Yesterday, drawing from the chapter in my book where I examine Jane Austen’s critique of literature that can lead people astray, I focused on how Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price may have used Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa to retain her moral compass. I should have mentioned, by way of contrast, that those around her are using a racy play by Elizabeth Inchbald to engage in inappropriate behavior. Most notably, Henry Crawford uses the play to cuckold Maria Bertram’s fiancé, casting her in a role where he himself can have an intimate moment with her.
Today, drawing from the same chapter, I make a comparison between how Marianne and Willoughby use poetry in their courtship and how Paulo and Francesca do in Dante’s Inferno. Austen herself doesn’t have Dante in mind but the parallels are illuminating, as are the contrasts.
Dante shows the two famous lovers trapped in the second circle of Hell, reserved for the lustful. The couple is based on an actual incidents of lovers caught in an adulterous affair and killed by the husband. (Francesca notes that he is destined for one of Inferno’s lower circles.) The two are blown about perpetually by the winds of their desire, never finding a point of stability. As Dante puts it (in John Ciardi’s translation),
And now the sounds of grief begin to fill My ear; I’m come where cries of anguish smite My shrinking sense, and lamentation shrill –
A place made dumb of every glimmer of light, Which bellows like tempestuous ocean birling In the batter of a two-way wind’s buffet and fight.
The blast of hell that never rests from whirling Harries the spirits along in the sweep of its swath, And vexes them, forever beating and hurling.
When they are borne to the rim of the ruinous path With cry and wail and shriek they are caught by the gust. Railing and cursing the power of the Lord’s wrath.
Into this torment carnal sinners are thrust. So I was told – the sinners who make their reason Bond thrall under the yoke of their lust.
A major culprit for their transgression, Francesca tells Dante, was the Arthurian tale about Lancelot’s love for Guinevere. Until they encountered that story, all was well:
But if there is indeed a soul in Hell to ask of the beginning of our love out of his pity, I will weep ad tell:
On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme of Lancelot, how love had masted him. We were alone with innocence and dim time.
After that, as it were, all hell broke loose:
Pause after pause that high old story drew our eyes together while we blushed and paled; but it was one soft passage overthrew
Our caution and our hearts. For when we read how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover, he who is one with me alive and dead
breathed on my lips ahd tremor of his kiss. That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander. That day we read no further.
Reading is also a key part of Willoughby and Marianne’s relationship. It begins romantically—he rides up out of the mist when she has sprained an ankle and carries her home—and continues on in the same vein:
His society became gradually her most exquisite enjoyment. They read, they talked, they sang together; his musical talents were considerable; and he read with all the sensibility and spirit which Edward had unfortunately wanted.
We know what they’re reading because Marianne’s older sister Elinor and Elinor’s admirer Edward, both on the sense side of the sense-sensibility spectrum, good-naturedly tease her about her favorite poets:
“Well, Marianne,” said Elinor, as soon as he had left them, “for one morning I think you have done pretty well. You have already ascertained Mr. Willoughby’s opinion in almost every matter of importance. You know what he thinks of Cowper and Scott; you are certain of his estimating their beauties as he ought, and you have received every assurance of his admiring Pope no more than is proper. But how is your acquaintance to be long supported, under such extraordinary despatch of every subject for discourse? You will soon have exhausted each favourite topic. Another meeting will suffice to explain his sentiments on picturesque beauty, and second marriages, and then you can have nothing farther to ask.
Edward, meanwhile, weighs in during a conversation about how the family would spend a large fortune were they suddenly to inherit one:
What magnificent orders would travel from this family to London,” said Edward, “in such an event!…[A]s for Marianne, I know her greatness of soul, there would not be music enough in London to content her. And books!—Thomson, Cowper, Scott—she would buy them all over and over again: she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her how to admire an old twisted tree.
For a while, Marianne and Willoughby are as absorbed in each other as Paulo and Francesca, so much so that they rudely ignore everyone else. There’s a real danger that Marianne, blown by the same winds, could lose her way. That’s because Willoughby is not one of Scott’s admirable heroes but a cad who has ruined one woman (Colonel Brandon’s Ward) and who will dump Marianne for an heiress. After he does, Marianne sinks into the melancholic self-absorption that Cowper helped romanticize and that alarmed many parents. To cite two instances, Cowper writes in Book III of The Task,
I was a stricken deer that left the herd Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt My panting side was charged when I withdrew To seek a tranquil death in distant shades.
And in “The Castaway,” about a young man who falls overboard, Cowper concludes,
No voice divine the storm allay’d, No light propitious shone; When, snatch’d from all effectual aid, We perish’d, each alone: But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he.
This is heady stuff for a moody, heartbroken 16-year-old. Thomson’s The Seasons, meanwhile, is the kind of poem that encouraged long walks in nature, and Marianne, venturing out despite a threat of rain, catches a chill and almost dies. In other words, one could say that Scott almost ruins her, Cowper almost drives her mad, and Thomson almost kills her.
