Our family lost a beautiful friend to cancer recently. When her distraught husband, who is battling his own health issues, asked us for a poem. I sent him Deborah Pope’s “Getting Through” because I know how hard he will have it for quite some time.
We don’t know how long the speaker in the poem has been mourning but it appears to have been a while. She realizes that, if she were rational, she would let go and move on. But love isn’t rational and continues to dominate her life, which leads her to concoct a series of metaphors. She is like a car that can’t get out of the loving gear, a chicken that can’t acknowledge it has lost an integral part of itself, a film that thinks it is still being projected even though it “has jumped the reel” so that one can hear the sound of it “ratcheting on.” Or, in one of the most haunting images, she’s like a phone “ringing and ringing,” unable to acknowledge that those in the house have moved away.
The images continue. Her heart goes blundering on, “a muscle spilling out/ what is no longer wanted.” The words she sends out into the void cannot be heard—she is like the last speaker of a beautiful language that now no one else can hear. Or like a train that has jumped its track and its hurtling towards a boarded-up station. The metaphors pile up, playing off each other, and my hope is that, somewhere amongst them all, our friend’s husband will experience some of the consolation that occurs when we see someone put our pain into words.
It’s much too early in his grieving to think about letting go. In fact, he probably can’t even conceive of it at the moment. That’s why the poem may speak to him.
Getting Through By Deborah Pope
Like a car stuck in gear, a chicken too stupid to tell its head is gone, or sound ratcheting on long after the film has jumped the reel, or a phone ringing and ringing in the house they have all moved away from, through rooms where dust is a deepening skin, and the locks unneeded, so I go on loving you, my heart blundering on, a muscle spilling out what is no longer wanted, and my words hurtling past, like a train off its track, toward a boarded-up station, closed for years, like some last speaker of a beautiful language no one else can hear.
Never Trumper and former conservative talk show host Charlie Sykes recently applied W. B. Yeats’s “Second Coming” to his old party last week on Nicole Wallace’s MSNBC show. Returning to the poem, I realize that it’s more relevant than ever.
Yeats wrote the poem about Irish nationalists in 1919, three years after the failed Easter Uprising. As far as the moderate Yeats could see, Irish politicos were either fanatics or cynics. He sums them up in the passage cited by Sykes: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”
The worst in our case are the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and Trump cultists, those who fear White Replacement Theory and storm the Capitol and circulate QAnon craziness. The best—although I’m not sure they can be called best—are those Republican cynics who exploit the worst for their own electoral advantage. The best quietly get vaccinated while exhorting the worst to “resist the tyranny,” with the result that many end up in Intensive Care Units.
By filibustering raising the debt ceiling, the worst and the best are working together to make sure that the center indeed cannot hold. They are loosing “mere anarchy” upon the world (“mere” because it takes so little effort on their part to bring about disaster).
Donald Trump would like to be that rough beast, slouching toward Bethlehem for his second coming. Will Yeats’s apocalyptic fears play out. Right now it feels like it.
Here’s one silver lining: although the world looked grim when Yeats wrote the poem—in fact, the world was even in the midst of the Spanish Flu, the last worldwide pandemic—three years later Ireland achieved independence. Sometimes the darkest hour is just before the dawn.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Having recently read Robert Kagan’s alarming Washington Post article about the GOP’s plans to rig the next election, I find a tweet mentioning Checkhov’s loaded gun unnervingly on target. Allow me to explain.
First to Kagan’s piece. The columnist is no liberal, which gives his fears about the Republicans’ authoritarian swing particularly convincing. After all, he’s seen these people up close. In Kagan’s view, January 6 is a foretaste of what we can expect in the future. After predicting that Trump will be the 2024 Republican nominee, Kagan writes,
Trump and his Republican allies are actively preparing to ensure his victory by whatever means necessary. Trump’s charges of fraud in the 2020 election are now primarily aimed at establishing the predicate to challenge future election results that do not go his way.
He then points out the worrisome portents:
[T]he amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. Republican legislatures are giving themselves greater control over the election certification process. As of this spring, Republicans have proposed or passed measures in at least 16 states that would shift certain election authorities from the purview of the governor, secretary of state or other executive-branch officers to the legislature. An Arizona bill flatly states that the legislature may “revoke the secretary of state’s issuance or certification of a presidential elector’s certificate of election” by a simple majority vote.
