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Sunday
Integral to the Epiphany story is the long and difficult journey involved. T.S. Eliot emphasizes this in the most famous poem about the magi’s journey, having the speaker observe,
A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year For a journey, and such a long journey: The ways deep and the weather sharp, The very dead of winter.
That’s the way it is with vision quests: to penetrate the veil that separates the numinous from the everyday requires discipline and dedicated effort. But as forbidding as this may sound, there are ways to keep from being overwhelmed. In “For Those Who Have Far to Travel,” poet Jan Richardson notes that “one of the mercies of the road” is that
we see it only by stages as it opens before us, as it comes into our keeping step by single step.
Richardson alerts us to the various guides to which we have access:
to be faithful to the next step; to rely on more than the map; to heed the signposts of intuition and dream; to follow the star that only you will recognize; to keep an open eye for the wonders that attend the path; to press on beyond distractions beyond fatigue beyond what would tempt you from the way.
And at the end, the poet tells us, what you offer up is the gift “that only you can give.” What is this gift? Christina Rossetti tells us in her “Christmas Carol”:
What can I give Him, Poor as I am? — If I were a Shepherd I would bring a lamb; If I were a Wise Man I would do my part, — Yet what I can I give Him, — Give my heart.
Sometimes it takes a journey to discover this heart.
For Those Who Have Far to Travel By Jan Richardson
If you could see the journey whole you might never undertake it; might never dare the first step that propels you from the place you have known toward the place you know not.
Call it one of the mercies of the road: that we see it only by stages as it opens before us, as it comes into our keeping step by single step.
There is nothing for it but to go and by our going take the vows the pilgrim takes: to be faithful to the next step; to rely on more than the map; to heed the signposts of intuition and dream; to follow the star that only you will recognize; to keep an open eye for the wonders that attend the path; to press on beyond distractions beyond fatigue beyond what would tempt you from the way.
There are vows that only you will know; the secret promises for your particular path and the new ones you will need to make when the road is revealed by turns you could not have foreseen.
Keep them, break them, make them again: each promise becomes part of the path; each choice creates the road that will take you to the place where at last you will kneel to offer the gift most needed— the gift that only you can give— before turning to go home by another way.
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Saturday
This year has been momentous in many ways but, on a personal level, the major event was the publication of my book. Last July I announced its forthcoming release while situating it in the context of other like-minded works that have been appearing. I’m not the only one arguing that literature can pack a dangerous punch.
Reprinted from July 3, 2024
I recently completed proofreading the galleys (if that’s what they’re still called) of my forthcoming book, which of course is tremendously exciting. Then I had the slightly unnerving experience of reading a New York Times essay about another soon-to-published book that explores some of the same themes and includes many of the same thinkers and ideas. Like my book, Lyta Gold’s Dangerous Fictions: The Fear of Fantasy and the Invention of Reality is concerned with the recent spate of book bannings, and we both note that there is a long history (2500 years long) of people freaking out over stories.
When similar books come out at the same time, it’s often because authors are tapping into the same zeitgeist or spirit of the times. Nor are Gold and I the only ones: in 2022 Yale Comp Lit Professor Peter Brooks’s published Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.
It’s good there’s a cluster of such books since they’re more likely to capture people’s attention that way. My book will be appearing (I think) sometime this summer whereas Gold’s is slated for an October release.
In today’s post I compare my ideas with Gold’s, especially noting how we arrive as almost diametrically opposite conclusions. Gold notes that the fear of fiction is a cyclical phenomenon, waxing and waning, and she points to various eruptions over the centuries. Then, as I do, she does a deep dive into Plato’s anxieties, which led him to ban the stories of Hesiod and Homer from his utopian republic. In my view, one reason why Plato banned Homer was because he himself was in love with the poet and was frightened over the effect that The Iliad and The Odyssey had over him. When he was in the grip of Homer’s mesmerizing fictions, he had difficulty exercising his “right reason,” which for Plato is philosophy’s highest aim.
Gold believes that fiction causes panic most commonly in democracies. That’s because
the inner lives and motives of others matter a great deal in a democracy, arguably more so than in other political systems where people have less direct control over their social experience — and less freedom of expression. In a democracy, your fellow citizens can organize for social progress or encourage the passage of draconian laws that terrorize minorities. Fear of other people, and how they might work together to shift reality, is the reason the contest over written language so often extends to the realm of make-believe — of fiction. Fiction is the story of other people; this is what makes it dangerous.
I agree with Gold’s point but approach it from the opposing angle, seeing fiction as a powerful tool for progressives. Looking at how Romantic poets like Blake and Wordsworth celebrated the lives of chimney sweeps, shepherds, leech gatherers, and other lower class figures, I write that
the door had been opened for poets and writers to use the Imagination to step beyond their own narrow class boundaries in ways that would have been, well, unimaginable in earlier times. Through literature authors have entered the lives of the marginalized (Walt Whitman), the urban poor (Charles Dickens), American slaves (Harriet Beecher Stowe), Dorset dairy maids (Thomas Hardy), French coalminers (Émile Zola), Nebraska pioneers (Willa Cather), Harlem residents (Langston Hughes), African American sharecroppers (Jean Toomer), African American homosexuals (James Baldwin), bankrupted Oklahoma farmers (John Steinbeck), Laguna Pueblo war veterans (Leslie Marmon Silko), transplanted Pakistanis (Hanif Kureishi), West Indian immigrants (Zadie Smith), American lesbians (Alison Bechdel), and on and on.
