Engraver Cornelis Galle the Elder after a drawing by Cigoli
Friday
When in yesterday’s post I compared the events of January 6 with Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, I omitted one of the most important scenes. An Editorial Board column by political scientist John Stoehr reminded me of it.
Watching the testimony of the four Capitol Police officers, Stoehr noted that they were most distressed by GOP betrayal:
The painful part, a sentiment expressed by each of them, came later when they realized everything they believed in—duty, sacrifice, loyalty and honor—meant nothing to these Republicans. Over and over, testimony kept returning to a variation on a familiar theme: betrayal.
Again, Officer Fanone: “My law enforcement career prepared me to cope. … Being an officer, you know your life is at risk whenever you walk out the door, even if you don’t expect otherwise law-abiding citizens to take up arms against you. But nothing, truly nothing, has prepared me to address those elected members of our government who continue to deny the events of that day, and in doing so betray their oath of office.”
The most painful moment in Julius Caesar is when Caesar realizes that a man he thought was his friend is amongst those killing him. “Et tu, Brute! Then fall, Caesar,” he cries.
The betrayal is so shocking that, in his own response to the historical event, Dante places Brutus is the lowest circle of hell, along with fellow conspirator Cassius and Judas Iscariot. The frozen environment captures the coldness of their hearts, and their being devoured by three-headed Satan—one mouth for each—shows the extent to which evil has engulfed their souls:
Each mouth devoured a sinner clenched within. Frayed by the fangs like flax beneath a brake; Three at a time he tortured them for sin.
But all the bites the one in front might take Were nothing to the claws that flayed his hide And sometimes stripped his back to the last flake.
“That wretch up there whom keenest pangs divide Is Judas called Iscariot,” said my lord, “His head within, his jerking legs outside; this side the Centre: 7.30 a.m. at the Antipodes
As for the pair whose heads hang hitherward: From the black mouth the limbs of Brutus sprawl— See how he writhes and utters never a word;
And strong-thewed Cassius is his fellow-thrall.
Shakespeare is kinder to Brutus than Dante is, seeing him more as one misled by Cassius than evil. Furthermore, Brutus has pangs of conscience, if that’s how we are to read the visitation of Caesar’s ghost.
I wouldn’t put those Republicans who have betrayed their oath of office in Hell’s lowest circle, although it’s worth noting that Dante’s punishments are always self-inflicted. Brutus is there because he has denied his God-bestowed humanity to an extreme degree, and there are Republicans denying the suffering undergone by the Capitol police. Trump may assure them that they will face no accountability for lying, but lying rebounds upon the liars, hollowing them out. A price is paid, whether or not they are ever held to account by earthly authorities.
In Dante’s vision, one avoids Inferno and achieves Purgatory if one recants. We’ll see if any of those GOP members currently intent on denying the events of January 6 face change their tune.
A Congressional investigation into the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol is now underway, and as I watched the Capitol police give their testimony— and watched GOP members of Congress continue to cower before Donald Trump—I found myself thinking of what Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar says about courage and cowardice.
More on that in a moment. First, however, I note that Julius Caesar lines up remarkably closely to Trump’s coup attempt, even though in this case the play is less black and white. Trump simply wanted supporters to pressure Vice-President Mike Pence and GOP Republicans to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, even though the election was clean. In Julius Caesar, by contrast, the senators claim they are forestalling a potential coup but their motives are unclear. Nor is Caesar portrayed as a tyrant. In any event, the assassination proves to be a catastrophic mistake, what with the subsequent mob violence and civil war. By the end of the play, conspirators Cassius and Brutus commit suicide and the Roman republic for which they sacrificed themselves comes to an end.
In the play, we see ingratitude such as that shown by the GOP towards the Capitol police. Cassius recalls a moment when he saved Caesar from drowning, only to be put down by Caesar in later interactions. The two were engaged in a swimming contest:
I think of the Republican congressman who refused to shake hands with a Capitol policeman who had protected him, and of Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reversing course and defending Trump’s participation in the events. Because McCarthy needs Trump’s support to become a god—or at least Speaker of the House—he is prepared to grovel to get it
Cassius is more like the rinsurrectionists than the police, however. Like the former, he is driven more by a sense of grievance than by genuine concern about the republic’s survival. Brutus is the nobler one, prepared to give up his life for a higher ideal. Likewise, the police are seeking only justice and an acknowledgement of their sacrifice– neither of which the GOP appears prepared to grant.
