Yesterday I wrote about a Tennessee high school teacher that was fired for teaching a Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay “The First White President” (about Donald Trump) and a spoken word poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey. I tracked down the video of Lacey delivering her poem (here) and a transcript of it (here) to get a better sense of what was going on in the course.
Lacey’s poem appears to have been composed between 2005-2008—in the latter years of the Geroge W. Bush administration—since there are references to Hurricane Katrina and to Bush cabinet officials. Then again, although it doesn’t mention Obama, it may be from 2009 as the allusion to Sandra Bullock could well be to The Blind Side. (Lacey is objecting to white savior movies since she also mentions Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.) In any event, the poem appears as timely as ever.
Which is disconcerting since often it seems like nothing ever changes. Thankfully, the Black Lives Matter movement has made us more aware of the issues involved. Thanks to Black Lives Matter, at least awareness of the issues has grown. Oh, and we can also thank poets like Lacey and to teachers who share their work with their classes.
We live in a society where many Whites, when they feel uncomfortable around Blacks, call the cops. Increasingly, GOP legislatures are also passing laws for punishing teachers who teach uncomfortable facts about our history. Sometimes conservatives don’t feel they even need laws, as in the case of Matthew Hawn’s firing. While they complain constantly about “cancel culture,” they have no compunction about canceling people they disagree with.
Lacey is aware that she’s making her audience uneasy, even asking rhetorically at one point, “Am I making you uncomfortable?” African American poet Lucille Clifton often used to describe her own poetry as comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.
But making audiences uncomfortable is dangerous business. Hawn forfeited his white privilege when he called it out and paid the price.
White Privilege By Kyla Jenée Lacey
We learned your French We learned your English, your Dutch, your Spanish, your Portuguese you learned our nothing, you called us stupid
that’s white privilege
and I’m sure it probably hurts for you to hear those two words kind of like gunshots and explosions from those commissioned to protect you whisking past your ears
what is white privilege?
it is only five decades of legal acknowledgment expected to correct 400 years of white transgression it is crack versus cocaine, blacks receiving almost 20% longer sentences for the same exact offenses or like, for instance, a black man without a record is less likely to geta job than a white felon or maybe it’s because we’re lazy and we don’t work hard enough, like what the fuck? 400 years in the same fields literally is an incredible resume builder. it is Katrina answering the government’s prayers of eugenics Dick Cheney going fishing the next day Condoleezza on a shopping spree Bush in San Diego But Kanye is the one you call crazy cuz like it only took the USA two days to get aid to Asia but five for FEMA to get to Canal Street and Esplanade it is the only one black kid who beat the shit out of the odds but only thanks to Michelle Pfeiffer and the white shadow and Sandra Bullock so now we all can make it It is only time thousands of white people are cheering for a black kid to win is in a stadium
it is you looking at me crazy if I told you to go back to Europe even though we didn’t have a say, and your great-grandparents came here voluntarily it is you, all of sudden having a problem with immigration, like, this isn’t even your nation how the hell do you discover something that wasn’t even missing to begin with? you’ve Columbus’ed our traditions got white girls twerking in high definition with multi colored nails and purple hair but it was ghetto when we did it
Oh am I making you uncomfortable?
try a cramped slave ship but wait, slavery is over now, it’s just called the prison system cuz like you’re not racist cuz you don’t use the ‘n’ word, but y’all use n*ggas everyday
what is white privilege?
It is the acceptance of bombs over Baghdad but not over Boston it is European history being taught as a major and African as an elective it is learning about my people only 28 days like I’m not black every fucking second
it is every white boy who wanted to f*ck my brains out not because I’m pretty, but because I’m pretty for a black girl
it is people saying that black people destroy neighborhoods but forgetting that white people destroyed continents
it is every time i have to bring up my plight some white man is telling me that I’m crazy but is kind enough to praise my English or say that we are all given the same opportunities when he has a family history of wealth and I don’t even know my family history at all
it is the justification of police brutality like what did that person do? well I’m sure it doesn’t hurt as much when the victim doesn’t look like you
it is throwing out a qualified applicant cuz their name sounded too African American
it is Newports being imported into black communities but black boys exported for weed it is big plastic asses being called fat when we naturally have them it is an Australian woman as the new classic of rap music
it is everyone who hears this poem, and dismisses all this truth as just spit
A Tennessee high school teacher was recently fired for teaching about white privilege in a Contemporary Issues course, bringing to mind the John Thomas Scopes monkey trial, which occurred in another Tennessee town just under a century ago. Growing up in Tennessee, I remember being fascinated by the account we get of that trial in the 1955 play Inherit the Wind, by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. I remember the play assuring my adolescent self that the forces of enlightenment will always prevail. I’m no longer confident that this is the case.
According to an article in The Boston Globe, Matthew Hawn was fired for teaching the Ta-Nehisi Coates essay “The First White President” (about Donald Trump) and a spoken word poem by Kyla Jenée Lacey to his students. I’ll see if I can track down the poem for a future post, but the Globe cited the following passage from the Coates essay:
“[Donald Trump’s] political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that Black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built,” Coates writes of the former president. “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true — his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”
According to the Globe article,
Hawn’s firing was precipitated by a parent who complained to the district that the essay conveyed a “somewhat angry, and hateful opinion towards President Trump” and contained words he believed should not be “introduced to our children by a high school teacher,” according to documents provided to WJHL.com.
According to the documents, Hawn said he was comfortable assigning the essay because “those were the words of the President and I thought the kids were mature enough to handle it.”
When asked what other reading materials he could have assigned to offer a differing viewpoint, Hawn replied: “There is no credible source for a differing point of view.”
Most of the public accounts of the affair are from the School Board so I don’t have the full story. Some former students report that Hawn was a balanced teacher so there’s that. If the School Board is right that Hawn was simply preaching to the class rather that getting his students to probe the issues—well, that would not be good teaching, although if teachers who lecture their classes regularly got fired, there would be a teacher shortage.
I want to know what the school board means by balanced, however. If they think that Hawn should be open to, say, debating whether Barack Obama is Kenyan-born or not, that’s not teaching but just lending legitimacy to fringe theories (as though facts are open to debate). It’s one thing to debate reasonable positions, but is a teacher supposed to rub his or her chin thoughtfully if someone trots out the latest “Democrats are pedophile cannibals” QAnon theory? You can see the challenges teachers face. Teachers have to listen to where students are coming from, but they can’t surrender intellectual integrity.
