I’ve written a couple of times about Glenn Youngkin’s attack on Beloved (here and here), which may have helped him win the Virginia governorship, but I want to make one final point. Because Toni Morrison’s novel is in fact social dynamite, it makes sense that those “tap-dancing” with white supremacy (that’s the phrasing of MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart) would be disturbed when their children are assigned it.
But at least those parents acknowledge that stories are powerful. I saw historian Michael Beschloss the other night on MSNBC observe that the incident is overblown because Beloved is only fiction. In saying so, he underestimates the disruptive potential of novels. Indeed, Beloved is meant to disturb readers, Black as well as White. Great literature is often great because it disturbs.
As I reflect on this, an interchange from the Lawrence Kasdan film Grand Canyon (1991) comes to mind, one that I mention in my book. Danny Glover, in the role of auto mechanic, is confronted by a gun-wielding gang leader while attempting to help stranded motorist Kevin Kline. Asked by the man whether he respects him or not, Glover replies, “You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.” One reason why schools are having conversations about Beloved (and why certain schools have also banned Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon) is because Morrison’s fiction is like a loaded gun that could go off at any moment, shattering complacency.
This is a point made by a recent Washington Post column, written before the Virginia election. After reading about the boy—now a Republican operative—who “gave up” on the novel because it was “gross” and hard to handle, African American columnist Cristine Emba recalls her own high school encounter with it:
I was also asked to read Beloved in a high school English class, also in Virginia — Richmond, to be precise. It was a hard read. You felt bad. It was also an illuminating corrective, studied against the Virginia backdrop of Robert E. Lee worship, Stonewall Jackson fetishization, and the plantations where enslaved people, we heard in our history classes, worked mostly happily for noble, caring masters.
Beloved in her case proved to be life-changing:
The novel taught me the power of literature, how words could transmit deep emotion. It did keep me up at night, because I was grappling with the pain of another person, wondering how someone could get to such a place, how people could do these things to one another. The gory details of the book fled my mind in the ensuing years. But the feeling — I never forgot it.
Rightwing Americans, Emba says, fear facing up to the past into which Morrison plunges them. And she does so in ways they never forget:
They fear it because examining our racial history, engaging in empathy for the enslaved and their descendants, might occasion a bit of guilt, a bit of knowledge that our national mythology (and its embedded racial hierarchy) is false, and a bit of responsibility to address racial inequality. It might occasion a bit of change, in short — and we can’t have that.
Youngkin’s promise to Virginiains, in other words, was “Elect me and your kids will never be forced to confront uncomfortable issues”:
In Virginia, all of this hides under a dad-like candidate in a fleecy vest, and in the beseeching eyes of a suburban mom protecting her little boy from books that made lawmakers turn “bright red with embarrassment.” But it is obvious from the segregationist history of “parents’ rights” discourse — and in the particular parts of curriculums most frequently opposed — what the real agenda is.
The problem with avoiding fearful issues is that we don’t so much escape them as push them under, which in turn renders them toxic. Facing up to them is how to break their hold over us, and doing so through novels is one of the most powerful means we have for doing so.
November is often a tough time for people who grapple with depression, but many of the poems about the season at least let them know they’re not alone. I’ve shared dark autumn poems by Mallarme and Mary Oliver in the past (here) and have a couple more poems to add to the list.
First, there’s the 19th century poet Thomas Hood brightening up November’s dark aspects with a playful final punchline:
November By Thomas Hood
No sun – no moon! No morn – no noon – No dawn – no dusk – no proper time of day. No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease, No comfortable feel in any member – No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! – November!
Amy Lowell has her own dark November moods, during which time she reports being abandoned by her own cat (!):
November By Amy Lowell
The vine leaves against the brick walls of my house, Are rusty and broken. Dead leaves gather under the pine-trees, The brittle boughs of lilac-bushes Sweep against the stars. And I sit under a lamp Trying to write down the emptiness of my heart. Even the cat will not stay with me, But prefers the rain Under the meagre shelter of a cellar window.
Finally, Rita Dove figures out how to handle the month in “November for Beginners.” The secret: step into the gloom, whether by memorizing “a gloomy line or two of German” or essentially telling the season to bring it on, with its rain and wind. There’s an echo in the poem of King Lear commanding the elements not to spare him:
You can dream of spring all you want, Dove tells us. In the meantime, however, embrace the darkness:
November for Beginners By Rita Dove
Snow would be the easy way out—that softening sky like a sigh of relief at finally being allowed to yield. No dice. We stack twigs for burning in glistening patches but the rain won’t give.
So we wait, breeding mood, making music of decline. We sit down in the smell of the past and rise in a light that is already leaving. We ache in secret, memorizing
a gloomy line or two of German. When spring comes we promise to act the fool. Pour, rain! Sail, wind with your cargo of zithers!
Today we remember our dead and turn back our clocks. Both are included in Dionisio D. Martinez’s “Standard Time: Novena for My Father,” a tender prayer poem directed to the speaker’s deceased father.
Early on, wind chimes remind the speaker of his parent, leading him to work “All Hallows Eve” and other names for the day into a little ditty. These thoughts of death lead him to Saint Francis, who in addition to welcoming birds embraced “Sister Death.” By not living in fear of death—this is what Martinez means by Francis “having nothing but faith in his hands”— Francis believed we could open ourselves fully to God.