Instead, Republicans are engaged in a Marc Antony-style dance with truth. Everyone knows the opening to Antony’s famous speech, which captures our attention with its lofty “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” The speech itself, however, is a tour-de-force in bad faith argumentation. Antony has had to promise that he will only deliver a funeral elegy for Caesar, nothing more, but he behaves instead like those Trump supporters who find ways to hint at election fraud without actually saying anything that could make them legally liable for perjury. For that matter, Trump himself stirred people up to attack the Capitol without ever saying so directly, thereby retaining plausible deniability.
Antony claims that he is on the podium “not to praise Caesar but to bury him.” Through skillful use of sarcasm, innuendo, and populist rhetoric, however he manages to both praise Caesar and cast aspersions against the conspirators. (Marc Antony claiming to be a populist is a joke.) Through his rhetorical skills, he succeeds is stirring up a murderous pro-Caesar mob that goes after the conspirators and anyone they associate with them, including an innocent poet who shares a name with one of the senators. Antony gains the upper hand and Brutus and Cassius must flee for their lives.
As I say, the parallels are inexact. The January 6 insurrectionists would certainly like to see themselves as high-minded republicans, as did the founding fathers that some of them cite. Given that their claims of Biden’s tyranny are fraudulent, however, the true saviors of the republic must be seen as those Capitol police. After all, their bravery made possible Congress voting to certify the election results, which it did later that night.
Also heroic are Lyn Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two Republicans who have braved their party’s ire and agreed to participate in the House investigation of January 6. About them, we can say what Caesar himself says of courage and cowardice:
It’s possible that their courage will cost them reelection, but at least they won’t have engaged in the reversals, distraction tactics, and moral equivocations of their colleagues. In other words, they will have tasted death but once, not through a series of small, self-inflicted soul lacerations. Cheney and Kinzinger are the true small-r republicans while the others are RINOs (republicans in name only).
At the end of Julius Caesar Marc Antony, who can now afford to be magnanimous as all his opponents are dead, delivers a eulogy to Brutus. The man who once mockingly and sarcastically called Brutus “an honorable man” now says that he alone of the plotters acted out of higher ideals:
If Trumpism triumphs and Cheney and Kinzinger go down to defeat, will Republicans try to reclaim the moral high ground by delivering such eulogies? We’ve seen that no act of hypocrisy is beyond them.
I have been reading the autobiography of John Stuart Mill, considered by many to be the greatest 19th century English philosopher, in which he discusses how Wordsworth came to his aid at a dark hour. It sounds as if he was caught in the grip of pure intellect and that Wordsworth showed him how to reconnect with his emotions.
I remember once using literature in a similar reconnection process, although my case was not as dire.
A proponent of utilitarianism, a very philosophical approach to social policy which advocates judging acts by their utility—how can one attain the greatest good for the greatest number?—Mill was raised by a philosopher father. As a result, he was immersed in what he calls “intellectual culture.” At a certain point, this proved to be not enough and he was plunged into depression:
During this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit…. Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers I have found a true description of what I felt, were often in my thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them), but in a later period of the same mental malady:
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.
Mill turned to poetry in a search for answers. His first choice proved to be no help:
In the worst period of my depression, I had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to try whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed to be that of the intenser feelings, could rouse any feeling in me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading, but the reverse. The poet’s state of mind was too like my own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid, uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Manfred had the same burden on them which I had; and I was not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from the vehement sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his Laras.
Wordsworth was a different matter:
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves powerfully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable susceptibilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking pleasure in Wordsworth’s poetry; the more so, as his scenery lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty.
Wordsworth’s nature descriptions in themselves were not what Mill needed, however. As he notes, Sir Walter Scott does a better job describing nature. Wordsworth, however, links nature to the emotions:
What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure…. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.
