Disruptive Desire in Shakespeare

By Robin Bates | Published: October 19, 2024
Danes and DiCaprio in Romeo and Juliet

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Saturday

I’m writing this special Saturday post because I promised the students in my University of Ljubljana class a summation of the major ideas in my first two Shakespeare lectures. Those of you interested in Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet may also enjoy it as it manages to tie them all together.

I began the course with some observations on why Shakespeare is so admired, mentioning his

–virtuosity

Shakespeare wrote 38 or so different plays in three different genres (comedy, tragedy, and history), with unquestioned masterpieces in each. Most playwrights limit themselves to a single genre (Sophocles tragedy, Molière comedy, etc.). He also wrote astounding sonnets, reinventing the form in the process. And then there were three long narrative poems.

–linguistic inventiveness

Shakespeare added above 1000 new words to the language—there’s dispute as to the exact number—along with countless memorable expressions. Among the words are alligator, bedroom, eyeball, gossip, inaudible, lonely, puppy, assassination, gloomy, and pious. Among the expressions: “We have seen better days”; “I have not slept one wink”; “the clothes make the man”; “it’s Greek to me”; “what’s done is done”; “wild goose chase”; “tower of strength”; “the world is my oyster.”

–depth of character

He created characters that feel so real that it’s as though they actually existed. And with this in mind, here’s what I write in my book about how, in Harold Bloom’s opinion, Shakespeare “invented the human”:

Harold Bloom contends that Shakespeare “pragmatically reinvented” us, changing the way we see others and ourselves and even how we experience feelings. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…”

“Even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Bloom writes, Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.” 17th century British theatergoers loved how Hamlet upended conventional expectations of what to expect from a revenge tragedy. They were so enthralled by the wild ramblings of Hamlet’s mind that the play’s revenge plot seemed almost incidental. They were similarly fascinated by Falstaff, Othello, Rosamond, Macbeth, Lear, Cleopatra, and others. For them, it was if the world had gone from black and white to color.

I concluded this early part of the first lecture with Ben Jonson’s immortal line, “He was not of an age but for all time!” And so it has proved as Shakespeare is read and performed endlessly around the world.

In the first two lectures I looked at Shakespeare’s handling of dangerous desires: gender-bending desire in Twelfth Night, sexual desire in Midsummer and Romeo and Juliet. Of the six plays that feature cross-dressing, Twelfth Night is my favorite. I advised my students to take special note of the play’s subtitle—What You Will—as Shakespeare plays with the notion of “what you will” or “what you desire” throughout.

The play is set in Italian Ilyria—I mentioned that the students wouldn’t necessarily be wrong if they imagined it being set in Slovenia—and Shakespeare plays with the Italian word for “want” (“volere”) in naming his characters. There’s Malvolio (“bad willing”), along with Viola and Oliva (near anagrams of each other). The end result in a plot in which we see

–a man fantasizing about having the qualities he associates with women (Orsino);
–a woman passing herself off as a man (Viola as Cesario);
–two women fantasizing about being able to behave like men (Viola and Olivia);
–a man in love with another man (Antonio);
–a woman in love with another woman (Olivia);
–an effeminate man who doesn’t want to fight but succumbs to male peer pressure (Sir Andrew and also, in a sense, Cesario);
–a sensitive man who, while a good fighter, is not afraid to admit that he can cry like a woman (Sebastian);
–a man desiring to rise above his station (Malvolio);
–and a wise fool who concludes, from observing all this gender confusion, that once we grow up and are slotted into fixed categories, life starts to suck.

Early in the play, I pointed out, a lightning bolt splits the ship upon which Viola and her twin brother are journeying. I speculated that this is inspired by the allegory that Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium recounts to explain sexual desire: once we were perfect creatures, with two heads and four arms and four legs, but the gods, fearing that we were so self-sufficient that we would ignore them, split us in half. Ever since, rather than contending with Mount Olympus, we have been searching for our missing half: split men are looking for other men, split women are looking for other women, and split androgynes are looking for members of the opposite sex.

In other words, Shakespeare is telling us that, at an early age, society splits us off from an integral part of ourselves, decreeing from henceforth we can only behave as a single gender. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, the Bard wrote a play that acknowledged that we are more complex than the gender labels and the associated behaviors that society foists on us.

I touched on the issue of homosexuality in Shakespeare’s time, noting the Buggery Act of 1533, which made it a capital offense. To be sure, the laws were not as comprehensive as they would become in Victorian times as there was a lot of gray area. It was okay, for instance, to have “masculine friendship,” which could include embraces, protestations of love, physical closeness in a common bed, and physical intimacy.

Still, there were boundaries for men and even more for women, who could not dress as men (as Viola does) or go running after men (as Olivia does). Nor could a steward marry a lady (as Malvolio desires). In short, Shakespeare is challenging rigid boundaries in his play, and if it is called Twelfth Night, it’s because the end-of-the-year twelfth night festivities were one of the few times of the year when people could pretend to be someone they weren’t.

Even calling the play Twelfth Night didn’t give Shakespeare full license, however, and he had to cast his gender exploration as a comedy, not as a melodrama. Furthermore, he framed it as what film theorist Chris Straayer calls a “temporary transvestite comedy”—which means characters cross-dress only because they are forced to, not because they want to. Famous film examples of the genre are Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Victor/Victoria, and She’s the Man (which is a modern teen version of Twelfth Night).

In a temporary transvestite comedy, characters must return to their “correct” genders by the end, and so it happens in Twelfth Night. But because Shakespeare feels that some precious part of us is denied when this happens—remember the violence of the lightning strike—he adds a sad note at the end, with the fool singing about “the wind and the rain.” Twelfth Night has been called “an autumnal comedy” as a result. After all, Antonio is thwarted in his love for Sebastian, Olivia finds herself married to a stranger, and Orsino—while seemingly happy to be marrying Viola—would like to see her dressed in male clothing for a little longer. Perhaps he is sad at losing this “masculine friendship.”