If Marianne doesn’t lose herself entirely in a Paulo and Francesca passion, it’s because she is grounded. She has, for a guide, a wise older sister and, for additional reading material, the poetry of Alexander Pope, whose heroic couplets (say, in Essay on Man) urge a balance between reason and emotion. Marianne may have only a grudging appreciation for Pope, but she has at least read him.
And so Marianne does not end up in an Inferno of endless desire but in a good, if not tempest-like, marriage. Those readers wishing she had ended up with Willoughby should consult Dante.
Francis Hayman, illus. of Lovelace preparing to abduct Clarissa
Wednesday
As I continue to revise my current book project (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), I am looking into how literature may have come to the aid of Mansfield Park’s Fanny Price at her darkest hour. Fanny is the most well-read of all Austen’s heroines, and while Austen doesn’t specifically mention that her reading assists her when the Bertram family pressures her to marry the problematic Henry Crawford, I’m now convinced that Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa helps steel her resolve.
Although Fanny has been denigrated by any number of readers for being mousy and “insipid” (this from Austen’s own mother), she rises to the occasion when confronted with more pressure than that encountered by any Austen heroine. Unsympathetic readers, who would prefer an Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse or Anne Elliot, underestimate her situation. A poor dependent, she is subject to the whims of the Bertram family at all times. She comes into the household as a child and is either ignored, bullied, or exploited by all but her older cousin Edmund.
As she grows older, they continue to thoughtlessly make use of her and to assume that her needs don’t matter. She is deprived of a fire in her room when it’s cold (by the malicious Aunt Norris) and made to run errands in the scorching heat (by the thoughtless Lady Bertram). Even Edmund, without thinking, takes away her horse when a woman he admires (Mary Crawford) wants to ride. All of this Fanny endures without complaint, and it’s noteworthy that the one time she pushes back—when she refuses the Crawford marriage—she is sent back to her impoverished family. Her attempts to remain invisible at all times are a survival tactic.
That’s why her rebellion, when it comes, is so remarkable. Accustomed to downplay her own rights as a human being, she asserts them here. The Bertrams and Crawfords are astounded by her decision. In their eyes, Henry’s proposal is extraordinary considering his wealth and her poverty. It’s the prince proposing to Cinderella.
Only Crawford is no prince. Fanny has seen how, beneath his charming exterior, he is hollow, self-absorbed, manipulative, at times even cruel. He may be everything that society admires, but that’s because society itself has faulty values. If Fanny can see through him whereas others can’t, it’s partly because her position as a dependent makes it necessary to assess those who are above her. But it may also be because she’s acquainted with Richardson’s Robert Lovelace.
Lovelace is the charming rake in Clarissa who first courts her, then kidnaps her, and finally rapes her. Always promising to reform and never doing so, he deludes many. In fact, many 18th century readers wanted Richardson to end the novel with a marriage (even after the rape), just as many readers want Fanny to marry Crawford. I myself did at one point. But Richardson resisted reader pressure and Fanny resists Bertram family pressure, even though Fanny’s beloved Edmund pleads with her and Sir Thomas, hoping that a dose of poverty will bring her “to her senses,” sends her back to her family.
It would be easy for her to decide that her own needs don’t matter, as she has been doing all her life, and succumb. That way she would please everyone, and she’d get an upper class life as a reward. Yet she resists.
Clarissa provides the model for doing so. Clarissa’s family puts unrelenting pressure on her to marry the odious Mr. Soames, sometimes more brutally and with coarser language than that encountered by Fanny. Yet Clarissa remains true to herself and holds firm, just as Clarissa does with Lovelace’s non-stop sexual overtures (which is why he finally resorts to rape). After that, though much of the world condemns Clarissa—they see her as having run off with Lovelace—she knows the truth. In the end, she dies, at which point Richardson practically canonizes her. One can see how having such a literary model would strengthen Fanny.
To be sure, Austen doesn’t actually mention that Fanny has read Clarissa, but it would be strange if she hadn’t, given how much of a reader she is. Richardson was Austen’s favorite author, and Clarissa is arguably the greatest English novel of the 18th century. Women would disappear for days into their private chambers to read the million-word novel, neglecting household duties to do so.
In his article “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader,” my dissertation director J. Paul Hunter says that the novel form generally, and Clarissa in particular, ushered in a new kind of solitude, upsetting people who were used to more social interactions. It was like kids disappearing into video games. Husbands were particularly upset at losing their wives’ services, but perhaps they were even more upset at the way the novel promotes female selfhood.
In any event, the thought of Fanny reading Clarissa helps me better understand how she withstands the pressure put on her.
Last week when Joe Biden was meeting with Vladimir Putin, Russia’s autocrat claimed to be quoting Leo Tolstoy when he responded to a reporter’s question about whether there was a “growing trust and happiness” between him and America’s president. “There is no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon, so cherish that,” Putin said
Commentators were unable to find any instances of Tolstoy saying or writing this, nor does it sound like something that Tolstoy would say. In fact, his characters often find genuine moments of happiness. The closest MSNBC’s Laurence O’Donnell could come was a passage from War and Peace, but Prince Andrei has something very different in mind that Putin.