Like Gold, I also examine why MAGA is attacking certain books. For instance, if they have repeatedly attacked the novel Beloved, it’s because Toni Morrison addresses two of their sore spots (to put it mildly), America’s dark racial past and a woman claiming control over her own body. (The slave owners steal Sethe’s breast milk and then whip her to an inch of her life.) In the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, a Republican operative complained that her son had been traumatized by being assigned the book in high school, and candidate Glenn Younkin used the story as the final argument in his successful bid.
Gold and I both look at two works that played a role in slave times and the Jim Crow south, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Clansman (which became Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation). Where we differ, however—and it’s a major difference—is that she wants to draw hard and fast lines between literature and life whereas I want to dismantle them. Gold writes,
Fiction writers can insist on having their work judged on its merits and not on whether it provides moral instruction or inculcates the right social value. This isn’t an anti-political stance but, rather, a highly political one. It tells readers to go get their values elsewhere, to stop demanding that fiction provide the difficult labor of soul-making — to do that work themselves.
Now, I agree that literature should not be yoked to an ideological agenda. In fact, a number of thinkers I explore argue specifically against doctrinaire literature, including Sir Philip Sidney, Karl Marx, Frederic Engels, W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Terry Eagleton. But by potentially changing the way people see the world, literature (so I argue) sometimes changes history and so can hardly be separated from morality or social values. In fact, soul-making is exactly what fiction does.
Percy Shelley provides specific examples. The great poets of the past, he says, have sowed the seeds for the ending of slavery and the liberation of women. “It exceeds all imagination,” he writes, “to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.”
“Poets,” the Romantic poet concludes, “are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Or to quote someone who is not an activist poet, Harold Bloom makes a compelling case that Shakespeare changed the fundamental way that humans see themselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Bloom writes in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human that the Bard 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…”
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, meanwhile, argues that literature is essential in a multicultural democracy for producing informed voters. How else are we to empathize with fellow citizens who are otherwise unlike us?
Sounds like soul-making to me.
Further thought: Gold appears to throw in her lot with the “art for art’s sake” crowd and elevate aesthetics above all, concluding her piece with Oscar Wilde’s contention, in his preface to Picture of Dorian Gray, that “there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”
But Wilde’s novel was profoundly moral, providing deep comfort to many closeted gay men when it came out, some of whom had it all but memorized. For that matter, the Aesthetic movement was itself a protest against capitalism, which dismissed anything (such as art) that could not be monetized. Wilde makes this clear in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism.”
In my own book, I describe a constant tension between literature as a fun activity (aesthetic delight) and literature as a practical tool. Matthew Arnold talks of lit as sweetness and light while John Stuart Mill makes it his goal to balance utility and beauty. The best literature, I contend, is always both/and, never either/or. Soul-construction AND a delightful romp.
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Friday
For much of this week I have been reposting essays from this past year about how literature can be a comfort, support,and guide in dark times. I’m struck by how literature reinforces a recent set of tips on how to keep democracy alive, courtesy of American philosopher and linguist George Lakoff.
Among these tips are: be brave, cultivate empathy, stay focused, foster real connections, avoid brain rot and lies, demand accountability, and support artists and the arts. Great literature touches on all these areas in one way or another, providing us with forums where courage, truth, and justice are prized, where accountability is demanded, where empathy is fostered, and where focus is required. The best poems, plays, and stories engage our best and fullest selves, providing us with a lodestar that will direct our steps when we find ourselves faltering.
This past July, looking for a pick-me-up, I turned to Samuel Johnson’s philosophic novel Rasselas: A Prince of Abyssinia. The following essay was the result.
Reprinted from July 12, 2024
Uncertainty about the 2024 election is driving Democrats mad at the moment. Why does the race continue so close, we wonder, given that Joe Biden has created a stellar economy while Donald Trump attempted a coup and is now—with his threats of retribution and Project 2025—promising a fascist takedown of American democracy if reelected? While the situation is worrisome, however, worrying ourselves sick over the matter is not going to change things.
When I find myself consumed by despair over this state of affairs, I sometimes think of Samuel Johnson’s astronomer in his philosophic novel Rasselas.
Rasselas is on a journey to discover the secret of happiness and thinks he has found it in a learned scientist who has given over his life to studying the heavens. This man spends as much time charting interstellar space as political junkies spend surfing the internet, a comparison I make because similar results ensue. First, here’s Rasselas’s mentor Imlac reporting on the astronomer:
I have just left the observatory of one of the most learned astronomers in the world, who has spent forty years in unwearied attention to the motion and appearances of the celestial bodies, and has drawn out his soul in endless calculations.
And now here’s the result, which Imlac discovers after noticing the astronomer’s depression and pressing him on it. The astronomer reveals that he does not possess the key to happiness after all:
Hear, Imlac, what thou wilt not without difficulty credit. I have possessed for five years the regulation of the weather and the distribution of the seasons. The sun has listened to my dictates, and passed from tropic to tropic by my direction; the clouds at my call have poured their waters, and the Nile has overflowed at my command. I have restrained the rage of the dog-star, and mitigated the fervors of the crab. The winds alone, of all the elemental powers, have hitherto refused my authority, and multitudes have perished by equinoctial tempests which I found myself unable to prohibit or restrain. I have administered this great office with exact justice, and made to the different nations of the earth an impartial dividend of rain and sunshine. What must have been the misery of half the globe if I had limited the clouds to particular regions, or confined the sun to either side of the equator?