What sets Trumpism apart from previous U.S. political movements, Kagan says, is the fact that, for millions of Americans, “Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments.” His followers feel that have an unbreakable bond with him.
Kagan concludes,
We are already in a constitutional crisis. The destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now.
Which leads me to Chekhov. Last week tweeter Jeff Sharlet shared a photo of a protester carrying an AK-47 outside the Arizona state capital and observed,
At this point, it’s unremarkable. Most of us just roll our eyes, & even as we loathe this, accept it as inevitable. We’ve normalized Chekov’s gun—the one in the 1st act—& we continue as if the next act isn’t coming.
“Chekhov’s gun” is a dramatic principle that anything irrelevant to the plot should be removed from the story. As the author once advised,
Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.
If Kagan is right, all those rightwing militants we see carrying automatic weapons are the first chapter. Those who stormed the Capitol didn’t bring their guns with them (thank you, Washington gun laws!), but maybe that’s just because we haven’t gotten to the second chapter yet. Kagan is predicting that the gun absolutely will go off.
Until Congress passes comprehensive immigration legislation, which it hasn’t done since the Ronald Reagan administration, the United States will continue to see desperate immigrants pile up on the border and unscrupulous politicians makes racist and xenophobic appeals to their base. Increasingly we’re hearing formerly mainstream Republicans repeating white supremacist talking points about white replacement while Fox’s Tucker Carlson accuses Joe Biden of importing “non-white DNA.”
For a more enlightened perspective, check out Wisława Szymborska’s“Psalm,” which Victoria Emily Jones recently shared in her excellent blog Art and Theology. “Only what is human can truly be foreign,” the poet tells us, making the point that humans excel at finding ways to divide themselves!
Psalm By Wislawa Szymborska Trans. Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states! How many clouds float past them with impunity; how much desert sand shifts from one land to another; how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers or alights on the roadblock at the border? A humble robin—still, its tail resides abroad while its beak stays home. If that weren’t enough, it won’t stop bobbing!
Among innumerable insects, I’ll single out only the ant between the border guard’s left and right boots blithely ignoring the questions “Where from?” and “Where to?”
Oh, to register in detail, at a glance, the chaos prevailing on every continent! Isn’t that a privet on the far bank smuggling its hundred-thousandth leaf across the river? And who but the octopus, with impudent long arms, would disrupt the sacred bounds of territorial waters?
And how can we talk of order overall when the very placement of the stars leaves us doubting just what shines for whom?
Not to speak of the fog’s reprehensible drifting! And dust blowing all over the steppes as if they hadn’t been partitioned! And the voices coasting on obliging airwaves, that conspiratorial squeaking, those indecipherable mutters!
Only what is human can truly be foreign. The rest is mixed vegetation, subversive moles, and wind.
My mother turned 96 on Saturday, and among the surprises we had for her was a Czeslaw Milosz poem appearing in her very own poetry column. My mother runs From Bard to Verse for the Sewanee Messenger and had planned John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” to welcome in the new season. Given her modesty, she would never have allowed us to run a poem honoring her, so I had to go behind her back. She was deeply moved when she saw it.
Entitling his poem “Late Ripeness,” Milosz explains that he wrote it as he was approaching his 90 year. (He died at 93.) At this stage in life, he reports, he has achieved a new clarity.
For instance, he can gaze back at, and let go of, his former lives and his former sorrows, which depart like ships. His poetic pen, like a brush, can describe his former locales better than ever before. He sees himself no longer separated from others by “Yes and No” but rather joined to them by “grief and pity.” Whatever seemed to separate them in the past is no longer there.
When he says, “We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King,” he may have Christ in mind or just common humanity. In any event, he has a vision of himself working in a vineyard along with everyone else who is “living at the same time/whether they are aware of it or not.”
It’s not that our former lives are inconsequential. He acknowledges that “we used no more than a hundredth part/ of the gift we received for our long journey.” Furthermore, things we did in the past are waiting for fulfillment—will make themselves known—in the present, whether they were momentous (“a sword blow”) or small (“the paintings of eyelashes before a mirror/of polished metal”). He uses archaic images to capture how this past life seems to have happened centuries ago.
Nevertheless, the poet appears to have reached a new level of acceptance. Peace radiates throughout the poem.