It’s important that Mill could see in Wordsworth someone going through his own struggles. Consider the opening of Intimations of Immortality:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light, The glory and freshness of a dream. It is not now as it hath been of yore; Turn whereso’er I may, By night or day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
In the course of the poem, however, Wordsworth manages to work his way back to joy. I suspect it is this which gives Mill hope in his own case:
The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober coloring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s immortality; Another race hath been, and other palms won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
I promised my own story so here it is. Having been raised, like Mill, by a father who was both intensely intellectual and emotionally reserved, I tried to be rational in my every endeavor. I felt thoroughly comfortable with the fiction of Jane Austen but shied away from more emotional authors. My research field, after all, was the British 18th century, about which Esther in Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar says, “I hated the very idea of the eighteenth century, with all those smug men writing tight little couplets and being so dead keen on reason.”
I don’t know about the smug but I put a high premium on reason. As Mill discovered, however, life can seem awfully arid under such an onslaught.
Feeling that something was missing, I spent my first sabbatical year exploring how I could make teaching literature more meaningful, both to my students and to myself. As I was in Ljubljana on a Fulbright at the time, I took advantage of the English Department’s excellent collection and started reading authors who plunge one into the emotional life of their characters. I remember especially immersing myself in English novelist Margaret Drabble’s melodramas, reading one work after another as though my life depended on it. They were enough like the reserved Jane Austen to make me feel comfortable but different enough to explore the emotions displayed.
Mill is careful to note that he “never turned recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both of individual and of social improvement.” In other words, he remained true to his utilitarian vision, just as I never ceased to value the intellect. But he learned, as I did, that it must be “joined” with emotions. As he puts it,
The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.
My recent reading has given me a case of emotional whiplash as I’ve moved from two Jo Nesbo serial killer mysteries to Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. I decided to give Nesbo a try after reading about “Nordic noir” so I randomly googled practitioners of the form and came up with the Norwegian author. I’ve read The Snowman and The Leopard and am now sorry I did so.
Switching over to Voyage Out, one of the few Woolf novels I haven’t read, was surreal. After having watched various women get tortured in gruesome ways, along with men proving their manhood, I needed something to wash the sadism and misogyny out of my mind. So I turned from dick lit to chick lit. Except that Woolf isn’t chick lit.
My initial impression is that nothing is happening. To be sure, I’m still in the early chapters, but cultivated Brits having random conversations as they boat around the Mediterranean is a long way from killing people with spiked balls that explode in the mouth and dissecting them with red hot wire. Where’s the plot, I found myself wondering.
After Woolf reprogrammed me to accept her leisurely pace, however, I felt at home. I especially enjoy a conversation about literature between Clarissa Dalloway and a young musician she has met on board ship. Clarissa has just interrupted Rachel while she is practicing the piano, and Rachel clears a chair for her to sit down:
She slid Cowper’s Letters and Wuthering Heights out of the arm-chair, so that Clarissa was invited to sit there.
“What a dear little room!” she said, looking round. “Oh, Cowper’s Letters! I’ve never read them. Are they nice?”
“Rather dull,” said Rachel.
“He wrote awfully well, didn’t he?” said Clarissa; “—if one likes that kind of thing—finished his sentences and all that. Wuthering Heights! Ah—that’s more in my line. I really couldn’t exist without the Brontes! Don’t you love them? Still, on the whole, I’d rather live without them than without Jane Austen.”
Lightly and at random though she spoke, her manner conveyed an extraordinary degree of sympathy and desire to befriend.
“Jane Austen? I don’t like Jane Austen,” said Rachel.
“You monster!” Clarissa exclaimed. “I can only just forgive you. Tell me why?”
“She’s so—so—well, so like a tight plait,” Rachel floundered.
Rachel’s comment reminds me of what Charlotte Bronte said about Pride and Prejudice when reviewer George Lewes held it up to her as a model. Although Lewes wrote a positive review of Jane Eyre, he was put off by what he saw as its melodrama, especially the gothic parts involving the mad woman in the attic. Bronte responded that essentially Austen doesn’t have enough melodrama:
I got the book and studied it. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers—but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy—no open country—no fresh air—no blue hill—no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.