Just like many who follow the ups and downs of politics, the astronomer doesn’t differentiate between worrying about cataclysmic events and having actual control over them. And while he acknowledges he can’t prove his power, he trusts his vibes:
I…shall not attempt to gain credit by disputation. It is sufficient that I feel this power that I have long possessed, and every day exerted it.
After describing the encounter, Imlac warns the Rasselas party,
He who has nothing external that can divert him must find pleasure in his own thoughts, and must conceive himself what he is not; for who is pleased with what he is? He then expatiates in boundless futurity, and culls from all imaginable conditions that which for the present moment he should most desire…and confers upon his pride unattainable dominion.
The problem is particularly acute, Imlac says, for those who have a strong sense of responsibility and who feel guilty for not doing more:
“No disease of the imagination,” answered Imlac, “is so difficult of cure as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt; fancy and conscience then act interchangeably upon us, and so often shift their places, that the illusions of one are not distinguished from the dictates of the other….[W]hen melancholy notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the faculties without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude or banish them.
Those who take their citizenship duties seriously may find conscience mixing with fantasies of power—we all have them—and consequently finding themselves plunged into melancholy or depression.
So what is to be done? Part of the problem is solitude, so Rasselas and his party pull the astronomer out of his observatory and get him to join them in a variety of activities, which include conversing with their lovely handmaiden Pekulah. In other words, they offer him perspective and a sense of proportion. Once they do, he comes to realize that he is doesn’t carry the whole weight of the world on his shoulders. As Imlac sums it up,
Open your heart to the influence of the light, which from time to time breaks in upon you; when scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments know to be vain, do not stand to parley, but fly to business or to Pekuah; and keep this thought always prevalent, that you are only one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue nor vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural favors or afflictions.
For concerned citizens, flying to business can include contacting members of Congress, writing postcards, knocking on doors, and donating money, and of course voting. Other versions of flying to Pekuah, meanwhile, include romantic outings, partying with friends, exercising, and so on. The key is stepping away from the black hole that is the political internet.
This remedy works with the astronomer, who reflects,
I now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to prey upon me in secret…I hope that time and variety will dissipate the gloom that has so long surrounded me, and the latter part of my days will be spent in peace.
To which Imlac replies, “Your learning and virtue may justly give you hopes.”
Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Caliban, Stefano and Trinculo
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Thursday
To those of us appalled at the prospect of another Trump presidency, the night of November 6, 2024 was our nadir. Applying Shakespeare’s Tempest to the moment, I wrote an introductory note in which I apologized for the way the essay swung back and forth between optimism and despair, culminating (in the end) with the latter. I noted that what Shakespeare designed to be a comic if somewhat disturbing subplot suddenly became, for me, the major drama. The three inept insurrectionists who try to overthrow Prospero, destroy his magic book, and seize Miranda emerge victorious. It was as if The Tempest had transmuted into Richard III.
Thinking of Prospero’s book as the Constitution and Miranda as reproductive freedom, I changed my headline several times in the course of the night: from “Caliban vs. Prospero” to “Can Caliban Defeat Prospero?” to (sadly) “Caliban Defeats Prospero.”
Following Trump’s victory in a tweet that received 22,000 likes, white nationalist and male supremacist Nick Fuentes gloated, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” When Prospero reminds Caliban that he was a kind master until the monster “didst seek to violate the honor of my child,” Caliban replies,
O ho, O ho! would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans.
Visions of sexual assault danced in many heads following election night. Here’s the essay that finally emerged from my computer.
Reprinted from November 7, 2024
I taught The Tempest yesterday in my Ljubljana Shakespeare class and, as I await election results—it’s midnight on the east coast, early morning Central European Time—I’ve been having a fantasy based on the play. It involves many of Trump’s fanatical followers coming to see him as he really is.
Of course, this fantasy can only happen if he loses. If he wins, he will only build on the mythological status that he has assumed in their eyes.
I draw on one of the play’s subplots for the fantasy. Caliban, son of the witch Sycorax and a thoroughly disagreeable character, encounters two of the lesser survivors of the shipwreck, the drunken butler Stephano and court jester Trinculo. Thinking they are his key to overthrowing the magician Prospero and freeing him from servitude, Caliban links his fate with theirs.
Winning him over is the wine that Stephano is carrying, which I associate with Trump’s seductive rhetoric, whether it be his birther lie about Obama, his misogynist attacks on women, his xenophobic descriptions of Mexicans, his Muslim ban, or all his other countless invitations to become our worst selves. Caliban, like Trump’s ardent fans, is enthralled:
These be fine things, an if they be not sprites. That’s a brave god and bears celestial liquor. I will kneel to him.
“Hast thou not dropp’d from heaven?” Caliban goes on to ask breathlessly before going even further in his adulation. Thrice we see him kneel down to kiss Stefano’s foot:
I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’ th’ island; And I will kiss thy foot: I prithee, be my god.
Why obey the old norms and conventions when one can follow a leader such as this? “A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!” Caliban declares as switches masters from Prospero to Stephano:
No more dams I’ll make for fish Nor fetch in firing At requiring; Nor scrape trencher, nor wash dish ‘Ban, ‘Ban, Cacaliban Has a new master: get a new man. Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! freedom, hey-day, freedom!
Caliban even has a version of the Right’s “America for Americans” declaration: “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me.“ Of courses, he ignores the fact that his mother, the witch Sycorax, established control through her own violent takeover, imprisoning original inhabitant Ariel in a tree.