Happy birthday, mama!
Late Ripeness
By Czeslaw Milosz, Trans. Robert Haas and Czeslaw Milosz
Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning.
One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow.
And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.
I was not separated from people, grief and pity joined us. We forget—I kept saying—that we are all children of the King.
For where we come from there is no division into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.
We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part of the gift we received for our long journey.
Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago— a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel staving its hull against a reef—they dwell in us, waiting for a fulfillment.
I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard, as are all men and women living at the same time, whether they are aware of it or not.
The lovely lyric “My Cathedral” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reminds me of Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church.” Her own church-going, she notes, has “a Bobolink for a Chorister –/And an Orchard, for a Dome –.”
Longfellow’s poem also brings to mind Harold Bloom’s observation about what he found to be the central tenet of religion in America, whether it be Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, Mormon, Roman Catholic, or mainline Protestant. According to Wikipedia,
Bloom’s view is that all of these groups in America are united by requiring that each person may only truly meet with the divine when experiencing a “total inward solitude” and that salvation cannot be achieved by engaging with a community, but only through a one-to-one confrontation with the divine.
Like Dickinson, Longfellow finds that the one-to-one confrontation occurs best in nature:
Like two cathedral towers these stately pines Uplift their fretted summits tipped with cones; The arch beneath them is not built with stones, Not Art but Nature traced these lovely lines, And carved this graceful arabesque of vines; No organ but the wind here sighs and moans, No sepulchre conceals a martyr’s bones. No marble bishop on his tomb reclines. Enter! the pavement, carpeted with leaves, Gives back a softened echo to thy tread! Listen! the choir is singing; all the birds, In leafy galleries beneath the eaves, Are singing! listen, ere the sound be fled, And learn there may be worship without words.
Yesterday I had my first interview with a potential publisher for Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate. It’s the book I’ve been working on for the past ten years, and in a zoom call from London the editor suggested that I set up groupings for the various theorists and schools that I survey. It took a while but I came up the following.
As a bonus, I throw in the quotations I use to introduce each theory chapter. They’ll give you a sense of what I’m up to.
Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate
Every art contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living.—Bertolt Brecht
Part I: Introduction
Part II: Better Living through Literature—in Theory
A. Hardwired for Story
Prehistory: Telling Stories to Ensure Species Success
[F]iction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.—Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Psychological Studies: Literature’s Impact upon the Brain
At a minimum, we can say that reading stories— those with strong narrative arcs—reconfigures brain networks for at least a few days. [The study] shows how stories can stay with us. This may have profound implications for children and the role of reading in shaping their brains.–Gregory S. Berns, director, Emory University Center for Neuropolicy
B. The Debate Begins
Plato: Poetry, a Threat to Justice and Virtue
All poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers…– Plato, The Republic (c. 375 BCE)
Aristotle: Poetry, Truer Than History
Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal, I mean how a person of a certain type will on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity…–Aristotle, Poetics (c. 335 BCE)
Horace: Instructing While Delighting
The tribes of the seniors rail against everything that is void of edification: the exalted knights [young men] disregard poems which are austere. He who joins the instructive with the agreeable, carries off every vote, by delighting and at the same time admonishing the reader.–Horace, Ars Poetica (c. 19 BCE)
C. Literature Takes on a Moral Mission
Sir Philip Sidney: Poetry as a Guide to Virtue
So that the ending end of all earthly learning being virtuous action, those skills that most serve to bring forth that have a most just title to be princes over all the rest; …the poet is worthy to have it before any other competitors. –Sir Philip Sidney, Defense of Poesy
Samuel Johnson: Shakespeare as a Faithful Mirror of Manners and Life
Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life…–Samuel Johnson, “Preface to the Plays of William Shakespeare”
D. Literature Takes on a Social Mission
Romantics vs. Utilitarians: Connecting through the Poetic Imagination
I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech; That moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me: To him my tale I teach. From Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poetry as a Force for Liberation
But it exceeds all imagination 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. —Percy Bysshe Shelley, Defence of Poetry
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Literature as a Portrayal of Real Conditions
I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together. – Friedrich Engels
Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung: Literature as a Blueprint for Self-Mastery