Having lost his wife as well and seeing his proposals for military reform dashed, Andrei is feeling particularly discouraged. He begins to experience new hope after meeting Natasha, however:
“Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it. Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!” thought he.
To be sure, this happiness will not be long-lasting. After accepting his marriage proposal, Natasha will renege and then Andrei will almost die when fighting Napoleon and almost die. Although he will in fact die, before he does he will experience a vision of absolute love. (Now there’s a vision of happiness that eludes Putin.) Andrei also forgives Natasha, and he does not so much surrender to death as accept it as a new adventure.
His best friend Pierre, to whom he attributes the observation, is the novel’s existentialist, constantly pondering the meaning of life. Yet happiness awaits him as well as, after he and Natasha mourn Andrei, they fall in love (this after Pierre escapes execution). We see them enjoying a contented family life as the book comes to its conclusion.
While it’s not Tolstoy, what Putin said serves his purposes. If Russians believe that life is inevitably unhappy, then they won’t blame Putin’s kleptocracy for tanking the Russian economy. They will just continue to suck it up, as they have been doing for hundreds of years.
In Putin’s defense, the reporter’s question was strange. What does happiness have to do with the Biden-Putin relationship? Indeed, Russians and Americans may have very different visions of what constitutes happiness. For Americans, the word appears in the most important sentence of their founding document: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 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 are the words of a people who think they can start fresh in a new world. It’s the vision of a young and optimistic people, a belief that one can erase the past. This vision has been embraced by each successive wave of immigrants and is integral to the American Dream, that which makes America America.
Russia, on the other hand, has experienced hardship after hardship. For them, there’s no easy way out. We see plenty of suffering in War and Peace when Napoleon invades, and the 20th century alone dumped on the Soviet Union more than almost any other nation. That Russians have been hardened in a way that optimistic Americans have not may contribute to Russia’s literary greatness. In any event, I can see why Putin would be taken aback by the question.
Incidentally, his response reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” He too represents a response to facile American optimism. After he and gang have just murdered a Georgia family, one of his men complains that he’s not having much fun. In the line that ends the story, the Misfit replies, “Shut up, Bobby Lee. It’s no real pleasure in life.”
The Misfit and Putin are both clear-eyed realists with blood on their hands. The issue of soul gets raised with both as well. When meeting with Putin as vice-president in 2011, Biden reported the following:
“I said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,’” Biden told the New Yorker at the time. “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, ‘We understand one another.'”
Biden’s remark was a follow-up to George W. Bush’s fatuous statement, made ten years before, about his meeting with Putin: “We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He’s a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that’s the beginning of a very constructive relationship.”
Both Putin and the Misfit have buried their souls so deep that they cannot respond to the humanity of others. It is because the Misfit momentarily sees the soul at work in the otherwise shallow grandmother that he freaks out and shoots her. By reaching out to him with tenderness and love, even though he has just had her family killed, she shakes his cynical world view to its foundations. When Bush thought he could reach out similarly, however, Putin ran circles around him. Biden knows a lost cause when he sees one.
In any event, Putin represents everything that Tolstoy was against. The writer spoke from the beating heart of his country whereas the autocrat just twists words for his cynical ends.
This being the first full day of summer, the famous mid-13th century lyric “Sumer is i-cumin in” is a must. My father, who was both a bird watcher and a lover of nature, lamented that the French couldn’t match the English for nature imagery, and this poem pulsates with the sounds, sights, and smells (“verteth” means farts) of early summer. The Middle Ages may have been a particularly spiritual age but it was also very earthy. These two aspects make for wonderful creative tension in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer.
There’s no such tension in “Sumer is i-cumin in,” however. This lyric is all earth all the time. You should be able to make out most of the middle English, but here are words you may need translated:
Nu – now Med – meadow Wude – wood Awe – ewe Lhouth- cow Lu – lows Sterteth – starts up Verteth – farts Bucke – male goat or deer
Sumer is i-cumin in— Lhude sing, cuccu! Groweth sed and bloweth med And springth the wude nu. Sing, cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb, Lhouth after calve cu, Bulluc sterteth, bucke verteth— Murie sing, cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, Wel singes thu, cuccu. Ne swik thu naver nu!
Bonus Poem:
While looking up the lyric on Wikipedia, I came across a very funny parody by A.Y. Campbell, a classic scholar who composed it in the 1920s or 1930s:
Plumber is icumen in; Bludie big tu-du. Bloweth lampe, and showeth dampe, And dripth the wud thru. Bludie hel, boo-hoo!
Thaweth drain, and runneth bath; Saw saweth, and scrueth scru; Bull-kuk squirteth, leake spurteth; Wurry springeth up anew, Boo-hoo, boo-hoo.
Tom Pugh, Tom Pugh, well plumbes thu, Tom Pugh; Better job I naver nu. Therefore will I cease boo-hoo, Woorie not, but cry pooh-pooh, Murie sing pooh-pooh, pooh-pooh, Pooh-pooh!