To be sure, Caliban appears a howling, drunken monster to Trinculo. But that’s often the way with cults: they seem crazed to outsiders, perfectly logical and sane to those caught up in them.
As every student of fascism understands, transitioning from blind adoration to violence is only a short step. Caliban’s plan is to overthrow Prospero and seize his daughter:
Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him, I’ th’ afternoon to sleep: there thou mayst brain him, Having first seized his books, or with a log Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake, Or cut his wezand with thy knife. Remember First to possess his books; for without them He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not One spirit to command: they all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burn but his books. He has brave utensils,–for so he calls them– Which when he has a house, he’ll deck withal And that most deeply to consider is The beauty of his daughter; he himself Calls her a nonpareil…
Stefano is as enthralled with the battle plan as were the January 6 insurrectionists with the idea of storming the Capitol. When he and Trinculo get to Prospero’s cave, however, they behave somewhat like those same intruders, who wandered around the building taking selfies, trashing Nancy Pelosi’s office, and looting souvenirs. In this case, they put on Prospero’s garments, infuriating Caliban, who understands Prospero’s power:
The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean To dote thus on such luggage? Let’s alone And do the murder first: if he awake, From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, Make us strange stuff.
Prospero, with the aid of the spirit Ariel, then sends in his version of the National Guard—“Stage direction: Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds”—hunting the three as relentlessly as the FBI and Justice Department have hunted those who attacked the Capitol:
Prospero: Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark! Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them Than pard or cat o’ mountain.
Ariel: Hark, they roar!
In the end they are routed and tormented, after which comes the moment that I’m dreaming occurs with Trump cultists. Prospero having ordered Caliban to his cell—”As you look to have my pardon, trim it handsomely”—the monsters see butler Stephano for who he really is:
Caliban: I’ll be wise hereafter And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass Was I, to take this drunkard for a god And worship this dull fool!
A major theme of The Tempest is rising above our earthly selves to a spiritual vision. As a white magic magus, Prospero seeks to bring order and enlightenment to a world that is riven by dark impulses, including political insurrection and unlawful passion.
But Caliban too is an integral part of who we are. America, a nation founded both on Enlightenment optimism and bloody conquest + enslaved labor, has a history of swinging back and forth between progressive ideals and brute impulse. “This thing of darkness, [I] acknowledge him mine,” Prospero says at the end of the play.
Will our version of Shakespeare’s tragicomedy end in tragedy or comedy? We stand here, as if on as knife edge, as
Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives.
The passage is from Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written at another time when the world faced a fascist threat.
Arthur Rackham, Lizzie under Assault in Goblin Market
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Wednesday – New Year’s Day
This past spring, when it was clear that Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee (and therefore potentially our next president), I turned to Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market for how to survive assaults on democracy. It’s not only one of my favorite poems but a powerful reminder to turn to others for help when we find ourselves in the grip of despair.
In other words, we are not without resources as we enter 2025. Happy New Year!
Reprinted from April 8, 2024
“What can an ordinary voter do to maintain engagement with the election while not turning their cerebral cortex into a wet, steaming mess of fused wiring?” asks Tom Nichols in an Atlantic article that speaks directly to many of us. Nichols points out that this is actually Trump’s strategy. To cause disillusion with democracy, “flood the zone with shit,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon colorfully puts it.
Among literary characters who show strength and resolve to stand strong in the face of relentless attacks, Lizzie in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market comes to mind.
First, however, here’s Nichols expanding on the problem:
By overwhelming people with the sheer volume and vulgarity of his antics, Trump and his team are trying to burn out the part of our brains that can discern truth from fiction, right from wrong, good from evil. His campaign’s goal is to turn voters into moral zombies who can no longer tell the difference between Stormy and Hunter or classified documents and personal laptops, who cannot parse what a “bloodbath” means, who no longer have the ability to be shocked when a political leader calls other human beings “animals” and “vermin.”
And further:
Trump isn’t worried that all of this will cause voters to have a kind of mental meltdown: He’s counting on it. He needs ordinary citizens to become so mired in moral chaos and so cognitively paralyzed that they are unable to comprehend the disasters that would ensue if he returns to the White House.
In Goblin Market, goblins seek to seduce Lizzie and Laura by appealing to their base desires, offering them forbidden fruit. Think of these tempters as “the best and most serious people” who currently surround Trump: Stephen Miller, Paul Manafort, Mike Flynn, Jim Jordan, Jeffrey Clark, and others. Link them up with the following as you see fit:
One had a cat’s face, One whisk’d a tail, One tramp’d at a rat’s pace, One crawl’d like a snail, One like a wombat prowl’d obtuse and furry, One like a ratel tumbled hurry skurry.
So what base desires does Trump appeal to? Well, resentment, sadism, fear, and the urge to dominate, among others. And what must they offer up in return? In Laura’s case, it’s a lock of her golden hair—which is to say, her innocence, her purity, her integrity. And at first, she is as exhilarated as Trump supporters upon first encountering him:
She dropp’d a tear more rare than pearl, Then suck’d their fruit globes fair or red: Sweeter than honey from the rock, Stronger than man-rejoicing wine, Clearer than water flow’d that juice; She never tasted such before, How should it cloy with length of use? She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more Fruits which that unknown orchard bore; She suck’d until her lips were sore; Then flung the emptied rinds away But gather’d up one kernel stone, And knew not was it night or day As she turn’d home alone.