Meanwhile, another Tennessee parent is objecting to her school teaching “Ruby Bridges Goes to School,” written by Bridges about her experience as the first Black child (she was six at the time) to integrate a segregated New Orleans school when she was six. As The Week reports,
Robin Steenman, who heads Moms for Liberty’s Williamson County chapter, reportedly pointed to this book and others at an education committee meeting, claiming its mention of a “large crowd of angry white people who didn’t want Black children in a white school” was too harsh and pointing to the fact that it didn’t offer “redemption” at the end, the Tennessean reports. Steenman also reportedly objected to another book about school segregation and expressed disapproval of teaching words like “injustice” and “inequality” in grammar lessons. https://theweek.com/news/1002407/anti-critical-race-theory-parents-reportedly-object-to-teaching-ruby-bridges-book
I have some experience with Tennessee race education, although admittedly it is from over 55 years ago. In our seventh grade Tennessee history course at Sewanee Elementary School, we were taught that the Civil War was about economics, not slavery. Fred Langford, who would go on to become a corrupt county superintendent of schools, told us the Civil War was actually “the War between the States” because the main issue was states’ rights. (At least he didn’t call it “The War of Northern Aggression,” as some did.) While we learned almost nothing about actual slavery, we were taught that Reconstruction failed because African Americans were incompetent at governance. Nothing was said about the use of white violence to establish Jim Crow rule.
Incidentally, I was once punished (this in sixth grade) for not standing up for “Dixie.” At the local high school, meanwhile, anti-government feelings were so strong in the 1960s that “Dixie” replaced the “Star Spangled Banner” at football games, and I’ve heard that it continues to be played there to this day (although no longer, following Black student protests, after every touchdown). The team is still called the Franklin County Rebels.
My history education didn’t become any more balanced in high school. I remember walking into my U.S. History class the day after Martin Luther King was shot and being told by Jim Miller that King “had lived by the sword and died by the sword.” These teachers were not fired for their views.
Nor were they thrown into jail, which is what happened to Scopes for teaching evolution in a 1925 biology class. In the play, his name is Bernard Cates, and I’m hoping that Hawn can hold onto Cates’s sense of humor as he goes through his ordeal. For instance, at one time Cates tells fellow teacher Rachel,
You know something funny? The food’s better than the boarding house. And you’d better not tell anybody how cool it is down there, or we’ll have a crime wave every summer,
The actual trial pitted populist politician and three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan (Matthew Harrison Brady in the play) against legendary defense lawyer Clarence Darrow (Henry Drummond) against each other. I remember being a Darrow fan in high school, having reading Irving Stone’s biography Clarence Darrow for the Defense.
In any event, I found the play reassuring because it’s so clear that reason and truth win out against superstition, even though the jury verdict goes against Scopes. While the fundamentalists have the power at the moment, it’s seems clear that the tide of history will go against them.
Why my confidence has sapped, as I return to Tennessee in retirement, is that the rightwing seems to have as much power as it ever had. In my childhood, segregationist Democrats ran things. Now it’s Trump evangelical Republicans, but the politics seem to be the same. Many today have the same opinions of Democrats as Cates’s neighbors have of him:
Cates: People I thought were my friends look at me now as if I had horns growing out of my head.
Drummond: You murder a wife, it isn’t nearly as bad as murdering an old wives’ tale. Kill one of their fairy-tale notions, and they call down the wrath of God, Brady, and the state legislature.
Of course, politicians make hay out of culture issues in the play just as they do now. Drummond notes, “Matthew Harrison Brady came here to find himself a stump to shout from.”
But in some ways, while trying to ride this evangelical wave to political power—or at least relevance again after three failed presidential bids—Brady finds himself like numerous GOP politicians: he thinks he can exploit the evangelical vote, only to discover that these people are crazier than he ever imagined. This he realizes at a revival meeting when he discovers that Reverend Brown is willing to consign not only Cates to hell but his own daughter Rachel if she stands up for him:
Brown: (Deliberately shattering the rhythm, to go into a frenzied prayer, hands clasped together and lifted heavenward) O Lord of the Tempest and the Thunder! O Lord of Righteousness and Wrath! We pray that Thou wilt make a sign unto us! Strike down this sinner, as Thou didst Thine enemies of old, in the days of the Pharaohs! (All lean forward, almost expecting the heavens to open with a thunderbolt . Rachel is white. Brady shifts uncomfortably in his chair; this is pretty strong stuff, even for him) Let him feel the terror of Thy sword! For all eternity, let his soul writhe in anguish and damnation—
Rachel: No! (She rushes to the platform) No, Father. Don’t pray to destroy Bertl
Brown: Lord, we call down the same curse on those who ask grace for this sinner— though they be blood of my blood, and flesh of my flesh!
In the end, both Bert and Rachel, who have previously been uncertain, decide to think for themselves. To do so is not easy, as Drummond tells Bert and Rachel earlier when they’re both thinking of backing down:
Drummond (to Rachel) Can you buy back his respectability by making him a coward? (He spades his hands in his hip pockets) I understand what Bert’s going through. It’s the loneliest feeling in the world— to find yourself standing up when everybody else is sitting down. To have everybody look at you and say, “What’s the matter with him?” I know. I know what it feels like. Walking down an empty street, listening to the sound of your own footsteps. Shutters closed, blinds drawn, doors locked against you. And you aren’t sure whether you’re walking toward something, or if you’re just walking away.
After the case ends, Drummond tells him what he’s achieved, despite being found guilty:
Drummond: You don’t suppose this kind of thing is ever finished, do you? Tomorrow it’ll be something else— and another fella will have to stand up. And you’ve helped give him the guts to do it!
Then Rachel comes in, having determined to leave her father, and gives what can be seen as the message of the play:
Mr. Drummond, I hope I haven’t said anything to offend you. You see, I haven’t really thought very much. I was always afraid of what I might think— so it seemed safer not to think at all. But now I know. A thought is like a child inside our body. It has to be bom. If it dies inside you, part of you dies, too! ( Pointing to the book) Maybe what Mr. Darwin wrote is bad. I don’t know. Bad or good, it doesn’t make any difference. The ideas have to come out— like children. Some of ’em healthy as a bean plant, some sickly. I think the sickly ideas die mostly, don’t you, Bert?