Guercino Giovan Francesco Barbieri, God The Father
Spiritual Sunday – Father’s Day
When I attended church as a child, I came away with the impression that God was an old man who was angry all the time. It didn’t help that our rector, as I learned later, was a fire and brimstone Episcopalian (they’re fairly rare). I was also freaked out by the confessional of the time, especially the lines, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us.” (The language was softened in the 1979 prayer book revision.) Christianity, as I experienced it, seemed to do little more than exacerbate my already strong sense of guilt. I would have agreed with William Blake’s depiction of such a God as “Nobodaddy,” a “silent & invisible Father of jealousy” who hides in “darkness and obscurity.”
The end result was that I stopped going to church when I hit high school and didn’t return until my late thirties.
It helped in my return that I started thinking of God as female rather than male. This gender shift opened up possibilities that had seemed closed off before. I also appreciated that Julian of Norwich, whom I taught in the British Literary survey, refers to Jesus as a mother.
Katherine Mansfield’s poem “God the Father,” however, provides a more positive view of a paternal God. She too appears to have had negative feelings until, after having been beaten about by life, she arrives at a new appreciation.
We can’t help but anthropomorphize the deities we worship, but literature helps us expand the range of our metaphors.
To God the Father
By Katherine Mansfield
To the little, pitiful God I make my prayer, The God with the long grey beard And flowing robe fastened with a hempen girdle Who sits nodding and muttering on the all-too-big throne of Heaven. What a long, longtime, dear God, since you set the stars in their places, Girded the earth with the sea, and invented the day and night. And longer the time since you looked through the blue window of Heaven To see your children at play, in a garden…. Now we are all stronger than you and wiser and more arrogant, In swift procession we pass you by. “Who is that marionette nodding and muttering On the all-too-big throne of Heaven? Come down from your place, Grey Beard, We have had enough of your play-acting!”
It is centuries since I believed in you, But to-day my need of you has come back. I want no rose-colored future, No books of learning, no protestations and denials– I am sick of this ugly scramble, I am tired of being pulled about– O God, I want to sit on your knees On the all-too-big throne of Heaven, And fall asleep with my hands tangled in your grey beard.
With Father’s Day coming up, I share one of the tenderest poems I know about fathers. I’ve heard Li-Young Lee read this poem upon visits to St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the college where I spent my career and where he came to visit Lucille Clifton. It prompts me to recall important moments with my own father, who died seven years ago at 90 but who is with me always.
The young boy in the poem is traumatized by a splinter, sure that he will die from it. Later, when he looks back, he indicates his hysteria by the ways he considered characterizing it:
I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here!
The hands of the father have two realities for the child. They are comforting when they cradle his face, disciplinary when they rise up to strike him. In this case, they comfort:
The Gift By Li-Young Lee
To pull the metal splinter from my palm my father recited a story in a low voice. I watched his lovely face and not the blade. Before the story ended, he’d removed the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.
I can’t remember the tale, but hear his voice still, a well of dark water, a prayer. And I recall his hands, two measures of tenderness he laid against my face, the flames of discipline he raised above my head.
Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame. Had you followed that boy you would have arrived here, where I bend over my wife’s right hand.
Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, Metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for My Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.
I love how the father’s “gift” has been planted in the boy, showing up years later when he cares for his wife. The gift is more than the removal of a splinter. It is a tenderness that transcends generations.
The poem has me thinking about gifts from my own father. One came after I said something sarcastic to one of my younger brothers. I don’t remember the occasion—I must have been trying to deflate him, as tweenagers do—but I remember my father’s response. Gently but firmly he told me that one should never burst another person’s bubble.
His admonition alerted me to the preciousness of another’s joy. Since then, I strive to enter into and bolster the excitement of others, whether it’s in the classroom, on the tennis court, or elsewhere. To do so doubles life’s enjoyments.
When I visited my son Darien and his family in Washington, D.C. last week, he cautioned me against attaching too much importance to the January 6 takeover of the Capitol. As he sees it, the insurrection was nothing more than cosplay, various blowhards acting out their barroom fantasies. Although we didn’t pursue it, I had the sense he would say the same about a lot of rightwing posturing, from Michigan yahoos brandishing automatic weapons to Cyber Ninjas in Arizona looking for bamboo in the presidential ballots. Nor does he worry about Trump, whom he regards as far too incompetent to pull off a coup. As Darien sees it, America’s fundamentals are solid enough to ride out such political bullshit, and liberals like myself should stop overreacting.
Macbeth’s best-known passage comes to mind as I think about what he had to say. Macbeth applies the analogy to life itself but try it out on rightwing braggarts:
It’s certainly true that we’ve had a whole series of sound-and-fury idiots in recent times, from Pat Buchanan to Sarah Palin to Donald Trump to, currently, Marjorie Taylor Green and Ted Cruz. As one fades into obscurity, someone else invariably steps up to take his or her place. It could well signify nothing.
Of course, Duncan thought that Macbeth would stand by his oath of allegiance and look how that turned out. It’s not unlike Trump swearing to uphold the Constitution.
I don’t know whether or not Darien is right, but I pray that he is.