[O]ur actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds.–Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”
Matthew Arnold: Poetry as Civilization’s Savior
More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry. – Matthew Arnold
Hans Robert Jauss: Literature That Expands Horizons
A literary work is not an object which stands by itself and which offers the same face to each reader in each period. It is not a monument which reveals its timeless essence in a monologue. It is much more like an orchestration which strikes ever new chords among its readers and which frees the text from the substance of the words and makes it meaningful for the time…A literary work must be understood as creating a dialogue…Hans Robert Jauss
E. Diversity Changes the Conversation
W. E. B. Du Bois: Literature’s Hidden Biases
We can afford the Truth. White folk today cannot.—W. E. B. Du Bois, Criteria of Negro Art
Bertolt Brecht: Art as a Hammer to Shape Reality
It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality.–Bertolt Brecht
Frantz Fanon: Post-Colonial Literature, a Form of Combat
This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it molds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.– Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
The Frankfurt School: Great Literature Protests One-Dimensional Society
Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. —Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Rachel Blau DuPlessis: Literary Endings: Marriage or Death
Once upon a time, the end, the rightful end, of women in novels was social—successful courtship, marriage—or judgmental of her sexual and social failure—death.—Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending
F. Literature as Training Ground for Citizenship
Terry Eagleton: Literature and Classroom Socialization
In the early 1920s it was desperately unclear why English was worth studying at all; by the early 1930s it had become a question of why it was worth wasting your time on anything else. English was not only a subject worth studying, but the supremely civilizing pursuit, the spiritual essence of the social formation.—Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch: Literature as Essential Being
Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time because then they are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives.—Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
Wayne Booth: The Best Books Build Character
You [literature] lead me first to practice ways of living that are more profound, more sensitive, more intense, and in a curious way more fully generous than I am likely to meet anywhere else in the world. You correct my faults, rebuke my insensitivities. You mold me into patterns of longing and fulfillment that make my ordinary dreams seem petty and absurd. You finally show what life can be…to anyone who is willing to work to earn the title of equal and true friend.—Wayne Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction
Martha Nussbaum: Literature, Indispensable to Democracy
Narrativeart has the power to make ussee the lives of the different with more than a casual tourist’s interest—with involvement and sympathetic understanding, with anger at our society’s refusals of visibility.—Martha Nussbaum, “Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education”
Part III – Better Living through Literature—in Practice
Case Study: How Jane Eyre Has Made the World a Better Place
Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen in the film Becoming Jane
Wednesday
My librarian friend Valerie Hotchkiss alerted me to an article by Professor Misty Krueger recommending Jane Austen for people undergoing stress. The purported subject is how those suffering from the Covid pandemic will benefit from reading or rereading the novels, but it also touches on how those traumatized by war and by cancer have turned to her. Given that the article sprawls in these many directions, I’ll just note some of the highlights here. For instance, there this:
Austen’s plots provide a welcome escape from reality while also helping us both better understand ourselves and the people in our lives and handle as best we can what life throws at us. During the pandemic, for example, many people have spent too much time isolated from family, friends, coworkers, and even potential companions; for others the pandemic forced us to spend more time with our loved ones than perhaps we ever imagined or wanted. Whether we felt isolated from other people or even from our own active selves or felt the desire to escape our remote, stay-at-home routines, turning to Austen during this difficult time made it easier to process the effects of the pandemic on our lives and, through this universalizing experience, to empathize with Austen’s characters as well as fans across the globe.
Krueger and I were on the same wavelength here since, after reading this, I instantly thought of Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Janeites,” which she turns to as well. The Janeites are a club in the World War I trenches who find solace in Austen’s novels. One of them recommends “Jane when you’re in a tight place.”
Krueger says that Jane Austen therapy has not been confined to fiction:
Doctors prescribed Austen’s novels to soldiers during and after World War I due to what Claudia Johnson calls the “rehabilitative” nature of Austen’s writings on “shattered minds,” and what [Mary] Favret likens to “restorative therapy.” Lee Siegel too writes of “shell-shocked veterans” who “were advised to read Austen’s novels for therapy, perhaps to restore their faith in a world that had been blown apart while at the same time respecting their sense of the world’s fragility.”
