Getting to Know Henry James

By Robin Bates | Published: September 16, 2021
Henry James

Friday

I’m currently on a Henry James kick after having long ignored the author’s novels (with the exception of Turn of the Screw and Portrait of a Lady.) Thanks to Sewanee Library’s fantastic books-on-disk collection, I just finished listening to Daisy Miller and Washington Square as I drove around on errands. I am now embarking upon the much longer Ambassadors.

What impresses me about James is that his protagonists have more to them than one expects. In the two novels I’ve just listened to, the other characters sell Daisy and Catherine Sloper short, and we the readers may do so as well, only to discover unexpected substance. Daisy at first seems a shallow American flirt and Catherine Sloper a timid and dull woman. Catherine’s brilliant father, in fact, sees Catherine in exactly this way. The danger of reducing them to types, a favorite activity of Dr. Sloper, becomes apparent.

The result is that one’s sense of human possibility expands in the course of the works. Quiet Catherine is much more than either of the two men in her life, both of whom ceaselessly mansplain. In fact, I can’t think of another novel that has such incessantly patronizing men. The fact that, in her quiet way, she breaks with both of them is a real victory. If this is what men are like, then her decision to remain unmarried makes perfect sense.

As I listen to James’s works, I sometimes think of the very high status he attained in the eyes of figures like scholar and critic F. R. Leavis, who cited him as one of England’s four greatest novelists (along with Austen, George Eliot, and Conrad). English departments in the 1950s and 1960s followed suit and lionized him. In his Introduction to Literary Theory, Terry Eagleton has fun poking holes in their belief that reading figures like James will save civilization:

Was it really true that literature could roll back the deadening effects of industrial labor and the philistinism of the media? It was doubtless comforting to feel that by reading Henry James one belonged to the moral vanguard of civilization itself; but what of all those people who did not read Henry James, who had never even heard of James, and would no doubt go to their graves complacently ignorant that he had been and gone? These people certainly composed the overwhelming social majority; were they morally callous, humanly banal and imaginatively bankrupt? One was speaking perhaps of one’s own parents and friends here, and so needed to be a little circumspect. Many of these people seemed morally serious and sensitive enough: they showed no particular tendency to go around murdering, looting and plundering, and even if they did it seemed implausible to attribute this to the fact that they had not read Henry James.

Eagleton is wonderfully witty here, and, given his Marxism, I think he singles out James because he is an acquired taste and because he sets his works in upper crust settings. And yet, I have to say that I could feel my own humanity expanding as I listened to the novels. Rather than flattering me with the sense that I was a member of some elite, the novels made me feel more connected with other people.

This, indeed, is the aspect of James that University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum appreciates. As she sees him, he is extraordinarily sensitive to the delicacy of relationships, both how we bruise each other and how we prove resilient. He respects his protagonists in profound ways and invites us to carry that respect into the world. In Nussbaum’s view, society is strengthened when we do so.

You’ll be hearing more from me about my James experiences.

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The Great Books as Assimilation Manual

By Robin Bates | Published: September 15, 2021

Thursday

Sue Schmidt, friend and occasional contributor to this blog, has alerted me to a Vietnamese immigrant’s story of how the classics came to his aid as he wrestled with the challenges of cultural transition. Phuc Tran recounts his encounters with racism at school and violence at home in Sigh, Gone: A Misfit’s Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In (2020).

I’m only in the early stages of the book but what I’ve read so far is riveting. Tran’s family escaped Vietnam after the fall of Saigon—a story that has suddenly become relevant again with the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan—and to stop the bullying in school, he concluded that he needed to be “less Asian.” Therefore, he “tried to erase my otherness, my Asianness, with an assimilation—an Americanization—that was relentless as it was thorough.”

One of the tools he chanced upon was Clifton Fadiman’s The Lifetime Reading Plan. As Tran describes it, Fadiman had “listed and summarized all the books that he thought educated, cultured Americans should read over their lifetime, beginning with the Bible and ending with Solzhenitsyn.” As Tran describes it, his introduction “was unapologetically American, classist, and white—and I loved it. The Plan would be the most powerful cannon in my war for assimilation.” The list of authors included Flaubert, Twain, Kerouac, Bronte, Kafka, Camus, Ibsen, James, Thurber, Shakespeare.