While I enjoyed Inherit the Wind, I thought, even as a high schooler, that it read too much like shooting fish in a barrel. Drummond tears apart Brady’s religious views so effectively that he all but causes Brady’s fatal heart attack. Then he grandly proclaims him to have been a great man. If you’re confident that Science is on the rise and will eventually dispel the mists of darkness, as many thought in the 1950s, you can afford to be magnanimous.
Could the authors have foreseen, however, that evangelical Christians would still be in the ascendency 75 years later, at least in parts of the country. They held the reins of power for four years with Trump and currently hold the GOP in thrall. Currently, they have Republican lawmakers running away from the Covid vaccine and denying the facts of the January 6 insurrection. Dark things are possible if they return the GOP to power.
The easy Enlightenment optimism of people like me is being sorely tested. Inherit the Wind may think it can get fundamentalists to stumble on the witness stand, but you don’t stumble if you can make up reality as you go along.
To save time as I near completion of my current book project, I have been sharing chapters rather than writing new blog posts. I promise that this will be the last time I do so since the revisions are almost done. Today you get to hear about Hans Robert Jauss, who has had a significant influence on me. I wrote about Jauss a couple of years ago but have revised a number of my thoughts about him since then.
We have seen lofty claims for the changes that literature can bring about, from Percy Shelley’s contention that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world to Matthew Arnold’s assertion that literature can forestall class warfare to Brecht’s belief that it can bring about class warfare. In 1967 Hans Robert Jauss of the University of Konstanz earned his 15 minutes of scholarly fame by giving us a way to see literature-caused change in action. Look at how a great work disturbs readers, he said, and you will see audiences on the cusp of significant transformation.
Jauss (1921-77) was a member of the so-called Konstanz School, which pioneered innovative approaches to studying literature. Jauss had a dark past, spending two years on the Russian front during World War II as a youthful member of the SS, a fact he managed to keep hidden until shortly before his death. After the war, he fled from his past by immersing himself in French literature, and his belief that great literature can rewire its readers in a progressive direction may owe something to his own transformation from Nazi to scholar. The momentous power that Jauss ascribes to literature is what attracts scholars like myself to his theory.
During Jauss’s Konstanz career, he and his colleague Wolfgang Iser called their approach Reception Theory, which changed the way we see readers engaging with literary texts. Iser argues that readers essentially collaborate with the author in the realization of the work—they fill in gaps left by the author—while Jauss contends that great works change the reader’s horizon of expectations so that one can become a different person following immersion in a masterpiece. Potentially, one emerges with a broader and more complex framework through which to view the world.
Jauss is most interested in works that confront or unsettle audiences, his assumption being that readers resist change and therefore will kick back against works that demand it of them. In this he owes a debt to Bertolt Brecht’s theories about confrontational theatre and also to avant garde art, which in the 1920s judged itself by how thoroughly it scandalized the bourgeoisie. Jauss’s horizon, like Brecht’s “Weltanschauung” or world view, feels comfortable because it’s familiar whereas a great new work causes a commotion by challenging readers to change their horizon. Perhaps the work is roundly attacked because its vision demands that people abandon traditional modes of thinking and embrace new and broader ones.
Jauss looks at a work’s reception to chart its dialogue with readers: how does it challenge them and how do they push back? To determine this back and forth, one resorts to everything from personal diaries to published reviews to (in certain cases) trial transcripts and political attacks. The literary historian should also check book sales and other indirect ways of assessing impact. Finally, one can find implicit acknowledgement of the author-reader dialogue in future works by the author—how has he or she changed as a result of audience reactions?—as well as in works by his or her contemporaries.
As for literature that does not challenge readers’ horizons, Jauss calls it “culinary.” Culinary works do not stretch readers’ vision of what the form or genre could accomplish but merely satisfy what people expect. It’s as though culinary authors provide a literary Big Mac to readers who have ordered a Big Mac. More to the point, readers who come expecting a certain kind of, say, crime novel experience will be irritated if they are served anything different. Imagine their distress, or at least confusion, if after ordering Agatha Christie’s enjoyable but lightweight Partners in Crime they are instead served with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
A great work may challenge readers in ways they cannot perceive. By focusing on horizon changes, Jauss’s theory resembles Thomas Kuhn’s influential idea of paradigm shifts, found in his landmark work Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Because people see reality in a certain way, Kuhn says, they cannot accept new ideas, even when faced with compelling scientific evidence. For the longest time, Europe could not accept the ideas of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo about the solar system because the reigning paradigm had humankind at the center of creation. Only with incessant challenges did the paradigm eventually change. Jauss’s horizons are his version of Kuhn’s paradigms. Great artists like great scientists hammer away at our understanding of reality until we come around to seeing things through their eyes.
Jauss’s major example of a horizon-changing work is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), which was brought up on charges of indecency. At first glance, Jauss says, the charges don’t make sense. After all, another work with a similar treatment of adultery appeared the same year to a dramatically different reception. Georges Feydeau’s all-but-forgotten novel Fanny was a smash success, going through 13 editions.
A lengthy account of Jauss’s Madame Bovary example is warranted given the insight it provides into literature’s reality-changing potential. Both Flaubert’s and Feydeau’s novels, Jauss says, “understood how to give a sensational twist to the conventional, rigid triangle which in the erotic scenes surpassed the customary details.” In Flaubert’s novel, the wife of a provincial doctor has a sordid affair with a local landowner and commits suicide after he dumps her. Feydeau, meanwhile, “has the youthful lover of [a 30-year-old woman] becoming jealous of his lover’s husband, although he has already reached the goal of his desires, and perishing over this tormenting situation.” Despite the similarities, however, Madame Bovary shook the very foundations of French society whereas Fanny did not.
Jauss locates the difference in the way the stories are told. Fanny might depict immoral actions in a titillating way, but the reader is aware of what’s right and what’s wrong and, more importantly, knows that the author knows it as well. While social rules get broken, the underlying moral structure remains intact. Because Fanny makes no real demands upon the reader’s value system—it has just provided a temporary illicit thrill before returning the reader to familiar moral grounds—the novelis a comfortable, culinary read. No horizon having been challenged, none is expanded.