Yes, there is a heady feeling when one has sucked upon Trumpian fruit. The problem , however, is that it leaves one a shell of one’s former self, a robot who can respond only to Trump’s trigger words. There are, in the United State, cultists who are so in thrall to the man that they have cut themselves off from their spouses, partners, children, grandchildren, relatives and friends, not to mention from humanity generally. We see in Laura the effects of such surrender:
But when the noon wax’d bright Her hair grew thin and grey; She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn To swift decay and burn Her fire away.
Now to Lizzie, who refuses to succumb to the goblin men as she goes to the aid of her sister. What truly sustains us, we learn, is not forbidden fruit but love. But this love requires courage and Lizzie encounters the kind of hate that, as we have learned to our sorrow, Trump cultists are only too willing to dish out to anyone who disagrees with them:
Their tones wax’d loud, Their looks were evil. Lashing their tails They trod and hustled her, Elbow’d and jostled her, Claw’d with their nails, Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking, Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking, Twitch’d her hair out by the roots, Stamp’d upon her tender feet, Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits Against her mouth to make her eat.
And further on:
One may lead a horse to water, Twenty cannot make him drink. Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her, Coax’d and fought her, Bullied and besought her, Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink, Kick’d and knock’d her, Maul’d and mock’d her, Lizzie utter’d not a word; Would not open lip from lip Lest they should cram a mouthful in…
And now to the passage I have in mind about standing up to Trumpist attempts to short-circuit our brains. It takes Lizzie’s resolve to stay firm and keep our eyes on the prize:
White and golden Lizzie stood, Like a lily in a flood,— Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone Lash’d by tides obstreperously,— Like a beacon left alone In a hoary roaring sea, Sending up a golden fire,— Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree White with blossoms honey-sweet Sore beset by wasp and bee,— Like a royal virgin town Topp’d with gilded dome and spire Close beleaguer’d by a fleet Mad to tug her standard down.
Compare this with Nichol’s advice on how we should respond to Trump:
The way to withstand Trump’s daily assaults on our senses is to regard them with fortitude, and even some stoicism. He’s trying to shake our confidence in democracy and basic decency; remaining engaged in civic life, calmly and without stooping to such tactics and rhetoric, is the superpower of every citizen in a democracy.
Plotwise, Lizzie allows Laura to lick the fruit juice she has accumulated off her face, where it works as an antidote to Laura’s addiction. In other words, love conquers base desire. Or in our case, love of “democracy and basic decency” can overcome (or so we can hope) fascistic temptation.
We dream that those Americans who have been led astray by this temptation will abandon the cult and return to the family and friends they have rejected. For her part, Laura, after having gone through an intense inner struggle, finds her way back:
Laura awoke as from a dream, Laugh’d in the innocent old way, Hugg’d Lizzie but not twice or thrice; Her gleaming locks show’d not one thread of grey, Her breath was sweet as May And light danced in her eyes.
I have experienced a loved one who was once taken over by a cult. During his junior year in college my son Justin joined a rabid fundamentalist church, which made prickly his ties with his family (especially when he told one of his brothers that he was going to hell). Once he asked me if I “had been saved,” even though he knew I attend church weekly. Apparently Julia and I weren’t Christian enough for him.
He was still a lovely man, however, and he would still give out hugs. Whenever I saw him around campus (he was attending the college where I taught), I refused to argue with him but instead saw myself ducking beneath the branches to embrace the trunk. What was most important was the love I had for him.
That’s how Lizzie saves Laura, who years later tells her children,
For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.
I will never know if my love would have helped Justin to a more balanced perspective because he drowned on April 30 in a freak accident. (I take some consolation from his friends reporting that he was starting to soften not long before then, as if he had had to experiment with total religious immersion before arriving at his own faith.) Likewise, I don’t know whether our caring for family and friends who have sold out to Trump will ever bring them back. We can only control what we ourselves do, not how they will respond. Like Queequeg in Moby Dick, we throw our caskets into the sea and hope that our Ishmaels will find them in time.
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Tuesday
I will spend the rest of this week reposting essays from this past year that I particularly like. Of the issues that have most concerned me as a lover of literature is the outbreak of book banning. When these bans extend to Shakespeare and (as noted in the essay below) Milton, one realizes that no book of substance is safe.
The good news is that those attacking teachers and librarians are beginning to experience blowback. One of the most noxious aspects of Trumpism is how it provides bullies with a permission structure to engage in outrageous behavior, but standing up to bullies—grabbing Grendel in a strong handgrip, as it were—is the best response. Citizens have been seizing back school boards from MAGA bigots while recently a federal judge ruled—as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment—an Arkansas law seeking to create criminal liability for librarians for distributing content that state legislators consider “obscene” or “harmful to minors.”
Reprinted from January 12, 2024
In the early 1990s I became involved in a Toni Morrison controversy in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where I taught for 36 years. One of my former students, David Flood, was teaching a unit at Leonardtown High School in which he paired Huckleberry Finn with Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A student was offended by three pages in Morrison’s novel—probably the scene where Milkman trades trash talk with a man he meets in a country store—and his mother took the offending pages to the school superintendent. She in turn banned the teaching of the novel in all St. Mary’s County public high schools, a ban (I believe) that is still in effect.
I visited the superintendent’s office to complain—it didn’t do any good—but that’s not where I’m going with today’s post. Rather, I am recalling a response I wrote to someone who wrote a letter to the local newspaper claiming that Morrison was a mediocre author not worth studying. (The Nobel Prize, in his view, was not based on merit but was literary affirmative action.) At the time, the so-called canon wars were underway, and his argument was that teachers should be teaching great authors, not figures like Morrison.
Not only did I contend that Morrison had more than earned her place in the pantheon of great authors—I consider her comparable to Faulkner among America’s novelists—but I pointed out that there were other authors in the canon who had passages far more graphic than anything in Song of Solomon. Among the works I mentioned was Paradise Lost.
I had meant this as a dig at those who worship the canon without truly seeing it—there were many like this in those days, including Secretary of Education William Bennet and National Endowment of the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney—but I didn’t anticipate that, one day, someone would actually ban Paradise Lost for its salacious content. Thanks to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, however, that has now happened. Apparently Milton’s immortal epic is among the works pulled from school library shelves in Orange County, Florida.
According to the Orlando Sentinel,
A total of 673 books, from classics to best-sellers, have been removed from Orange County classrooms this year for fear they violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students.
The list of rejected books, which the district began compiling during the summer, will get another review from Orange County Public Schools staff, so some could eventually be put back on shelves. But for now, teachers who had them in their classrooms have been told to take them home or put them away so students cannot access them.
In addition to Paradise Lost, the books pulled include John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Morrison’s Beloved, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Alice Walker’s Color Purple, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Also on the list are popular novels by Stephen King, Sue Monk Kidd, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and John Irving.
According to dissenting Orange County School Board member Karen Castor Dentel, the books pulled represent “over censorship” by media specialists who fear they will be held responsible for every item on their shelves. Dentel said that the Florida law is “creating this culture of fear within our media specialists and even teachers who just want to have a library in their classrooms, so kids have access.”
The Sentinel article reports that the new state training required for all media specialists is warning them to “err on the side of caution” when approving books. If they approve inappropriate books, they “can face criminal penalties and the loss of their teaching certificates.”
So imagine a State Board confronting a media specialist who failed to remove Paradise Lost with the following passages from Book II. First there’s Satan having sex with his daughter Sin, who has sprung Athena-like from his head. Sin is describing to her father and lover how he got her pregnant:
…familiar grown, I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing Becam’st enamored, and such joy thou took With me in secret, that my womb conceived A growing burden.
What happens next is a nightmarish birth scene in which their child, Death, tears through Sin’s birth canal. Sin describes this horrendous birth as she introduces Satan to his son:
At last this odious offspring whom thou seest Thine own begotten, breaking violent way Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew Transform’d…
Believe it or not, the worst is yet to come. After being born, Death doesn’t waste any time but straightway proceeds to rape his mother, engendering a pack of hell hounds that emerge from her now reptilian nether regions:
I fled, but he pursued (though more, it seems, Inflamed with lust then rage) and swifter far, Me overtook his mother all dismayed, And in embraces forcible and foul Engendering with me, of that rape begot These yelling Monsters that with ceaseless cry Surround me…
Earlier we have gotten a depiction of these hounds. The hideous birth has transformed Sin’s nether regions into something snake-like:
The one seemed Woman to the waist, and fair, But ended foul in many a scaly fold Voluminous and vast, a Serpent armed With mortal sting: about her middle round A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing barked With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep, If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb And kennel there, yet there still barked and howled Within unseen.
These hounds, meanwhile, continue to interbreed so that more are
hourly conceived And hourly born, with sorrow infinite To me, for when they list into the womb That bred them they return, and howl and gnaw My Bowels, their repast; then bursting forth [ 800 ] A fresh with conscious terrors vex me round, That rest or intermission none I find.
It’s a nightmare straight out of Dante’s Inferno (is that on the Orange County list?), a powerful image of how sin is perpetually breeding more sin.
And now let’s turn to the Adam and Eve episodes. The two wander around naked, engaging first in good sex (this before the fall) and then bad sex (this after the fall). Milton was controversial in having them engage in sex before the fall but his point is that sex itself isn’t bad. In fact, it’s a gift that God “declares pure and commands to some, leaves free to all.” Those who think otherwise—who bid us abstain from sex—are parroting Satan. His words apply well to the Orange County School Board:
Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk Of purity and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all. Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?
Where sex goes wrong, in Milton’s eyes, is when it becomes bound up with power and ego. Lustful sex, he would say, is what the Chairman of the Florida Republican Party and his wife, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, were having with a third party, a relationship that ultimately culminated in a rape. Here’s Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s bad sex:
…but that false Fruit Far other operation first displayed, Carnal desire enflaming, he on Eve Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him As wantonly repaid; in Lust they burn: Till Adam thus ‘gan Eve to dalliance move…
And a little later:
So said he, and forbore not glance or toy Of amorous intent, well understood Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire. Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank, Thick overhead with verdant roof embowered He led her nothing loath; Flowers were the Couch, Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel, And Hyacinth, Earth’s freshest softest lap. There they their fill of Love and Love’s disport Took largely, of their mutual guilt the Seal, The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play.
The thrill that Adam and Eve experience comes from their disobedience. As Norman Mailer once wrote, guilt gives sex an existential edge. Whether or not one agrees with Milton, he includes sex in his work because, like all great authors, he is exploring all that goes with being human, which includes the sexual component. It’s what those other great works banned by Orange County—East of Eden, Madame Bovary, Beloved, Color Purple, Love in the Time of Cholera—are also doing.
The real perverts are not the authors who explore sex and the teachers and librarians who teach their works. The real perverts are those who, like Pentheus in Euripides’s The Bacchae, refuse to see sex as a gift and a joy. When Pentheus is condemning the women of the city, who have joined Dionysus to dance in the countryside, the prophet Teiresias tells him,
I am sorry to say it, but you are mad. Totally mad. And no drug could help you, even though you’re as sick as if you had been drugged.