For that matter, how do we think Viola will take to wearing dresses and conforming to proper female behavior again? As the twelfth night party ends, life is about to feel a lot narrower.

And remember, I told the students—all these issues arise in a play nearly half a millenium ago.

I hadn’t fully realized, when I paired Midsummer and R&J for the second lecture, how much they reflect each other. Of course, I knew that Pyramus and Thisby, the source story for R&J, gets performed in Midsummer. But there’s more, with the same interplay between sexual drive and imagination occurring in both plays. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see what different insights emerge when one approaches the same subject through two different genres.

Comedy, I told the students (calling on theorist Northrup Frye) focuses on society, tragedy on the individual. And where comedy aims to renew and thereby restore a society that has become static and stale, tragedy acknowledges the depth of the individual. To cite a word that could have been coined by Shakespeare but instead is the invention of the immortal Lisa Simpson, one emerges from a tragedy “embiggened.”

For this genre discussion, I also quoted Charlie Chaplin, who once observed, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot.”

There’s plenty of potential for tragedy in Midsummer—Lysander and Demetrius could kill each other, leading to a double suicide on the part of their lady loves–and a slight mix-up in timing is all that keeps R&J from becoming a comedy. (Well, that and the deaths of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris.) And there are other similarities as well.

For instance, while we watch magic fairy juice cause Lysander to rapidly switch his allegiance from Hermia to Helena, we see Romeo too turning on a dime, from Rosaline to Juliet, and there’s no Puck around to explain that. While King Theseus notes that there’s not much difference between lovers and madmen (he also throws in poets), Mercutio says something similar when he describes Queen Mab. In both speeches, our fertile imaginations, spurred by sexual desire, are seen as taking control. Here’s Theseus:

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt [a gypsy]…

Mercutio says something similar as he watches Romeo lose his head over Rosaline. The difference is that he is just imagining a fairy whereas actual fairies show up in the other play. Romeo reports that he has been dreaming of his love, to which Mercutio responds by describing a malevolent fairy who visits our dreams.

O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you.
She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The traces of the smallest spider’s web,
The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams,
Her whip of cricket’s bone, the lash of film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a round little worm
Prick’d from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love…

When Romeo objects that “thou talkst of nothing,” his friend—comparing these dreams of love with the inconstant wind, replies,

True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger’d, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.

If Shakespeare explored socially-disruptive gender desire in Twelfth Night, he focuses on the chaos that can be caused by sexual desire in Midsummer and R&J. We see this from the very first scene when testosterone-fueled Capulets swagger through the streets looking for violence and sex:

SAMPSON: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s.
GREGORY: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall.
SAMPSON: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.

Under the influence of sexuality’s force, women too become assertive, even when threatened with explusion (Juliet) or death (Hermia in Midsummer). Juliet knows what to expect from her father when she resists him:

An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend;
And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets,
For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee,
Nor what is mine shall never do thee good:
Trust to’t, bethink you; I’ll not be forsworn…

Desire is so strong, however, that these formerly docile and obedient daughters go into full rebellion. “I know not by what power I am made bold,” Hermia tells Theseus while Juliet absolutely revels in her newly discovered sexuality. In her longing for Romeo, she speaks with a new boldness, showing herself to be as much in love with her own power as in her lover.

Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die [sexual pun alert],
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Whereas Midsummer is shot in long shot, however, R&J is shot in close-up. Puck can look down on the lovers as they go careening through the woods and say, “What fools these mortals be.” Likewise he and Oberon can look from afar as Queen of the Fairies Titania, under the influence of the same love potion, falls in love with an ass. Yes, desire makes us do things that, at a distance, appear funny.

But it’s not funny if you’re one of the lovers. We see, in close-up intensity, the joys and agonies of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship. We get to laugh at ourselves with the first play, but with the second–one of the world’s great love stories–we are embiggened. Sexual passion and our seething imaginations can be seen in two different ways.

We don’t know which of these two plays, both written around 1595-96, came first. Did Shakespeare step back from tragic immersion to make fun of himself? Or did he parody love in his first play and then get serious? Whatever the case, his ability to produce two masterpieces in two different genres is what I mean by genius versatility.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Heine’s Weavers vs. Trump’s Weave

By Robin Bates | Published: October 18, 2024
Carl Wilhelm Hübner, The Silesian Weavers

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Friday

The other evening I was discussing Donald Trump’s increasing incoherence with my Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar, along with how Trump has been covering for himself by calling it “the weave.” In response, Mladen mentioned a Heinrich Heine poem that, when I checked it out, works as a perfect rejoinder to someone who hates labor unions and has, throughout his life, stiffed workers. It also captures the candidate who has begun threatening to unleash the U.S. military on all of his enemies, at home as well as abroad.

First about the Trump weave. John Stoehr of the Substack blog Editorial Board believes that Trump is discussing it because he senses he’s slipping into dementia. By talking about his growing mental deficit as though it were a mental asset, he “wants us to believe that cognitive decline is extraordinary.”

“In reality,” Stoehr observes, “the weave is what happens when an aging brain flits from topic to topic without any apparent reason for doing so.”

Trump’s habit of projecting his own vulnerabilities onto his foes, we could add, provides another indication of his condition: he has been calling Kamala Harris “retarded.”

Heine envisions Silesian weavers responding to the bosses who ruthlessly put down their 1844 revolt over exploitation and wage decreases. After killing 11and imprisoning many others, the Prussian military banned the subsequent poem and sent to prison a man who publicly recited it.