And in another letter:
The Passions are perfectly unknown to her.
There is something Austen-esque in Clarissa Dalloway, which she attributes to being older. She remembers being drawn to Adonais, Percy Shelley’s passionate elegy on Keats, as a young woman:
“Ah—I see what you mean. But I don’t agree. And you won’t when you’re older. At your age I only liked Shelley. I can remember sobbing over him in the garden.
He has outsoared the shadow of our night, Envy and calumny and hate and pain—
you remember?
Can touch him not and torture not again From the contagion of the world’s slow stain.
How divine!—and yet what nonsense!” She looked lightly round the room. “I always think it’s living, not dying, that counts.
I shudder to think how Shelley, who lived life at the stretch and who once wrote, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed,” would respond to Clarissa’s next observation:
I really respect some snuffy old stockbroker who’s gone on adding up column after column all his days, and trotting back to his villa at Brixton with some old pug dog he worships, and a dreary little wife sitting at the end of the table, and going off to Margate for a fortnight—I assure you I know heaps like that—well, they seem to me really nobler than poets whom every one worships, just because they’re geniuses and die young. But I don’t expect you to agree with me!”
She pressed Rachel’s shoulder.
“Um-m-m—” she went on quoting—
Unrest which men miscall delight—
“when you’re my age you’ll see that the world is crammed with delightful things. I think young people make such a mistake about that—not letting themselves be happy. I sometimes think that happiness is the only thing that counts. I don’t know you well enough to say, but I should guess you might be a little inclined to—when one’s young and attractive—I’m going to say it!—everything’s at one’s feet.”
In The Company We Keep, theorist Wayne Booth differentiates great literature from popular literature on the grounds than the former prompts us to desire better desires. It expands or (as Lisa Simpson would say) embiggens us. I don’t feel embiggened by Nesbo’s Nordic noir whereas, in Voyage Out, I watch people’s faltering but genuine attempts to imagine something bigger than themselves.
Woolf doesn’t get the blood pumping in the same way as Nesbo. I find her fiction ultimately more invigorating, however.
I’m currently looking into the work of John Stuart Mill, the great 19th century British philosopher who looked for ways to merge his utilitarian philosophy with the arts, especially literature. Utilitarians judge actions by the extent to which they bring about the greatest good to the most people. How literature enters into the discussion is not at first evident.
Except that, when he was a young man devoting himself to liberal causes, Mill hit a wall that plunged him into a deep depression. (I’ve written about that here.) While he could see that his cause was good—Mill advocated for broadening the British electorate, raising working wages, improving gender relations, and protecting free speech—something important seemed to be missing. That something missing was beauty, and Wordsworth came to the rescue. Mill tells us in his autobiography how the poet pulled him out of his depression:
What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed… I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this…
Years later, when he had been named rector of Scotland’s University of St. Andrew’s, Mill talked about the importance of the arts, including poetry, to a well-rounded education. In today’s post I look at what he says in his inaugural address.
After singing the praises of math and the sciences, he turns to the arts. While he’s not quite ready to put them on the same level as those other disciplines, they are nevertheless essential:
There is a third division, which, if subordinate, and owing allegiance to the two others, is barely inferior to them, and not less needful to the completeness of the human being; I mean the aesthetic branch; the culture which comes through poetry and art, and may be described as the education of the feelings, and the cultivation of the beautiful.
Mill acknowledges that society accords the arts little respect. This has been especially the case with the so-called “fine arts” of painting and sculpture, which has been seen as
little more than branches of domestic ornamentation, a kind of elegant upholstery. The very words “Fine Arts” called up a notion of frivolity, of great pains expended on a rather trifling object—on something which differed from the cheaper and commoner arts of producing pretty things, mainly by being more difficult, and by giving fops an opportunity of pluming themselves on caring for it and on being able to talk about it.