Yesterday, when my eldest granddaughter turned nine, I looked back at the post I wrote when she was born. As I have done with each of my grandchildren, I looked into the literary antecedents to her name. The most famous Esmé in literature, I believe, is J.D. Salinger’s “To Esmé—with Love and Squalor.” Nine years later, I can report the prediction I made at that time has proved fairly prescient.
Reprinted from June 18, 2012
My son Toby and his wife have just managed to accomplish what neither my paternal grandparents, my parents, nor Julia and I could do: they have given birth to a baby girl. Esmé Eleanor Wilson-Bates arrived 2:58 Friday morning, turning me instantly into the cliché of the doting grandfather. I’m also pleased to report that her parents are keeping alive a Bates tradition of giving their children literary names. Esmé is the enchanting little girl in the J. D. Salinger short story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” which bodes well for Esmé Eleanor’s future.
At least it does if you subscribe to the Walter Shandy theory of naming, which I’ve written about here. According to the father in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, names determine destiny. To Walter Shandy, it’s self-evident why Julius Caesar grew up to become a great general and leader of men. After all, he bore the name “Julius Caesar.” (Also according to Walter, the worst name that one can possibly have, a name that will doom one forever, is “Tristram”—and how his son ends up with that name is part of the comedy of the novel.)
So how have literary names shaped destiny in our family? I was named after Christopher Robin and there was indeed a way in which, as the oldest son, I saw myself as the chief game master in my family, with my brothers as so many Poohs, Piglets and Eyores. To this day I still like to run things. [Slight amendation: My mother points out that the actual source of my name was the family name of “Robins,” with my poet father dropping the “s” because “Robin Bates” scans better. While I accept this explanation, names are often overdetermined so Milne’s character is in there as well.]
Meanwhile Darien, who owes his name to the Keats sonnet “Upon First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” is a bold explorer like Cortes/Balboa, starting his own Manhattan marketing agency at the height of the recession with virtually no capital. Toby, meanwhile, is one of the kindest men I know, sharing similarities with his namesake Uncle Toby, who refuses to hurt a fly in Tristram Shandy.
By naming their daughter Esmé, then, Toby and Candice have given her a real gift. Salinger’s Esmé is an English girl in her early teens who befriends a U. S. soldier (the narrator) in a restaurant on the eve of his being sent over to France in the D Day invasion. She has lost both parents, her father in the African campaign, and is reaching out to Americans. She is earnest, sensitive, and precocious—she likes to use big words—and the soldier is captivated. When she learns that the narrator is a writer, she asks him if he will write a story about her:
“I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime. I’m an avid reader.”
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.
“It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.” She reflected. “I prefer stories about squalor.”
“About what?” I said, leaning forward.
“Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.”
And later:
“Are you at all acquainted with squalor?”
I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I’d do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.
Her final words are, “ I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact.”
Esmé doesn’t appear to know what squalor means, but the narrator does indeed become better acquainted with it when he undergoes combat, as did Salinger. His faculties, furthermore, take a beating: we next see him stationed in a house in Germany after the war suffering from PTSD. He has the shakes and a facial twist, and he vomits when he gets too close to real emotion. At one point he recalls the Brothers Karamazov passage that hell is the inability to love, and he himself finds himself unable to answer, or even to read, the letters which his wife and relatives are sending him. He wraps himself in a protective shield of irony.
Esme’s letter pulls him out of the worst of his illness. Here’s her postscript:
P.S. I am taking the liberty of enclosing my wristwatch which you may keep in your possession for the duration of the conflict. I did not observe whether you were wearing one during our brief assocition, but this one is extremely water-proof and shock-proof as well as having many other virtues among which one can tell as what velocity one is walking if one wishes. I am quite certain that you will use it to greater advantage in these difficult days than I ever can and that you will accept it as a lucky talisman.
The narrator knows the meaning of the watch, which belonged to Esmé’s father. It helps him recover enough to return to his wife and begin his life anew.
I can imagine Esmé Eleanor 12 years from now as an alert, curious, and gregarious girl (“gregarious” is a word that fascinates the fictional Esmé). I see her, like Salinger’s heroine, wearing a Campbell tartan dress and being sensitive to people in distress (as her father was at a very early age). She will reach out to lonely souls.
I pray that she won’t be forced to grow up too fast, even though I’m aware that tragedy happens. Her father, after all, wrestled with the death of an older brother when he was just 16.
I share today another chapter of my current book project, Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate. Since I am still in the revision process, I am particularly interested in feedback.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, while very interested in making our lives better, don’t have a lot to say about how literature can help. I include them in this book, however, because many left-leaning literary theorists think that literature can join with their class politics to advance human liberation.
Had things turned out differently, it’s possible that Marx would have had a lot to say about literature since, at 17, he was a brilliant student who wanted to study literature in college. (Instead, his father made him study law, which he finessed into law and philosophy.) He wrote some poetry and short fiction, along with a play, before shifting over to philosophy, focusing on the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. After leaving the university, he became a journalist increasingly interested in socialist causes.