Although the weavers’ revolt was unsuccessful, however, it proved a harbinger of the revolutions that would break out all over Europe four years later. Meanwhile Karl Marx published the poem in his newspaper Forward! while Friedrich Engels translated it into English.

Imagine the weavers as the voters who, if there is justice in the world, will send Trump packing three weeks from now. It would be our own version of the weavers’ shroud.

The Weavers
By Heinrich Heine

Not a tear in the dark eye

From darkened eyes no tears are falling;
Gnashing our teeth, we sit here calling:
“Germany, listen, ere we disperse,
We weave your shroud with a triple curse —
We weave, we are weaving!

“A curse to the false god that we prayed to,
And worshiped in spite of all, and obeyed, too.
We waited and hoped and suffered in vain;
He laughed at us, sneering, for all of our pain —
We weave, we are weaving!

“A curse to the king, and a curse to his coffin,
The rich man’s king whom our plight could not soften;
Who took our last penny by taxes and cheats,
And let us be shot like the dogs in the streets —
We weave, we are weaving!

“A curse to the Fatherland, whose face is
Covered with lies and foul disgraces;
Where the bud is crushed as it leaves the seed,
And the worm grows fat on corruption and greed —
We weave, we are weaving!

“The shuttle flies in the creaking loom;
And night and day we weave your doom —
Old Germany, listen, ere we disperse
We weave your shroud with a triple curse.
We weave — we are weaving!”

Trump’s weaving deserves a counter weave. Although in our case, we are weaving a shroud to save our Fatherland.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Swift on Media Sane-Washing

By Robin Bates | Published: October 17, 2024
Jonathan Swift

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Thursday

Although Donald Trump’s rhetoric grows increasingly Hitlerian by the day, the corporate media continues to sane-wash him. I’m thinking that Jonathan Swift, in my opinion literature’s greatest satirist, would have had something to say about this.

First of all, Swift would point out how Trump dehumanizes migrants, using fascistic rhetoric as he accuses them of poisoning American blood and, thanks to their genes, of committing thousands of murders. As Trump remarked to conservative television host Hugh Hewitt,

How about allowing people to come to an open border, 13,000 of which were murderers, many of them murdered far more than one person, and they’re now happily living in the United States. You know now a murder, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.

In “Modest Proposal,” we counter similar cold-blooded talk about human beings as the fictitious author treats children as marketable assets:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.

I call Trump’s rhetoric Hitlerian because Nazi propaganda about how the German master race was threatened by inferior blood lines may well be behind his thinking. Such pseudo-science, of course, helped provide a rationale for the Final Solution. So how did the New York Times report this? Its headline talked of Trump’s “long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”

Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri was having none of this. As she noted, “That is simply not correct. That’s not genetics! It’s not even science.” And then she thought of parallel situations:

This would be like hearing someone say, “Let’s bleed him to release the humors!” and calling him fascinated with medicine. Sure, if by “fascinated with,” you mean “not paying attention to” — but that is not what those words mean! Unless we are just indifferent to the meaning of words now, something that is always possible.

And again:

Similarly, if someone said, “I sure love that the sun revolves around us every day!” you would not say, “That man is fascinated with astronomy.” You would say, “That man has been in a coma for centuries! Remarkable!”

And finally:

I could go on. I will go on! If someone says, “I’m about to add people to this party by murdering seven!” you don’t call him passionate about arithmetic. You say, “That man is threatening people, and also — way, way down the list of priorities — he doesn’t seem to understand how addition works!”

But the Times was not deterred by the scathing criticism it received. Two weeks later, it was back at it again. At a Trump town hall in which two people fainted, he decided that he would shut down questions and just play his favorite songs. For an extraordinary 39 minutes, he swayed along with the music before leaving. Was this a sign of early dementia, as many psychologists are starting to tell us? Was it, as fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat believes, an authoritarian “basking in a cocoon of adoration, standing in a protected environment of his own design”? Neither, according to the Times:

And so Mr. Trump, a political candidate known for improvisational departures, made a detour. Rather than try to restart the political program, he seemed to decide in the moment that it would be more enjoyable for all concerned—and, it appeared, for himself—to just listen to music instead.

Mr. Trump had his staff fire up his playlist, standing on the stage for about half an hour and swaying to songs as the crowd slowly dwindled.

Other news organizations had their own version of “improvisational departures.” Associated Press reported, “Trump turned his town hall into an impromptu concert,” while the Wall Street Journal wrote, “Pennsylvania Town Hall Ends in Concert.”

Alexandra Petri was on this case as well:

Not that it was ever exceptionally strong to begin with, but I feel I have lost my hold on reality.

I could have sworn that Donald Trump prematurely ended his town hall (I use the term loosely, because that implies a forum where questions are asked and answered, which this really was not) and instead forced the crowd to stand there while he swayed along to his rally playlist. But it is equally possible that I am hallucinating and my brain is just trying to make me realize that my body is being dissected by aliens in a laboratory.

Then she thought of an analogous situation:

Imagine, by comparison, the audience’s response if Taylor Swift stopped an Eras Tour concert early and decided to play her favorite political speeches instead while she remained onstage, occasionally mouthing along with the words (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) and the audience tried to decide whether this was a sign that their idol had finally cracked.

I promised you Jonathan Swift so here he is. This master satirist is brilliant in his ability to take sordid reality and sane-wash it. At the end of “Modest Proposal,” he characterizes his baby-killing idea as follows:

But, as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal, which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real, of no expense and little trouble, full in our own power…

He even, in his proposal’s defense, assures us that he has no ulterior motive. He offers it to us purely from the goodness of his heart as he does not stand to benefit in any way from it:

I profess in the sincerity of my heart, that I have not the least personal interest in endeavoring to promote this necessary work, having no other motive than the publick good of my country, by advancing our trade, providing for infants, relieving the poor, and giving some pleasure to the rich. I have no children, by which I can propose to get a single penny; the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing.