Flaubert, by contrast, disturbs readers with a new style of storytelling, called “impersonal telling” or “le style indirect libre.” Instead of signaling a value system by which to judge the action, the author appears to have absented himself. Accustomed though we are to this style now (think Ernest Hemingway), it challenged the 1857 horizon of expectations. One can see why Flaubert was taken to court by examining how the prosecution responded to Emma’s ecstasy over having a lover. Here’s the offending passage:
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.
As the prosecutor saw it, Flaubert seems to be glorifying adultery:
The prosecuting attorney regarded the last sentences as an objective description which included the judgement of the narrator and was upset over this “glorification of adultery,” which he considered to be even more dangerous and immoral than the misstep itself.
When we read the passage today, we know that this is not Flaubert’s opinion but Emma’s belief. We know the author has taken us into her mind. The defense in fact made exactly this argument. Readers of the time, however, were not accustomed to having the responsibility thrown upon them.
In earlier novels, omniscient authors make clear how we should assess characters and events. To cite a random example, Charles Dickens intrudes to reassure readers following the heartbreaking death of Little Nell at the conclusion of TheOld Curiosity Shop (1841):
Oh! it is hard to take to heart the lesson that such deaths will teach, but let no man reject it, for it is one that all must learn, and is a mighty, universal Truth. When Death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world, and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the Destroyer’s steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.
The issue with Flaubert is more than a new storytelling technique. If that’s all it was, then there would probably have been no trial. Indirect style, however, appeared to undermine society’s moral guardians as it shifted power to the reader. Without an author to guide them, Flaubert’s readers felt as though they were wandering in an amoral world. Looking at the case through the prosecutor’s eyes, Jauss asks,
To what authority should the case of Madame Bovary be presented if the previously valid standards of society, “public opinion, religious beliefs, public morals, good manners,” are no longer sufficient for judging this case?
As with the scientific breakthroughs that challenge Thomas Kuhn’s paradigms, masterpieces don’t change horizons all at once. For a while, novelists continued to write as they had the past. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, which appeared five years after Madame Bovary, features an author who regularly intrudes to comment on the action and draw moral lessons. Nor did a significant mass of French citizens stop looking to society’s reigning social guardians for guidance in how to live their lives. But wheels had been set in motion for significant changes, both in the way stories were told—showing rather than telling eventually became all the rage—and in the way traditional institutions were seen.
Whether Madame Bovary made French lives better depends on who’s making the judgement. The court, tasked with upholding public morality, agreed with the prosecution that the novel undermined prevailing social standards. Without these, it feared, society was slide into Matthew Arnold’s anarchy.
On the other hand, if those institutions had become so problematic or debased that society, to renew itself, needed citizens capable of thinking outside the prevailing horizon of expectations, then we can regard Madame Bovary as a force for social progress. We’ve seen Herbert Marcuse praising the novel for exposing one-dimensional capitalism, challenging readers through its “great refusal” not to settle for less but to keep imagining the possibilities for a more fulfilling society. If Flaubert prods people to address in a substantive way the underlying causes of Emma’s longings, then he has made lives better.
Jauss’s model doesn’t work for all literature since not all works create a ruckus, let alone make court appearances. It does, however, provide insight into those works that do. Whenever one encounters a reading controversy, one can ask about the horizon of expectations that is being challenged. Even when one doesn’t agree with the attackers, one can construct their horizon to make sense of their responses. If Jauss is right that great literature changes the behavior of readers, then such reading is indeed akin to playing with dynamite.
Andrea Solario, Salomé with Head of John the Baptist (ca. 1507-09)
Spiritual Sunday
Today’s Gospel reading is the lurid story of Herod, Herodias, Salome, and John the Baptist. It has caught the attention of numerous authors and artists, including an intriguing poem by Carol Anne Duffy.
First, here’s the reading:
For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For John had been telling Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him. But she could not, for Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed; and yet he liked to listen to him. But an opportunity came when Herod on his birthday gave a banquet for his courtiers and officers and for the leaders of Galilee. When his daughter Herodias came in and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests; and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it.” And he solemnly swore to her, “Whatever you ask me, I will give you, even half of my kingdom.” She went out and said to her mother, “What should I ask for?” She replied, “The head of John the baptizer.” Immediately she rushed back to the king and requested, “I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter.” The king was deeply grieved; yet out of regard for his oaths and for the guests, he did not want to refuse her. Immediately the king sent a soldier of the guard with orders to bring John’s head. He went and beheaded him in the prison, brought his head on a platter, and gave it to the girl. Then the girl gave it to her mother. When his disciples heard about it, they came and took his body, and laid it in a tomb.
I’ve never heard a good sermon on this passage and would be intrigued to hear what people would say about it (other than using it to illustrate the decadence of Herod’s court). There seems to be a trajectory to literary treatments of it, however. In the original version, Salomé is an instrument in her mother’s machinations instead of an independent actor, and the same is true of Flaubert’s Salomé in Herodias as well.
Oscar Wilde, however, turned her into the central figure in Salomé. The daughter of privilege, she is drawn to the ascetic prophet, whom she longs to kiss upon the lips. It’s a decadent longing of someone who has everything for that which she can’t have.
There are erotic passages in the play where Salomé expresses her fascination/revulsion, and it is she, not her mother, who engineers the king’s promise. After she gets her wish, she kisses John’s (now severed) head, only to be executed herself by her horrified step-father.
T. S. Eliot has a comic allusion to the Biblical passage in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I love how he throws in a parenthetical aside:
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet…
Prufrock aspires to be like John the Baptist, awakening his society to the spiritual emptiness of its existence. Or at least he considers trying to be prophet, only to back down when he imagines (1) not being able to express himself adequately and (2) getting blank stares even if he did successfully communicate. He’s fairly sure that women will (as the saying goes) hand him his head on a platter if he says anything. So yes, he is no prophet.
Duffy, a Scottish lesbian poet and no shrinking violet, seems to relish the thought of women handing men their heads. The speaker is a promiscuous woman who has had a series of one-night-stands. Then there’s the surprise ending:
Salomé By Carol Ann Duffy
I’d done it before (and doubtless I’ll do it again, sooner or later) woke up with a head on the pillow beside me – whose? – what did it matter? Good-looking, of course, dark hair, rather matted; the reddish beard several shades lighter; with very deep lines around the eyes, from pain, Id guess, maybe laughter; and a beautiful crimson mouth that obviously knew how to flatter … which I kissed … Colder than pewter. Strange. What was his name? Peter?