But something funny happened on the way to assimilation:

My reading molded me, the tool hammering its hand into shape. By some miracle—and by miracle, I mean great teachers—I pushed past the shallowness and stupidity of my own motivations. I fell in love with the actual literature and the actual ideas of great literature. As an immigrant, as a Vietnamese kid, as a poor kid, I had collected so many scarlet letters of alienation that I connected profoundly to the great works.

Tran elaborates:

As I read, I began to understand that all the great works wrangled with big questions, important questions: our place in the world, the value of our experience, the fairness and meaning of our suffering, our quest for love and belonging. Universal themes bound these great works together, and they bound me to their oaky, yellowed pages like Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship. I felt a connective and humanizing resonance in books: I wasn’t alone in my aloneness. I wasn’t alone in my longing for love. I wasn’t alone in my fear of being rejected, my fear of never finding my place, my fear of failing. The snarl of my journey was untangled and laid out clearly by books.

And further:

In the great classics, there were so many moments for me to divest my age, my town, my skin, so many moments to be part of a universal conversation. Homer sharpened my mind’s edge. Dickinson gave me winged hope. Thoreau made a whole cabin for me.

To cite a couple of examples, Dostoevsky gave Tran a framework for the violence he encountered at home, triggered by his father’s PTSD and the stress everyone felt at being strangers in a strange land. Trans explains the power of the work as follows:

Violence lashed Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment to my childhood. The violence of Dostoevsky’s world is woven throughout Crime and Punishment, stitched into the very language of the novel’s narrative. In his tale about a desperate college student who murders two helpless women Dostoevsky plunges his reader into a paranoid world where violence hangs thick in the air. The violence and assault of his raw imagery, feverish and unyielding, is indelible. This was a world I knew from experience, a world I had grown up in, a world where violence was potentially everywhere.

The Scarlet Letter, meanwhile, provided its own complex framework. Originally thinking that Hester is a fool for accepting her punishment instead of leaving the colony, Tran comes to see her as consenting to be publicly shamed

because it’s where she has a powerful (albeit negative) identity, and from that robust identity comes her purpose and meaning. Hester chooses to stay where she is Hester.

Tran, meanwhile, came to accept a community that was calling him a gook. He allowed himself to be harmed by the word because, if he did, he

was showing them that I belonged at least by virtue of understanding their language. And all I wanted was to belong.

I’m early in the book and will report more as I get further into it. You can already see, however, the rich resource that literature provided him.

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Surveying Great Thinkers about Lit’s Power

By Robin Bates | Published: September 14, 2021
Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson

Wednesday

In my almost-completed survey of what great thinkers have said about literature’s impact upon audiences, I recently arrived at a new clarity at what I think my book accomplishes. Below is an excerpt from the introduction that explains why I find the approach useful.

I can report that the book is currently being reviewed by professional colleagues, whose feedback is proving invaluable. I am also putting together a book proposal to send out to publishers. There’s finally an end in sight for a project that I have been actively working on for ten years and indirectly working on my entire career.

Excerpt from Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate

When we reflect on the richness that comes from studying readers’ responses to literature, we encounter a theoretical problem. How can one generalize about literary impact when individual responses are so unpredictable and vary so widely?

The task is so daunting that we can understand why Reader Response Criticism and Reception Theory have never caught on as widely as other theoretical approaches, such as (in their time) New Criticism and Deconstruction and New Historicism.

Some scholars have argued that we should skip readers altogether. In literary criticism’s formalist period following World War II, W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley contended that to judge a work based on its emotional affect was to commit “the affective fallacy.” They found it cleaner and a more purely aesthetic and intellectual exercise to look only at the text.

The rest of the world isn’t interested in clean, however. Most people who have had intense literary experiences aren’t willing to dismiss them as irrelevant. And then there are English teachers, who have a stake in figuring out why their students respond as they do to a work, and parents, who have the same concern regarding their children and teenagers. If people really thought that literature didn’t change human behavior, we wouldn’t see the censorship battles that never go away. Messy or not, we’ve got to grapple with whether literature affects human behavior and, if so, how.

To arrive at answers, my approach is threefold. By showing, side by side, those thinkers who believe that literature packs a punch, I strive to reassure readers who are distressed that so many regard literature as a luxury rather than a necessity. Or as Sir Philip Sidney puts it, who are distressed at how “poor poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children.”

By surveying the arguments that have been put forth, you will get a sense of literature’s potential and, in the theories that resonate most with your own reading experiences, find the weapons to fight back against the naysayers. If you hope literature can fend off cultural barbarians who want to trash revered traditions, Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, and Allan Bloom will come to your aid.  If you see literature as vital in bringing about a more just and equitable society, you’ll find allies in W. E. B. Du Bois, Bertolt Brecht, Herbert Marcuse, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum.

Second, while some of the theories conflict, certain recurring themes reveal themselves. Throughout the book we will be tracking common concerns as we search for, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “a great constancy.”

Finally, because no generalized observation can do full justice to idiosyncratic responses—often there’s no predicting what an individual reader will take away from a specific work—I present the thinkers as models. Their theories, like yours, are based on their immersion in specific works, and seeing how these men and women have derived meaning from intense reading encounters can help you in your own analysis. My final chapter is devoted to helping you arrive at customized insights about why you love the books you love and hate the books you hate.

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Biden as Dryden’s Ideal Leader

By Robin Bates | Published: September 13, 2021
John Michael Wright, Charles II, model for David in Absalom and Architophel

Tuesday

When Joe Biden declared his anti-Covid measures last week—required vaccines for many, required vaccines or weekly testing for others—I was put in mind of King David in John Dryden’s long poem Absalom and Architophel. Fed up with hoping that his rebellious son Absalom will see reason, David lays down the law.

In his satire, Dryden uses the Biblical story as an allegory of how Charles II, somewhat passive initially, should lay down the law in responding to the Duke of Monmouth, his illegitimate son who led a rebellion against him. Ultimately Monmouth was executed for having done so.

After announcing the new policy, Biden said,

We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin.  And your refusal has cost all of us.  So, please, do the right thing.  But just don’t take it from me; listen to the voices of unvaccinated Americans who are lying in hospital beds, taking their final breaths, saying, “If only I had gotten vaccinated.”  “If only.”

It’s a tragedy.  Please don’t let it become yours.

The following day, when asked by reporters that Republican governors would be suing him for “overreach,” he was similarly defiant:

Have at it.

And then:

I am so disappointed that particularly some Republican governors have been so cavalier with the health of these kids, so cavalier with the health of their communities.

In Dryden’s poem, David/Charles has watched Absalom/Monmouth “ma[k]e the lure to draw the people down.” He has seen Absalom’s evil advisor Architophel “turn[ ] the plot to ruin church and state.” He has seen the Council (state legislatures in our case) acting irresponsibly and “the rabble” (unruly Trump supporters) acting even worse. Because he, like Biden, is responsible for the stability of his country, his patience finally wears thin;

With all these loads of injuries opprest,
And long revolving in his careful breast
Th’event of things; at last his patience tir’d,
Thus from his royal throne, by Heav’n inspir’d,
The god-like David spoke…

Having hoped that people would be reasonable, David explains why he hasn’t been more forceful previously. Don’t misinterpret a father’s love of his son for weakness, he says:

Thus long have I by native mercy sway’d,
My wrongs dissembl’d, my revenge delay’d:
So willing to forgive th’offending age;
So much the father did the king assuage…

He may have been mild in the past, David states, but he refuses to take any more flack (or “heap’d affronts”):

Yet, since they will divert my native course,
‘Tis time to shew I am not good by force.
Those heap’d affronts that haughty subjects bring,
Are burdens for a camel, not a king…

Like Biden reminding Americans that he’s responsible for the health of all Americans, David reminds those around him that “kings are the public pillars of the state,/Born to sustain and prop the nation’s weight.”

Then David, comparing Absalom to Sampson, says that he must expect the consequences that come with shaking the column. One is tempted to say the same of vaccine resistors who end up in ICU wards only they unfortunately threaten the rest of us:

If my young Sampson will pretend a call
To shake the column, let him share the fall:

King David would much prefer that his son get the vaccine “repent and live”:

But oh that yet he would repent and live!
How easy ’tis for parents to forgive!
With how few tears a pardon might be won
From Nature, pleading for a darling son!

And then my favorite line in the entire poem:

Beware the fury of a patient man.

David gets God’s endorsement for his speech, which is more than Biden can claim. The president would like to believe, however, that the people will come to acknowledge his lawful health measures:

And peals of thunder shook the firmament.
Henceforth a series of new time began,
The mighty years in long procession ran:
Once more the god-like David was restor’d,
And willing nations knew their lawful lord.

If everyone took the vaccine, we could end the pandemic in 30 days. And if that were to happen, historians could look back and report, “Henceforth a series of new time began,/ The mighty years in long procession ran.”

Dare to dream.

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On Grendel, a Boston Bar, and a Texas Law

By Robin Bates | Published: September 12, 2021
Grendel, artist unknown

Monday

A Harvard-adjacent bar called Grendel’s Den is gaining some national attention after Texas’s recent abortion law, which relies on bounty hunters for enforcement. That’s because the lawsuit that allowed Grendel’s Bar to serve liquor—so ruled the Supreme Court in 1982—may be the precedent needed to overrule the Texas law.

I of course am intrigued by the bar’s Beowulf allusion and am looking to apply it.

Apparently there used to be a Massachusetts blue law that (this according to Wikipedia) would allow “a school or a religious institution within 500 feet of a liquor license applicant to prevent the issuance.” When Grendel’s Bar wanted such a license—after all, what self-respecting Danish troll would abstain from mead—a nearby church objected. Their objection was overruled, however, first by a state court and then by the Supreme Court. After all, it’s the state’s responsibility to enforce laws. It can’t delegate that responsibility to private citizens or organizations.

According to Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe, who successfully argued the case before the Supreme Court, the precedent should apply to Texas as well. The legislature can’t farm out enforcement of its abortion-ban-after-six-weeks to citizens bringing private lawsuits. It would have to enforce the law itself.

And the reason it can’t do that is because abortion is currently a Constitutional right thanks to Roe v. Wade. Texas thought it could circumvent that inconvenient fact by incentivizing private citizens to snitch on their neighbors, earning $10,000 a pop plus legal fees plus no legal liability. The conservative Supreme Court did not say no, but Tribe doesn’t see how it can ignore the Grendel’s Bar ruling.

From the Texas legislature’s point of view, such liberal objections are like Grendel storming its nice white male Christian party. Since its QAnon supporters already regard Democrats as cannibalistic pedophiles engaging in global child sex trafficking, why not just call them God-cursed Grendels and quote such passages as the following:

                                    Suddenly then
The God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
Greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
From their resting places and rushed to his lair,
Flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
Blundering back with the butchered corpses.

“Butchered corpses” is how the Texas legislature regards aborted fetuses–even though a six–week fetus is the size of a grain of rice. So why not allow outsiders—Beowulf, after all, is a Geat, not a Dane—to come in and take down the monster. And heap lots of treasure on him after he proves successful.

The Danes win round one when Beowulf takes out Grendel. They win round two when he handles the backlash, as embodied in Grendel’s mother. But round three, which happens after Beowulf leaves and after King Hrothgar dies, will see fratricidal strive break out amongst Hrothgar’s kin. The great mead hall of Heorot will burn to the ground.

In other words, extra-legal measures once set in motion don’t solve the issue but breed ever more resistance and ever more monsters. Some of these monsters take the form of Democratic voters.

Further thought: While I spent a summer in Harvard Square in 1973, I don’t remember Grendel’s Den. I wonder if it resembles at all the underwater den described in the poem:

The gallant man
Could see he had entered some hellish turn-hole
And yet the water did not work against him
Because the hall-roofing held off
The force of the current; then he saw firelight,
A gleam and flare-up, a glimmer of brightness.