My favorite instance of Swift inappropriately using neutral language to describe a horror appears in his Tale of a Tub. It’s short and sweet and therefore devastating. I suspect he is describing a prostitute tied to the back of an ox cart and flogged through the town:

Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse.

The difference between Swift and the New York Times, of course, is that he means for us to be appalled by his speakers’ underreactions. We are meant to harshly criticize people who, by choosing to suspend their humanity and by failing to fully acknowledge what they are witnessing or proposing, have surrendered all moral authority.

Our corporate media, by contrast, is repeatedly surrendering. Under the guise of what it calls its imperative to even-handedly report on both sides, it fails in its basic obligation to report the truth.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Not Rage Or Tears but Radical Hope

By Robin Bates | Published: October 16, 2024
Ursula K. Le Guin

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Wednesday

An Ursula K. Le Guin short story is helping me understand some of the batshit craziness (to use the technical term) that we have been witnessing in some of Trump followers. I’m thinking of how MAGA thugs have been threatening workers from FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in their rescue and clean-up efforts after the two hurricanes. Meanwhile Marjorie Taylor Green—she of “Jewish space lasers” fame—has informed us that Democrats are sending the hurricanes to devastate Trump areas.

And then, as I mentioned Monday, there are portions of MAGA have all but become a death cult, sometimes deliberately exposing themselves to Covid. And I suppose I should mention those Christian fundamentalists who believe that the end times have arrived.

We’re not only hearing apocalyptic talk from the right, however. There are well-founded warnings (in my opinion) about cataclysmic climate change and, if Trump triumphs in the election, about a fascist takeover that would end America’s democratic experiment. The world, especially with the internet, has shrunk considerably while the things we do—from hydrocarbons to plastic production—are having outsized effects. No wonder we seem simultaneously to have more and less control than we have ever had. For the Marjorie Taylor Greens, maybe targeted hurricanes is the logical next step in this evolution.

“Things” is a short story about an island population that is facing extinction, although we never know from what. The islanders have two responses: there are those who weep and those who rage. The Ragers, who resemble some of our MAGA nihilists, destroy everything upon which people depend. They also target anyone who doesn’t think like them. As one of them tells the brickmaker protagonist,

Things, things! Free yourself of things, Lif, from the weight that drags you down! Come with us, above the ending of the world!

This freedom sometimes takes the form of active destruction, with the Ragers burning crops, killing livestock, and tearing down local businesses.

Neither a Rager nor a Weeper, Lif takes a third path. Although he knows the task is impossible, he begins using his bricks to build an underwater road to the other islands. In this he has the help of a widow and her child. The Ragers would attack him if they realized he was doing something constructive, but thinking that he is merely drowning his bricks, they applaud him.

After he has used up all his bricks, Lif assures the widow that they will trod this road together:

By God! said Lif, thinking of his underwater road across the sea that went for a hundred and twenty feet, and the sea that went on ten thousand miles from the end of it–I’ll swim there! Now then, don’t cry, dear heart. Would I leave you and the little rat here by yourselves?

“Things” ends ambiguously in a way that is characteristic of Le Guin’s short stories. Lif and the widow wade to the end of the road and then, up to their chests in water, prepare to take the last step. At that moment Lif thinks that he sees the whiteness of a sail, a “dancing light above the waves, dancing on towards them and towards the greater light that grew behind them”:

Wait, the call came from the form that rode the grey waves and danced on the foam, Wait! The voices rang very sweet, and as the sail leaned white above him he saw the faces and the reaching arms, and heard them say to him, Come, come on the ship, come with us to the Islands.

Hold on, he said softly to the woman, and they took the last step.

One could read this ending as death—who knows what really lies beyond that great divide?– or one could read it as an assertion of radical hope. In certain ways, it resembles the existentialists’ Sisyphus, about whom Albert Camus writes,

Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

For Le Guin, however, I think it means more than this. After all, Lif’s road goes forward rather than in a circle. I think the author is saying that if we refuse to surrender to either raging or weeping, using instead our tools and our talents in the world that we have been given, unforeseen possibilities may open up. True, it may be, as Ulysses puts it in Tennyson’s poem, “that the gulfs will wash us down.” But it also may be the case that “we shall touch the Happy Isles,/ And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.”

In any event, we will dwell in possibility rather than in despair, in hope rather than in hatred. That’s not a bad way to spend the remaining time we have on earth.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Hurricane Milton and the Bad Angels

By Robin Bates | Published: October 14, 2024
Gustave Doré, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (in Paradise Lost)

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Tuesday

As hurricanes bore down on the east coast of the United States, there’s one poem that I found myself periodically reciting. We memorized Lord Byron’s “Destruction of Sennacherib” my sophomore year in high school as an example of anapestic meter (short, short, long):

 The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

We did not experience the poem’s happy ending, where the invading force is destroyed, not the Israelites. It is the people of Florida, Georgia and North Carolina who “lay withered and strown” (along with their leaves):

Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.

A retired librarian, wrote wondering whether Hurricane Milton was revenging itself on Florida for allowing a school district to ban Paradise Lost (you can read about it here). Since I’m hearing about this particular ban for the first time, allow me a momentary digression.

Back in 1994, in a fight with my Maryland school superintendent over her banning of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, I imagined a Paradise Lost ban. Thinking no one would take me seriously, I noted that Milton has far worse in his epic than Morrison’s two pages of trash talk. After all, in one scene Satan rapes his daughter Sin, who is then subsequently raped by Death, their son. The birth of Death, meanwhile, tears Sin’s entrails apart in horrific style. And indeed, I was right: Paradise Lost remains untouched in St. Mary’s County, Maryland whereas English teachers to this day are not allowed to teach Song of Solomon.