The lack of respect extends even to poetry, Mill complains, despite its being “the queen of the arts.” Even though Shakespeare and Milton are praised, poetry is “hardly looked upon in any serious light, or as having much value except as an amusement or excitement…”
Among the culprits, Mill targets “commercial money-getting business,” which regards as “a loss of time” whatever does not contribute to profit. The businessman he characterizes as one
whose ambition is self-regarding; who has no higher purpose in life than to enrich or raise in the world himself and his family; who never dreams of making the good of his fellow-creatures or of his country an habitual object…
If we wish such people to practice virtue, Mill says, we must find a way to get them to experience virute as”an object in itself, and not a tax paid for leave to pursue other objects.” If we want them to develop an “elevated tone of mind” and see that there is more to life than mere self,” we can call on poetry, which instills in us lofty or heroic feelings while also “calming the soul.” Poetry, he says,
brings home to us all those aspects of life which take hold of our nature on its unselfish side, and lead us to identify our joy and grief with the good or ill of the system of which we form a part; and all those solemn or pensive feelings, which, without having any direct application to conduct, incline us to take life seriously, and predispose us to the reception of anything which comes before us in the shape of duty.
Mill then names names:
Who does not feel himself a better man after a course of Dante, or of Wordsworth, or, I will add, of Lucretius or the Georgics, or after brooding over Gray’s “Elegy [Written in a Country Churchyard]” or Shelley s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”?
After mentioning the other arts as equally worthy of respect, Mill returns to the topic of beauty in general, including the beauty of nature:
[T]he mere contemplation of beauty of a high order produces in no small degree this elevating effect on the character. The power of natural scenery addresses itself to the same region of human nature which corresponds to Art. There are few capable of feeling the sublimer order of natural beauty, such as your own Highlands and other mountain regions afford, who are not, at least temporarily, raised by it above the littlenesses of humanity, and made to feel the puerility of the petty objects which set men’s interests at variance, contrasted with the nobler pleasures which all might share.
Regardless of what profession we end up in, we must cultivate “these susceptibilities within us,” seeking out “opportunities of maintaining them in exercise.” If we have dull jobs, then it’s even more important to seek out art, which will show us how we are ennobled by “useful and honest work—which, “if ever so humble, is never mean but when it is meanly done…”
And there’s more. “He who has learnt what beauty is,” Mill says, “if he be of a virtuous character, will desire to realize it in his own life—will keep before himself a type of perfect beauty in human character, to light his attempts at self-culture.” To which end Mill cites Goethe, who believes that the Beautiful adds something essential to the Good:
Now, this sense of perfection, which would make us demand from every creation of man the very utmost that it ought to give, and render us intolerant of the smallest fault in ourselves or in anything we do, is one of the results of Art cultivation. No other human productions come so near to perfection as works of pure Art.
Beauty, Mill concludes,
trains us never to be completely satisfied with imperfection in what we ourselves do and are: to idealize, as much as possible, every work we do, and most of all, our own characters and lives.
In short, if you want to excel in your job and find meaning in your life, read literature.
Mark Jarman has a simple but powerful poem about today’s Gospel reading, which is about Jesus walking on the water. Here’s the passage from John 6: 16-21:
When evening came, his disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was now dark, and Jesus had not yet come to them. The sea became rough because a strong wind was blowing. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus walking on the sea and coming near the boat, and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Then they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land toward which they were going.
Jarman’s poem is entitled “Matthew 14,” which is Matthew’s version of the event. The major difference between the two versions is Peter attempting to follow Jesus’s example but sinking. At this point, “Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. ‘You of little faith,’ he said, ‘why did you doubt?’”
Matthew 14
Always the same message out of Matthew. The water Jesus walks on is life’s turbulence. He calms our trouble and lifts us up again.
To walk on water? That’s what’s puzzling – that feat of anti-matter, defeat of physics, those beautiful unshod feet of cosmic truth
for whom the whole performance is child’s play. And unless one becomes as a little child the kingdom’s inaccessible by any route.
The following essay ran eleven years ago during the 2010 Winter Olympics. Simply replace what I say below about skaters with gymnasts. And hope for less uncertain times.