Think of how many MAGA politicians and activists this describes.
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Monday
I was watching a clip of African American comedian Josh Johnson reflecting on the shooting death of HealthCare CEO Bryan Thompson, and one thing he said reminded me of a passage in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. While Johnson decried the murder, he said his first response was relief over the fact that the shooter was not Black. Or as he put it,
When I saw it happen, when I saw that video footage that they played, when I saw that dude walk up and pull out that gun and point it at the CEO, when I saw that I thought to myself, “Thank God, those are white hands.” When I saw those lily white hands…When I saw those pearly white hands, I thought to myself, “What a white sight! What a beautiful White thing to happen that doesn’t have anything to do with me, that should not blow back on me at all. What a White moment in America!”
We can well understand his response given how so many American Whites readily associate African American men with violent crime. In fact, the association is so automatic that, as Johnson went on to point out, CBS News couldn’t altogether break with past habits. Instead of identifying the killer as White, it… But here’s Johnson:
And they said on CBS, “a light-skinned man…No! No, no, not! Light skinned! When has the News ever said, “light skinned.” Light skinned! I was horrified! Now, you know that if it had been a Black person they would have said “Black” because they love saying “Black.” They like saying, “This Black was last seen at the scene of the crime.” If you’ve seen this Black, call this number so you can report him for this blackety-black crime.
The key dividing line in Midnight’s Children is between Hindu Indians and Muslim Indians (and then Muslim Pakistanis). When Hindu Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated, the Muslim community in the novel, worried that the assassin is Muslim, goes into immediate lockdown:
The audience had begun to scream before [the television announcer] finished; the poison of his words entered their veins—there were grown men rolling in the aisles clutching their bellies, not laughing but crying, Hai Ram! Hai Ram! -and women tearing their hair: the city’s finest coiffures tumbling around the ears of the poisoned ladies-there were film-stars yelling like fishwives and something terrible to smell in the air—and Hanif whispered, ‘Get out of here, big sister-if a Muslim did this thing there will be hell to pay.’
…[F]or forty-eight hours…our family remained within the walls of Buckingham Villa (‘Put furniture against the doors, whatsitsname!’ Reverend Mother ordered. ‘If there are Hindu servants, let them go home!’); and Amina did not dare to visit the racetrack.
The killer, however, was a right-wing Hindu nationalist, Nathuram Godse, who considered Gandhi too pro-Muslim and too soft on Pakistan. This leads to the following version of Josh Johnson’s response:
[F]inally the radio gave us a name. Nathuram Godse.
‘Thank God,’ Amina burst out, ‘It’s not a Muslim name!’
And Aadam, upon whom the news of Gandhi’s death had placed a new burden of age: ‘This Godse is nothing to be grateful for!’
Amina, however, was full of the light-headedness of relief, she was rushing dizzily up the long ladder of relief. . . ‘Why not, after all? By being Godse he has saved our lives!’
Gandhi’s killing and Thompson’s killing are both tragedies, as both Rushdie and Johnson make clear. But we can understand why vulnerable populations would first think of themselves in the wake of such events.
Bartolome Esteban Murillo, Adoration of the Shepherds
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Sunday
I’m traveling today, visiting sons, daughters-in-law, and grandchildren in Buford, Georgia, so you’ll have to settle for one of my father’s poems that I’ve shared before. When rightwing politicians accused cultural elites of waging a war against Christmas, my father liked to point out that Christmas’s most iconic symbols have actually been imported from other religions.
The incident that triggered this poem was a legal battle over a Texas county that erected a nativity scene outside its courthouse in 2011. Scott Bates starts with the fact that Christianity, like all religions, is syncretistic—which is to say, it is an amalgamation of rituals and symbols from all over, some articulated by inspired individuals (Jesus and his followers), some taken from earlier religions. Another way of putting this is that every religion is a symbol system that human beings employ to come as near as they can to the (ultimately unknowable) mind of God. The universe will always have mysteries that we cannot penetrate, and humans use whatever materials—whatever symbols—are at hand to do what they can.
Devout followers may deny the affinities between the crucifixion of Jesus and the dismemberment of the Egyptian god Horus or overlook the fact that Jesus was probably not born in December, the time of the winter solstice and the Roman feast of Saturnalia. After all, they like to believe their religious symbols are “pure.” Examined carefully, however, Christmas proves to be more inclusive than they think.
Christmas at the Courthouse By Scott Bates
The wise-men are Egyptian, The virgin birth, Antique; The evergreen is Roman The manger scene is Greek;
T’is the Saturnalian Season When solar gifts are cool, So Happy Birthday, Horus! From our Multiculture School.
If those beating the war drum over Christmas were to embrace such an open version of the Christmas story, maybe we wouldn’t be having all these battles. Then again, maybe they want people of other faiths to feel excluded.
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Friday
I owe to novelist Kate Atkinson a major self-insight which I touched on in Tuesday’s post and which I elaborate on today. This blog, which I launched on April, 2009 and have been maintaining faithfully six days a week ever since (for one exhausting spell, it was seven days a week), is not unlike the poetic project that T.S. Eliot describes in TheWaste Land. I too use cultural and poetic fragments to “shore up against my ruins.”
I hope you’ll indulge me as I engage in a bit of navel-gazing. To see myself as doing anything remotely like what Eliot does in his signature poem astounds me as Waste Land has frustrated me ever since I encountered it in a Carleton College survey class. Despite great lines like “April is the cruelest month” and “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” it utterly baffled me and made me feel stupid.