I don’t know if this was the scene that triggered the Florida ban or if the censors were more concerned about Adam and Eve having sex, which was controversial even when Milton wrote the poem. In any event, one school board member asserted that Milton’s masterpiece was removed “not out of prudery but by fear of inviting trouble from the state.”

This is how bullies and fascists work—they establish an atmosphere in which people begin censoring themselves.

For the record, Milton doesn’t say that Adam and Eve have sex. He just says that did not not have sex. Here’s the passage:

                          [I]nto their inmost bower
Handed they went; and, eased the putting off
These troublesome disguises which we wear,
Straight side by side were laid; nor turned, I ween,
Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites
Mysterious of connubial love refused…

Then the author launches into an attack on 17th century versions of Florida’s censors, calling them hypocrites who are “defaming as impure what God declares pure.” After all, “Our Maker bids increase; who bids abstain/ But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?” Rightwing ideologues may talk of “purity, and place, and innocence” but they are working for Satan.

But back to hurricanes. The destruction wrought by Helene and then Milton has resembled the devastation in Heaven caused by the battle between the bad angels and the good angels in Book VI. The devils, under Satan’s leadership, have gained a temporary advantage by introducing gun powder into the fray. Never at a loss, however, the good angels respond by tearing up tree-covered hills, with which they temporarily bury the bad angels. Then these respond in their turn by start throwing their own hills. As Milton describes it in a passage that North Carolinian Appalachians will relate to,

So hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire…

Some of these people did indeed see “the bottom of the mountains upward turned.” Here’s the battle:

But they [the good angels] stood not long;
Rage prompted them at length, and found them arms
Against such hellish mischief fit to oppose.
Forthwith (behold the excellence, the power,
Which God hath in his mighty Angels placed!)
Their arms away they threw, and to the hills
(For Earth hath this variety from Heaven              
Of pleasure situate in hill and dale,)
Light as the lightning glimpse they ran, they flew;
From their foundations loosening to and fro,
They plucked the seated hills, with all their load,
Rocks, waters, woods, and by the shaggy tops
Up-lifting bore them in their hands:  Amaze,
Be sure, and terror, seized the rebel host,
When coming towards them so dread they saw
The bottom of the mountains upward turned;
Till on those cursed engines’ triple-row              
They saw them whelmed, and all their confidence
Under the weight of mountains buried deep;
Themselves invaded next, and on their heads
Main promontories flung, which in the air
Came shadowing, and oppressed whole legions armed;
Their armor helped their harm, crushed in and bruised
Into their substance pent, which wrought them pain
Implacable, and many a dolorous groan;
Long struggling underneath, ere they could wind
Out of such prison, though Spirits of purest light,
Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown.
The rest, in imitation, to like arms
Betook them, and the neighbouring hills uptore:
So hills amid the air encountered hills,
Hurled to and fro with jaculation dire;
That under ground they fought in dismal shade;
Infernal noise! war seemed a civil game
To this uproar; horrid confusion heaped
Upon confusion rose…

Finally God, who has foreseen all this, decides enough is enough and sends in Jesus in all his glory. The bad angels take one look at him and jump over the side of heaven, falling through Chaos for nine days before ending up in hell. Jesus’s intervention is not only a lesson to the bad angels but to the good angels as well: they cannot save themselves but need God in the end.

So yes, the hurricanes have been like the battle in heaven. Or as Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s Tempest puts it before it before jumping into the sea,

                     Hell is empty
And all the devils are here!

And to think, conservatives once fought to keep this poem by a dead white man in schools. I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Lyn Cheney’s National Endowment for the Humanities. Then again, Florida governor Ron Desantis and his book-hating censors are not conservative but dangerously radical.

Further thought: In her note to me, my librarian reader reported,

I encourage my grandchildren to read books that make them feel uncomfortable, and I tell them if they’re not allowed to do it in school, then they can come to my house and read the ones that I have here. I want them to open their minds to all ideas and make their own decisions without being hypnotized…

To which I responded with my gratitude to her and to all librarians, who suddenly find themselves once again on the front line of the battle for critical thinking and imaginative play.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Covid PTSD and the Green Knight

By Robin Bates | Published: October 14, 2024
Illus. from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Monday

Thom Hartmann, whose Substack blog I read regularly, contends that MAGA has become a death cult and he has an explanation why: it’s in part due to Covid-caused PTSD. The idea brought to mind Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I believe was written in response to an even worse pandemic, one that spawned its own share of death cults. Although the author would have had either first or second-hand experience with the 1348-50 Black Plague, which killed off a third of Europe’s population (!!), yet his poem advocates a much healthier response.

Hartmann points to PTSD symptoms that may be showing up in members of Trump’s cult:

-— Hypervigilance and threat sensitivity, causing people to experience heightened alertness to potential and often imagined (like Trump’s lies about Haitian immigrants) threats.
— Difficulty with trust, which may lead to skepticism of official sources and greater reliance on alternative information channels; vulnerability, in other words, to Trump’s lies and his claims of “fake news” when he’s fact-checked.
— Emotional dysregulation, making individuals like Tina Peters, the hundreds of January 6th rioters now in jail, and other Trump followers more vulnerable to emotionally-charged misinformation and MAGA cult membership.
—Cognitive changes impacting critical thinking skills needed to evaluate information that might contradict the lies Trump and his co-conspirators promulgate.
— Social isolation which may limit exposure to different perspectives and fact-checking from others who try to tell MAGA members how deluded and exploited they really are.
— Seeking explanations causing people to have a heightened need to understand and make sense of their experiences, making them more open to MAGA’s anti-science and politically charged explanatory narratives, even when they’re lies.
—Avoidance behaviors leading people to  avoid exposure to diverse information sources, keeping them trapped in Trump cult bubbles like rightwing hate radio and Fox “News.”