Having sat all day with a statue of Francis, the poet no longer needs to hear the wind chimes to imagine his father as present. He thinks of Francis’s birds as dead souls (night birds), which
breathe music back into the wind chimes when the forecast calls for stillness.
I must admit to difficulties with the next two stanzas, even though I love some of the imagery. Here they are:
I still remember what you said about belief, how you laughed when I said I thought the world could carry the cross I’d carved around my shoulder and through my fist.
The world is busy with its clocks and its wind chimes and the night birds that never fly home once they learn the secret of exile.
Perhaps, thinking back to his disagreements with his father over belief, he now questions his need for tangible evidence. When he says, in the first of the stanzas, that the only thing he believed in was what he could carry on his shoulders and accomplish with his fist—he believed more in the crucifixion than the resurrection—his father laughed at him. Unlike the senior Martinez, the son doesn’t have St. Francis’s faith, which draws birds, not heavy world responsibilities, to his shoulders.
Similarly, if he is still obsessed with resetting clocks and finding signs of his father in wind chimes and imagined night birds, then he has yet to achieve the faith. But I’m still puzzled about what he means by “secret of exile,” even though I love the phrase. Is he saying that his father, once having flown to God, would not fly home again? And is the poet, having thought that he detected the presence of his father, now wondering if it just been an illusion? After all, why would a bird fly home after having discovered the secret of eternity?
The questioning takes me back to three successive Sundays after my eldest son died. Each time, as Julia and I stood atop the churchyard bluff looking down at where Justin had drowned, an osprey landed in the tree above us and stayed there until we left some twenty minutes later. It provided us comfort at a very dark time, a seeming sign from Justin, but I can understand Martinez’s doubts.
Incidentally, the 17th century metaphysical poet uses the same flown bird image to contrast the earthly and the spiritual in “They are all gone into the world of light”:
Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just, Shining nowhere, but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust Could man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know At first sight, if the bird be flown; But what fair well or grove he sings in now, That is to him unknown.
Returning to Martinez’s poem, in the next stanza he emits an “almost musical sigh” after lighting a votive candle. If we have no other contact, maybe you can at least hear this, the poet says to his father. Then he launches unexpectedly into hell imagery.
Perhaps “all the souls in hell” represent materialist doubt in the divine—that’s partly what hell is for Dante—because Martinez indicates the weapons these souls use to plunge us into hell (“set the world on fire”) are mathematics and equations. Despite their efforts, however, they cannot prevail over the way we “cling to the last flame in the equation.” That flame could be both the candle Martinez lights before his father’s picture or and the Pentecostal flame, where the Holy Spirit entered us after Jesus departed the world.
In other words, when we lose a loved one and all the world is dark, when we doubt an afterlife because it makes no rational sense, some small flame of hope persists. Its ability to override our doubts is all the more impressive.
Standard Time: Novena for My Father
By Dionisio D. Martinez
We’re turning back the clocks tonight to live an hour longer. I suppose this is a useless ritual to you now.
Late October brings life to the wind chimes with that perpetually nocturnal music so reminiscent of you.
I memorize a small song, a seasonable dirge for the night that lives outside my window. I call each note by name: All Hallows Eve; All Saints Day; all the souls in my music pacing, talking to themselves.
All day I sit by the statue of Saint Francis of Assisi, birds on his shoulders, nothing but faith in his hands.
At dusk I return to the house you knew and a life you would probably understand. There are night birds waiting to breathe music back into the wind chimes when the forecast calls for stillness.
I still remember what you said about belief, how you laughed when I said I thought the world could carry the cross I’d carved around my shoulder and through my fist.
The world is busy with its clocks and its wind chimes and the night birds that never fly home once they learn the secret of exile.
I let out one sigh that is almost musical. I know you can hear this much. I take a small step back and picture you here before I light the last candle.
All the souls in hell couldn’t set this world on fire. Even if they prove that our lives are mathematically impossible, we will cling to the last flame in the equation.
I hope readers will indulge another reflection upon my return to my alma mater Carleton College this past weekend, where I participated in 50th reunion planning. I discussed my mixed feelings about the school on Monday but didn’t mention my meaningful encounters with former classmates. In one of the English language’s greatest poems about revisiting old haunts, Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey talks about the importance of having someone with whom to share intense memories.
Given the power of Wordsworth’s trip down Memory Lane, I’ve always found it funny that the poem memorializes a fifth-year reunion, maybe the least dramatic of all reunions (it stands in stark contrast with the 50th). Maybe, given Wordsworth’s intensity, five years for him is 50 for anyone else. In any event, the year is 1798 and Wordsworth is returning to a spot “a few miles above Tintern Abbey…on the Banks of the Wye” that he first visited in 1793 at the age of 22.
Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur.—Once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
Since then, the poet has carried the scene and the accompanying sensations with him wherever he has gone:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind With tranquil restoration…
Nor is that all the remembrance does for him. Because he recollects so deeply, he has an out-of-body experience:
To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,— Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
Wordsworth acknowledges that not everyone will have a mystical experience when looking back, and I must admit that my Carleton memories have not put me in touch with the divine. What Wordsworth says about his intense nature moments, on the other hand, resonates with me. In Tuesday’s post I recounted how Dylan Thomas’s “Poem in October” took me back to experiences with Julia in Carleton’s Arboretum, and the following Tintern Abbey passage also captures the heightened emotions that I remember:
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led… For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.—I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love…
Contributing to my own “glad animal movements” was the pulsating animal poetry of D. H. Lawrence, one of which (the sexually explicit “Tortoise Shout”) Julia and I included in our Commencement-day wedding.
I promised this post would be about reunions as shared experience, however, so I turn now to where Wordsworth talks about the importance of having a companion. His sister Dorothy accompanies him on this second visit, and he now looks at the scene through her eyes. To continue with my reunion theme, he resembles the parents who, Carleton graduates themselves, want their children to have the Carleton experience:
For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister!
Sounding like someone who is my age (70) rather than 27, Wordsworth hopes that his sister’s memories will help him hang on to his own. “When these wild ecstasies shall be matured/ Into a sober pleasure,” writes the still young William to Dorothy, your mind will be
a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies…
Because they share the moment, the poet concludes, this magical spot on the Wye River will always be special. Or as he puts it,
Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
When I attended my 40th reunion ten years ago, my classmates sharing their varied life experiences revealed how much we had been shaped by both Carleton and the early 1970s. Despite differences, we all carried with us a similar vision of life because we had all used our liberal arts education to negotiate the same historical forces—those being the Vietnam War, the protest movement, the racial strife, and the Nixon White House. I have always told my students that, to understand an author’s vision, look at the world when he or she was 21. One can apply that lesson to college reunion classes as well.
The planning committee came up with a logo and a slogan for the reunion that captures what we share. There is a sketch of Carleton’s landmark “Hill of the Three Oaks,” the three individual trees having their roots intertwined below ground. The slogan will probably be, “Shared Journeys, Deep Roots.”
As I have just been reading Richard Powers’s The Overstory, a sublime novel about trees and humans, I can see the theme to be even better than I would previously have thought. Powers lets us know that, even when trees appear separate, they are actually joined in complex ways, sometimes through root systems, sometimes via the chemicals they send off. For instance, here’s his botanist Patricia Westerford responding to an aspen forest:
The oldest downed trees are about eighty years. She smiles at the number, so comical, for these fifty thousand baby trees all around her have sprouted from a rhizome mass too old to date even to the nearest hundred millennia. Underground, the eighty-year-old trunks are a hundred thousand, if they’re a day. She wouldn’t be surprised if this great, joined, single clonal creature that looks like a forest has been around for the better part of a million years.
And here are maples communicating through the air:
Confirmation comes the following spring. Three more trials, and she’s convinced. The trees under attack pump out insecticides to save their lives. That much is uncontroversial. But something else in the data makes her flesh pucker: trees a little way off, untouched by the invading swarms, ramp up their own defenses when their neighbor is attacked. Something alerts them. They get wind of the disaster, and they prepare. She controls for everything she can, and the results are always the same. Only one conclusion makes any sense. The wounded trees send out alarms that other trees smell. Her maples are signaling. They’re linked together in an airborne network, sharing an immune system across acres of woodland. These brainless, stationary trunks are protecting each other.
As she writes up her results, Westerford observes,
The biochemical behavior of individual trees may make sense only when we see them as members of a community.
Our own lives make more sense if we see ourselves as members of a common experience. When this experience occurs at one of the most impressionable moments of our lives, it’s important for the members to reassemble and ritually revisit it. I didn’t think this when I was closer to Wordsworth’s 27 years—in fact, I avoided all reunions until the 25th—but I think it now.
I don’t know the degree to which attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved contributed to the GOP’s victories in Virginia Tuesday night. To the extent that education was a voting issue, I suspect the Democrats’ losses had more to do with people feeling unhappy about continuing Covid-caused chaos in the schools, for which they blamed the party in power. But Republican Glenn Youngkin was definitely employing racist dog whistles, which apparently never get old in American politics. The trick is to attack Black people while pretending to care about public safety or children’s education or some other noble cause.
Nevertheless, the idea that any literature that makes students “uncomfortable” is now red meat for aspiring rightwing politicians is disturbing. It leaves teachers and school administrators hunkering down, hoping to fly beneath the radar as Trumpists go looking for something to sink their teeth into.
Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri, thankfully, offers us a little levity. Before the election, she imagined what school reading lists would look like if (as in fact has happened) Youngkin were elected governor. The column begins cheerfully:
Hello, everyone! We’re going to have a great year! Some minor, barely noticeable adjustments to the curriculum have taken place since Glenn Youngkin took office. This is a college-level class in which we’re supposed to be tackling challenging material. But you may remember the Glenn Youngkin commercial starring the mother who was trying to stop “Beloved” from being taught in her senior son’s AP English class on the grounds that he thought it was “disgusting and gross” and “gave up on it.” Anyway, he supported that kind of parental control over the curriculum, so we’ve had to tweak just a couple of things!