Reprinted from February 27, 2010
I sense a supernatural presence as I watch skaters, in groups of four, dart in an out of the line while miraculously staying upright. I gaze in awe as skiers fling themselves down dangerously steep slopes at breakneck speeds, all the while making cuts that put them virtually horizontal to the ground. When a skating couple moves in perfect synchronicity across the ice, time stands still. For all the garbage associated with the Olympics– the politics of choosing a venue, the commercialism, the drugs, the judging controversies—one just has to see a skier or snowboarder doing flips in the air to forget everything else.
The sights rivet us in part because they let us know that it is possible, even if only for a few seconds, to transcend our earthly realm. When, in The Odyssey, Odysseus picks up a discus and sends it flying, it makes sense that the goddess Athena would be there applauding the effort. Here’s the passage:
He leapt out, cloaked as he was, and picked a discus, a rounded stone, more ponderous than those already used by the Phaiakian throwers, and, whirling, let it fly from his great hand with a low hum. The crowd went flat on the ground– all those oar-pulling, seafaring Phaiakians– under the rushing noise. The spinning disk soared out, light as a bird, beyond all others. Disguised now as a Phaiakian, Athena staked it and called out: “Even a blind man, friend, could judge this, finding with his fingers one discus, quite alone, beyond the cluster. Congratulations; this event is yours; not a man here can beat you or come near you.” (trans. Robert Fitzgerald)
Until reading an article in Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature, I didn’t realize that literature has played an important role in defining the modern Olympics. In a 2008 article authors Jeffrey O. Segrave and James G. King compare the writings of Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, with passages in European literature since the Renaissance. The article is a bit dense—you can read it here –but it’s got great examples. Literature had been so successful at associating the games with a perfect balance of mind, body, and spirit, Segrave and King point out, that Coubertin’s vision seemed obvious to people.
To cite one of their examples, here’s a passage from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III. Henry is seeking to rally his faltering troops with the image of winning Olympic honors:
Yet let us all together to our troops, And give them leave to fly that will not stay, And call them pillars that will stand to us; And, if we thrive promise them such rewards As victors wear at the Olympian games. This may plant courage in their quailing breasts; For yet is hope of life and victory.
Segrave and King conclude:
We suggest that references in literature to the ancient games, especially during the 18th and 19th centuries, created a favorable and generally unified perception of the Olympic games that obtained across time and impacted upon a European consciousness in such a way that Coubertin’s ideas about an internationalized and indeed Hellenized form of the games did not seem at all alien or problematic. From the moment in English literature in 1595 that the dramatist Thomas Kyd first proclaimed that athletes competed in the games in order “to grace themselves with honor,” the Olympics have been eulogized in prose and extolled in verse as a dignified, noble, and indeed honorable form of sport, one that serves as the quintessential and most hallowed model of all, especially with an attendant moralism and enlightened, non-materialistic ideology. . . . [T]he games have endured in history as instantiations of excellence, grandeur, enlightenment, and transcendence, the most sublime expression of sport . . .
And then, to acknowledge that literature also had a hand in some of the negative sides of the Olympics, especially in their early days, Segrave and King add that works referring to the Olympics frequently had “connotations of noblesse oblige that were at the same time masculinist, socially elitist, and steeped in a traditional Anglo-Saxon hegemony.”
But that aside, literature has recognized, within the idea of the Olympics, something that goes deep into the human spirit. For a few precious moments, watching this event or that, we get to step out of ourselves and imagine ourselves as gods.
My Sewanee colleague John Gatta, who has been reading my book manuscript, has noted a significant omission: given that Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate is about the transformative power of literature, why don’t I say anything about imagination? After all, as the Romantic poets saw it, this was the major source of literature’s power.
He’s absolutely right so I’m devoting today’s blog post to some preliminary discussion for an additional chapter. In my chapter on Samuel Johnson, I talk about how, borrowing a metaphor from Hamlet, he discusses how Shakespeare held a faithful mirror up to nature. Romantics scholar M.H. Abrams famously pointed out that the Romantic poets moved from a mirror to a lamp metaphor. In addition to revealing the reality that is there, poets also shine the light of their souls to illuminate the world.
I’m particularly interested in the two connections with the world that, according to poet William Wordsworth, the imagination makes possible: with common people and with nature. In a world in which we feel locked inside our individual selves and alienated from natural world, the imagination reconnects us with something bigger than ourselves.
