Great Lit Is Also Practical Lit

By Robin Bates | Published: December 15, 2021
John Singer Sargent, Man Reading

Thursday

My dear friend and former colleague Jackie Paskow has just alerted me to a couple of books that sound a bit like the book I’m just completing. This can either be a good thing (“Great, my topic is of interest to people!”) or a bad thing (“Oh no, others have gotten there first!”). In reading Louis Menard’s New Yorker review, however, I’ve concluded that my book is different enough that it still has a chance in the publishing world.

The two books are Roosevelt Montas’s Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation and Arnold Weinstein’s The Lives of Literature: Read, Teaching, Knowing.

Menard describes such books as follows:

The genre, a common one for academics writing non-scholarly books, is a combination of memoir (some family history, career anecdotes), criticism (readings of selected texts to illustrate convictions of the author’s), and polemic against trends the author disapproves of. The polemic can sometimes take the form of “It’s all gone to hell.” Montás’s and Weinstein’s books fall into the “It’s all gone to hell” category. Other books that fall within the genre, Menard says, are Hiram Corson’s The Aims of Literary Study (1894), Irving Babbitt’s Literature and the American College (1908), Robert Maynard Hutchins’s The Higher Learning in America (1936), Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014). All these works, Menard says, complain that “higher education has lost its soul,” to which he adds, “It’s a song that never ends.”

Whether or not higher education has lost its soul, it’s true that the purpose of the university has flipped. Menard explains this as follows:

In the old college system, the entire curriculum was prescribed, and there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their majors. That is the system the great books were designed for use in. The great books are outside the regular curriculum.

The so-called great books courses, then, have been devised to address this new reality. They are, as Montas puts it, “pointedly countercultural,” aiming to balance out the “knowledge factory” that colleges have become. But given that this seems a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of literature, why are these guys complaining? As Menard points out,

At this point, great-books-type courses—that is, courses where the focus is on primary texts and student relatability rather than on scholarly literature and disciplinary training—are part of the higher-education landscape. Few colleges require them, but many colleges happily offer them. The quarrel between generalist and specialist—or, as it is sometimes framed down in the trenches, between dilettante and pedant—is more than a hundred years old and it would seem that this is not a quarrel that one side has to win. 

As I was reading the review, one point stood out since it sounds like what I aspire to, both in my teaching and in my blog. Here it is:

In a great-books course of the kind that Montás and Weinstein teach, undergraduates read primary texts, then meet in a classroom to share their responses with their peers. Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives. (emphasis mine)

So do Montas and Weinstein do this? How much into the weeds of their students’ lives do they go? Regular readers of this blog know that I’m willing to go fairly far. Over the past 12 years I’ve given numerous examples of my students using great books to sort out vital life questions, from confronting war trauma and processing sexual abuse to seeing teammates commit college vandalism (this latter in an essay on Rime of the Ancient Mariner). If Montas and Weinstein include such exploring in their books, more power to them. But according to the Menard review, they stay at a more abstract level, preferring to talk about the examined life:

What humanists should be teaching, Montás and Weinstein believe, is self-knowledge. To “know thyself” is the proper goal. Art and literature, as Weinstein puts it, “are intended for personal use, not in the self-help sense but as mirrors, as entryways into who we ourselves are or might be.” Montás says, “A teacher in the humanities can give students no greater gift than the revelation of the self as a primary object of lifelong investigation.”

To which, my instant response is, “What’s wrong with using literature in a self-help sense?” I agree with Menard when he rips them apart for their vagueness:

And if, as these authors insist, education is about self-knowledge and the nature of the good, what are those things supposed to look like? How do we know them when we get there? What does it mean to be human? What exactly is the good life?

Oh, they can’t say. The whole business is ineffable. We should know better than to expect answers. That’s quaint-thinking. “The value of the thing,” Montás explains, about liberal education, “cannot be extracted and delivered apart from the experience of the thing.” Literature’s bottom line, Weinstein says, is that it has no bottom line. It all sounds a lot like “Trust us. We can’t explain it, but we know what we’re doing.”