Now for some of her imagined tweaks:
Below please find our reading list new and improved reading list after being forced to bend to every concern from a parent: —The Odyssey mutilation and abuse of alcohol, blood drinking –Brideshead Revisited not sure what’s going on with that teddy bear; house named after something that should be saved for marriage –The Handmaid’s Tale everything about book was fine except its classification as ‘dystopia’ –The Catcher in the Rye anti-Ronald Reagan somehow though we’re not sure how –The Importance of Being Earnest includes a disturbing scene where a baby is abandoned in a train station in a handbag and the people in the play regard this as the subject of mirth –Candide buttock cannibalism –Don Quixote makes fun of somebody for attacking a wind-or-solar-based energy source –Great Expectations convict presented sympathetically –Les Miserables see above –King Lear violence and it’s suggested that there are scenarios where parents actually do not know best –The Sun Also Rises offensive to flat-Earthers –Death of a Salesman features a White man to whom attention is not paid
The mother who led the attack on Beloved said that the book gave her son nightmares. Yes, literature is filled with nightmare-inducing scenes. Once scene Petri may have in mind is this one from Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops:
Neither reply nor pity came from him, but in one stride he clutched at my companions and caught two in his hands like squirming puppies to beat their brains out, spattering the floor. Then he dismembered them and made his meal, gaping and crunching like a mountain lion– everything: innards, flesh, and marrow bones. We cried aloud, lifting our hands to Zeus, powerless, looking on at this appalled; but Kyklops went on filling up his belly with manflesh and great gulps of whey, then lay down like a mast among his sheep.
I remember, as a high school student, reading this scene with horrified fascination. I also was riveted by Raskolnikov taking an axe to the old lady in Crime and Punishment. I gazed in horror as Milton’s Satan rapes his own daughter (Sin), who thereupon gives birth to Death, who then rapes his own mother, blasting her vagina and giving birth to hounds who live there, howling incessantly. And then there was Oedipus, who when he learns he has committed both patricide and incest blinds himself with his mother/wife’s brooches.
We’re trying to figure people out in our teenage years, and we get a sense of humanity’s darker side when we encounter such works. We read and we survive. High schoolers are tough that way. Our parents, however, although normally silent, swing into action when race and sex are involved.
If “student discomfort” is the new criteria about whether certain books should be taught, then we are indeed on a slippery slope. Petri makes this clear in her conclusion:
Nope, sorry, we aren’t reading anymore. A parent complained that the books on the reading list transported them to different times and places against their will and forced them to imagine the lives of people different than themselves. This is like kidnapping and probably also brainwashing, and we can’t possibly read any texts that do this.
We’re looking forward to engaging with complex, challenging texts that will teach us to read critically, write compellingly and look at the world with new eyes sitting here staring at the wall thinking about what it might have been like to read books all semester long!
When parents “protect” their kids against these books, they risk turning them into frightened adults who fear tough conversations and retreat into reactionary, fear-based politics. The nation is impoverished when this happens.
Further note: Lest you think I exaggerate about the passage from Paradise Lost, here is an excerpt. Sin is explaining to her father Satan what happened after he raped her and she gave birth to Death. First, here’s Milton’s description of her:
The one seemed woman to the waist, and fair, But ended foul in many a scaly fold, Voluminous and vast–a serpent armed With mortal sting. About her middle round A cry of Hell-hounds never-ceasing barked With wide Cerberean mouths full loud, and rung A hideous peal; yet, when they list, would creep, If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb, And kennel there; yet there still barked and howled Within unseen.
And now for her birthing story, which is a delivery table nightmare
“At last this odious offspring whom thou seest, Thine own begotten, breaking violent way, Tore through my entrails, that, with fear and pain Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew Transformed: but he my inbred enemy Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart, Made to destroy. I fled, and cried out Death! Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed From all her caves, and back resounded Death! I fled; but he pursued (though more, it seems, Inflamed with lust than rage), and, swifter far, Me overtook, his mother, all dismayed, And, in embraces forcible and foul Engendering with me, of that rape begot These yelling monsters, that with ceaseless cry Surround me, as thou saw’st–hourly conceived And hourly born, with sorrow infinite To me; for, when they list, into the womb That bred them they return, and howl, and gnaw My bowels, their repast; then, bursting forth Afresh, with conscious terrors vex me round, That rest or intermission none I find. Before mine eyes in opposition sits.
The endlessly proliferating hounds are a powerful expression of how sin endlessly engenders sin. I’ve never heard of parents objecting to English teachers teaching the episode.
Eero Jarnefelt, “Portrait of Arvid Jarnefelt” (Finland, 1888)
Wednesday
My friend Rebecca Adams alerted me to an American Scholar article in which a retired English professor, James A. W. Heffernan, makes a compelling case for the humanities: without literature, he contends, we lose touch with our humanity.
The article begins with the latest alarming stats on literature majors:
The Summer 2021 newsletter of the Modern Language Association reports a troubling statistic about American colleges and universities: from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of bachelor’s degrees awarded in modern languages and literature has plunged by 29 percent. “Where Have All the Majors Gone?” asks the article.
Then Heffernan asks a question very much in the spirit of this blog:
But here’s a more pragmatic question: what sort of dividends does the study of literature pay, out there in the real world?