Hartmann cites an article in the National Library of Medicine where researcher Stephen Schwartz writes about the rise of an American death cult:

“[T]his [million-plus Covid] death rate is directly correlated to the politicization and weaponization of anti-science throughout the MAGA world created by Donald Trump and the Republican Party. … Anti-vaxxers, and anti-maskers, usually the same people, have made fidelity to a fact-free but emotionally satisfying reality more important than life itself, and created the first American death cult. …

Writing in February of 2022, Schwartz mentions that, while there was the equivalent of anti-vaxxers during both the Black Plague and the 1918 Spanish Flu, they did not—as Covid did— evolve into a mainstream political movement. After all, those early pandemics didn’t witness people willingly subjecting themselves to a vastly higher risk of contracting and dying of the disease to prove that it wasn’t real. And yet, Schwartz observes, MAGA Americans have been doing this, even in the face of “a million dead, and 2000 people, or more, dying each day.”

In a related incident, I think of the man who reported how his MAGA-obsessed father-in-law refused all help from FEMA after Hurricane Helene wiped away his house, believing Trump when he said the federal agency was hopelessly corrupt.

I’ve long thought that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a 14th century romance that ranks among my top five favorite works of literature, is a poem that deals with PTSD. In it a Camelot knight must grapple with how to respond to what is essentially an immutable death sentence. Confronted by a nature deity that knows him better than he knows himself, he discovers that his coping mechanisms are inadequate. While he initially thinks he can just shrug death off—after all, he is a Christian knight who believes that his faith and his knightly duty should shield him from caring about his life—he discovers by the end of the poem that he cares deeply after all.

In my book I write about how a former student—an Afghan vet who had defused roadside bombs— discovered that the poem spoke directly to his war experience. Matt said that, while he and his fellow marines had thought they didn’t fear death, he realized from reading the poem that they had been in denial. Just as Gawain dons a magical sash that is supposed to save his life, so Matt had religiously donned his Kevlar vest each day before going out into the field. He had thought he was more stoic than he actually was.

The Green Knight, rather than berate Gawain for what Gawain considers an act of cowardice, instead celebrates the fact that he is finally taking life seriously. It’s as though he is celebrating Gawain’s PTSD cure. While Matt never said that he had PTSD so I can’t claim that he did, he spent the entire night reading this 14th century poem (it wasn’t even for an assignment) and came to class awed by what he had read. “That poem is so true,” he told me.

I love Sir Gawain and the Green Knight because it is such a confident assertion of life. It gives us gorgeous nature imagery, even as it simultaneously gives us excruciating depictions of death. (The hunters in the poem don’t just kill animals: we watch them pull their guts out.) When we use ideology as a means of shielding ourselves from death, which is what Gawain does and which many Trump followers have done as well, the Green Knight—in a quirky way that at times is genuinely comic—pushes us back into right relation. Even at the grimmest of times, he reminds us to embrace the vibrancy that is to be found in creation. No holding back.

That a poet with an intimate acknowledge of one the greatest disasters ever to befall humankind can advocate this, surely it is worth our while to listen to him.   

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Don’t Worry, the Heart Knows the Way

By Robin Bates | Published: October 12, 2024
Joy Harjo

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Sunday

As this weekend we celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day (formerly known as Columbus Day), here’s a Joy Harjo poem “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet.” It appeared in her collection Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2105).

 Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that
bottle of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel
the earth gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and
back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were
a dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

Let your moccasin feet take you to the encampment of the
guardians who have known you before time,
who will be there after time.
They sit before the fire that has been there without time.

Let the earth stabilize your postcolonial insecure jitters.

Be respectful of the small insects, birds and animal people
who accompany you.
Ask their forgiveness for the harm we humans have brought
down upon them.

Don’t worry.
The heart knows the way though there may be high-rises,
interstates, checkpoints, armed soldiers, massacres, wars, and
those who will despise you because they despise themselves.

The journey might take you a few hours, a day, a year, a few
years, a hundred, a thousand or even more.

Watch your mind. Without training it might run away and
leave your heart for the immense human feast set by the
thieves of time.

Do not hold regrets.

When you find your way to the circle, to the fire kept burning
by the keepers of your soul, you will be welcomed.

You must clean yourself with cedar, sage, or other healing plant.

Cut the ties you have to failure and shame.

Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction.

Ask for forgiveness.

Call upon the help of those who love you. These helpers take many forms: animal, element, bird, angel, saint, stone, or ancestor.

Call yourself back. You will find yourself caught in corners and creases of shame, judgment, and human abuse.

You must call in a way that your spirit will want to return.
Speak to it as you would to a beloved child.

Welcome your spirit back from its wandering. It will return
in pieces, in tatters. Gather them together. They will be
happy to be found after being lost for so long.

Your spirit will need to sleep awhile after it is bathed and
given clean clothes.

Now you can have a party. Invite everyone you know who
loves and supports you. Keep room for those who have no
place else to go.

Make a giveaway, and remember, keep the speeches short.

Then, you must do this: help the next person find their way through the dark.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

The U.S. Ignored Kipling’s Cautionary Tale

By Robin Bates | Published: October 11, 2024

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Friday

It doesn’t appear that Afghanistan, the “graveyard of empires,” will play a role in this election, perhaps because neither Republicans nor Democrats have handled it well. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but think of our tragic experience there as I taught Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.”

I assigned the work in the post-colonial literature class that I’m currently teaching at the University of Ljubljana, and we discussed it after first looking at Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden,” which features some of the same themes. The story carries a lesson that George W. Bush should have heeded when he first launched the American invasion. Instead of a quick in and out, as some recommended, he tried his hand at nation-building, with similar consequences.