Simon? Andrew? John? I knew I’d feel better for tea, dry toast, no butter, so rang for the maid. And, indeed, her innocent clatter of cups and plates,
her clearing of clutter, her regional patter, were just what needed – hungover and wrecked as I was from a night on the batter.
Never again! I needed to clean up my act, get fitter, cut out the booze and the fags and the sex. Yes. And as for the latter, it was time to turf out the blighter, the beater or biter, who’d come like a lamb to the slaughter to Salome’s bed.
In the mirror, I saw my eyes glitter. I flung back the sticky red sheets, and there, like I said – and ain’t life a bitch – was his head on a platter.
My shock at the ending comes from my realization that we have left metaphor behind for the realm of the actual. Does she really have her recent lover’s head in bed with her? Images of the horse head from The Godfather come to mind.
Maybe it’s because I’ve been listening to a Norwegian noir detective story by Jo Nesbo—The Snowman—that I’m thinking this way since severed heads (and other body parts) make regular appearances there. In any event, Duffy’s Salomé is no longer a passive tool or even someone who has to use her arts to someone else to do the dirty work. She’s fully her own woman. “Ain’t life a bitch,” she taunts whoever (or whatever) she is looking at.
But surely her maid wouldn’t be serving breakfast if it were a real head, right?
In Wednesday’s essay I shared the first part of the conclusion I’m writing for my current book project, Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate. I share the second half here, only noting that this is still in draft form and that I’m looking for feedback. As I noted earlier, I am using my blog deadlines as spurs to finish my book, which means that, this week, you are mostly receiving excerpts of the latter rather than freshly minted essays.
Literature’s power, for good or for bad, has been the constant theme for our theorists, going back to Plato. What is different is the audiences, which have expanded. It was easier to talk about literature’s impact when readers and playgoers looked like you—Athenian male citizens for Plato and Aristotle, Elizabethan courtiers for Sidney. That all began to change in the 18th century, to the consternation of authors like Pope and Swift, as the newly affluent middle class began demanding narratives and characters that spoke specifically to them. The franchise expanded even further as the working class, women, people of color, members of developing nations, LBGTQ folk and others called for true universality. Their demands have often led to heated debates.
We also saw the rise of literature missionaries, with literary experts spreading the news of literature’s good effects and declaiming against the bad. Johnson taught new readers how to appreciate Shakespeare and various contemporary poets while warning them away from novels. Matthew Arnold, seeing the potential in universal education, thought that the arts, led by poetry, could replace religion and usher in a new Renaissance, transforming the “philistine” middle class and the anarchic working class into model citizens. Teachers in this vision were to be the new missionaries, bringing enlightenment where before there had been only ignorance and darkness, including to women’s colleges and worker universities. Cambridge professor F.R. Leavis and his followers, regarding literature as the quintessential means of achieving a civilized society, persuaded schools to make literature instruction an integral part of their curricula.
This had the effect of transferring the inevitable political battles to the schools. As faculties and student bodies became more diverse, the question arose as to what a model citizen looks like. In the 1960s, with the rise of the various liberation movements, activists saw in literature the chance to awaken minds to a liberated consciousness. In the reactive 1980s, conservatives pushed back, contending that the great minds of the past were being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. For all their disagreements, however, the one area of agreement between left and right was literature’s transformative potential, whether for good or for ill. Poems and stories were still seen to be firing bullets.
The ultimate threat to literature is not attack but indifference. That being acknowledged, literature has encountered indifference before and weathered the storm. Thomas Peacock, writing in the early days of utilitarianism (1820), voiced (albeit partially tongue-in-cheek) an early version of current STEM thinking when he contended that “the progress of useful art and science” was rendering poetry obsolete. (Shelley took the bait and responded with his magnificent Defence of Poetry.) Arnold shamed the money-obsessed middle-class with the “philistine” epithet, thereby triggering what Eagleton calls “the rise of English.” In 2018 Salman Rushdie, responding to the cascade of lies pouring out of the White House, pointed out that the classics will always remain powerful because of their commitment to truth. The STEM disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math may not be able to fight back effectively against assaults on evidence-based reality, including on science itself, but literature can.
Literature, in short, will remain a force for those who encounter it. Add film and television to that mix and few would argue, but even limiting ourselves to poetry, fiction, and drama, we will see their enduring impact. As long as there are books and people to read them, horizons will expand and lives will be changed, to the joy of some and the consternation of others.
At the moment, as I slog towards the end of my current book project (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), I am using blog deadlines as book deadlines—which means subjecting you, dear reader, to various stages of the revision process. Today I’ll share my meditations on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I’m including in my chapter on popular or culinary literature. I include it there with a caveat, however, because I’m not entirely sure whether the novel appears in the lesser or greater literature category. I lean towards the second but hear me out on the matter.
One of the questions I address in my book is whether great literature has a greater impact than lesser literature and, if so, whether great literature is good for us and lesser literature bad. Or if not bad, at least not so good. Since most of my book points in a “yes” direction, then Uncle Tom’s Cabin, if it is no more than a melodramatic potboiler, presents me with a particular challenge. After all, it helped bring about the end of American slavery.
Of that, there’s little doubt. In his book Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, Davis S. Reynolds makes a compelling case that Stowe tilted the playing field in abolition’s favor.
She did so in various ways. First, the novel rejuvenated and united the abolition movement, which until publication had been scattered. It also made it more likely that an anti-slavery candidate would be elected president (which contributed to the outbreak of hostilities) and hardened southern attitudes (which did the same). After the war had started, the novel, which was wildly popular in Britain, undermined British sympathy for the southern cause. It also may have helped stiffen Lincoln’s spine so that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
From a political science point of view, Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be said to have shifted the Overton window, which is the range of policies deemed politically acceptable at the time. Before the novel, many abolitionists were regarded as wild-eyed radicals. After the novel, it became respectable to debate the evils of slavery.
The novel’s power lay foremost in its emotional appeal. Reynolds describes the reception:
Sympathetic readers were thrilled when the fugitive slave Eliza Harris carried her child across the ice floes of the Ohio River and when her husband George fought off slave-catchers in a rocky pass. They cried over the death of the angelic Eva St. Clare and the fatal lashing of the good Uncle Tom. They guffawed at the impish slave girl Topsy and shed thankful tears when she embraced Christianity. They loved to hate the selfish hypochondriac Marie St. Clare and the cruel slave owner Simon Legree. They were fascinated by the brooding, Byronic Augustine St. Clare. They were shocked by the stories of sexual exploitation surrounding enslaved women like Prue and Cassy.
Reynolds notes novelist Henry James’s response when reading it as a boy:
[The novel] knew the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn’t sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried. . .
Part of the novel’s effectiveness, Reynolds notes, lies in the skillful way that Stowe merges two strains of popular fiction, the sensational and the sentimental. Sensational writings, he notes, were usually published as pamphlet novels and featured “criminals, pirates, or other social outcasts involved in nefarious deeds that were often bloody or transgressive.” Sentimental fiction, meanwhile, often was about people who had visions of angels and heaven. Stowe herself had written stories about sinless children whom she regarded as “living examples of Christian love.” Reynolds observes that Stowe was the first writer in American history to effectively combine the two.
That Stowe draws on these strains doesn’t automatically mean that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a work of lesser or culinary fiction. In my chapter on the subject, I note that great authors will often plug into the energies of lesser authors to produce great works. Kurt Vonnegut draws on the pulp sci-fi magazines of the 1950s, many featuring bug-eyed monsters, in Slaughterhouse Five, and Margaret Atwood borrows from 19th century penny dreadfuls and the sensationalist press in her award-winning Alias Grace. That Uncle Tom’s Cabin has elements of the sensational and the sentimental doesn’t automatically make it a lesser work.
What is determinative is whether the work plays mostly on the emotions or whether the head gets involved. Thomas Dixon, a racist author who hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, used many of its techniques, including the merging of the sensational and the sentimental, in composing The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (1902)and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). These are novels that have done a great deal of damage, solidifying Jim Crow segregation, resurrecting the KKK, and promulgating the noxious myth of “the lost cause,” with the damage compounded further by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film version of The Clansman. Plato, who fears how fictional immersion will unleash unruly passions, would be justified in excluding Dixon from his ideal republic.
In my eyes, however, Stowe’s use of sensation and sentiment is mixed with thoughtful reflection. Many of her characters are three-dimensional—including Uncle Tom, who in the novel is not the caricature he later came to be seen as—and her handling of different types of slavery and slave owners, not to mention northern liberals, is often nuanced. Earlier in my book I note that Friedrich Engels, while inveighing against literature with a political agenda, says that it’s not necessarily bad that poets are partisan, as Stowe undeniably is. It’s only bad when they can’t separate their political agendas from their responsibility to accurately describe reality.
If Stowe had given us nothing but sentimental caricatures of African Americans, then she would have denied their humanity no less than Dixon with his demonic depiction of Gus, the former slave who rapes the pure-of-heart Marion. (“A single tiger spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.”) Whatever short-term good Uncle Tom’s Cabin did would be offset by a different kind of stereotyping.
In “note to self” Lucille Clifton describes this trap, talking of how “the merely human/is denied me still/and i am now no longer beast/ but saint.” In my view, Stowe does not show us saints (well, except for Little Eva) but three-dimensional people wrestling for their humanity within an evil system. When she shared this vision with the world, the world changed.
I’m in the final stages of my book–Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old-Debate–and share today what I’ve written so far by way of a conclusion. I’ve put off this moment for a long time but used today’s post as a deadline that would kick my butt. The conclusion is not concluded yet but it’s getting there.As always, I am very desirous of feedback.
When assessing literature’s capacity to improve lives, it always good to keep Terry Eagleton’s caution in mind: some people who don’t read literature lead good lives and some who do don’t. The boldest claims made by literature advocates don’t always stand up.
The same caution goes for attacks against literature. Athenian youths who ran away in battle didn’t necessarily do so (despite Plato’s contention) because they had been softened up by Homer. Young 18th century men who drank and womanized didn’t necessarily do so because they had read Tom Jones. One can’t blame The Perks of Being a Wallflower for today’s young people experimenting with sex and drugs and questioning their sexual identities.
But while one should be wary of cause-and-effect claims regarding literature, there are reasons why, over the centuries, autocrats have consigned certain classics to the flames, why religious authorities have compiled lists of books that their members should not read, and why “concerned parent groups” have stormed school boards complaining about summer reading. By getting us to question prevailing wisdom, even if only by showing us alternative ways of thinking and being, literature plants seeds and starts conversations that can go in unpredictable directions.
In the introduction, I identified three sets of paired questions, and I think the answer to the first in all three sets is “yes.” Yes, great literature changes individual lives, yes it can change history itself, and yes, great literature does so better than lesser literature. Insofar as a broader perspective is good, then the change is for the better. Insofar as a more inclusive vision of humanity is good, then great literature is inherently progressive. And insofar as literature that refuses to sell out to our baser instincts is positive, then yes, great literature is better for us than lesser literature.
As we have seen in our survey of literary theorists, however, there is more to the discussion than simple yes answers. For instance, while great literature may well plant seeds, it’s not always clear where those seeds will take root and how long it will take them to germinate. Percy Shelley says hundreds of years in some cases.
As I’ve noted, this might seem to put into question his contention that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” How seriously should we take the strong female characters in the ancient Greek tragedies if women are still second-class citizens two thousand years later?
Yet it is also true that, when the time is right, such works will suddenly seem to speak with oracular power, providing aid and comfort to readers of a later age. Dramas that may have seemed comfortably old-fashioned to one generation take on a new urgency for another when, to apply Hans Robert Jauss’s formulation, the horizon of expectations changes. At such times, Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Euripides’s Medea take on a new urgency. To apply the words of Walter Benjamin, readers “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” as past works are “blasted out of the continuum of history” and become “charged with the time of the now.”
So perhaps Shelley is right after all. By showing us in our full humanity, the great authors uncork something that can never be entirely put back in the bottle. That the Greek tragedians did not support equal rights for women is no more relevant than the fact that America’s founding fathers didn’t intend women, slaves, and non-landowners to have full citizenship rights. Once you have said “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” these oppressed groups take those words to their bosoms and use them to direct future actions.