And it wasn’t only Eliot doing this. A lot of poetry from this era struck me as inaccessible. For me to conclude that my Better Living through Beowulf blog is a Modernist project, therefore, is like Molière’s bourgeois gentleman waking up one day to discover that all his life he has been speaking in prose:
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Oh, really? So when I say: Nicole bring me my slippers and fetch my nightcap,” is that prose?
PHILOSOPHY MASTER: Most clearly.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Well, what do you know about that! These forty years now I’ve been speaking in prose without knowing it!
I can’t explain the rationale behind Modernism in a short space but suffice it to say that it was characterized by intense experimentation where poets were prepared to throw out all previous rules of what people normally thought of as poetry. No longer did people confidently assert, as they had in the 19th century, that one day they would formulate theories that explained whole fields (think Mark, Darwin, and Freud). Instead, everything seemed to be fragmented. As a short piece in Poetry Foundation reports, figures like Gertrude Stein
explored the possibilities of creating literary works that broke with conventional syntactical and referential practices” while Ezra Pound’s guiding star was to “make it new” and “break the pentameter.” The essay notes that Waste Land became the “archetypical Modernist text, rife with allusions, linguistic fragments, and mixed registers and languages.”
Many people were angry at the Modernist movement, feeling that it was taking poetry away from them. Where, they wondered, were the regular rhythms, the rhyming, the clear themes? Not that earlier poetry was necessarily self-explanatory, but Modernist poets seemed to be taking poetry to new levels of obscurity. Or that’s how it seemed to me. As a scholar specializing in the 18th century—famous for the Age of Reason—I was accustomed to more direct discourse.
Once, when discussing this with my St. Mary’s colleague Bruce Wilson, a brilliant literary mind who taught courses on “Dante and Eliot” and “Yeats and Japanese Noh Theatre,” I told him that Modernism was the one period that “I just don’t get.” To which he replied that the 18th century was that way for him.
Nor is he alone. In the semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s protagonist explains that the 18th century literature requirement is what kept her from majoring in English:
There were lots of requirements, and I didn’t have half of them. One of the requirements was a course in the eighteenth century. I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason. So I’d skipped it. They let you do that in honours, you were much freer. I had been so free I’d spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.
I wouldn’t characterize Dryden and Pope, the foremost practitioners of the heroic couplet, as smug, but I get Plath’s point. They are nowhere near as elliptical and confessional as she is in her poetry. And for whatever reason, I like their poetry better. Which explains further my shock at discovering my kinship with Eliot.
So how is my blog a Modernist project? In my early days as a scholar, I sought to come up with a universal theory about literature’s impact upon audiences. Knowing that novels, plays, and poems had shaped my own life in profound ways, I thought I could use the emerging fields of reception theory and reader response theory to provide significant answers to the question “Why literature?” I soon came to realize, however, that there are far too many variants at play, variants involving both multiple definitions of literature and multiple responses from audiences, to arrive at anything comprehensive.
Blogging provided an Eliot-like solution, however. If, on a daily basis, I recorded ways that this or that work—let’s call them fragments of the larger field—were shoring up my life, then I was partially answering the question I had set out to answer. Even if I couldn’t generalize, I could offer personal testimony.
I’m sounding almost confessional when I say this—not unlike a confessional poet such as, say, Sylvia Plath. And while I hastily add that I haven’t been recording only my own responses to literature but have been collecting examples from literary history, my students, and other sources, still a daily blog is a fairly random and haphazard way to explore literary impact. Whatever is happening from one day to the next prompts me to search for relevant literary works. One day I will discuss Donald Trump, another day a sick friend, another a recent book I’ve stumbled across.
Which is to say, I have been responding as Eliot responded to his confusing, chaotic world, only I do so as a scholar rather than as a poet. When this world resisted Modernist attempts to formulate tidy generalizations, they grabbed whatever was around them. A character in Kate Atkinson’s God in Ruins refers to the process as “scraps from her ragbag because words were all that were left now.” Eliot sometimes appears to be throwing literary passages, like spaghetti, at the wall to see what will stick. In any event, we all of us seem to be perfoming a kind of bricolage, which is to say attempting to create something out of anything that comes to hand.
I tried to be more systematic in my other large scale attempt to explore literary impact, which was to write a book on the subject. Although Better Living through Literature: How Books Change Lives and (Sometimes) History was not able to come up with a single answer to how literature changes lives, by surveying what major thinkers throughout history have said on the subject, I hoped that readers would at least get a sense of the possibilities.
To be sure, many of the thinkers–even when they are disagreeing with each other–don’t have my level of doubt. Aristotle, for instance, seems certain that everyone experiences the catharsis he does while watching Oedipus Rex, and Sir Philip Sidney is absolutely convinced that works like The Aeneid will cause people to become more virtuous. But if I have not been able to achieve their level of certainty—that’s why I don’t settle on just one of them—I hope that by putting their various ideas in the hands of contemporary readers, these readers will be able to choose the ones that speak most directly to them.
As for myself, my two favorite theorists are Percy Shelley, who I find compelling with regard to the great authors changing collective humanity, and Wayne Booth, with regard to literature changing individuals. Others may find a guide in Plato or Matthew Arnold or W.E.B. Du Bois or Rachel Blau DuPlessis. In the end, perhaps we can do no other than adopt the explanations that resonate with us most.
