non-novels but novels filled with (in her boyfriend’s phrase) chitter chatter and novels that are more action oriented. Mysteries of Udolpho, in which the heroine is kidnapped and locked up in a castle, where she subsequently explores secret passageways and stumbles over dead bodies, is pretty action oriented. No wonder Thorpe and Tilney like it. Steven King’s gothics, which also have a large male following, also feature lots of action. If Sarkar were to contend that such novels don’t “prod the nooks and crannies of the human heart,” I would disagree. They just do it in a different way than chitter-chatter novels.
As proof, take the novel I’m currently listening to while driving, written by that most macho of writers, Ernest Hemingway. I can testify that For Whom the Bell Tolls is obsessed with issues of the human heart. True, its male characters don’t speak openly about their feelings—often, one has to read between the lines to figure out what they’re feeling—but we are given special insight thanks to their interior monologues. Here, for instance is protagonist Robert Jordan thinking of how he may not have much more time with his new-found love Maria, given that he’s supposed to blow up a bridge in two days and may well be killed, either in the attempt or trying to escape afterwards:
So if you love this girl as much as you say you do, you had better love her very hard and make up in intensity what the relation will lack in duration and in continuity. Do you hear that? In the old days people devoted a lifetime to it. And now when you have found it if you get two nights you wonder where all the luck came from. Two nights. Two nights to love, honor and cherish. For better and for worse. In sickness and in death. No that wasn’t it. In sickness and in health. Till death do us part. In two nights. Much more than likely. Much more than likely…
And further on:
If this was how it was then this was how it was. But there was no law that made him say he liked it. I did not know that I could ever feel what I have felt, he thought. Nor that this could happen to me. I would like to have it for my whole life. You will, the other part of him said. You will. You have it now and that is all your whole life is; now. There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
Through such interior monologues, then, Hemingway shows there are lots of feelings. Sarkar doesn’t acknowledge this, however, claiming that men miss out when they don’t read “literary fiction”:
But the thing is, women don’t just read novels to understand ourselves: we read them to understand each other. Literary fiction is how we can study human frailty, making the world of feelings, friendship, love, personal dilemma, rivalry, money and psychology rich terrain for exploration.
I guess all I’m saying is that Sarkar doesn’t realize how much of the above is going on in the kind of genres that guys are traditionally drawn to. Emotional insight can be gleaned from Hemingway no less than from Jane Austen, from sci-fi authors like Ursula Le Guin no less than from some of the authors Sarkar admires (Bernardine Evaristo, Anna Burns, Marian Keyes,Torrey Peters, Candice Carty-Williams). Sarkar appears to think that, if people aren’t talking openly and constantly about their feelings, the feelings aren’t there.
She’s far from the only one who thinks this way. Indeed, the fact that we now associate melodrama with female emotion and think that emotion is absent from the action-adventure genre shows how we underestimate the latter. Men’s action films are filled with feelings. They may be stereotypical guy feelings but they are feelings nonetheless.
Indeed, if one looks at the history of melodrama in Hollywood, one discovers that it is only in recent decades that the genre has become associated with women’s pictures (“women’s weepies,” as they used to be called). Steve Neale, an expert on Hollywood genres, notes that, from around 1910 to about 1970, when people in the film industry said “melodrama,” they meant
action thrillers with fast-paced narratives , episodic story-lines featuring violence, suspense and death-defying stunts. Dastardly villains, heroines in peril and daring adventurous heroes populated these films, their actions speaking louder than their words. Cowboy films, gangster films, crime thrillers and horror movies were typically labelled “melodramas” in the trade press. (Melodrama, Mercer and Shingler, p.6).
In fact, what we now call action-adventure movies were sometimes referred to as “mellers,” Neale says. It’s only since the 1970s that our associations with melodrama have done a complete 180.
I suspect that, contra Sarkar, men are still reading plenty of novels—certainly her boyfriend is—and are using them to process any number of significant issues in their lives. Of course, I’m in favor of them reading even more than they do, and I’d like them to read chitter-chatter novels as well as spy novels and westerns. In fact, I think that both men and women should branch out since, the more variety they encounter, the richer their lives will become.