Meeting Friedrich Engels was a major turning point in his life. Engels, the son of a Lancashire textiles factory owner, had researched the abysmal living conditions of mill hands, producing the landmark Condition of the Working Class in England (1844). Disenchanted with Hegel’s idealism, which believed that ideas shape history, Marx turned his attention to economics and worker activism. When revolutions broke out all over Europe in 1848, Marx and Engels co-authored The Communist Manifesto, designed to transform working class dissatisfaction into a mass movement.
As Marx and Engels see it, more inclusive forms of society invariably replace less inclusive forms, meaning that the proletariat will one day replace the bourgeoisie as the bourgeoisie replaced the landed classes. The desired end is a communal state where each individual, free of worrying about physical needs, can develop his or her particular potential to the fullest. Marx analyzed the workings of capitalism in Capital, his masterpiece. Engels, meanwhile, would go on to write, among other works, The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State.
According to Marx’s daughter Elaine, he was a fan of Shelly, whom he considered as “one of the advanced guard of Socialism.” It’s important to distinguish between the two, however. Defence of Poetry is closer to the Hegelian idealism that Marx rejected in that Shelley sees visions of human liberation, grasped by the great poets, inevitably seizing hold of human society and changing it. In other words, consciousness (including literature) shapes history, even though it can take a while.
If Marx is said to have stood Hegel “on his head,” it’s because he saw economic forces influencing consciousness, not the other way around. Shelley may have called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” but Marx became increasingly interested in actual legislating. What does it take for power to change hands?
Consciousness and literature still have a role to play, however. To understand how, we must look at the relationship between what Marx and Engels call “the ideological superstructure” and “the economic base.” The superstructure involves “ideas, concepts and consciousness”—the mental structures that influence how we see ourselves—while the base concerns “the material intercourse of man”:
The production of ideas, concepts and consciousness is first of all directly interwoven with the material intercourse of man, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the spiritual intercourse of men, appear here as the direct efflux of men’s material behavior…
The Marx-Engels passage has led to many debates about which is more important, material life or culture (life or literature for us). At first glance, it appears that Marx and Engels consider material life to be primary:
We do not proceed from what men say, imagine, conceive….[R]ather we proceed from the really active man…Consciousness does not determine life: life determines consciousness.
While this may seem to definitively relegate consciousness to the second tier, it’s actually more complicated than that. In pushing against Hegel’s contention that consciousness determines history, Marx and Engels may overstate the case, going to the other extreme. “Interwoven,” I think, gives us a better sense of the actual relationship. Literature can’t act independently from the material conditions on the ground, but it is through people’s ideological sense of themselves that the economic conditions manifest themselves. History may involve impersonal forces, but it takes place through actual people.
The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, a labor organizer who thought about these issues when locked up in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, helps clarify the relationship. As he sees it, workers (economic base) and cultural activists (ideological superstructure) need each other. Without connection to actual working conditions, culture laborers (including poets) are prone to airy abstractions, while without the efforts of those who work with ideas, manual workers are vulnerable to what Engels calls “false consciousness” and Gramsci “bourgeois cultural hegemony.”
As Gramsci sees it, the middle class uses the institutions of culture (the media, universities, religious institutions) to “manufacture consent,” with the result that the middle class need not rely only on armies and the police to stay in power. The existing power relations will appear, to the working class, as just the way things are.” What passes as “common sense,” Gramsci writes, is actually a manipulated reality. William Blake, in his poem “London,” captures how people forge mental shackles for themselves. Although miserable, they do not cast off the internal restraints:
I wander thro’ each charter’d street, Near where the charter’d Thames does flow. And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every Infant’s cry of fear, In every voice: in every ban, The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
When the reigning power structure can convince people to forge mental manacles for themselves, we have what Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye calls “soft power.”
If culture helps enforce existing power relations, however, it also can challenge them. Gramsci himself is more interested in how political philosophy can break the hold of bourgeois “common sense” on worker minds, but we will be examining literature’s ability to do so. W.E.B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Frantz Fanon, and various feminists (Rachel Blau Du Plessis, Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Tania Modleski) all examine ways that poetry, fiction and drama can break the hegemonic power of, respectively, racism, capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy. If Sir Philip Sidney is right that literature is the best way to teach virtue, then maybe it is also the best way to break the hold of oppressors over our minds.
We will also see a contrary view expressed by Victorian poet and thinker Matthew Arnold, who openly calls for poetry to be used to ensure middle class hegemonic control, not challenge it. Literature, as Arnold sees it, should be taught in worker schools because it will “civilize” the masses, by which he means persuade them to be content with their lot in life.
Marx and Engels do not disagree with Arnold that great literature can play a reactionary role in class struggle. For instance, they both noten how members of the rising middle class used Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for their own purposes. One can see how the story of a shipwrecked mariner creating a new society would appeal to entrepreneurs, casting someone like them as a heroic protagonist in a drama that breaks with the past and forges a new path into the future. Crusoe’s father wants him to stay at home and pursue a safe “middle way” whereas Crusoe wants something more, even though he can’t put his finger on exactly what that is. In any event, he continues to engage in risky ventures, with the final result that he creates a new world that far surpasses anything that his father could envision. The story so engaged readers that for 200 years Robinson Crusoe was the world’s most popular novel.
Marx would point out that Robinson Crusoe was popular because it reflected the historical shift from the land-owning gentry to the mercantile and industrial middle class. The economic base, in other words, was determining the ideological superstructure. But it did more than reflect. By giving entrepreneurs an identity, putting steel in their spines and confidence in their decision making, the novel helped propel historical forces forward. And not only Robinson Crusoe. In his seminal work The Rise of the Novel, scholar Ian Watt talks about how early novels in general reinforced new notions of individualism that were part of the new economic order. Each time readers immersed themselves in the story of Robinson Crusoe, Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, Goethe’s Young Werther, Sarah Fielding’s David Simple, Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, William Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, or a host of other novelistic protagonists, they were invited to prioritize the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individuals over age-old traditions. Watt points out how the break is particularly striking in Crusoe:
Crusoe’s island gives him the complete laissez-faire which economic man needs to realize his aims. At home market conditions, taxation and problems of the labor supply make it impossible for the individual to control every aspect of production, distribution and exchange. The conclusion is obvious. Follow the call of the wide open places, discover an island that is desert only because it is barren of owners or competitors, and there build your personal Empire with the help of a Man Friday who needs no wages and makes it much easier to support the white man’s burden.
What’s for a middle class businessman not to like?
Marx was not entirely opposed to the middle class embracing this vision. In his dialectical view of history, the heroes of one era are the villains of the next. Although the capitalists who replaced the gentry would become oppressors in their turn, they represented a new prosperity where, theoretically, the needs of all could be met—although for that to become a reality, the proletariat would need to force capitalists to (a) stop exploiting them and (b) share the wealth.
So what are authors to do if their work is used in the service of progress at one moment in history and oppression in another? Marx and Engels have a simple answer: don’t worry about it. The artist’s job is to tell the truth, not engage in politics. Authors are not to be activists but reality describers.
In this, Marx and Engels share with Aristotle, Samuel Johnson and Shelley the belief that looking closely at literature gives us access to certain larger human truths. Johnson, as we have seen, believes that “much instruction” is to be gleaned from Shakespeare’s deep understanding of human nature while Shelley finds evidence of humanity’s yearning for freedom in literature’s masterworks. For their part, Marx and Engels believe that novelists give us a deeper understanding of the workings of society than economists, sociologists, and political scientists. “Scientific socialism”—which is to say, socialism based on empirical reality, not on utopian dreaming—benefits from literature’s insights.
Even as Robinson Crusoe inspired capitalists, for instance, it also revealed the dark side of capitalism, especially its self-absorption and its readiness to use other people as instruments of profit. Crusoe thinks that God is using earthquakes to send him special messages, and he doesn’t hesitate to sell a Muslim friend into slavery when it suits his purposes. (His shipwreck, meanwhile, occurs when he is traveling to Africa to acquire slaves.) To reflect upon Robinson Crusoe, then, is to recognize both the energies of emergent bourgeois capitalism and the way it sacrifices human beings. Because these energies remain a powerful element of capitalism, socialist activists underestimate them at their peril. In other words, they can use literature to better understand the enemy.
To cite another literary example, Marx and Engels praise the French novelist Honoré de Balzac, even though he has royalist sympathies. Engels claimed to have learned more about French society and its history from the French novelist than from any historian or social scientist. Marx too admired Balzac and once planned to write a critical study of the author after his studies of economics were complete. Engels explains why Balzac’s grand project, his La Comédie Humaine, is so revealing:
Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply – the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favorite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found – that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.
If literary masterpieces like Robinson Crusoe and the novels that make up Balzac’s Comédie Humain function as objective mirrors of social relations, allowing political and economic theorists to penetrate to their core, then works that sacrifice truth to politic expediency will not serve us, even if we agree with their politics. Engels makes this clear in his criticism of the draft of an 1885 novel about salt miners sent to him by a hopeful author. In his letter to the author, Engels begins by pointing out that she appears chiefly interested in proclaiming her socialist convictions:
You obviously felt a desire to take a public stand in your book, to testify to your convictions before the entire world. This has now been done; it is a stage you have passed through and need not repeat in this form.
He goes on to note that he is not against partisanship per se. Some of the great authors have been partisan, a qualification that Shelley too should have made:
I am by no means opposed to partisan poetry as such. Both Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were highly partisan poets, Dante and Cervantes were so no less, and the best thing that can be said about Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe is that it represents the first German political problem drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who produce excellent novels, all write with a purpose.
The danger comes when partisanship clouds one’s vision, however. At that point, one has surrendered literature’s greatest strength, which is the ability to provide “a faithful portrayal of real conditions.”
Engels would undoubtedly endorse novelist Iris Murdoch when she makes a similar point, distinguishing between the writer as citizen and the writer as artist:
A citizen has a duty to society, and a writer might sometimes feel he ought to write persuasive newspaper articles or pamphlets, but this would be a different activity. The artist’s duty is to art, to truth-telling in his own medium, the writer’s duty is to produce the best literary work of which he is capable, and he must find out how this can be done.
With a “faithful portrayal of the real conditions,” Engels says, the socialist problem novel will have done its job. Once one sees the truth about the world, the optimism of the bourgeoisie will have been shaken and its aura of invincibility shaken. Literary truth, in other words, will make us free, which means that novelists don’t need to offer direct solutions to the problems presented or even to take sides. They don’t have to write newspaper articles or pamphlets advocating for proletarian revolution—or if they do, they will be engaging in a different activity.
As we have seen, however, Engels himself is less interested in authors as activists than as truth tellers. Leave it to others, Engels might have said in his letter, to turn literary insight into active resistance. With his view that the arc of history bends towards equality for all, Engels shares with Shelley the belief that the greatest (and therefore most truthful) literature will, by definition, be consistent with history’s progressive march, expanding the vision of freedom for all.
One other issue is worth taking up given Engels’s preference for a truthful author over a politically correct author. Stalin’s Soviet Union chose political correctness over truth, with the result that authors whose works didn’t toe the party line could be imprisoned or even killed. Marxist literary scholars like Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson have labeled this “vulgar Marxism” and, citing Marx and Engels’s admiration for the monarchist Balzac, come to the defense of conservative writers. For instance, Eagleton praises reactionary author Joseph Conrad for accurately depicting the crisis of late 19th century capitalism in works like The Heart of Darkness.
Since we will be seeing figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Chinua Achebe, and Frantz Fanon attacking a work that depicts Africans as a howling mass, it’s worth looking deeper into Eagleton’s defense. As Eagleton sees it, Conrad’s pessimism reflects how capitalism has reached a dead-end. Because Conrad focuses on the individual when the world (so Eagleton believes) requires a collective solution, he finds himself in a dead end:
The pessimism of Conrad’s world view is rather a unique transformation into art of an ideological pessimism rife in his period— a sense of history as futile and cyclical, of individuals as impenetrable and solitary, of human values as relativistic and irrational, which marks a drastic crisis in the ideology of the Western bourgeois class to which Conrad allied himself. There were good reasons for that ideological crisis, in the history of imperialist capitalism throughout this period.
Consider, for instance, the contrast that Conrad draws between Kurtz and Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Kurtz represents Europe’s failure to reconcile enlightened Christianity with unregulated capitalism. He goes into the jungle to civilize the natives (also to make his fortune) but, in the process, descends into barbarism, displaying the heads of his enemies on spikes while coupling up with a native queen. Greed and lust expose civilization’s values. Narrator Marlow, however, is at a loss when it comes to alternatives. He finds himself admiring Kurtz because at least he at least strives for big things, unlike Marlow, who doesn’t believe in anything. Marlow downplays the fact that Kurtz has become absolutely corrupt..
Eagleton also has a Marxist explanation for why Conrad would see the bourgeois crisis so clearly:
[E]very writer is individually placed in society, responding to a general history from his own particular standpoint, making sense of it in his own concrete terms. But it is not difficult to see how Conrad’s personal standing, as an “aristocratic” Polish exile deeply committed to English conservatism, intensified for him the crisis of English bourgeois ideology…
Conrad wasn’t alone and Eagleton mentions other conservative writers of the time who provide similar critiques of capitalism. Marxist criticism, he believes, should use these insights in the service of building a better world rather than castigating the authors for their politics:
Whether those insights are in political terms “progressive” or “reactionary” (Conrad’s are certainly the latter) is not the point—any more than it is to the point that most of the agreed major writers of the twentieth century—Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence—are political conservatives who each had truck with fascism. Marxist criticism, rather than apologizing for the fact, explains it—sees that, in the absence of genuinely revolutionary art, only a radical conservatism, hostile like Marxism to the withered values of liberal bourgeois society, could produce the most significant literature.
Since we’ve seen, in his critique of the salt miners novel, Engels’s own preference for truthful literature over doctrinally correct literature, we can imagine him and Marx criticizing socialist realism, the party line art that arose in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China. They would also have been appalled at the persecution of authors whose work didn’t conform to orthodox dogma. By executing writers or sending them to the Gulag, Stalin shut himself off from the truths that artists could have taught the Soviet Union about itself. Listen to literature or you will become stagnant, one could say.
In summation, literature provides revolutionaries with a powerful tool: if they reflect upon the master works, they will better understand the energies and tendencies of history. Just as (according to Johnson) “a system of social duty may be selected” from Shakespeare’s plays, so scientific socialism can build upon literature’s truth telling. Marx and Engels, of course, would then add that simply knowing the truth isn’t enough: literature can help expose the way oppression works, revealing the physical and mental chains that constrain humanity, but it is up to the working class to usher in a new world. As Marx lyrically asserts in his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.”
That being said, we will be looking at theorists who think that literature should not only reveal the chain but also assist in throwing it off. Just as Sidney sees poetry as a powerful way to inculcate virtue, so Bertolt Brecht will see drama as a way to inspire and direct revolutionary action.