Is literature the ideal major for future entrepreneurs? Heffernan considers the question and decides no. On the plus side, he says, there are the 15 different perspectives that one encounters in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, which theoretically prepares one to
develop the kind of adaptability that it takes to succeed in business, where the budding entrepreneur must learn how to satisfy customers with various needs and where he or she must also be ever ready to adapt to changing needs and changing times.
Heffernan, however, then counters,
If all you want is entrepreneurial adaptability, you can probably gain it much more efficiently by going to business school. You don’t need a novel by Faulkner—or anyone else.
I’m going to disagree with Heffernan here. My eldest son, who majored in Theatre, is very entrepreneurial, even though he has never taken a business course. Darien is in charge of all internal and external communications for a thriving company, and a major part of his job is figuring out what other people need and how to mediate between different departments to get the best out of everyone. When he was acting in college productions, he wasn’t thinking that this is how he would put his major to use, but he now reports that he uses his theatre training every day at work.
I also reject Heffernan’s next argument, which which is that majoring in literature makes you a better writer. Again, he first gives a pro answer before following it up with a con. Here’s the argument for:
To study literature is not just to see the rules of grammar at work but to discover such things as the symmetry of parallel structure and the concentrated burst of metaphor: two prime instruments of organization. Henry Adams once wrote that “nothing in education is more astonishing than the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Literature shows us how to animate facts, and still more how to make them cooperate, to work and dance together toward revelation.
Now the con:
Yet literature can be highly complex. Given its complexity, given all the ways in which poems, plays, and novels resist as well as provoke our desire to know what they mean, the study of literature once again invites the charge of inefficiency. If you just want to know how to make the written word get you a job, make you a sale, or charm a venture capitalist, you don’t need to study the gnomic verses of Emily Dickinson or the intricate ironies of Jonathan Swift. All you need is a good textbook on writing and plenty of practice.
I take even stronger exception to this than I did to the first point and use my own life as an example. My first fulltime job following graduation was as a journalist for a small-town newspaper. I started behind where I would have been had I majored in journalism. But having seen many different forms of writing in my history major and English minor, I learned very quickly the style I needed for this one. In very short order, I was writing 10-20 articles a week. Indeed, my whole life has involved adapting to new writing challenges, including composing a daily blog.
Heffernan next mentions literature teaching us “moral lessons” (argument for) but asks what kind of moral can be extracted from the death of Cordelia in King Lear (argument against). Having made the point, however, he then goes on to argue that literature helps us hold on to our humanity when we are at risk of losing it.
His case is that, because literature captures humans in all their complexity, it can both offer us a refuge from the world’s inhumanity and help us confront it, often in complex and contradictory ways. This is a view I endorse wholeheartedly. Here he is making his argument:
As a refuge from such horrors, literature can offer us visions or at least glimpses of beauty, harmony, and love. They are part of what Seamus Heaney called “the redress of poetry”—compensation for the misery, cruelty, and brutality that human beings ceaselessly inflict on one another. But literature at its most powerful is never just a balloon ride to fantasy, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. Rather than taking flight from our inhumanity, great literature confronts it even while somehow keeping alive its faith in our humanity. What is the moral of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the story of a formerly enslaved Black woman who killed her own infant daughter to spare her from a life of slavery and sexual exploitation? In a world of merciless inhumanity, can infanticide become an expression of love?
This is the kind of question literature insists on asking. At the heart of the humanities lies humanity, which stubbornly insists on measuring everything in terms of its impact on human life.
Heffernan goes on to mention Robert Oppenheimer’s opposition to the further development of nuclear warfare after having been a key figure in the invention of the atom bomb. The article could have strengthened its case by mentioning the profound influence that the poetry of George Herbert had upon the scientist. I have written about that here.
The article concludes by turning to Albert Camus’s The Plague, which Heffernan sees as capturing the struggle to hold on to our humanity, even when everything seems out to destroy it. He quotes the doctor who does all he can to save lives, even though the situation appears hopeless:
“Despite their personal afflictions,” he says, [the war against terror] must be waged “by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”
Heffernan concludes,
Having spent trillions of dollars fighting terrorism with bullets and bombs, we need literature and the humanities now more than ever, because they strive to heal, to nurture the most priceless of all our possessions: our humanity.
My only argument with Heffernan is that, after having asked what dividends literature pays out, he offers only this one. Immense though it may be, it will not reverse the slide in English majors. After all, if you need literature to persuade people that they are at risk of losing their humanity, then how are you going to persuade non-readers of their peril in the first place? You need multiple incentives to get people to read.
I’m for an all-of-the-above approach. Yes, literature will help you succeed in the work world; yes, it will make you a more effective communicator—and yes, it will help you become more fully human in a world that is in desperate need of three-dimensional humans.
I have just returned from a weekend at Carleton College, where I was a member of the committee planning our 50th reunion. (The reunion isn’t until June of 2023 but it’s an elaborate affair, resembling at times an academic conference, so we need a long head start.) Carleton is a very good small college in the Midwest, and as I visited old haunts, the cold October air penetrating my limbs, I was overwhelmed by a flood of emotions.
I’m having difficulty sorting them out. There were fond memories, but I also experienced a sadness and a pain resembling dread. At times I was on the verge of tears. Perhaps I’m feeling my age, I thought, or mourning a lost innocence. But though the world is dark now, it was dark then too, what with the seemingly endless Vietnam War and corruption in Nixon’s White House. To figure out my internal state, I’m turn to poems that seem to capture the emotions.
D. H. Lawrence’s “Piano” was one poem that came to mind as I walked around. Hearing a woman singing, the poet is thrown back to a time in his childhood when his mother was playing the piano as he sat at her feet:
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
Another poem I thought of was A. E. Housman’s “Into my heart an air that kills.” Many of the Shropshire Lad poems are filled with intense longing, but this may surpass them all. The “air that kills” captures some of the pain I was feeling:
Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
Later, I thought of Dylan Thomas, another master of nostalgia. In his seasonally appropriate “Poem in October,” he remembers being a boy in the summer, before “the weather turned round.” Here are the concluding stanzas:
And the twice told fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. These were the woods the river and sea Where a boy In the listening Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide. And the mystery Sang alive Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday Away but the weather turned around. And the true Joy of the long dead child sang burning In the sun. It was my thirtieth Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon Though the town below lay leaved with October blood. O may my heart’s truth Still be sung On this high hill in a year’s turning.
I think the Thomas poem gets closest to explaining my emotional state, since Lawrence’s desire to return to childhood isn’t my desire, nor did I ever see Carleton as a land of content. But I do remember times there when “the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide/And the mystery/Sang alive/Still in the water and the singingbirds.” That’s how the world looked when Julia and I would take our sleeping bags and spend warm May nights together in Carleton’s arboretum. Our love has matured and deepened since then—we too will be celebrating 50 years in 2023—but on Saturday, as I walked through the college’s nature preserve, I was hit with the contrast. The youthful intensity, the “joy of the long dead child,” is no longer there.
Thomas’s poem echoes Wordsworth’s Intimation of Immortality, where the Romantic poet wonders, “Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?” Thomas, meanwhile, hopes that, even though the town may be “leaved with October blood,” summer passion will “still be sung/On this high hill in a year’s turning.”
Don’t misunderstand what I say here. I love Julia deeply and I wouldn’t want our relationship to return to its earlier stages, when there were painful misunderstandings to go along with the euphoric highs. I like the serenity and the mutual understanding we have managed to achieve. But our lives are now leaved with October blood and don’t sing with the intensity of summer. It could well be that my melancholy over the weekend arose from the absence of something that once was but that cannot come again.
This is an updated and expanded version of an October 3, 2012 and a January 23, 2013 post.
In last week’s post about political attacks on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, I added a note about a Texas lawmaker who has compiled a list of 850 books (!) that he wants Texas school libraries to (1) report if they own and (2) justify why. One of those books is John Irving’s Cider House Rules, whose sensitive handling of abortion is what has probably drawn the man’s ire.
Before explaining why banning the novel would be an abomination, here’s the background of Texas’s latest political stunt. According to the Texas Tribune,
A Republican state lawmaker has launched an investigation into Texas school districts over the type of books they have, particularly if they pertain to race or sexuality or “make students feel discomfort.”
State Rep. Matt Krause, in his role as chair of the House Committee on General Investigating, notified the Texas Education Agency that he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content,” according to an Oct. 25, letter obtained by The Texas Tribune.
Here’s what the inquiry involves:
Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law” designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools.
A number of the books contain information about gender and sexuality and some are about abortion. There are also books about America’s racial history. And then there are the books that I’ve heard of, including
the Pulitzer Prize-winning William Styron novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner and best-sellers that were turned into movies or television series, such as John Irving’s The Cider House Rules, Alan Moore’s dystopian V For Vendetta, and the graphic novel version of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.
Morrison’s novels don’t make the list yet, but since they fit two of Krause’s criteria (they pertain to race and they make students uncomfortable), it may be only a matter of time. Stay tuned.
But back to abortion. Texas’s new law incentivizing people to sue abortion abettors and collect the $10,000 fines levied has essentially ended abortions in the state, taking us back to pre-Roe v Wade times. The Guttmacher Institute reminds us what it was like back then:
Estimates of the number of illegal abortions in the 1950s and 1960s ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year. One analysis, extrapolating from data from North Carolina, concluded that an estimated 829,000 illegal or self-induced abortions occurred in 1967.
One stark indication of the prevalence of illegal abortion was the death toll. In 1930, abortion was listed as the official cause of death for almost 2,700 women—nearly one-fifth (18%) of maternal deaths recorded in that year. The death toll had declined to just under 1,700 by 1940, and to just over 300 by 1950 (most likely because of the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, which permitted more effective treatment of the infections that frequently developed after illegal abortion). By 1965, the number of deaths due to illegal abortion had fallen to just under 200, but illegal abortion still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth that year. And these are just the number that were officially reported; the actual number was likely much higher.
Abortion plays a significant role in the Irving novel, which has sympathetic characters on different sides of the debate. On the one hand, there is obstetrician, orphanage director, and illegal abortion doctor Wilbur Larch, who doesn’t originally set out to perform abortions but begins doing so when he sees that women are determined to have them regardless. He knows that he can at least abort their fetuses safely.
Then there is Homer Wells, the orphan he raises to be his right-hand man. Under his tutelage, Homer becomes a superb doctor—better than Larch himself—but he leaves Larch after learning about the abortions. His moment of crisis occurs when, trying to save the full-term fetus of a mother who has been stabbed, he and Larch discover that it has been stabbed as well. Gazing upon the dead body, Homer decides that fetuses at all stages of development are babies. The developmental stages as presented in Gray’s Anatomy suddenly look different to him:
Homer Wells had seen the products of conception in many stages of development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial form as to be barely recognizable, too. Why the old black-and-whit drawings should have affected him so strongly, he could not say. In Gray’s there was the profile view of the head of a human embryo, estimated at twenty-seven days old. Not quick, as Dr. Larch would be quick to point out, and not recognizably human, either: what would be the spine was cocked, like a wrist, and where the knuckles of the fist (above the wrist) would be, there was the ill-formed face of a fish (the kind that lives below light, is never caught, could give you nightmares). The undersurface of the head of the embryo gaped like an eel—the eyes were at the sides of the head, as if they could protect the creature from an attack from any direction. In eight weeks, though still not quick, the fetus has a nose and a mouth; it has an expression, thought Homer Wells. And with this discovery—that a fetus, as early as eight weeks, has an expression—Homer Wells felt in the presence of what others call a soul.
This perspective prompts Homer to break with the man he loves, although he doesn’t condemn him:
He wasn’t blaming Dr. Larch, either. Homer felt there was nothing as simple as anyone’s fault involved; it was not Larch’s fault—Larch did what he believed in. If Wilbur Larch was a saint to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna, he was both a saint and a father to Homer Wells. Larch knew what he was doing—and for whom. But that quick and not-quick stuff: it didn’t work for Homer Wells. You can call it a fetus, or an embryo, or the products of conception, thought Homer Wells, but whatever you call it, it’s alive. And whatever you do to it, Homer thought—and whatever you call what you do—you’re killing it. He looked at the severed pulmonary artery, which was so perfectly displayed in the open chest of the baby from Three Mile Falls. Let Larch call it whatever he wants, thought Homer Wells. It’s his choice—if it’s a fetus, to him, that’s fine. It’s a baby to me, thought Homer Wells. If Larch has a choice, I have a choice, too.
His choice is to abandon obstetrics, for which he has a genius, and go work on an apple farm. He refuses to yield, even when Larch sends him letters attempting to persuade him to return. Larch writes,
If abortions were legal, you could refuse—in fact, given your beliefs, you should refuse. But as long as they’re against the law, how can you refuse? How can you allow yourself a choice in the matter when there are so many women who haven’t the freedom to make the choice themselves? The women have no choice. I know you know that’s not right, but how can you—you of all people, knowing what you know–HOW CAN YOU FEEL FREE TO CHOOSE NOT TO HELP PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT FREE TO GET OTHER HELP? You have to help them because you know how. Think about who’s going to help them if you refuse.” Wilbur Larch was so tired that if he had allowed himself to go to sleep, the bark would have grown over his eyes.
“Here is the trap you are in,” Dr. Larch wrote to Homer. “And it’s not my trap—I haven’t trapped you. Because abortions are illegal, women who need and want them have no choice in the matter, and you—because you know how to perform them—have no choice, either. What has been violated here is your freedom of choice, and every woman’s freedom of choice, too. If abortion was legal, a woman would have a choice—and so would you. You could feel free not to do it because someone else would. But the way it is, you’re trapped. Women are trapped. Women are victims and so are you.”
To graphically make Larch’s point, the book gives us an instance of a woman who is dying after stuffing things up her vagina in a failed self-abortion attempt:
Dr. Larch bent so close to the speculum, he had to hold his breath. The smell of sepsis and putrefaction was strong enough to gag him if he breathed or swallowed, and the familiar, fiery colors of her infection (even clouded by her discharge) were dazzling enough to blind the intrepid or the untrained. But Wilbur Larch started to breathe again, slowly and regularly; it was the only way to keep a steady hand. He just kept looking and marveling at the young woman’s inflamed tissue; it looked hot enough to burn the world. Now do you see, Homer? Larch asked himself. Through the speculum, he felt her heat against his eye.
Despite the letters, however, Homer styas away. This leads to one final letter from Larch, who deliberately overdoses on ether because he knows he is dying from his addiction to it:
1. YOU KNOW EVERYTHING I KNOW, PLUS WHAT YOU’VE TAUGHT YOURSELF. YOU’RE A BETTER DOCTOR THAN I AM—AND YOU KNOW IT.
2. YOU THINK WHAT I DO IS PLAYING GOD. BUT YOU PRESUME YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS. DO YOU THINK THAT’S NOT PLAYING GOD?
3. I AM NOT SORRY—NOT FOR ANYTHING I’VE DONE (ONE ABORTION I DID NOT PERFORM IS THE ONLY ONE I’M SORRY FOR). I’M NOT EVEN SORRY THAT I LOVE YOU.
Homer returns to take up Larch’s practice after he himself performs an abortion on a girl who has been raped by her father. In this case, since his son is in love with the girl, he has direct experience with the conflict between an abstract stance and a particular case. After that, he plays a double game. On the one hand, there is what he tells the board that hires him:
On the matter of abortions, [Homer] surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, [Homer] assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law.
On the other, he privately performs abortions for women who come to him for help. The book tells us,
Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal—that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)…
Moral rules, about which many can disagree when it comes to abortion, must never jettison individual circumstance altogether or they risk succumbing to an inhuman purity. In such instances, morality becomes more about the ideologue’s desire for certainty than a compass to help us negotiate the shoals of human complexity. Or as Charlotte Bronte says in the epigraph that opens Cider House Rules,
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
I have been reporting on my responses to Thor Magnus Tangeras’s important new study Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences (Anthem, 2020) and today note a startling turn his argument takes. In the process of analyzing five readers who had life-changing encounters with books, at one point he shifts to religious language, describing their experience as “an evolving and deepening devotional transaction.”
The language doesn’t come out of nowhere. Earlier, Tangeras has turned to American psychologist William James’s study of religious conversion to understand how transformation happens. For James, the key concept is surrender. Just as book lovers surrender to the world of the book, so do religious devotees surrender themselves to God:
When surveying the history of the different narratives of Christianity, [James] finds a gradual circling in of one particular experience: the crisis of self-surrender and the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness. ‘The crisis of self-surrender is the turning-point in two different senses: The critical point around which James’s investigation turns, and the point where the life of the individual is transformed from egocentricity to allocentricity, from forlornness to redemption: ‘In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life.” Crisis-surrender-redemption is at the heart of James’s phenomenology of transformation and constitutes his narrative of narratives.
There are a number of thinkers who talk about surrendering to a work of literature. One of my favorites is phenomenologist Georges Poulet, who dramatically describes absorption or immersion in a book as follows:
As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me with its unreality.
Tolstoy too weighs in on the phenomenon, noting that we are “infected” with an author’s ideas and emotions and declaring, “The stronger the infection, the better is the art as art.”
We see Tangeras also looking to frame reading as a quasi-religious experience when, in reflecting upon one of his readers, he compares what she is doing to the Medieval practice of Lectio Divina, where religious figures would see themselves tasting and digesting the Scriptures to inscribe them on their hearts. Speaking of his subjects, Tangeras says that
at some point these readers unreservedly give themselves over to, and surrender to, the experience, and become fully involved, body, heart and mind. Furthermore, in this evolving and deepening devotional transaction, these readers are deeply moved. The experience of a panoply of feelings that traditionally have straddled aesthetic and religious domains – such as wonder, awe, tenderness, jubilation and faith – come into full awareness. When this happens, the expanded affect-consciousness allows for an altered sense of self in which the crisis can be resolved.
Tangeras’s thoughts here arise in part from his analysis of a reader reporting on how Matthew Arnold’s “Buried Life” pulled her out of a severe depression. Here’s an excerpt from the poem:
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life; A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us—to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves— Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on for ever unexpress’d. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do Is eloquent, is well—but ‘t is not true! And then we will no more be rack’d With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. Only—but this is rare— When a belovèd hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear, When our world-deafen’d ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caress’d— A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life’s flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes.
And here’s some the conversation that Tangeras had with his subject about the poem’s impact:
Thor: ‘And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.’ So that line there is to me what the authentic self would be, wouldn’t it? Sue: Yes. ‘A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast.’ Bolt. Shot. Back – I’ve never really understood what a bolt shot back means, but it sounds so … right. I think it’s like, I imagine it to be a shock, a shocking awakening. Like a sort of an aha moment, a sitting up moment. Or a … it was like a bolt was shot back somewhere in my breast, Thor: It seems you have a clear felt sense of what that means.
Sue: Yeah, I think I’ve got a felt sense of it, but I would find it a bit hard to describe as well. ‘And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again’, that’s that awakening of the deepest part of yourself, the bit of you that just … if things aren’t used, or noticed, they can just sort of fade away, can’t they? So a lost pulse is like something that’s there, but it’s getting weaker and weaker because it’s not ever attended to. Hmmm, so it’s not putting something new into him, it’s not putting within, he’s reawakening something that is there already, it’s always there.
And elsewhere:
Sue: …but something about just that very first bit of this poem, it felt like it changed everything really. Thor: It changed everything? Sue: Well, it felt like it just changed everything, that suddenly I was awake to this possibility of what poetry might do. I mean it did feel that big actually, yeah… [Since then] I’ve grown tremendously, and I can’t imagine my life without poetry now, you know. I don’t even want to think about my life without poetry now. So yeah, I just think it was the most magical, amazing stuff.
And finally:
Sue: I keep on using the work impact, it’s had a really significant impact, definitely. Has it changed my life? It has really, because it’s opened me up to the power of the written word, so in that respect it has really. I don’t know if it’s saved my life, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, I mean, I think my life was already on a sort of upward trajectory by the time I read it….But the poem has really helped me. I love it, because – I mean I love it for itself and I think it’s a great poem – but it also has a special resonance for me in that it opened something up in me. Something that I will always carry with me. So I don’t think of it so much as saving my life, I think of it more as, I don’t know, reminding me of something important, getting back to sort of excavating something ‘from the soul’s subterranean depth’.
When we become immersed or absorbed in a great poem or story, soul work is going on, which is why “devotional transaction” seems right. Arnold, interestingly enough, thought that poetry would one day replace religion as the mauor way values were instilled in the population. While reading literature may not be a religious act, it it is definitely a spiritual one.