Shelley, Eagleton and others speak to what we are to make of great literature’s conservative or reactionary dimensions. While, at its core, great literature steps beyond local prejudice and identifies the universal, the local must still be accounted for. For Aristotle, this occurs when literature fails to follow “the law of probability and necessity”—when it behaves like idiosyncratic history—and for Johnson when it does not provide us with “a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Engels, Du Bois, and Eagleton all critique literature than sacrifices truth to a political agenda, and Shelley and Booth both provide frameworks of separating out the universal from the local.
Booth, for instance, finds himself revisiting beloved authors like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence after reading feminist and race theory and identifying areas where they surrender to the prejudices of their age, even though at their best they transcend them. Shelley names only a handful of authors he regards as truly transcendent, and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt notes how one of them, Shakespeare, explodes local stereotypes right before our eyes. For instance, because Shakespeare was constitutionally unable to create a one-dimensional character, Greenblatt says in Shylock he creates a character so multi-dimensional—so far beyond the anti-Semitic tropes of the day—that he had to be dropped in Act V before he took over the entire play.
This also means, however, that literature doesn’t operate in a vacuum but must work in conjunction with history if its full vision is to be realized. Marx and Engels’s distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure is important here. Economic and social conditions have to be such for literature’s progressive vision to come to fruition. At the same time, without literature’s images and narratives—without, say, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders providing indelible images of indefatigable entrepreneurs—the rising middle class might have had more difficulty stepping into its powers.
Thus Frantz Fanon welcomed authors as indispensable allies in the struggle against colonialism, speaking of a literature of combat. To free their minds of racial assumptions, Civil Rights activists applied W. E. B. Du Bois’s dictum “all art is propaganda” to recognize which literature aided their cause and which literature was covertly racist or unhelpfully sentimental. Similarly, literary scholars played a key role in the 1970s feminist movement, showing how women were trapped inside certain narratives and finding literature that showed them ways to protest. Jane Eyre may have chipped away at Victorian patriarchy when it appeared in the mid-19th century, but the novel erupted into a full-throated roar 120 years later when readers identified with the madwoman in the attic.
Great literature’s adherence to truth, finally, means that literature that settles for less will inevitably be less good for us, if not do us active harm. Jane Austen’s views of such works provide a good guide. By all means enjoy the gothics of Ann Radcliffe, the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and the love poetry of Robert Burns. Just recognize them for what they are and make sure you don’t neglect the works of, well, Jane Austen and others in her sphere.
I’m re-running a post I wrote three years ago about a Salman Rushdie essay because it remains as relevant as ever. Rushdie mentions the disinformation that people spread about vaccines, which we’ve now see people applying to the Covid vaccines. It now appears that disinformation from Fox “News” and various GOP politicians prevented us from reaching Joe Biden’s goal of 70% adult vaccinations by July 4. (I believe we got to 67%.)
Rushdie essentially says that we are in constant danger of being buried by mounds of bullshit and that literature presents us with a safe space where we can reconnect with truth. In other words, think about the classics as a “no bullshit zone.”
Reposted from June 7, 2018
Few contemporary authors are better qualified to talk about “fake news” than Salman Rushdie. In a past post, I discussed how he raises the issue in Midnight’s Children, at one point saying of Pakistan and its military dictatorship,
in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case.
Therefore, I was not surprised that he would write a smart reflection for The New Yorker on novelists’ special responsibility in combatting Trumpism.
Rushdie starts the article with a telling exchange between Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I:
“What, art thou mad? Art thou mad?” Falstaff demands of Prince Hal, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. “Is not the truth the truth?” The joke, of course, is that he has been lying his head off, and the prince is in the process of exposing him as a liar.
In modern parlance, we could also say that Falstaff is gaslighting Hal. Rushdie observes that the passage is only too relevant to today’s politics:
In a time like the present, when reality itself seems everywhere under attack, Falstaff’s duplicitous notion of the truth seems to be shared by many powerful leaders. In the three countries I’ve spent my life caring about—India, the U.K., and the United States—self-serving falsehoods are regularly presented as facts, while more reliable information is denigrated as “fake news.”
Unfortunately, Rushdie says, we cannot return to some golden age where “truth was uncontested and universally accepted.” That’s because “truth has always been a contested idea.”
Rushdie gives a brief history of 19th century literary realism to make this point:
[I]n the nineteenth century there was a fairly widespread consensus about the character of reality. The great novelists of that time—Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and so on—could assume that they and their readers, broadly speaking, agreed on the nature of the real, and the grand age of the realist novel was built on that foundation. But that consensus was built on a number of exclusions. It was middle-class and white. The points of view of, for example, colonized peoples, or racial minorities—points of view from which the world looked very different to the bourgeois reality portrayed in, say, The Age of Innocence, or Middlemarch, or Madame Bovary—were largely erased from the narrative. The importance of great public matters was also often marginalized. In the entire œuvre of Jane Austen, the Napoleonic Wars are barely mentioned; in the immense œuvre of Charles Dickens, the existence of the British Empire is only glancingly recognized.
I’ve written several posts making this point (including this one), noting that figures such as Bertolt Brecht and Antonio Gramsci (writing about class), W. E. B. Du Bois and Chinua Achebe (writing about race), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (writing about gender) have shaken up what previously passed for reality. In our pluralistic world, classic realism is no longer an option for authors who want to convey the truth of life. Rushdie mentions what has taken its place:
In the twentieth century, under the pressure of enormous social changes, the nineteenth-century consensus was revealed as fragile; its view of reality began to look, one might say, fake. At first, some of the greatest literary artists sought to chronicle the changing reality by using the methods of the realist novel—as Thomas Mann did in Buddenbrooks, or Junichiro Tanizaki in The Makioka Sisters—but gradually the realist novel seemed more and more problematic, and writers from Franz Kafka to Ralph Ellison and Gabriel García Márquez created stranger, more surreal texts, telling the truth by means of obvious untruth, creating a new kind of reality, as if by magic.
If the magical realism of García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Rushdie is so powerful, it is because it captures the modern world’s “conflicting and often incompatible narratives”:
I have argued, for much of my life as a writer, that the breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality, and that the world can perhaps best be explained in terms of conflicting and often incompatible narratives. In Kashmir and in the Middle East, and in the battle between progressive America and Trumpistan, we see examples of such incompatibilities. I have also maintained that the consequences of this new, argumentative, even polemical attitude to the real has profound implications for literature—that we can’t, or ought not to, pretend it isn’t there. I believe that the influence on public discourse of more, and more varied, voices has been a good thing, enriching our literatures and making more complex our understanding of the world.
Rushdie is aware of the conundrum at which he has arrived, however. If there are conflicting realities, then who determines which one should have precedence? What is to prevent an autocrat from declaring his own preferred reality as the truth and using the power of the state to back it up? Drawing on One Hundred Years of Solitude, yesterday I described Trump’s determination to dictate the reality of Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria. Here’s Rushdie setting forth the problem:
How can we argue, on the one hand, that modern reality has become necessarily multidimensional, fractured and fragmented, and, on the other hand, that reality is a very particular thing, an unarguable series of things that are so, which needs to be defended against the attacks of, to be frank, the things that are not so, which are being promulgated by, let’s say, the Modi Administration in India, the Brexit crew in the U.K., and the President of the United States? How to combat the worst aspects of the Internet, that parallel universe in which important information and total garbage coexist, side by side, with, apparently, the same levels of authority, making it harder than ever for people to tell them apart? How to resist the erosion in the public acceptance of “basic facts,” scientific facts, evidence-supported facts about, say, climate change or inoculations for children? How to combat the political demagoguery that seeks to do what authoritarians have always wanted—to undermine the public’s belief in evidence, and to say to their electorates, in effect, “Believe nothing except me, for I am the truth”? What do we do about that?
Literature has a special role in combatting this, Rushdie says, and for that he draws on the idea of universal human nature, which was big in the 1950s and 1960s (think of Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibit) but then fell into disfavor with the deconstructionists and, after them, the new historicists. Rushdie writes,
[W]hen we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature.
In my opinion, deconstruction was a useful skepticism, getting us to challenge received truths, but ultimately it descended into nihilistic relativism. New historicism, like cultural anthropology, had its own contributions to make and its own limitations. Rushdie argues that the truth we experience with great literature gives us a unifying foundation to fight back against tyranny:
[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.
Rushdie concludes by referencing German authors following World War II. Having seen their society “poisoned by Nazism,” they wrote “rubble literature (“Trümmerliteratur”), which was literature designed to rebuild their shattered language and their shattered country. Authors face a similar call today:
We stand once again, though for different reasons, in the midst of the rubble of the truth. And it is for us—writers, thinkers, journalists, philosophers—to undertake the task of rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality, their faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.
Having taught two Rushdie novels this past semester, one in Magical Realism (Midnight’s Children) and one in British Fantasy (Two Years, Eight Months, and 28 Days), I can testify that he is doing his part. Fantasy, when combined with a deep understanding of human nature, gives us space to imagine healthy alternatives to the deadening realities that threaten to crush us. Rushdie acknowledges multiple cultural voices in his fictions, even while also capturing our shared humanity.
I won’t say that reading good contemporary literature will solve our problems. It is, however, a powerful ally as we mount a resistance.
I put my nine-year-old grandson Alban on a flight back to Washington, D.C. yesterday after 10 magical days with him. It didn’t start well because he had to watch his great grandmother being loaded onto an ambulance on his first evening. (She fell while we were washing the dishes and fractured her pelvis.) The rest of the time was positive, however, as we played board games, cards, and ping pong, went hiking and swimming, hit a tennis ball around, and (of course) read novels.
One of my favorites has now, gratifyingly, become one of his. Cecil Day-Lewis, a one-time Professor of Poetry at Oxford (he beat out C.S. Lewis for the position) and the English poet laureate following John Masfield, immediately after World War II wrote a children’s book. The Otterbury Incident is about two gangs of middle schoolers who reenact war battles before joining forces to help out one of their members. In the process, they uncover and take down a counterfeiting and black-market ring.
As exciting as it is, what sets it apart is the first-person narrator, who adds all the dramatic flourishes that can be expected from a literate 12-year-old. Alban and I, for instance, enjoyed George’s description of their war games, such as this line:
Bodies, locked in mortal combat, were rolling about everywhere: the air was rent with the screams of the dead and the dying.
And George’s dramatic summation of the day:
One advantage I have over the ordinary historian is that I don’t have to bother about a lot of dates, which are sickening things, to my mind, and quite unnecessary. It all happened over the weekend. First, a great victory; then the moment when disaster stared us in the face; then the recovery from this crippling blow and the turning of the tables on a dastardly enemy…
Here’s his description of a critical turning point:
Then the idea came to him which was destined to write a new chapter in the history of Otterbury.
And of his efforts to become a detective:
Anyway, as we walked back into the town, I was revolving in my mind all that I knew of the criminal mentality—which, I admit, comes chiefly from books, though Mr. Robertson did say once that for a Rogue’s Gallery and Chamber of Horrors rolled into one, nobody need go further than the Upper Fourth at our school.
It’s particularly enjoyable watching George wrestle with literary conventions. The Lewis Carroll-King of Hearts advice he gets (“Begin at the beginning, go to the end, and there stop”) conflicts with “Jump right into the deep end of the story, don’t hang about on the edge.” And then there’s the problem with descriptions, which he encounters when he needs to describe two of the villains:
I’d better try to describe this pair of blisters. Personally, speaking for myself, I always skip the bits in novels where they describe people: you know—“He had a strong, sensitive face and finely chiseled nostrils,” or, “Her eyes were like pools of dewy radiance, her lips were redder than pomegranates”—that sort of thing doesn’t get one anywhere, I mean, it doesn’t help you to see the person, does it?
He cites a line from a Robert Browning poem at one point, and I think “wild surmise” from “Upon First Reading Chapman’s Homer” shows up twice. Anyway, I understand why a reading crazy tweenager such as I was loved the book and why Alban is drawn to it now. We even read the exact copy that I checked out from Sewanee’s Thurmond Library in the early 1960s as my parents saw it in a library sale years later and bought it for me.
In a future post I’ll tell you about reading Alban the French children’s book The Knights of King Midas, by Paul Berna, which is another book about a gang of children who come together to work on a common project. A man overheard us reading it in the airport and was so entranced that he took a photo of the cover so that he could track it down.
Maybe kids are just an excuse that adults use for revisiting childhood favorites.