Elsewhere in the book I talk about how various theorists believe literature can free us from “false consciousness” (Marx and Engels), the prevailing “horizon of expectations” (Hans Robert Jauss), what passes for “common sense” (Antonio Gramsci) or the reigning “world view” (Bertolt Brecht). These are all “soft power” ways (Joseph Nye) that those in authority use to maintain power. The imagination, however, helps us see beyond these “mind forg’d manacles” (to cite William Blake’s “London”) to new human possibilities.
Great poetic imaginations do not do this on a superficial level but, in Wordsworth’s words, help us “see into the life of things” (Tintern Abbey).
I find myself returning to philosopher John Stuart Mill, whom I encountered in a college ethics class. Although a utilitarian who believed in finding ways to do the greatest good for the greatest number, he found the utilitarianism of a figure like Jeremy Bentham to be sterile, a kind of ethical algebra. It’s as though one needs to be a passionless accountant to distribute society’s resources (not that they ever get evenly distributed). A literary example of a utilitarian is Gradgrind in Hard Times, who sees everything in terms of social utility and regards fantasy and the world of the circus as pointless. When he was a young man being raised by a utilitarian father, Mill had a mental breakdown and it took poetry to pull him out.
Poetry, as Mill saw it, can change our hearts and minds as mere rational self-interest cannot. Thus, although imagination and poetry seem to take us out of the world—this is certainly Gradgrind’s view—it actually allows us to engage more effectively with it.
I’m particularly interested in how it helps us imagine a freer and more egalitarian society and a healthier relationship with our natural environment. As an example of the first, there’s the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose soaring free verse in Song of Myself helps show America how to live up to the vision expressed in The Declaration of Independence. Whitman bestows humanity on everyone, including escaped slaves, Native Americans, backwoodsmen, and other marginalized populations. Seeing himself as standing in for America, Whitman memorably declares, “I contain multitudes.” Whitman doesn’t only show what a diverse and multicultural society looks like. Through his imagination, he sweeps us up so that we feel the power and excitement of such a society.
Literature does the same for the natural world, as countless poems and stories in literary history have demonstrated. Some works demonstrate the cost of being alienated from the natural world (Euripides’s The Bacchae, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us”), others the gifts that it imparts. Given that how we interact with nature in the upcoming decades will determine the fate of humankind, I should have a chapter on how literature can help us negotiate this particular challenge. Perhaps there’s a good essay by Wendell Barry that has thought through these issues more systematically than I have.
Obviously, much more to come. Please write in with any suggestions you have.
Heorot before Grendel’s arrival, as envisioned in the film Beowulf
Wednesday
As I prepare a Beowulf talk I will be giving at a summer lecture program in Monteagle, Tennessee, I’m thinking about the discord the ensues when empires find their power waning. While I’m no political scientist, I’m wondering if there is some identifiable cycle in which (1) national success leads to (2) a sense of entitlement accompanied by complacency which in turn results in (3) internal turmoil. Has something like that happened with the United States? It seems to occur in Beowulf.
I start with something a Chinese student attending St. Mary’s College of Maryland wrote in a composition class of mine in 1981: “In the brief but glorious history of the United States…” It startled me because, while I had never thought about it before, it rang true. Here was someone from a country 5000 years old looking a country that had only recently celebrated its 200th birthday.
Even if America’s glorious history has been brief, it’s still longer than the four-generation dynasty described in Beowulf. The poem begins by lauding Shield Sheafson, a foundling who rises to glory. He is succeeded by Beow, who is generous and “well-regarded,” and by Beow’s son Halfdane, a “fighter prince” who “held sway for as long as he lived.” Although Halfdane’s son Hrothgar is king when Grendel strikes, initially it appears that he will be carrying on the glorious tradition:
Friends and kinsmen flocked to his ranks, young followers, a force that grew to be a mighty army.
As leader of most powerful nation around, Hrothgar looks to memorialize his nation:
So his mind turned to hall-building: he handed down orders for men to work on a great mead-hall meant to be a wonder of the world forever; it would be his throne-room and there he would dispense his God-given goods to young and old— but not the common land or people’s lives. Far and wide through the world, I have heard, orders for work to adorn that wallstead were sent to many peoples. And soon it stood there, finished and ready, in full view, the hall of halls. Heorot was the name he had settled on it, whose utterance was law.