First a note on Kipling’s poem, which frames colonialism as a selfless act on the part of Britain. In understated self-pity, the poet complains about being unappreciated by the “half-devil and half-child” natives. (In the previous class I had cited Edward Said’s complaint that Western Orientalism characterizes the East as irrational, depraved, and childlike and itself as rational, virtuous, and mature.) At one point “White Man’s Burden” compares the natives to Israelites complaining about Moses’s leadership in the desert, which positions the Brits as a legendary prophet that knows what’s best. It’s noteworthy that the poem never once mentions how much wealth the colonies generated for England. (Answer: A lot)

“The Man Who Would Be King” features two conmen who resemble—and were probably inspired by—Mark Twain’s King and Duke. (Kipling actually met with Twain when he was writing “a sequel to Tom Sawyer”). In this case, the rogues actually do go on to become kings, using cunning, superior firepower, and a fair amount of luck to sell themselves as gods, which in turn enables them to carve out a little kingdom of their own.

And if they had kept up this god masquerade, the story informs us, they would have stayed in power—just as the U.S. (or so some argue) could have swooped in, sent a message about 9-11, and left. Instead, Dravot decides he wants to create an enduring nation, complete with dynasty. In other words, he has evolved from rogue to leader. As such, he is a summation of Britain’s imperial ambitions. Here he is making his case before his skeptical partner:

“‘I won’t make a Nation,’ says he. ‘I’ll make an Empire! These men aren’t niggers; they’re English! Look at their eyes — look at their mouths. Look at the way they stand up. They sit on chairs in their own houses. They’re the Lost Tribes, or something like it, and they’ve grown to be English. I’ll take a census in the spring if the priests don’t get frightened. There must be a fair two million of ’em in these hills. The villages are full o’ little children. Two million people — two hundred and fifty thousand fighting men — and all English! They only want the rifles and a little drilling. Two hundred and fifty thousand men, ready to cut in on Russia’s right flank when she tries for India! Peachey, man,’ he says, chewing his beard in great hunks, ‘we shall be Emperors — Emperors of the Earth!

The kicker to all this is that, to form a dynasty, he needs a wife. But having a wife will mean that he will no longer be seen as a god, which is what keeps him in power. Here he is overriding his partner’s objections about finding a woman:

“‘Who’s talking o’ women?’ says Dravot. ‘I said wife — a Queen to breed a King’s son for the King. A Queen out of the strongest tribe, that’ll make them your blood-brothers, and that’ll lie by your side and tell you all the people thinks about you and their own affairs. That’s what I want.’

His planned marriage, however, blows his masquerade, and there is an uprising that ends in his death and in his partner’s crucifixion. Carnehan only barely manages to get back to the narrator to tell his story before dying of his wounds.

In America’s case, George Bush was convinced that he could sell the Afghans on democratic governance and, while some Afghans benefitted, in the end the U.S. was tone deaf to the situation on the ground. Then, in withdrawing, 183 died from a suicide blast (13 American marines, 170 Afghan civilians). For his part, Dravot is marched out on one of his rope bridges and the rope is cut:

Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing ropes, ‘Cut, you beggars,’ he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round, twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.

I don’t know if the Taliban would have gained total control over the country if first the Soviet Union and then the United States hadn’t interfered in their internal affairs. As it is, many people are dead who could have been alive, and Afghanis, men as well as women, are feeling all the tyranny of fundamentalist rule. Kipling may have been an imperialist, but he also had the insight to know how super power arrogance can lead to disaster.

This is why we need our leaders reading literature.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Orientalizing the Other

By Robin Bates | Published: October 10, 2024

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at [email protected]. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.

Thursday

My postcolonial Anglophone literature courage at the University of Ljubljana got off to a good start yesterday as I taught an excerpt from Edward Said’s Orientalism and then applied it to excerpts from H. Rider Haggard’s She and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Tomorrow I’ll report on our discussion of Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” as we wrap up the section of the course on the colonialists’ perspective.

To kick off the discussion, I showed the class “The Snake Charmer,” the 1879 painting by France’s Jean-Léon Gérôme that graces the cover of Said’s book and that I used in yesterday’s post. Because I was fortunate to have a Turkish student in the class, I asked her if the painting was at all an accurate depiction of life in 19th century Turkey. Her vigorous dissent drove Said’s point home: the fantasies we impose on other cultures tell us far more about ourselves than they do about those other cultures.

While cultures have been imposing such fantasies on the Other since the dawn of time, Said notes that they become particularly dangerous when there is a power imbalance. Nineteenth and twentieth century politicians could confidently make generalizations about the people whose lives they impacted because “novelists, poets, translators, and gifted travelers” had been describing “the Orient” for years. In other words, they didn’t invent Orientalism to justify their policies but drew on common assumptions about Middle Eastern people and cultures.

So what were some of these assumptions? Said writes that, in British minds, “the Oriental” was irrational, depraved, childlike, and “different” while “the European” was rational, virtuous, mature, and “normal.”

Our discussion of Said set up nicely our incursion into She, Haggard’s 1886 adventure novel where two British explorers, following an ancient map, make their way into deepest, darkest Africa and discover a beautiful but evil queen who has found the secret to eternal life and youth. The novel traffics in various racist tropes: while Ayesha rules over dark-skinned cannibals, she herself is white since who but white people could have built the engineering marvels in which she resides?

The excerpt we read allowed us to see Orientalizing, exoticizing and brutalizing at work. The dark savages make it clear that the country needs British civilization whereas the beautiful queen adds an emotional dimension to conquest: Brits prove their manhood by conquering the feminized landscape. One of the students noted British colonists venturing to the Americas in the 1600s were also fed this drama, seeing the New World almost as a virgin (Virginia) to be mastered. “Oh my America, my new found land,” rhapsodizes John Donne as he watches his lover strip down in his poem “To His Mistress  Going to Bed.”