Austen also played a role during World War II. For instance, Winston Churchill, when he was recovering from pneumonia in 1943, turned to Austen:
Austen helped Churchill regain his sense of self. He states that in his convalescence he felt disconnected from himself: “it was like being transported out of oneself.” In his recovery he was instructed not to work or worry, so he “decided to read a novel” (actually, to have his daughter read one to him): Pride and Prejudice. Churchill enjoyed the “calm lives” of Austen’s characters and saw them as free from the stresses of war and living in a world for which the biggest problems concerned “manners” and “natural passions.”
Nor was Churchill alone, as Professor Favret notes in another article:
Other individuals wrote to the literary journals to report that they too were reading—and re-reading—Austen’s novels, often at a terrific rate. War years in England provoked an energetic discussion of the merits of re-reading; and though she wasn’t the only re-read author, Jane Austen always figured in the discussion. There was an assumption at the time that re-reading books from Britain’s tremendous literary past served as fortification against the upheavals of wartime. Austen provided something additional, at least in the eyes of British novelist Rebecca West: her work demonstrated an “underlying faith that the survival of society was more essential to the moral purpose of the universe than the survival of the individual,” and such faith could prove crucial in wartime. The public re-read Austen in particular, writes a London paper in 1943, because “Her books are full of the drowsy hummings of a summer garden, which can deafen ears even to the hummings of the aeroplane overhead.”
Krueger says that reading Austen helps build up our resilience. Reading the novelist, she notes, can be a form of what Mayo Clinic researchers have called “self-directed stress management,” helping patients “divert negative thoughts and interpret experiences positively.” Although the clinic doesn’t mention reading Austen, Krueger says that her novels can help us survive “months of uncertainty and social isolation”:
Austen’s world…holds up a mirror to ours, and people have identified with her characters’ life-threatening maladies, quarantines, and social distancing. It seems that we share the troubles faced by Marianne Dashwood, Jane Bennet, Tom Bertram, Harriet Smith, Louisa Musgrove, and more; some of us might even identify with hypochondriacs Mr. Woodhouse and the Parkers as we panic about coronavirus. If Austen’s characters can survive sickness and seclusion with grace, surely we can too. Right? One of the things we admire about Austen’s characters, Janice Hadlow reminds us, is their resilience.
Later in her piece, Krueger mentions the “Jane Austen Guide for Surviving Covid,” which I believe I’ve blogged on in the past. Created during the lockdown days of the virus by Megan O’Keefe, it recommends
only leaving the house to take long walks and “essential trips”; “suddenly wearing gloves, writing letters to far away friends, and taking on unique hobbies”; “maintain[ing] a respectable distance of at least six feet” while in public; and skipping large gatherings like parties (or balls)—to our own pandemic habits.
Krueger also mentions Josephine Tovey’s article “Sense and Social Distancing: Lockdown Has Given Me a Newfound Affinity with Jane Austen’s Heroines”:
The article recalls the absurdity-cum-reality of the scene in Pride and Prejudice when Caroline Bingley encourages Elizabeth Bennet “‘to follow [her] example, and take a turn about the room’” because it is “‘refreshing.’” Tovey “discovered a newfound sympathy—affinity even—for every character battling tedium in that room.” Surely, many of us can relate: “All of a sudden, period dramas have become extremely relatable. Ceaseless hours indoors with your family? Fretting about falling into financial ruin? Feeling an outsized thrill at a neighbor who stops by to visit? There’s an Austen for that.” Tovey speaks to the “inherent suffocation of a life lived almost entirely within the same four walls” and how our experiences in pandemic lockdown are providing us with a “fresh appreciation for why characters like Elizabeth Bennet and . . . Marianne Dashwood find a simple walk so electrifying. It gives them freedom and perspective.”
In short, you can find better living through Jane Austen. For an author whose first work appear in 1811 and who died six novels and six years later, she’s had a hell of an impact.
Last week I wrote about the early chapters in Phuc Tran’s memoir Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In (2020). Landing in Carlyle, Pennsylvania after he fled Saigon with his parents, Tran would later find refuge in a “great books” list. Seeing literature initially as a ticket to acceptance and assimilation, he eventually discovered that literature gave him a framework for navigating his identity confusion.
In other words, literature did indeed provide him with a special key. Just not in the way he thought.
In his memoir, Tran uses different works to capture different moments of his experience. I wrote last week about how Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment helped him deal with family violence and Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter with the racism he encountered. Here are some of the other works he mentions:
Madame Bovary
Tran notes that, the first time her read Flaubert’s novel, “I knew immediately that she and I had shared a passion”:
In Flaubert’s novel, Emma Bovary yearns for a life that is beyond her grasp. Her desire for a grander existence burns from her love of romance novels, and her devouring of these bodice-rippers enflames in her an unyielding desire.
It doesn’t matter that her novels are trashy, Tran says, and he quotes Flaubert: “Emma tried to find out what one means exactly in life by the words bliss, passion, ecstasy, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.”
For Tran, comic books served this purpose:
But if literature moves you deeply, does it matter where it comes from? Does it matter that it’s trashy or lowbrow? Isn’t that emotional connection one of the purposes of art? To make you feel—really feel—emotions? To resonate with your life? And perhaps, in that connection, to introduce you to a world that lies beyond your own perspective, the utopia beyond your myopia.
Pygmalion
Shaw’s play hit home because Tran, in high school, felt that, like Eliza Doolittle, he was trying to pass himself off as someone he wasn’t. How else would he escape the racist bullying and fit in? This had some good effects in that he found a gang of boys that accepted this new self. But he also encountered Eliza’s crisis at the end of the play and describes what many immigrant children have experienced:
At the end of Pygmalion, Eliza laments that she cannot go back to her old life, to her old ways, and she cannot find a place in her new world, either. In the currents of fitting in, in the push and pull of Americana that was sweeping me and my brother away, I could no longer communicate deeply with my parents. I had begun to forget my Vietnamese, and that act of forgetting was my Vietnamese forfeiture for my future in America…. Sometimes, in annoyance, I chose to answer my mother in English, bypassing Vietnamese altogether. I didn’t bother to consider what was lost in the undertow of the flood.
I was in the waters of America, and gasping, dying. I chose to survive.
I held my breath and dove deeper.
The Metamorphosis
Kafka’s famous story about a man who wakes up one morning and discovers that he has metamorphosed into a giant roach captures, for Tran, his experience of being an alienated adolescent in a family that did not—could not—understand what he was going through:
You read The Metamorphosis and you realize: it’s his family’s ugliness toward Gregor that moves the story. Gregor is now a giant roach, and he cannot do anything about it. His family, instead of acting with compassion and kindness, sends Gregor to his room and locks the door.
What’s worse that turning into a giant bug? Turning into a giant bug and having your family act like a bunch of assholes.
Tran’s framing of the story makes one realize that it addresses adolescence in general, not just the experience of immigrant teens:
And isn’t that adolescence? A biological change over which we have no control? And then our family, like a bunch of assholes, treats us like an insect in the midst of a metamorphosis that we ourselves hardly understand. Suddenly, with a different focus, from the perspective of a bug, we see who they are.
The Importance of Being Ernest
Wilde’s play for Tran worked as a sequel to Pygmalion: one thinks one is faking an identity, only to discover that one really is that person. Or as Tran describes the ending,
In the course of lying about his name being Ernest, Jack finds out that his real name is Ernest at the play’s end….Truths and lies are the same.
After trying out alternative names, “Phuc” having an obvious drawback, Tran concludes,
Phuc. That was enough to be the sum of who I was and who I would be. And it would never be a lie. I just had to find the courage to be him and ask myself why I was afraid to be Phuc.
The Iliad
The final work Tran mentions is the Iliad. Having established himself, by this point, as a standout student in his English classes, he finds himself relating to Achilles–which is to say, the best warrior in the Greek army but put down by the Greeks’ insecure leader Agamemnon. As he finds himself explaining to the other students in class,
“Achilles’s conundrum is complicated because he is the best fighter on the Greek side but not the leader of the Greeks and then he’s shamed in front of the whole group. The MVP on the team but not the captain of the team….Achilles can’t figure it out—the system seems rigged. I mean, maybe it is all rigged.”
Fortunately—this is one thing that America does better than many countries—the system is not so rigged as to entrap Tran for ever in lower-class status. His academic success in his public high school earns him a substantial scholarship from a very good liberal arts college (Bard), and he goes on to major in classics and become a high school Latin teacher. He has also given a TED talk and, according to his bio, is a “highly-respected tattooer.”
As someone who used the great literature in a similar way in high school, although my challenges were nowhere near as great as Tran’s, I can say that he is no anomaly. Give teenagers substantive works and a number of them will rise to the occasion.