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Let These Weak Feet Tread in Narrow Ways

By Robin Bates | Published: September 11, 2021
Daniel Gabriel Rossetti, Retro Me Satana (unfinished sketch)

Spiritual Sunday

I share a Daniel Gabriel Rossetti sonnet today that I don’t entirely understand but that fascinates me. I chose it when looking for poems that explore today’s Gospel reading, which is Jesus’s famous reprimand to Peter:

Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (Mark 8, 31-33)

The poem is entitled “RETRO ME, SATHANA!”, meaning “Get Thee Behind Me, Satan,” and Rossetti has an unfinished illustration with the same title. Rossetti’s Satanic temptation, at least in the poem, appears to be dreams of being mighty, which is what it is for Peter as well. The heavy-curled charioteer who is “snatched from out his chariot by the hair” must be Absolom, who was in revolt against King David. Those who are ambitious like Absolom are too much enthralled with the here and now—they are enthralled time—and when death comes, the world will careen onward, drawn by its now reinless steeds.

The Satanic desire to unfurl one’s mighty wings means that one sets onself to be broken like a lath or thin sheet of wood. The poet wants rather to tread narrow ways, which I’m reading as Jesus’s declaration that “strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which. leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Then again, those who the temptation of “the broad vine-sheltered path” (I think of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress) will one day encounter God’s wrath, as described in the Book of Revelations (16:1): “And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.”

I’m not sure what promises of power and ambition the poet is tempted by, but he imagines angry judgement if he yields to them. Or at any rate, that’s what I think this poem is saying:

Get thee behind me. Even as, heavy-curled,
Stooping against the wind, a charioteer
Is snatched from out his chariot by the hair,
So shall Time be; and as the void car, hurled
Abroad by reinless steeds, even so the world:
Yea, even as chariot-dust upon the air,
It shall be sought and not found anywhere.
Get thee behind me, Satan. Oft unfurled,
Thy perilous wings can beat and break like lath
Much mightiness of men to win thee praise.
Leave these weak feet to tread in narrow ways.
Thou still, upon the broad vine-sheltered path,
Mayst wait the turning of the phials of wrath
For certain years, for certain months and days.

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Remembering 9-11 in Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: September 9, 2021

Friday

Reposted with modifications from September 10, 2016

On September 11, 2001 and for six days afterwards, Lucille Clifton wrote poems exploring the attack. In other words, for a week she used poetry as a daily meditation to process what had happened.

At the time, Lucille was a colleague of mine at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, and we have posted all of them on plaques around St. John’s Pond, which sits in the middle of our campus. As one walks around the pond, one can read the sequence in its entirety.

The first poem turns on its head what it means to believe that God has blessed America. Often Americans assert that we are blessed because, as a wealthy and safe country, we are “exempt” from the suffering experienced “in otherwheres/israel ireland palestine.” Clifton notes that, with the attacks, we received a different kind of blessing, one that is in line with Jesus reaching out to the wretched of the earth: God has blessed us with the knowledge of what these “otherwheres” regularly experience:

1 Tuesday 9/11/01

thunder and lightning and our world
is another place no day
will ever be the same no blood
untouched

they know this storm in otherwheres
israel ireland palestine
but God has blessed America
we sing

and God has blessed America
to learn that no one is exempt
the world is one all fear
is one all life all death
all one

In Wednesday’s poem, Clifton reminds us that Muslims no less than Christians are God’s children. God has multiple names and many tongues. This is not the time to focus on divisiveness, she says, either anger against Muslims or anger against those targeting Muslims. This is a time to pray together under one flag, “warmed by the single love/ of the many tongued God.”

2 Wednesday 9/12/01

this is not the time
i think
to note the terrorist
inside
who threw the brick
into the mosque
this is not the time
to note
the ones who cursed
Gods other name
the ones who threatened
they would fill the streets
with arab children’s blood
and this is not the time
i think
to ask who is allowed to be
american America
all of us gathered under one flag
praying together safely
warmed by the single love
of the many tongued God

Thursday’s poem uses a passage from Genesis (28:12) to honor the firemen who gave their lives. There we read that, while dreaming, Jacob “saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.”

3 Thursday 9/13/01

the firemen
ascend
like jacob’s ladder
into the mouth of
history

Friday’s poem refers to the historical suffering of oppressed groups and passes along to all Americans an insight Clifton has struggled to learn as an African American woman: victims are not to blame for their suffering. While various rightwing preachers like Jerry Falwell said that the 9/11 attacks were in retribution for America’s toleration of homosexuality, Clifton reassures Americans that we have done nothing “to deserve such villainy.”

4 Friday 9/14/01

some of us know
we have never felt safe

all of us americans
weeping

as some of us have wept
before

is it treason to remember

what have we done
to deserve such villainy

nothing we reassure ourselves
nothing

Saturday’s poem invokes Jesus and asks whether there is a higher purpose at work in our suffering. Lucille wonders whether there will be miracles of love in store for us, even as she acknowledges that the intention of “the gods” is difficult to understand:

5 Saturday 9/15/01

i know a man who perished for his faith.
others called him infidel, chased him down
and beat him like a dog. after he died
the world was filled with miracles.
people forgot he was a jew and loved him.
who can know what is intended? who can understand
the gods?

Sunday’s poem is dedicated to Lucille’s new granddaughter, born five days before the attacks. As she looks over the St. Mary’s River that flows by our campus, Lucille is struck by the calm, which is in marked contrast with the attacks. While she is well aware of humanity’s history of injustice and the many reasons to hate—she is “cursed with long memory”—she chooses to love instead.

Her granddaughter, she notes, is born innocent into a violent world. While Bailey will become aware of the bad, however, she will also become cognizant of the good. Buoyed by new life, Lucille talks about how she loves all of the world, despite “the hatred and fear and tragedy.” Ultimately, love trumps all.

6 Sunday Morning 9/16/01
for bailey

the st. marys river flows
as if nothing has happened

i watch it with my coffee
afraid and sad as are we all

so many ones to hate and i
cursed with long memory

cursed with the desire to understand
have never been good at hating

now this new granddaughter
born into a violent world

as if nothing has happened

and i am consumed with love
for all of it

the everydayness of bravery
of hate of fear of tragedy

of death and birth and hope
true as this river

and especially with love
bailey fredrica clifton goin

for you

It so happened that Rosh Hashanah fell upon September 17 in 2001, prodding Lucille to find symbolic significance in the Jewish new year and the supposed anniversary of Adam and Eve. While human evil emerged from the Garden of Eden, so did human love. Lucille writes that “what is not lost” from that original connection with God “is paradise.” In the sweet and delicious image of “apples and honey,” we see that Lucille believes that not all has been lost:

7 Monday Sundown 9/17/01

Rosh Hashanah

i bear witness to no thing
more human than hate

i bear witness to no thing
more human than love

apples and honey
apples and honey

what is not lost
is paradise

And so we continue on, finding something to salvage in even the grimmest of times.

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Eliot Explains Conspiracy Theories

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2021
Pam Ferris as Mrs. Dollop, spreader of conspiracy theories

Thursday

A great literary tweet comes to us from one David Baddiel, who shares a Middlemarch passage that explains how conspiracy theories take hold. Author George Eliot, he says, nails it in the following passage:

But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

It so happens that, unlike many QAnon conspiracy theories, the one in Middlemarch has some basis in fact. The wealthy man Bulstrode has an actual scandal in his past and has found a way to do away with a man who has been blackmailing him over it. Nevertheless, fact soon morphs into something more fantastical:

Even the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode’s earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.

The innocent victim of this conspiracy theory is Lydgate, an idealistic and accomplished doctor who is trying to reform the medical profession. How he becomes linked with the wealthy Bulstrode is complicated, but all you need to know here is that he is an unknowing accomplice to Bulstrode murdering the blackmailer. When Bulstrode goes down, so does Lydgate, along with his lofty dreams. He dwindles into a conventional doctor ministering to rich people with gout in seaside resorts.

While today’s conspiracy theories take hold via the internet, in Victorian England they are spread through tavern gossip. Mrs. Dollop, “the spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane,” is one of those pouring lively metal into dialogue so that they take fantastic shapes. Time and again, she must correct those who want to stick to facts. As Eliot puts it, she

had often to resist the shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think that their reports from the outer world were of equal force with what had “come up” in her mind. How it had been brought to her she didn’t know, but it was there before her as if it had been “scored with the chalk on the chimney-board—”

When someone points out to her that she’s attributing a quotation she read in a newspaper to Bulstrode, she’s not deterred. Just as QAnon believers have a way around every difficulty, Mrs. Dollop says, “If one raskill said it, it’s more reason why another should.”

With such reasoning, what chance does truth have? As Mark Twain once wrote, “A lie can travel around the world and back again while the truth is lacing up its boots.” The problem with our current lies is that they are killing people, leading them to reject healing vaccines and instead ingest livestock dewormers.

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Hurricane Ida and Murakami’s 1Q84

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2021
Hurricane Ida hits the New York subway

Wednesday

Last week, as I was watching news reports of Hurricane Ida hammering the east coast, one image in particular caught my attention: New York’s subway system filling with water. In Haruki Murakami’s novel 1Q84, a supernatural squall, triggered by the anger of “the Little People” (more on them in a moment) submerges a Tokyo subway station. Hang on while I apply the novel to the current climate crisis.

Aomame, a female fitness instructor who assassinates men who batter women, has just killed the cult leader of a fanatical sect who rapes little girls. Because the leader is the conduit for dark supernatural forces, embodied in a mysterious group of dwarfs, those dwarfs erupt in one last spasm of anger. Their target is the subway station where Aomame has stored her getaway bag. She is on her way there when she hears about the torrential downpour:

“Wasn’t that thunder something?” the driver said. “And the rain was incredible.”

And further on:

I hear the water in the streets overflowed and ran down into the Akasaka-Mitsuke subway station onto the tracks. It was because the rain all fell in one small area. They stopped the Ginza Line and the Marunouchi Line. I heard it on the radio news.

Aomame realizes that the Little People are trying to thwart her plans to escape. She barely manages to get her bag and get to her safe house before the cult is on her track.

The Little People, we learn, are behind the rage that leads men to batter women—and indeed, they are behind the deaths of Aomame’s two closest female friends. Once the cult loses their leader, they also lose touch with the Little People, which drives their search. As the leader explains to Aomame before she kills him, “the organization that I have created will never leave you alone…[T]hey will track you down and punish you severely. That is the kind of system that we have created: close-knit, violent, and irreversible.”

Murakami undoubtedly is basing the organization on Aleph, a Japanese doomsday cult and terrorist organization that carried out the deadly Tokyo subway sarin attack in 1995. In Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, Murakami interviewed members of the cult and came to see them as expressions of a deep frustration with Japan’s materialistic society.

With the election of Donald Trump, America saw the rise of the largest cult in its history, and the fact that this cult is denying climate change, even as we witness increasing numbers of extreme weather events (including Hurricane Ida), makes Murakami’s novel relevant to our current situation. Although America has become more enlightened in certain areas—we elected a Black president, our scientists came up with a Covid cure, we can track the impact of our hydrocarbons—it has also become prey to dangerous conspiracy theories. As the leader explains about such a dichotomy,

Where there is light, there must be shadow, and where there is shadow there must be light. There is no shadow without light and no light without shadow. Karl Jung said this about “the shadow” in one of his books: “It is as evil as we are positive…the more desperately we try to be good and wonderful and perfect, the more the Shadow develops a definite will to be black and evil and destructive….The fact is that if one tries beyond one’s capacy to be perfect, , the Shadow descends to hell and becomes the devil.

And further:

We do not know if the so-called Little People are good or evil. This is, in a sense, something that surpasses our understanding and our definitions. We have lived with them since long, long ago—from a time before good and evil even existed, when people’s minds were still benighted.

But the leader then gives us reason to hope:

But the important thing is that, whether they are good or evil, light or shadow, whenever they begin to exert their power, a compensatory force comes into being.

In the case of 1Q84, the final compensatory force is Aomame’s love for Tengo, the novel’s other protagonist, as well the child they will have together. The cult wants that child, sensing it can be the new conduit for the voices, but Aomame and Tengo’s relationship proves to be more powerful than the forces of destruction.

So what will it be for our environment? Will the rage of the Little People prevail? Or will love, for each other and for the earth, win out?

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