If our Orientalizing tells us more about ourselves than the colonized, what do we learn about 19th century Brits. Well, being sexually repressed, their sexual imaginations ran rampant when they learned about Middle Eastern polygamy and harems, even though—in real life—those were as tightly regulated as social regulations always are. Here’s Haggard’s own rampant imagining in a scene where She does a virtual striptease for the narrator:

Then all of a sudden the long, corpse-like wrappings fell from her to the ground, and my eyes travelled up her form, now only robed in a garb of clinging white that did but serve to show its perfect and imperial shape, instinct with a life that was more than life, and with a certain serpent-like grace that was more than human. On her little feet were sandals, fastened with studs of gold. Then came ankles more perfect than ever sculptor dreamed of. About the waist her white kirtle was fastened by a double-headed snake of solid gold, above which her gracious form swelled up in lines as pure as they were lovely, till the kirtle ended on the snowy argent of her breast, whereon her arms were folded. I gazed above them at her face, and—I do not exaggerate—shrank back blinded and amazed. I have heard of the beauty of celestial beings, now I saw it; only this beauty, with all its awful loveliness and purity, was evil—at least, at the time, it struck me as evil. How am I to describe it? I cannot—simply I cannot!

One of the students pointed out that Haggard is engaged in the kind of cataloguing of body parts that earlier poets practiced, most notably Andrew Marvell in “To His Coy Mistress.”

Although Haggard is fairly lightweight while Joseph Conrad is major talent, there are some surprising similarities. Conrad too talks about barbarous savages and beautiful women at the heart of “the dark continent.” First, barbarism. Conrad’s narrator imagines Romans, newly arrived after Julius Caesar’s conquest, gazing about in horrified fascination:

Imagine him here—the very end of the world, a sea the color of lead, a sky the color of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina—and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages,—precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink. No Falernian wine here, no going ashore. Here and there a military camp lost in a wilderness, like a needle in a bundle of hay—cold, fog, tempests, disease, exile, and death—death skulking in the air, in the water, in the bush. They must have been dying like flies here….He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

And then there’s an alluring female, although Conrad’s “wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman” has the same skin color as her subjects. So I guess that’s some progress:

She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous ornaments. She carried her head high; her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to the knee, brass wire gauntlets to the elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck; bizarre things, charms, gifts of witch-men, that hung about her, glittered and trembled at every step. She must have had the value of several elephant tusks upon her. She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. And in the hush that had fallen suddenly upon the whole sorrowful land, the immense wilderness, the colossal body of the fecund and mysterious life seemed to look at her, pensive, as though it had been looking at the image of its own tenebrous and passionate soul.

Notice how Marlow sees her as a personification of “the immense wilderness” itself. She represents “mysterious and fecund life” whereas the “dark continent” possesses a “tenebrous and passionate soul.” For this woman, ivory hunter Kurtz has abandoned his angelic and ethereal fiancé, along with his mission to civilize and convert the heathen.

Back again to how Orientalizing, exoticizing, and barbarizing the Other is a self-reveal. The Victorians had tied their manhood to conquest, which is easy to do if your empire is expanding. The explorers in She are manly men—lion-like Leo Vince is compared to a god—and while Ayesha may dominate others, she falls all over herself to please him. At the same time, back at the home front, the suffragette movement was on the rise and many women were no longer willing to play “the angel in the home” (Kurtz’s fiancé excepted, which is why Marlow admires her so much). Furthermore, doubts were beginning to set in about empire-building itself, especially with the excesses of King Leopold in the Belgian Congo and with the expansionist Boer War in South Africa.

To be sure, Haggard’s novel has no problem with colonialism and doesn’t even mention its monetary benefits. But Conrad saw up close the greed and barbarism of the colonists, which seriously undermined the façade of bringing civilization and Christianity to Africa—just as, in Francis Ford Coppola’s remake of the novel, the on-the-ground reality of the Vietnam War brought into question America’s expressed intention to spread democracy. So where Haggard can treat British colonialism as a boyish lark, Conrad is plunged into existential despair.

There’s a problem, of course, with using another culture as mere backdrop for your anguished self-doubt. In a famous essay that we’ll be reading next week, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe takes Conrad to task for treating Africans as props in an internal drama. But Conrad is at least grappling with substantive issues. As I write in my book, “if you want to understand the crisis of capitalism, Heart of Darkness is a good book to study. Just don’t read it to understand Africa.”

The bottom line here is that literature of various sorts can be used both to support and to question colonialist projects—and also, as we will see next week with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to push back against them. It’s why courses like this, putting students in touch with literature from different cultures around the globe, are so important.

On a personal note: It so turns out that I am one degree of separation from Cecil Rhodes, the great imperialist who dreamed of a continent-long British railway stretching “from Capetown to Cairo” and for whom Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) was named. So my own family history is tied up with the colonialist enterprise.

Here’s the story: My great grandfather, Edwin Fulcher, was an accountant for a South African diamond mine when Rhodes was there. Family lore has it that at one time they were the only two Englishmen in the small town where they resided.

This would have been in the 1890s when Rhodes was using his political power to expropriate land from Black Africans. He was also using his monopoly power to take over British-owned mines so I’m thinking it might have been more of a chance encounter, with my great grandfather seeing what Rhodes was up to. He was not a fan. My grandmother, who in some ways was a sweet and very Victorian woman–somewhat like Kurtz’s fiancé, come to think of it–would have been a little girl. 

Eventually Fulcher’s accounting partner would run off with their funds, forcing the family to relocate. They ended up in Evanston, Illinois, where my grandmother met and married Alfred Bates.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed