First They Came for Toni Morrison, Then…

By Robin Bates | Published: November 3, 2021

Thursday

I don’t know the degree to which attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved contributed to the GOP’s victories in Virginia Tuesday night. To the extent that education was a voting issue, I suspect the Democrats’ losses had more to do with people feeling unhappy about continuing Covid-caused chaos in the schools, for which they blamed the party in power. But Republican Glenn Youngkin was definitely employing racist dog whistles, which apparently never get old in American politics. The trick is to attack Black people while pretending to care about public safety or children’s education or some other noble cause.

Nevertheless, the idea that any literature that makes students “uncomfortable” is now red meat for aspiring rightwing politicians is disturbing. It leaves teachers and school administrators hunkering down, hoping to fly beneath the radar as Trumpists go looking for something to sink their teeth into.

Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri, thankfully, offers us a little levity. Before the election, she imagined what school reading lists would look like if (as in fact has happened) Youngkin were elected governor. The column begins cheerfully:

Hello, everyone! We’re going to have a great year! Some minor, barely noticeable adjustments to the curriculum have taken place since Glenn Youngkin took office. This is a college-level class in which we’re supposed to be tackling challenging material. But you may remember the Glenn Youngkin commercial starring the mother who was trying to stop “Beloved” from being taught in her senior son’s AP English class on the grounds that he thought it was “disgusting and gross” and “gave up on it.” Anyway, he supported that kind of parental control over the curriculum, so we’ve had to tweak just a couple of things!

Now for some of her imagined tweaks:

Below please find our reading list new and improved reading list after being forced to bend to every concern from a parent:
—The Odyssey mutilation and abuse of alcohol, blood drinking
–Brideshead Revisited not sure what’s going on with that teddy bear; house named after something that should be saved for marriage
–The Handmaid’s Tale everything about book was fine except its classification as ‘dystopia’
–The Catcher in the Rye anti-Ronald Reagan somehow though we’re not sure how
–The Importance of Being Earnest includes a disturbing scene where a baby is abandoned in a train station in a handbag and the people in the play regard this as the subject of mirth
–Candide buttock cannibalism
–Don Quixote makes fun of somebody for attacking a wind-or-solar-based energy source
–Great Expectations convict presented sympathetically
–Les Miserables see above
–King Lear violence and it’s suggested that there are scenarios where parents actually do not know best
–The Sun Also Rises offensive to flat-Earthers
–Death of a Salesman features a White man to whom attention is not paid

The mother who led the attack on Beloved said that the book gave her son nightmares. Yes, literature is filled with nightmare-inducing scenes. Once scene Petri may have in mind is this one from Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops:

Neither reply nor pity came from him,
but in one stride he clutched at my companions
and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies
to beat their brains out, spattering the floor.
Then he dismembered them and made his meal,
gaping and crunching like a mountain lion–
everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones.
We cried aloud, lifting our hands to Zeus,
powerless, looking on at this appalled;
but Kyklops went on filling up his belly
with manflesh and great gulps of whey,
then lay down like a mast among his sheep.

I remember, as a high school student, reading this scene with horrified fascination. I also was riveted by Raskolnikov taking an axe to the old lady in Crime and Punishment. I gazed in horror as Milton’s Satan rapes his own daughter (Sin), who thereupon gives birth to Death, who then rapes his own mother, blasting her vagina and giving birth to hounds who live there, howling incessantly. And then there was Oedipus, who when he learns he has committed both patricide and incest blinds himself with his mother/wife’s brooches.

We’re trying to figure people out in our teenage years, and we get a sense of humanity’s darker side when we encounter such works. We read and we survive. High schoolers are tough that way. Our parents, however, although normally silent, swing into action when race and sex are involved.

If “student discomfort” is the new criteria about whether certain books should be taught, then we are indeed on a slippery slope. Petri makes this clear in her conclusion:

Nope, sorry, we aren’t reading anymore. A parent complained that the books on the reading list transported them to different times and places against their will and forced them to imagine the lives of people different than themselves. This is like kidnapping and probably also brainwashing, and we can’t possibly read any texts that do this.

We’re looking forward to engaging with complex, challenging texts that will teach us to read critically, write compellingly and look at the world with new eyes sitting here staring at the wall thinking about what it might have been like to read books all semester long!

When parents “protect” their kids against these books, they risk turning them into frightened adults who fear tough conversations and retreat into reactionary, fear-based politics. The nation is impoverished when this happens.

Further note: Lest you think I exaggerate about the passage from Paradise Lost, here is an excerpt. Sin is explaining to her father Satan what happened after he raped her and she gave birth to Death. First, here’s Milton’s description of her:

The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair,               
But ended foul in many a scaly fold,
Voluminous and vast–a serpent armed
With mortal sting. About her middle round
A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked
With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung
A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb,
And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled
Within unseen.

And now for her birthing story, which is a delivery table nightmare

“At last this odious offspring whom thou seest,
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way,
Tore through my entrails, that, with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transformed: but he my inbred enemy
Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
Made to destroy. I fled, and cried out Death!
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded Death!
I fled; but he pursued (though more, it seems,
Inflamed with lust than rage), and, swifter far,
Me overtook, his mother, all dismayed,
And, in embraces forcible and foul
Engendering with me, of that rape begot
These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry
Surround me, as thou saw’st–hourly conceived
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me; for, when they list, into the womb
That bred them they return, and howl, and gnaw
My bowels, their repast; then, bursting forth
Afresh, with conscious terrors vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.
Before mine eyes in opposition sits.

The endlessly proliferating hounds are a powerful expression of how sin endlessly engenders sin. I’ve never heard of parents objecting to English teachers teaching the episode.

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Holding on to Our Imperiled Humanity

By Robin Bates | Published: November 2, 2021
Eero Jarnefelt, “Portrait of Arvid Jarnefelt” (Finland, 1888)

Wednesday

My friend Rebecca Adams alerted me to an American Scholar article in which a retired English professor, James A. W. Heffernan, makes a compelling case for the humanities: without literature, he contends, we lose touch with our humanity.

The article begins with the latest alarming stats on literature majors:

The Summer 2021 newsletter of the Modern Language Association reports a troubling statistic about American colleges and universities: from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded in modern languages and literature has plunged by 29 percent. “Where Have All the Majors Gone?” asks the article. 

Then  Heffernan asks a question very much in the spirit of this blog:

But here’s a more pragmatic question: what sort of dividends does the study of literature pay, out there in the real world?

Is literature the ideal major for future entrepreneurs? Heffernan considers the question and decides no. On the plus side, he says, there are the 15 different perspectives that one encounters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which theoretically prepares one to

develop the kind of adaptability that it takes to succeed in business, where the budding entrepreneur must learn how to satisfy customers with various needs and where he or she must also be ever ready to adapt to changing needs and changing times.

Heffernan, however, then counters,

If all you want is entrepreneurial adaptability, you can probably gain it much more efficiently by going to business school. You don’t need a novel by Faulkner—or anyone else.

I’m going to disagree with Heffernan here. My eldest son, who majored in Theatre, is very entrepreneurial, even though he has never taken a business course. Darien is in charge of all internal and external communications for a thriving company, and a major part of his job is figuring out what other people need and how to mediate between different departments to get the best out of everyone. When he was acting in college productions, he wasn’t thinking that this is how he would put his major to use, but he now reports that he uses his theatre training every day at work.

I also reject Heffernan’s next argument, which which is that majoring in literature makes you a better writer. Again, he first gives a pro answer before following it up with a con. Here’s the argument for:

To study literature is not just to see the rules of grammar at work but to discover such things as the symmetry of parallel structure and the concentrated burst of metaphor: two prime instruments of organization. Henry Adams once wrote that “nothing in education is more astonishing than the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Literature shows us how to animate facts, and still more how to make them cooperate, to work and dance together toward revelation.

Now the con:

Yet literature can be highly complex. Given its complexity, given all the ways in which poems, plays, and novels resist as well as provoke our desire to know what they mean, the study of literature once again invites the charge of inefficiency. If you just want to know how to make the written word get you a job, make you a sale, or charm a venture capitalist, you don’t need to study the gnomic verses of Emily Dickinson or the intricate ironies of Jonathan Swift. All you need is a good textbook on writing and plenty of practice.

I take even stronger exception to this than I did to the first point and use my own life as an example. My first fulltime job following graduation was as a journalist for a small-town newspaper. I started behind where I would have been had I majored in journalism. But having seen many different forms of writing in my history major and English minor, I learned very quickly the style I needed for this one. In very short order, I was writing 10-20 articles a week. Indeed, my whole life has involved adapting to new writing challenges, including composing a daily blog.

Heffernan next mentions literature teaching us “moral lessons” (argument for) but asks what kind of moral can be extracted from the death of Cordelia in King Lear (argument against). Having made the point, however, he then goes on to argue that literature helps us hold on to our humanity when we are at risk of losing it.

His case is that, because literature captures humans in all their complexity, it can both offer us a refuge from the world’s inhumanity and help us confront it, often in complex and contradictory ways. This is a view I endorse wholeheartedly. Here he is making his argument:

As a refuge from such horrors, literature can offer us visions or at least glimpses of beauty, harmony, and love. They are part of what Seamus Heaney called “the redress of poetry”—compensation for the misery, cruelty, and brutality that human beings ceaselessly inflict on one another. But literature at its most powerful is never just a balloon ride to fantasy, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. Rather than taking flight from our inhumanity, great literature confronts it even while somehow keeping alive its faith in our humanity. What is the moral of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the story of a formerly enslaved Black woman who killed her own infant daughter to spare her from a life of slavery and sexual exploitation? In a world of merciless inhumanity, can infanticide become an expression of love?

This is the kind of question literature insists on asking. At the heart of the humanities lies humanity, which stubbornly insists on measuring everything in terms of its impact on human life.

Heffernan goes on to mention Robert Oppenheimer’s opposition to the further development of nuclear warfare after having been a key figure in the invention of the atom bomb. The article could have strengthened its case by mentioning the profound influence that the poetry of George Herbert had upon the scientist. I have written about that here.

The article concludes by turning to Albert Camus’s The Plague, which Heffernan sees as capturing the struggle to hold on to our humanity, even when everything seems out to destroy it. He quotes the doctor who does all he can to save lives, even though the situation appears hopeless:

“Despite their personal afflictions,” he says, [the war against terror] must be waged “by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”

Heffernan concludes,

Having spent trillions of dollars fighting terrorism with bullets and bombs, we need literature and the humanities now more than ever, because they strive to heal, to nurture the most priceless of all our possessions: our humanity.

My only argument with Heffernan is that, after having asked what dividends literature pays out, he offers only this one. Immense though it may be, it will not reverse the slide in English majors. After all, if you need literature to persuade people that they are at risk of losing their humanity, then how are you going to persuade non-readers of their peril in the first place? You need multiple incentives to get people to read.

I’m for an all-of-the-above approach. Yes, literature will help you succeed in the work world; yes, it will make you a more effective communicator—and yes, it will help you become more fully human in a world that is in desperate need of three-dimensional humans.

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Mixed Emotions about My Alma Mater

By Robin Bates | Published: November 1, 2021
Carleton College’s Arboretum

Tuesday

I have just returned from a weekend at Carleton College, where I was a member of the committee planning our 50th reunion. (The reunion isn’t until June of 2023 but it’s an elaborate affair, resembling at times an academic conference, so we need a long head start.) Carleton is a very good small college in the Midwest, and as I visited old haunts, the cold October air penetrating my limbs, I was overwhelmed by a flood of emotions.

I’m having difficulty sorting them out. There were fond memories, but I also experienced a sadness and a pain resembling dread. At times I was on the verge of tears. Perhaps I’m feeling my age, I thought, or mourning a lost innocence. But though the world is dark now, it was dark then too, what with the seemingly endless Vietnam War and corruption in Nixon’s White House. To figure out my internal state, I’m turn to poems that seem to capture the emotions.

D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano” was one poem that came to mind as I walked around. Hearing a woman singing, the poet is thrown back to a time in his childhood when his mother was playing the piano as he sat at her feet:

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

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

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

Another poem I thought of was A. E. Housman’s “Into my heart an air that kills.” Many of the Shropshire Lad poems are filled with intense longing, but this may surpass them all. The “air that kills” captures some of the pain I was feeling:

Into my heart an air that kills 
  From yon far country blows: 
What are those blue remembered hills, 
  What spires, what farms are those? 

That is the land of lost content,
  I see it shining plain, 
The happy highways where I went 
  And cannot come again.

Later, I thought of Dylan Thomas, another master of nostalgia. In his seasonally appropriate “Poem in October,” he remembers being a boy in the summer, before “the weather turned round.” Here are the concluding stanzas:

   And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
   These were the woods the river and sea
           Where a boy
       In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
       And the mystery
           Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.

   And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
   Joy of the long dead child sang burning
           In the sun.
       It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
       O may my heart’s truth
           Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

I think the Thomas poem gets closest to explaining my emotional state, since Lawrence’s desire to return to childhood isn’t my desire, nor did I ever see Carleton as a land of content. But I do remember times there when “the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide/And the mystery/Sang alive/Still in the water and the singingbirds.” That’s how the world looked when Julia and I would take our sleeping bags and spend warm May nights together in Carleton’s arboretum. Our love has matured and deepened since then—we too will be celebrating 50 years in 2023—but on Saturday, as I walked through the college’s nature preserve, I was hit with the contrast. The youthful intensity, the “joy of the long dead child,” is no longer there.

Thomas’s poem echoes Wordsworth’s Intimation of Immortality, where the Romantic poet wonders, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Thomas, meanwhile, hopes that, even though the town may be “leaved with October blood,” summer passion will “still be sung/On this high hill in a year’s turning.”

Don’t misunderstand what I say here. I love Julia deeply and I wouldn’t want our relationship to return to its earlier stages, when there were painful misunderstandings to go along with the euphoric highs. I like the serenity and the mutual understanding we have managed to achieve. But our lives are now leaved with October blood and don’t sing with the intensity of summer. It could well be that my melancholy over the weekend arose from the absence of something that once was but that cannot come again.

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A Texas Pol Attacks Cider House Rules

By Robin Bates | Published: October 31, 2021
Caine, Maguire in Cider House Rules

Monday

This is an updated and expanded version of an October 3, 2012 and a January 23, 2013 post.

In last week’s post about political attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I added a note about a Texas lawmaker who has compiled a list of 850 books (!) that he wants Texas school libraries to (1) report if they own and (2) justify why. One of those books is John Irving’s Cider House Rules, whose sensitive handling of abortion is what has probably drawn the man’s ire.

Before explaining why banning the novel would be an abomination, here’s the background of Texas’s latest political stunt. According to the Texas Tribune,

A Republican state lawmaker has launched an investigation into Texas school districts over the type of books they have, particularly if they pertain to race or sexuality or “make students feel discomfort.”

State Rep. Matt Krause, in his role as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an Oct. 25, letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.

Here’s what the inquiry involves:

Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law” designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools.

A number of the books contain information about gender and sexuality and some are about abortion. There are also books about America’s racial history. And then there are the books that I’ve heard of, including

the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Morrison’s novels don’t make the list yet, but since they fit two of Krause’s criteria (they pertain to race and they make students uncomfortable), it may be only a matter of time. Stay tuned.

But back to abortion. Texas’s new law incentivizing people to sue abortion abettors and collect the $10,000 fines levied has essentially ended abortions in the state, taking us back to pre-Roe v Wade times. The Guttmacher Institute reminds us what it was like back then:

Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.

One stark indication of the prevalence of illegal abortion was the death toll. In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher.

Abortion plays a significant role in the Irving novel, which has sympathetic characters on different sides of the debate. On the one hand, there is obstetrician, orphanage director, and illegal abortion doctor Wilbur Larch, who doesn’t originally set out to perform abortions but begins doing so when he sees that women are determined to have them regardless. He knows that he can at least abort their fetuses safely.

Then there is Homer Wells, the orphan he raises to be his right-hand man. Under his tutelage, Homer becomes a superb doctor—better than Larch himself—but he leaves Larch after learning about the abortions. His moment of crisis occurs when, trying to save the full-term fetus of a mother who has been stabbed, he and Larch discover that it has been stabbed as well.  Gazing upon the dead body, Homer decides that fetuses at all stages of development are babies. The developmental stages as presented in Gray’s Anatomy suddenly look different to him:

Homer Wells had seen the products of conception in many stages of development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial form as to be barely recognizable, too. Why the old black-and-whit drawings should have affected him so strongly, he could not say. In Gray’s there was the profile view of the head of a human embryo, estimated at twenty-seven days old. Not quick, as Dr. Larch would be quick to point out, and not recognizably human, either: what would be the spine was cocked, like a wrist, and where the knuckles of the fist (above the wrist) would be, there was the ill-formed face of a fish (the kind that lives below light, is never caught, could give you nightmares). The undersurface of the head of the embryo gaped like an eel—the eyes were at the sides of the head, as if they could protect the creature from an attack from any direction. In eight weeks, though still not quick, the fetus has a nose and a mouth; it has an expression, thought Homer Wells. And with this discovery—that a fetus, as early as eight weeks, has an expression—Homer Wells felt in the presence of what others call a soul.

This perspective prompts Homer to break with the man he loves, although he doesn’t condemn him:

He wasn’t blaming Dr. Larch, either. Homer felt there was nothing as simple as anyone’s fault involved; it was not Larch’s fault—Larch did what he believed in. If Wilbur Larch was a saint to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna, he was both a saint and a father to Homer Wells. Larch knew what he was doing—and for whom. But that quick and not-quick stuff: it didn’t work for Homer Wells. You can call it a fetus, or an embryo, or the products of conception, thought Homer Wells, but whatever you call it, it’s alive. And whatever you do to it, Homer thought—and whatever you call what you do—you’re killing it. He looked at the severed pulmonary artery, which was so perfectly displayed in the open chest of the baby from Three Mile Falls. Let Larch call it whatever he wants, thought Homer Wells. It’s his choice—if it’s a fetus, to him, that’s fine. It’s a baby to me, thought Homer Wells. If Larch has a choice, I have a choice, too.

His choice is to abandon obstetrics, for which he has a genius, and go work on an apple farm. He refuses to yield, even when Larch sends him letters attempting to persuade him to return. Larch writes,

If abortions were legal, you could refuse—in fact, given your beliefs, you should refuse. But as long as they’re against the law, how can you refuse? How can you allow yourself a choice in the matter when there are so many women who haven’t the freedom to make the choice themselves? The women have no choice. I know you know that’s not right, but how can you—you of all people, knowing what you know–HOW CAN YOU FEEL FREE TO CHOOSE NOT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT FREE TO GET OTHER HELP?  You have to help them because you know how. Think about who’s going to help them if you refuse.” Wilbur Larch was so tired that if he had allowed himself to go to sleep, the bark would have grown over his eyes.

“Here is the trap you are in,” Dr. Larch wrote to Homer. “And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims and so are you.”

To graphically make Larch’s point, the book gives us an instance of a woman who is dying after stuffing things up her vagina in a failed self-abortion attempt:

Dr. Larch bent so close to the speculum, he had to hold his breath. The smell of sepsis and putrefaction was strong enough to gag him if he breathed or swallowed, and the familiar, fiery colors of her infection (even clouded by her discharge) were dazzling enough to blind the intrepid or the untrained. But Wilbur Larch started to breathe again, slowly and regularly; it was the only way to keep a steady hand. He just kept looking and marveling at the young woman’s inflamed tissue; it looked hot enough to burn the world. Now do you see, Homer? Larch asked himself. Through the speculum, he felt her heat against his eye.


Despite the letters, however, Homer styas away. This leads to one final letter from Larch, who deliberately overdoses on ether because he knows he is dying from his addiction to it:

1. YOU KNOW EVERYTHING I KNOW, PLUS WHAT YOU’VE TAUGHT YOURSELF. YOU’RE A BETTER DOCTOR THAN I AM—AND YOU KNOW IT.

2. YOU THINK WHAT I DO IS PLAYING GOD. BUT YOU PRESUME YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS. DO YOU THINK THAT’S NOT PLAYING GOD?

3. I AM NOT SORRY—NOT FOR ANYTHING I’VE DONE (ONE ABORTION I DID NOT PERFORM IS THE ONLY ONE I’M SORRY FOR). I’M NOT EVEN SORRY THAT I LOVE YOU.

Homer returns to take up Larch’s practice after he himself performs an abortion on a girl who has been raped by her father. In this case, since his son is in love with the girl, he has direct experience with the conflict between an abstract stance and a particular case. After that, he plays a double game. On the one hand, there is what he tells the board that hires him:

On the matter of abortions, [Homer] surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, [Homer] assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law.

On the other, he privately performs abortions for women who come to him for help. The book tells us,

Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal—that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)…

Moral rules, about which many can disagree when it comes to abortion, must never jettison individual circumstance altogether or they risk succumbing to an inhuman purity. In such instances, morality becomes more about the ideologue’s desire for certainty than a compass to help us negotiate the shoals of human complexity. Or as Charlotte Bronte says in the epigraph that opens Cider House Rules,

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

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Reading Poetry as Religious Experience

By Robin Bates | Published: October 30, 2021
Ishibashi Kazunori, Lady Reading Poetry

Spiritual Sunday

I have been reporting on my responses to Thor Magnus Tangeras’s important new study Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences (Anthem, 2020) and today note a startling turn his argument takes. In the process of analyzing five readers who had life-changing encounters with books, at one point he shifts to religious language, describing their experience as “an evolving and deepening devotional transaction.”

The language doesn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier, Tangeras has turned to American psychologist William James’s study of religious conversion to understand how transformation happens. For James, the key concept is surrender. Just as book lovers surrender to the world of the book, so do religious devotees surrender themselves to God:

When surveying the history of the different narratives of Christianity, [James] finds a gradual circling in of one particular experience: the crisis of self-surrender and the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness. ‘The crisis of self-surrender is the turning-point in two different senses: The critical point around which James’s investigation turns, and the point where the life of the individual is transformed from egocentricity to allocentricity, from forlornness to redemption: ‘In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life.” Crisis-surrender-redemption is at the heart of James’s phenomenology of transformation and constitutes his narrative of narratives.

There are a number of thinkers who talk about surrendering to a work of literature. One of my favorites is phenomenologist Georges Poulet, who dramatically describes absorption or immersion in a book as follows:

As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me with its unreality.

Tolstoy too weighs in on the phenomenon, noting that we are “infected” with an author’s ideas and emotions and declaring, “The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.”

We see Tangeras also looking to frame reading as a quasi-religious experience when, in reflecting upon one of his readers, he compares what she is doing to the Medieval  practice of Lectio Divina, where religious figures would see themselves tasting and digesting the Scriptures to inscribe them on their hearts. Speaking of his subjects, Tangeras says that

at some point these readers unreservedly give themselves over to, and surrender to, the experience, and become fully involved, body, heart and mind. Furthermore, in this evolving and deepening devotional transaction, these readers are deeply moved. The experience of a panoply of feelings that traditionally have straddled aesthetic and religious domains – such as wonder, awe, tenderness, jubilation and faith – come into full awareness. When this happens, the expanded affect-consciousness allows for an altered sense of self in which the crisis can be resolved.

Tangeras’s thoughts here arise in part from his analysis of a reader reporting on how Matthew Arnold’s “Buried Life” pulled her out of a severe depression. Here’s an excerpt from the poem:

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress’d.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘t is not true!
And then we will no more be rack’d
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafen’d ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.

And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.

And here’s some the conversation that Tangeras had with his subject about the poem’s impact:

Thor: ‘And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.’ So that line there is to me what the authentic self would be, wouldn’t it?
Sue: Yes. ‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast.’ Bolt. Shot. Back – I’ve never really understood what a bolt shot back means, but it sounds so … right. I think it’s like, I imagine it to be a shock, a shocking awakening. Like a sort of an aha moment, a sitting up moment. Or a … it was like a bolt was shot back somewhere in my breast,
Thor: It seems you have a clear felt sense of what that means.

Sue: Yeah, I think I’ve got a felt sense of it, but I would find it a bit hard to describe as well. ‘And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again’, that’s that awakening of the deepest part of yourself, the bit of you that just … if things aren’t used, or noticed, they can just sort of fade away, can’t they? So a lost pulse is like something that’s there, but it’s getting weaker and weaker because it’s not ever attended to. Hmmm, so it’s not putting something new into him, it’s not putting within, he’s reawakening something that is there already, it’s always there.

And elsewhere:

Sue: …but something about just that very first bit of this poem, it felt like it changed everything really.
Thor: It changed everything?
Sue: Well, it felt like it just changed everything, that suddenly I was awake to this possibility of what poetry might do. I mean it did feel that big actually, yeah… [Since then] I’ve grown tremendously, and I can’t imagine my life without poetry now, you know. I don’t even want to think about my life without poetry now. So yeah, I just think it was the most magical, amazing stuff.

And finally:

Sue: I keep on using the work impact, it’s had a really significant impact, definitely. Has it changed my life? It has really, because it’s opened me up to the power of the written word, so in that respect it has really. I don’t know if it’s saved my life, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, I mean, I think my life was already on a sort of upward trajectory by the time I read it….But the poem has really helped me. I love it, because – I mean I love it for itself and I think it’s a great poem – but it also has a special resonance for me in that it opened something up in me. Something that I will always carry with me. So I don’t think of it so much as saving my life, I think of it more as, I don’t know, reminding me of something important, getting back to sort of excavating something ‘from the soul’s subterranean depth’.

When we become immersed or absorbed in a great poem or story, soul work is going on, which is why “devotional transaction” seems right. Arnold, interestingly enough, thought that poetry would one day replace religion as the mauor way values were instilled in the population. While reading literature may not be a religious act, it it is definitely a spiritual one.

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Coleridge’s Nightmare LIFE-IN-DEATH

By Robin Bates | Published: October 28, 2021
Gustave Doré, Life-in-Death playing dice with Death

Friday – Halloween Edition

Reposted and reworked from October 31, 2013

Have you ever thought of Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a Halloween poem? Along with its gothic elements, it has at least one stanza that describes the trick-or-treating experience of timid children.

The poem is filled with spooky images. To begin with, there are the two dice players aboard the skeleton ship who are competing for the mariner. The winner, “Life in Death,” has a great Halloween get-up:

Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she,
Who thicks man’s blood with cold.

And then there are all those corpses—the mariner’s former crew mates–who are reanimated to man the ship. Think of them as the living dead:

The loud wind never reached the ship,
Yet now the ship moved on!
Beneath the lightning and the Moon
The dead men gave a groan.

They groaned, they stirred, they all uprose,
Nor spake, nor moved their eyes;
It had been strange, even in a dream,
To have seen those dead men rise.

The helmsman steered, the ship moved on;
Yet never a breeze up-blew;
The mariners all ‘gan work the ropes,
Where they were wont to do;
They raised their limbs like lifeless tools—
We were a ghastly crew.

The body of my brother’s son
Stood by me, knee to knee:
The body and I pulled at one rope,
But he said nought to me.

The mariner’s description of how the corpses creep him out is very much like how a child on Halloween imagines monsters behind every tree:

Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And turns no more his head;
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

So, are you scared now? But wait a moment, I have something even more frightening. What if Coleridge’s LIFE IN DEATH is actually a metaphor for debilitating depression? What if, after such a promising opening to his voyage, Coleridge is in the grip of a mental breakdown which makes all the world around him seem dead and sterile. “The very deep did rot,” he says at point. He feels so hopeless that even praying is beyond his grasp. As he will explain it later,

Oh wedding guest, this soul hath been
Alone on a wide, wide sea:
So lonely ’twas, that God himself
Scarce seemed there to be. 

Luckily, for kids going out trick-or-treating, they get to return to a safe home after flirting with fright. In the poem, meanwhile, the monsters turn into something positive. Just as the sea snakes change from “slimy things” to “happy living things” that are stunningly beautiful, so the corpses are revealed to be “a troop of spirits blest” who make beautiful music and then light up the landscape as shining seraphs.

Inspect a monster closely enough and you will find a beautiful soul somewhere within.

Is this the true spirit of Halloween?

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“Beloved” Under Attack Once Again

By Robin Bates | Published: October 27, 2021
Winfrey as Sethe in Beloved

Thursday

First it was caravans, then it was wokeness, then it was Critical Race Theory, and now it’s Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Apparently, Republican candidates have one play and one play only for winning elections: scare your voters by pointing at people of color.

Morrison’s novel, which won her both a Pulitzer and a Nobel, is being used as the closing argument by Glen Youngkin, Republican candidate for Virginia governor. Apparently eight years ago the son of Republican activist Laura Murphy, then a high school senior, claimed to have had nightmares because of the book. What emerged out of his mother’s complaint was a bill that parents could exempt their sons and daughters from reading books with explicit sex scenes. While the bill was passed by the State Assembly, it was then vetoed by Governor Terry McAuliffe, who is running again this year. According to a Washington Post article on the controversy, the Beloved bill (as it was called) “would have made Virginia the first state in the nation to give parents that opt-out power.”

Youngkin is now using McAuliffe’s veto to turn voters against him. He is also playing on McAuliffe’s assertion that parents shouldn’t be telling teachers what to teach. Youngkin has framed this as McAuliffe wanting “to silence parents because he doesn’t believe they should have a say in their child’s education.”

In a Youngkin ad, Laura Murphy is seen saying, “When my son showed me his reading material, my heart sunk. It was some of the most explicit reading material you can imagine.” McAuliffe has replied that “Youngkin’s closing message of book banning and silencing esteemed Black authors is a racist dog whistle designed to gin up support from the most extreme elements of his party–mainly his top endorser and surrogate, Donald Trump.”

I consider Beloved to be one of America’s greatest novels—up there with The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby—but set that aside for the moment. I’ll say first that the Virginia situation is very familiar because I once found myself battling a school superintendent over another Morrison novel, Song of Solomon, in which some of the same dynamics were in play.

I write about the incident here but to sum up the highlights, a high school English teacher who was a former student of mine paired up Huckleberry Finn and Song of Solomon in an AP class, an inspired coupling given that both are coming-of-age novels involving young men grappling with race in America. (Indeed, Morrison admires and has defended Huckleberry Finn.) A student objected to three pages of explicit trash-talking between the protagonist Milkman and some country folk, who are testing his manhood. (Milkman passes the test and is accepted by the group.) The student’s mother photocopied the offending passages and took it to the county’s superintendent of schools, who decreed that St. Mary’s County school teachers could no longer teach the book in their classes.

I went to talk to the superintendent but was palmed off on two of her assistants. In our conversation, I noted (1) that parents should be thrilled that such a book as Song of Solomon was being taught as it is about a young man finding purpose in his life; (2) that they were sending a terrible message to the African American community by banning a work by the first African American author to win a Nobel prize; and (3) that if they banned Song of Solomon today, might they not ban Beloved tomorrow?

My visit didn’t do any good and, as far as I can tell, teachers are still forbidden from teaching Song of Solomon in St. Mary’s County schools. I haven’t heard about Beloved.

Back to the novel. Beloved is about an escaped slave who, to save herself and her children from being taken back into slavery, kills her eldest daughter and attempts to kill the others. That daughter comes back to haunt her, breaking up her family and driving her half crazy.

The novel, in other words, really is the stuff of nightmares—but then, much of literature is. Slavery was such a horrifying institution that it sometimes caused people, Blacks as well as Whites, to do dreadful things. When I wonder what traumatized Laura Murphy’s son, however, I wonder if what most oppressed him was race oppression making Whites look bad.

For although there are some good Whites in the book, there are some awful ones as well. For instance, there’s a scene where the slaveowner’s sons force Sethe, who is about to deliver, to suckle them with her breastmilk. When she informs on them to her horrified mistress, she is beaten so badly that a permanent tree pattern appears to be etched into her back. As she recounts the episode,

“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak for her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.”

“They used cowhide on youds?”

“And they took my milk.”

“They beat you and you was pregnant?”

“And they took my milk.

We are living in a society right now where anything racial that makes certain Whites feel uncomfortable is a cause for offense. We’ve seen videos of police being called on Black birdwatchers, on Black picnickers, on Blacks standing in their front yard and Blacks entering their apartment complexes. Ahmaud Arbery was shot for jogging, Trayvon Martin for returning from the store.

And it’s getting worse. Increasingly we’re seeing parents complain when their kids are taught Civil Rights history, while Texas history books have begun to soft pedal slavery. It seems inevitable that people would get around to Toni Morrison sooner or later.

Literature, after all, packs a wallop. And just as Edgar Allan Poe (in the words of Harold Bloom) dreamt America’s nightmares, so Morrison dreams  its racial traumas. African Americans no less than Whites continue to bear the scars of slavery. One imagines Morrison quoting one of her own literary models, William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

If we were truly concerned about raising young people right in this country, English teachers would explain to parents how their children benefit from reading challenging novels like Beloved. Kids are tougher than their parents think and well able to rise to the challenge of difficult material, but to involve the entire community in the education of the young would be to avoid some of the conflicts that we are encountering.

Unfortunately, we are so polarized, and so many Whites are see mere discussions of race as threatening, that I’m becoming pessimistic that such conversations could ever happen. If that’s the case, then we’ll continue to have racial fear-mongering in our politics. And if Beloved is targeted today, other African American classics that remind us of our dark past will find themselves on banned lists tomorrow.

Added note: To make clear the slippery slope we have entered, just today a Texas lawmaker has released a list of 850 books that he wants school districts to investigate, with more to come. As NBC News reports,

A Texas Republican lawmaker has drawn up a list of 850 books on subjects ranging from racism to sexuality that could “make students feel discomfort,” and is demanding that school districts across the state report whether any are in their classrooms or libraries.

State Rep. Matt Krause, R-Fort Worth, also wants to know how many copies of each book the districts have and how much money they spent on them, according to a letter he sent Monday to Lily Laux, deputy commissioner of school programs at the Texas Education Agency, and several school district superintendents.

Krause, who chairs the state’s House Committee on General Investigating, also directed the districts to identify “any other books” that could cause students “guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Toni Morrison isn’t on the list yet but could well be included under “any other books” once the censors get started. The NBC News article mentions some of the fiction that has been included:

Along with the letter, which was first obtained by The Texas Tribune, Krause appended the book list that includes well-known titles like the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

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Nature’s Autumn Jazz Tune

By Robin Bates | Published: October 26, 2021
Jasper Francis Cropsey, Autumn Landscape

Wednesday

The leaves in Tennessee’s Southern Cumberland Mountains are currently in full-change mode, sending me to a poem by my father that I’ve shared in past. Enjoy!

Maple Dance

By Scott Bates

We watch the show
 From our kitchen window–

 Our maple tree’s
 Annual striptease.

 She shimmies
 In the autumn breeze.

 Everything glows
 In the golden sun,

 Everything goes
 Till the dance is done–

 Every leaf
 Of her lamé sheath,

 Every veil
 In the woodwind’s wail,

 Until she’s bare
 In the whistling air

 Her arms held high
 To the rocking sky

 As slender
 In her Giacometti splendor

 As a lightning rod
 For the thunder god

 Who comes
 With his drums,

 His flashing cymbal,
 His rimshot hail,

 His wirebrush snow,
 His white Peugeot,

 To take her
 To his theatre

 Resplendent
 In her ermine fur.

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Hamlet and a Teen Suicide Outbreak

By Robin Bates | Published: October 25, 2021
Dakota Collins as Hamlet in Sewanee production

Tuesday

Yesterday, after seeing a Sewanee student production of Hamlet, I compared Claudius’s successful coup to Donald Trump’s attempted one. Today I’m thinking of the play again after having read a Washington Post article about political turmoil in a polarized Montana town. Not only are the adults fighting about today’s hot button issues but, over the past 16 months, nine of their teenagers have committed suicide, including three since the beginning of the school year. Hamlet’s own suicidal thoughts help us understand what may be going on.

To be sure, Hamlet is no teenager but a young man of about 30. That being said, he can come across as a precocious adolescent, and this was reenforced by Dakota Collins’s superb performance. Through him, Hamlet was androgynous, super sensitive, and somewhat innocent. As a result, I understood much better why he would be so affected by the machinations of those running society and could imagine those Montana school children being similarly affected. As the Post article observes,

No one knows exactly what led the teenagers to end their lives. But people here are thinking: What if the adults in the Flathead, with all their anger, have provided a terrible example for the children?

“We’re such a highly wounded community right now,” said Kyle Waterman, a gay city councilman who received training this year in making a citizen’s arrest in case he feels physically threatened. “It’s been hard to show people we’re here for our kids.”

Now put yourself in Hamlet’s situation. Thinking his father has everything in hand, despite a war with Norway, Hamlet feels free to go away to college. When he returns, however, everything has been turned upside down, with his uncle suddenly his king and stepfather. Claudius and Gertrude want him to shrug off his father’s death and adapt to the new reality but, even before he learns of the “murder most foul,” he wants to erase himself from reality. He even contemplates self-slaughter as everything seems “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable”:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. 

Things, of course, go from bad to worse once Hamlet Sr.’s ghost reports the murder. Already fragile, Hamlet is pushed over the edge. Whatever idealism he had has been shattered, as we see in his discourse with his former friends Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern:

I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me…

As Hamlet figures out that his friends have been set up to spy on him, and as he detects Polonius setting up Ophelia to spy on him as well, he feels less and less able to trust anyone or anything. His mother’s behavior has prompted him to wonder about Ophelia (“frailty, thy name is woman”), and the visiting actors’ ability to feign tears over imaginary characters (“What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?”) only furthers his sense of unreality.

Sensing himself half mad, Hamlet once again thinks upon death in his most well-known soliloquy:

To be, or not to be, that is the question,
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.

Given his active imagination, however, even death doesn’t seem a simple solution. His reasoning, fortunately, has the virtue of forestalling a suicide:

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Faced with conflicting pressures, Hamlet becomes increasingly erratic and high-strung. Like a teenager, he vacillates between crippling self-doubt and precipitous action. Late in the play he reflects upon death once again as he muses upon the skull of a man who played with him as a child. Only at the end of the tragedy does everything become clear to him.

Did those Montana teenagers have a version of Hamlet’s confusion? Did reality to them seem unstable because of the way that adults were behaving? Between Trump unleashing America’s id and a world-wide pandemic affecting every aspect of life, there’s plenty to point to. When the instability of adolescence comes up against adults who are unwilling or unable to provide the necessary support systems–when grown-ups act like teenagers, in other words–tragedy seems inevitable.

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