Menard also criticizes the two for seeing themselves superior to the other disciplines:

A class in social psychology can be as revelatory and inspiring as a class on the novel. The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.

And then, taking Montas and Menard down another peg, Menard concludes:

The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person. 

While I agree with Menard that lit professors are not “the wisest and most humane people on earth” and appreciate his not wanting to be holier than thou, I take issue with his concluding statement. I think that great literature can make you a better person, in part by plopping us in the middle of big issues and showing us what comes of good choices and of bad choices. While literature is not the only way to teach empathy, it is a particularly powerful way to do so, as various psychological studies have shown. Some social psychologists I know use novels in their classes for just this reason.

As far as whether literature can make you a better person, many great thinkers have argued that it does and have explained how. In my book, I profile some who have done so, including Aristotle (but not Plato), Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Franz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, F. R. Leavis, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Allan Bloom, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum. What may distinguish these figures from Weinstein and Montas—I don’t know for sure, not having read the latter—is their specificity. They show how literature mixes it up with everyday life.

Do I think that only literature can do this? Certainly not. But I think it is a particularly powerful tool that imparts knowledge in a way not accessible to other disciplines and other arts. While I don’t believe in making a quasi-religion out of great literature, I think that people miss out on a great way of improving their lives when they don’t read it.

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Beloved’s War against White Supremacy

By Robin Bates | Published: December 14, 2021
Oprah as Sethe in Beloved

Wednesday

Mia Brett, legal historian for Editorial Board, has written a fascinating (albeit somewhat disjointed) article linking America’s history of chattel slavery to the anti-abortion movement. It caught my eye because it helps me understand some of the rightwing hatred of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

The article argues that American Whites have been focused on controlling Black female bodies all the way back to 1662, when Virginia passed a law

that made race and enslavement an inheritable condition through the mother. This law became the basis of the American racialized chattel system of slavery. It also clearly linked racial construction and the continuation of white supremacy to reproduction. Enslaved Black women would produce enslaved Black children while white women would produce free white children. The race of the fathers did not matter. 

This law became even more important when importing slaves from Africa became illegal, making Black female reproduction the only way to generate more slaves. Women were sometime raped by their owners, sometimes forced to breed with fellow slaves.

In reaction, Brett notes, abortion became a way for enslaved Black women “to not only control their own reproduction, but also resist the slave system.”

 After the Civil War, white supremacists became obsessed with the idea that they would be replaced by people of color (replacement theory), an obsession that continues today with figures like Fox’s Tucker Carlson. As a result, such people did not want white women aborting pregnancies and, through miscegenation laws, they tried to ensure that those babies were not of mixed race.

Obsession with Black reproduction also was to surface amongst such people as Ronald Reagan, who attacked “welfare queens” for supposedly having babies just so they could collect checks. I have personal knowledge of how, in the 1970s, even Minnesota Democrats (I suspect they’re now Trump supporters) were calling for the forced sterilization of urban Black women.

There’s an apparent contradiction here, however. You’d think that conservatives would be for abortions in this case. And in fact, abortion was not a big deal with mainstream conservatives at the time. That’s why Row v Wade passed the Supreme Court fairly easily with a 7-2 vote.

I can also report that my conservative aunt and uncle were, at the time, strong supporters of Planned Parenthood. Thinking back, I now suspect it was because they wanted to control Black reproduction—just as, at the time, Black Panthers brandishing firearms prompted many conservatives to support meaningful gun control.

All that has changed, of course. Now the right is united against abortion, including Black abortion. But even when people have changed their positions, the underlying obsession with controlling women’s bodies has remained the same. This may explain why Beloved gets attacked.

At first glance, it just seems that many Whites don’t want controversial novels about race. But there are other controversial books about race on the AP list, most notably Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son. In the latter, a Black man inadvertently smothers a white woman and then cuts off her head so that he can stuff her body in a furnace.  I haven’t heard many calls for that book to be banned.

What may most disturb White readers of Beloved is not the vicious whipping of a pregnant Sethe but the scene where the nephews of her slave master suckle her. “They stole my milk,” she reports years later to the man who loves her. The lashing occurs after she reports the act to her mistress, the slave master’s sister.

One can see why the nephews would take her milk. Their uncle is a grim sadist with no softness, and some deep part of them longs for mother tenderness. And because of the dynamics of slavery, they can force Sethe to mother them. Obsessed with Black fertility, they demand it for themselves.

After she escapes, Sethe doesn’t have an abortion but she takes the next logical step: to keep her family from being taken back into slavery, she kills her new-born daughter and tries to kill her other children. There’s a terrible logic to the act: she exercises the only power she has to fight back against a hideous institution. In one way, the act saves her—she is so obviously mad that her master doesn’t reclaim her—but the daughter (named Beloved) comes back to haunt her for decades.

In other words, Sethe rebels against a system that uses her fertility against her. No wonder the right has turned the novel into a cause celebre.

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A Lion Judges Nature-Destroying Humans

By Robin Bates | Published: December 13, 2021
Mountain lion at Glacier National Park

Tuesday

The horrendous tornadoes that hit Kentucky and adjoining states over the weekend are only the latest warnings we have received about the perils of climate change, causing me to turn to the Book of Revelations. Or rather, I turn to an allusion to John’s apocalyptic work that appears in an apocalyptic Advent poem by my nature-loving father. The poem has some local references as well as religious allusions, which I’ll go into after the poem:

Mountain Lion
By Scott Bates

Herman Gudger had just shot a three-pronged buck
Down in Lost Cove last December when he happened to glance up
And there on the rim of the bluff above him

On a rock ledge watching him intently and slowly
Waving his tail stood a mountin lion
Herman was so startled he forgot he had a gun

And besides he said later he
Wouldn’t of shot him noway
He knew cougars was mighty scarce these days

The mountain lion turned and loped off into the woods
Herman generally drinks a good deal Saturday night
And goes to meeting Sunday at the Jump-Off Baptist Church

THE LION OF JUDAH
WILL BE A DEVOURER OF NATIONS

HE WILL COME TO JUDGE THE QUICK AND THE DEAD

Out of Egypt
In the senescence of the year
Came Jesus ben Panthera

Jump-Off Baptist Church is an actual church, located two miles from our home. We are also walking distance from a bluff that overlooks Lost Cove, recently acquired by the University of the South so that it could preserve the old growth forest found there. Herman Gudger was, I believe, a local mountain man. We see white-tailed deer daily and, while I’ve never seen a mountain lion in the vicinity, my mother did once.

Now to the poem’s other allusions. Jesus, descended from Judah’s line, was seen by early Christians to be “the lion of Judah,” who would come at judgment day to judge the living and the dead. He would come at a dark time (thus the Advent symbolism), and legend had it that, like Moses, he would come out of Egypt. The early anti-Christian writer Celsus, however, claimed that Jesus was not fully Jewish but actually the son of a Roman centurion named Panthera, calling him “Jesus ben [son of] Panthera.” My father, playing with the pun, connects Panthera to the Lion of Judah to Herman Gudger’s mountain lion.

The poem’s local references take on new meaning in the context of my father’s poem. Jump-Off Church already has apocalyptic associations—we jump off this vail of tears into eternity—and Herman is a sinner who drinks on Saturdays but seeks forgiveness and redemption on Sundays. His meeting with the divine, however, comes in the form of a mountain lion, which he encounters while spiritually lost (he’s in Lost Cove). It’s not clear whether Gudger is legally hunting, but the lion appears in the poem as a judgment on how humans are treating nature. Herman, to his credit, at least acknowledges that he has come face to face with something transcendent.

As such, he stands in dramatic contrast to the hunters D. H. Lawrence meets in his own “Mountain Lion” poem. In this one, the hunters have in fact killed a mountain lion, triggering Lawrence’s contempt for foolish humans as well as sorrow for the animal:

_Qué tiene, amigo?
León_–
He smiles, foolishly, as if he were caught doing wrong.
And we smile, foolishly, as if we didn’t know.
He is quite gentle and dark-faced.
It is a mountain lion,
A long, long slim cat, yellow like a lioness.
Dead.
He trapped her this morning, he says, smiling foolishly.
Lift up her face,
Her round, bright face, bright as frost.
Her round, fine-fashioned head, with two dead ears;
And stripes in the brilliant frost of her face, sharp, fine
dark rays,
Dark, keen, fine rays in the brilliant frost of her face.
Beautiful dead eyes.

Lawrence is so furious that he wants the hunters—and all humans who are like them—dead:

And I think in this empty world there was room for me
and a mountain lion.
And I think in the world beyond, how easily we might
spare a million or two of humans
And never miss them.
Yet what a gap in the world, the missing white frost face
of that slim yellow mountain lion!

I can think of one other mountain lion reference in literature, this one in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. There a mountain lion saves the protagonist from imprisonment, leading off his captors and so allowing Tayo to escape and complete his mission. Earlier, the mountain lion has come upon Tayo at a moment of despair when, again, his mission is in peril. The lion’s appearance, then as later, helps Tayo to continue on. It is a mystical moment (as with Herman Gudger) and Tayo offers up a prayer:  

The mountain lion came out from a grove of oak trees in the middle of the clearing. He did not walk or leap or run; his motions were like the shimmering of tall grass in the wind. He came across the meadow, moving into the wind. Tayo watched it with his head against the ground, conscious of pine needles tangled in his hair. He waited for the mare to shy away from the yellow form that moved toward them; but the horse was upwind and did not stir. The eyes caught twin reflections of the moon; the glittering yellow light penetrated his chest and he inhaled suddenly. Relentless motion was the lion’s greatest beauty, moving like mountain clouds with the wind, changing substance and color in rhythm with the contours of the mountain peaks: dark as lava rock, and suddenly as bright as a field of snow. When the mountain lion stopped in front of him, it was not hesitation, but a chance for the moonlight to catch up with him. Tayo got to his knees slowly and held out his hand.

  “Mountain lion,” he whispered, “mountain lion, becoming what you are with each breath, your substance changing with the earth and the sky.” The mountain lion blinked his eyes; there was no fear. He gazed at him for another instant and then sniffed the southeast wind before he crossed the stream and disappeared into the trees, his outline lingering like yellow smoke, then suddenly gone.

In all three accounts, the mountain lion provides a way of judging fallen humanity and offering the world hope of redemption. Passing bills to reverse climate change is the least we can do.

And if we fail, the Lion of Judah—Jesus ben Panthera—will condemn us. So will Tayo’s animal guide. Do will Lawrence.

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The Tornadoes and America’s Fairy Tale

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2021
The cyclone in the 1939 film Wizard of Oz

Monday

 “The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold” in parts of the American south this past weekend, leaving death and destruction in its wake. And unfortunately, God didn’t intervene this time, as God does in Lord Byron’s “The Destruction of Sennacherib.” As a result, Mayfield, Kentucky and other communities in the area suffered devastating tornado damage.

Eight years ago I applied L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz to Oklahoma’s horrendous tornadoes, which killed 26 people and injured 212 others. The death toll from the recent tornadoes far surpasses those numbers. Baum drew his own inspiration from the tornadoes that struck the drought-stricken midwest in the 1890s, a condition caused partly by seasonal cycles and partly by poor farming practices. Our own tornadoes are likely caused by climate change as air from an unseasonably warm December hit a cold front.

Sadly, climate change promises more landscapes like the one in which Dorothy grows up:

When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child’s laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy’s merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at.

Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke.

The tornado strike seems in keeping with the landscape:

From the far north they heard a low wail of the wind, and Uncle Henry and Dorothy could see where the long grass bowed in waves before the coming storm. There now came a sharp whistling in the air from the south, and as they turned their eyes that way they saw ripples in the grass coming from that direction also.

Suddenly Uncle Henry stood up.

“There’s a cyclone coming, Em,” he called to his wife. “I’ll go look after the stock.” Then he ran toward the sheds where the cows and horses were kept.

Aunt Em dropped her work and came to the door. One glance told her of the danger close at hand.

“Quick, Dorothy!” she screamed. “Run for the cellar!”

Toto jumped out of Dorothy’s arms and hid under the bed, and the girl started to get him. Aunt Em, badly frightened, threw open the trap door in the floor and climbed down the ladder into the small, dark hole. Dorothy caught Toto at last and started to follow her aunt. When she was halfway across the room there came a great shriek from the wind, and the house shook so hard that she lost her footing and sat down suddenly upon the floor.

Of course, Dorothy has a far happier ending than that experienced by the citizens of western Kentucky and eastern Tennessee and northern Arkansas. In Oz, according to allegorical readings of the novel, America’s problems get sorted out.

In this reading, which I’ve written about before, the Wicked Witch of the East is the East Coast banks, which were keeping farmers’ mortgages high by insisting on the country retaining the gold standard. As populist presidential candidate Williams Jennings Bryan memorably thundered,

If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

The Wicked Witch of the West, meanwhile, is the drought conditions. In Baum’s American fairy tale, pioneer woman Dorothy joins arms with agriculture (the scarecrow), industrial workers (the tin woodman) and Bryan (the cowardly lion) to restore America to its former glory.

One must be careful about pushing the allegory too far, but Wizard of Oz starts out very grim until Dorothy, demonstrating America’s fighting can-do spirit, triumphs over adversarial conditions and a conman chief executive to restore the country to its former condition—which is to say, a country that can dream of a better future. When Dorothy returns home, the farmhouse has been rebuilt, Em folds Dorothy in her arms, and Dorothy says, “I’m so glad to be at home again.” For the moment, the darkness that opens the book has lifted.

Now it’s not an economic catastrophe that threatens us but a climate catastrophe. Once again we’re seeing extreme weather events, and while some of them are again happening out west (the West Coast drought and wildfires), every part of the country has been hit. In other words, we have a Wicked Witch of the West-East-North-South. And of course, there’s also the rest of the world.

So let’s rethink the Wizard of Oz as a fairy tale about saving the planet, not just America. Let’s say that the Wicked Witch of the East is the fossil fuel companies and their lobbyists in Washington. Imagine that the climate disasters that are devastating us only stiffen our resolve. Although, for a little while, we are tricked by a conman who ascends to power through hot air, ultimately the various sectors of society unite to defeat the climate destroyers.

Yes, Wizard of Oz was written as a fairy tale. As Baum writes in his forward,  “It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.” But fairy tales, as fantasy author Neil Gaiman tells us, can simultaneously be fantastical and true. As he puts it,  

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

So imagine that the dragon of climate change, now that we’ve named it, can be beaten. It’s a dream to aspire to.

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Help Me Forget the Cold

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2021
Gerda melts Kay’s frozen heart in Andersen’s The Snow Queen

Spiritual Sunday

I’ve recently been drawn to Madeleine L’Engle’s Advent poems, including “The winter is cold, is cold.” It’s not only the winter that is cold, the speaker makes clear, but her heart as well. One thing that keeps it frozen is closing it down so it won’t be hurt.

Opening ourselves up to joy is to render ourselves vulnerable. Better, we think, to shrink from the wound and look for happiness that is

Small, safety-seeking, dulled,
Selfish, exclusive, in-turned.

We won’t find peace that way, however, given that the peace we desire comes only “when it’s not sought.” In her references to a knight encased in “ancient suits of mail,” L’Engle may be borrowing an image from Adrienne Rich’s “The Knight,” where a man finds himself similarly entrapped.

Therefore, the speaker asks God to help her forget the cold world and reach for God’s warmth, which she characterizes as “purifying fire.” Once she does so, the coldness in her heart will melt so that it will beat once again.

The winter is cold, is cold.
All’s spent in keeping warm.
Has joy been frozen, too?
I blow upon my hands
Stiff from the biting wind.
My heart beats slow, beats slow.
What has become of joy?

If joy’s gone from my heart
Then it is closed to You
Who made it, gave it life.
If I protect myself
I’m hiding, Lord, from you.
How we defend ourselves
In ancient suits of mail!

Protected from the sword,
Shrinking from the wound,
We look for happiness,
Small, safety-seeking, dulled,
Selfish, exclusive, in-turned.
Elusive, evasive, peace comes
Only when it’s not sought.

Help me forget the cold
That grips the grasping world.
Let me stretch out my hands
To purifying fire,
Clutching fingers uncurled.
Look! Here is the melting joy.
My heart beats once again.

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The Chariot That Bears a Human Soul

By Robin Bates | Published: December 9, 2021
Pieter Symonsz Potter, Elijah taken up into Heaven in the Chariot of Fire

Friday

I end the week with a well-known poem about poetry that I used to think was smarmy but now consider magnificent.  

Maybe I dismissed Emily Dickinson’s “There is no Frigate like a Book” because I considered it a children’s poem, having encountered it at a very early age.

Later, as a teenager, I associated it with the young and naïve Sandy Dennis in the 1967 film Up the Down Staircase. In a hilarious scene, first-year-teacher Dennis tries teaching the poem to a classroom full of tough, urban kids, who see “frigate” as two words and define it much differently than Dickinson. If Dennis is to survive and flourish in this environment, she must become more street smart, while as a shy 16-year-old my own sense of growing up included rejecting that which is childish.

Now, however, I love the sense of wonder Dickinson expresses in the poem. Books really do take us lands away:

There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll –
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears the Human Soul –

Always the contrast is between the humble and the magnificent, with the humble turning in a far more impressive performance. A frigate in full sail may be impressive, and a courser (warhorse) as well. But poems do what poems do and aren’t confined to the wealthy and the proud.

“Bears” is surely a pun—through poetry, the poet bares her soul and through poetry readers discovers theirs. How remarkable that a book, available to anyone who has access to a library, beats out frigates and coursers for magnificence. A book is a chariot, only not an instrument of war this time.

In fact, I suspect the chariot that Dickinson has in mind is Elijah’s fiery chariot, one of the few instances in the Bible of a human being transported directly to heaven. Poetry performs a similar miracle, effortlessly moving us from the earthly to the transcendent.

And having entered the realm of religion, we need to mention Dickinson’s allusion to Jesus, who informed us that the kingdom of God is open to the poorest. No toll demanded.

Literature as a heavenly experience? I’ll buy it.

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Mrs. Dalloway on Moving Past Covid

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2021
Meryl Streep as a modern version of Mrs. Dalloway in The Hours

Thursday

Last year (April 26, 2020) I reported on a fascinating Evan Kindley New Yorker article that links Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) to the great 1918-20 flu epidemic. Now Literary Hub has published another account of someone making the link. The difference between the two readings is the difference between how we were experiencing Covid 18 months ago and how we are experiencing it now.

In making his case, Kindley acknowledges that the novel barely mentions the illness, which had struck seven years before. But he points out that Woolf’s mother died of the flu in 1895 and that she herself had dangerous run-ins with it throughout her life, which means that it may operate as a kind of absent presence in the work. Kindley says that the joy Clarissa Dalloway takes in shopping is an assertion of life in the face of death.

His own longing to go out in public during the Covid lockdowns helped him see this. Thus, a line like “she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day” takes on a whole new meaning. So does Clarissa’s announcement, appearing in the famous opening line, that she (rather than her maid) will go out and buy the flowers for her party. Kindley describes the novel as “the most ecstatic representation of running errands in the Western canon,” and one sees her exhilaration at going out in the following passage. As you read it, think back to how you yourself felt the first time you were able to go to a restaurant or other public venue following quarantine:

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night, were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour, discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery; and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to tempt Americans (but one must economise, not buy things rashly for Elizabeth), and she, too, loving it as she did with an absurd and faithful passion, being part of it, since her people were courtiers once in the time of the Georges, she, too, was going that very night to kindle and illuminate; to give her party. But how strange, on entering the Park, the silence; the mist; the hum; the slow-swimming happy ducks; the pouched birds waddling; and who should be coming along with his back against the Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh–the admirable Hugh!

Literary Hub’s Colin Dickey, writing a year and a half later, has a related but slightly different take on the novel. It’s caused by the fact that, while the pandemic is not over, an ending appears in sight. From that point of view, Mrs. Dalloway is a post-apocalyptic novel:

For all our love of post-apocalyptic fiction, what Mrs Dalloway offers is a glimpse of a true “dystopian” reality, for Woolf understood that a dystopian future would not look like The Hunger Games or The Road so much as it would the everyday, banal world of Before, shot through now with the dead and their ghosts—where everything is the same but all is changed, changed utterly.

Dickey writes that few books “capture this moment” as well as Mrs. Dalloway, which he describes as “a novel obsessed with the question of how moving on can be possible”:

How can anyone have a party in the wake of the flood? It is a question the novel takes both rhetorically—how dare anyone have a party in such a time—and literally: how might it be possible to do such a thing? It is a novel about a broken, hobbled England, unable to face the wreckage of war and influenza and the death throes of its own empire, where nonetheless the work of the living persists, where, as the character Peter Walsh observes, “life had a way of adding day to day.”

In other words, after something as cataclysmic as a pandemic, we have to look backward and forward at the same time. The novel helps Dickey frame our own contradictory times:

The pandemic is now over—except for those for whom it is not. Healthcare workers, stunned and traumatized by what they’ve seen, and still processing late breaking waves and public indifference. Restaurant workers who saw their colleagues decimated and now face entitled patrons who tip poorly. Those who lost jobs, lost homes, fell behind, fell out. Parents with kids under five. Those with compromised immune systems, for whom the vaccines don’t take. Longhaulers. People whose loved ones have died. People who have died. The pandemic is now over except for those who’ve lost something, which is every one of us.

And yet, the work of living goes on—doggedly, at times obscenely. We have not yet even begun to face the task of what we owe the dead, and we are nonetheless still faced with the question of what we owe the still living. There are birthday parties to plan, quarterly reports due, new books to read, new friends to make. Our faces are still turned toward the past, fixedly contemplating the single catastrophe of the past two years, wreckage upon wreckage, still wanting to wake the dead and make whole what’s been smashed, even as the storm called Progress propels us into the future.

And further on:

We’ve been through so much, seen too much, suffered too much, are still too raw and wounded. The temptation is to stay too long down there, in the wounds and in the depths, but we are not just our wounds, not just our trauma. We are also our longing and aspirations and our regrets, and we assume the shapes we do because we hope in whatever meager way to hold the future and realize it. In each and every exchange, each and every seemingly superficial interaction, lies the potential for the whole of the world, the whole of a life.

Mrs. Dalloway captures these contradictory emotions, which makes Clarissa’s flower shopping seem at once trivial and life-affirming. Likewise, her response to her friend Septimus Smith’s suicide seems at once callous and compassionate, with critics unable to decide which is uppermost:

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur is among those who see in her response empathy and vindication: “Septimus’s death, understood and in some way shared, gives to the instinctive love that Clarissa holds for life a tone of defiance and of resolution”; Woolf scholar Julia Briggs instead sees callous indifference: Clarissa accepts, she argues, “his death as the sacrifice that enables the party to go on—as if the millions of war deaths have served only to guarantee the continuance of her way of life.”

Dickey vacillates between the two:

Myself, having read Mrs Dalloway some dozen times, each at a different moment in my life, I’ve found room for both readings; times when I only see Clarissa as the superficial society lady, and times when I see a Clarissa whose belief in the vitality of life redeems Septimus Smith’s death.

When I was younger, perhaps, it was easy enough to decide on a single reading. Now, I’m less sure. What I find now, in this world newly and utterly changed, is that when Woolf asks the question, How does one throw a party after the end of the world?, she asks it neither literally nor rhetorically, but with both inflections at once. It is impossible to do such things without seeming callous and indifferent—and yet, we must find a way to do them anyway. To exist after a tragedy is to bear survivor’s guilt and to be unable to shake the ghosts of those we’ve lost and also to nonetheless dream of—and demand—some kind of future for ourselves.

Dickey concludes,

One reads Mrs Dalloway because it asks questions it cannot fully answer, questions that are all the more urgent because they will never have simple or easy answers. That—and also to be reminded that even in the bright and banal surfaces of the world—the bustle of the city, a stand of flowers, a society party—there are clues to the secret pulse of the world, thrumming beneath us and all around us, drawing us ever forward to whatever may come next.

Dickey says that “one does not read Woolf’s novel as a guide on how to live,” but I think he has shown just the opposite. Woolf has shown just how difficult it is to live in the face of trauma and, by her complex response, given us a framework within which to consider our options. We can neither ignore the past (which is still ongoing) nor let it keep us from moving forward. Some days we may lean one way, some days the other. Woolf lets us that this very uncertainty is life.

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The Horror and the Idiocy of War

By Robin Bates | Published: December 6, 2021
Bombing of Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941

Tuesday – Pearl Harbor Day

Today is the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the “day that will live in infamy” and the occasion that brought America into World War II. That war, called by some “the great war” and by documentarist Ken Burns “the worst war” produced some very strange but breakthrough novels, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22.

It also shaped my father, who was drafted out of Carleton College early in 1942 and spent time in both France and Germany, crossing over the England Channel two weeks after D Day. He was fortunate that, as an interpreter, he didn’t end up fighting, but he did witness Dachau three days after it was liberated. In fact, one of his jobs when he was stationed in Munich was to take Germans through the concentration camp, both to show them what their country had done and to make sure that they didn’t dismiss it as so much American propaganda.

Like many veterans, my father had no illusions about war. He wrote the following poem after my youngest son Toby—called “Mike” in the poem for the rhyme—asked him about his war experiences for a school project. What emerged in his accounting was the mess that war always is. In that way, he shares a vision with Vonnegut and Heller.

My father always hated that his generation was called “the greatest,” so the title he has given the poem is ironic. Idealizing those who serve, he felt, is always an inducement to more war. When he returned to the States in 1945, he became a proud member of the War Resisters League.

“The Greatest Generation”
By Scott Bates

“What was the Second World War like?”
 I am asked by my youngest grandson, Mike,
 Who has just remembered that he has
 To write a paper for his English class
 And hopes his grandfather will tell him a story
 Like Private Ryan, full of guts and glory.
 “That’s easy,” I answer—I am the One
 Who Was There, the Expert, the Veteran–
 (Who has read in the paper, by the way,
 That thousands of vets die every day),
 “It was boring, mostly,” I say, “and very
 Gung-ho.” I think. “It was pretty scary.
 And long. And the longer it got, the more idiotic
 It seemed.” I stop. “It was patriotic.”

How to tell the kid the exciting news
 That we survived on sex and booze.
 And hated the Army and hated the War
 And hoped They knew what we were fighting for . . . .
 And I remember my buddy, Mac,
 Who got shot up in a tank attack,
 And Sturiano, my closest friend . . .

It is still going on. How will it end?

“It was people surrounded by dying men.”

“But what was it like?” asks Mike again.

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