Unlike a certain ex-president, Hrothgar also pays the contractors who have done the work:
Nor did he renege, but doled out rings and torques at the table.
The mead-hall is more than a place to dispense rings to faithful followers. It’s also a warning to other countries not to mess with the Danes. And indeed, as Denmark is the reigning superpower in the region, no one dares to. The danger, rather, comes from domestic terrorism.
Because that’s what Grendel represents. I’ve written multiple times that Grendel is the resentment that eats away at a society from within. In America at the moment, we see this as the destructive effects of white grievance. Ever since the end of the Cold War, the United States has seemed invulnerable to foreign attack and, in fact, is one of the most prosperous countries on earth. In spite of this–or perhaps because of it–its citizens have turned against each other.
Seeing the situation in this light, we can find parallels between the resentment-crazed Grendel who storms Heorot and the resentment-crazed Trumpists who stormed the Capitol on January 6. For 10 years Hrothgar, despite his power, is helpless. The one silver lining is that Grendel at least cannot touch the king’s throne, with the poet telling us “the throne itself, the treasure-seat,/ he was kept from approaching.” America has got to hope that the January 6 insurrectionists and those members of the GOP who are now trying to whitewash the event are not damaging the underlying democratic principles to which the Capitol Building is a monument.
And indeed, Heorot still standing after Grendel’s forages is like our own Capitol standing after the insurrection: the rebels may have desecrated it but they haven’t ended what it stands for. Here’s Grendel’s version of their insurrection:
The hall clattered and hammered, but somehow survived the onslaught and kept standing: it was handsomely structured, a sturdy frame braced with the best of blacksmith’s work inside and out. The story goes that as the pair struggled, mead-benches were smashed and sprung off the floor, good fittings and all…
Unfortunately, we can’t look to Beowulf for a hopeful future as the survival of Heorot is only temporary. The peaceful transfer of power that Seith Sheafson, Beow and Halfdane were able to bring about ends with Hrothgar’s death. In a coup that is only alluded to obliquely in the text, the regent Hrothulf (Hrothgar’s nephew) kills one of Hrothgar’s two young sons and seizes power. The other son, who has escaped, comes back to kill Hrothulf. Amidst all the fighting, the great hall of Heorot burns to the ground.
Hrothgar’s warning to Beowulf after he has killed the Grendels could also apply to arrogant superpowers. In stage #1, the king and his kingdom are riding high:
It is a great wonder how Almighty God in His magnificence favors our race with rank and scope and the gift of wisdom; His sway is wide. Sometimes He allows the mind of a man of distinguished birth to follow its bent, grants him fulfillment and felicity on earth and forts to command in his own country. He permits him to lord it in many lands . . .
The first sign of trouble comes when the king starts to take all these gifts as his due. He thinks he is rich because “the whole world conforms to his will,” not because he has inherited a situation built by people “with rank and scope and the gift of wisdom.” In America’s case, it’s living comfortably in a society–and an infrastructure–built by earlier generations:
. . . until the man in his unthinkingness forgets that it will ever end for him. He indulges his desires; illness and old age mean nothing to him; his mind is untroubled by envy or malice or the thought of enemies with their hate-honed swords. The whole world conforms to his will, he is kept from the worst . . .
Arrogance, and with it discontent, continues to grow. The passage notes the imperceptible gradualness of the change. Instead of seeing himself joined with the country in a common enterprise, the king gradually finds himself resenting others. The “devious promptings of the demon start” as he imagines them eyeing “his” possessions:
. . . until an element of overweening enters him and takes hold while the soul’s guard, its sentry, drowses, grown too distracted. A killer stalks him, an archer who draws a deadly bow. And then the man is hit in the heart, the arrow flies beneath his defenses, the devious promptings of the demon start. His old possessions seem paltry to him now. He covets and resents; dishonors custom and bestows no gold; and because of good things he ignores the shape of things to come.
In the end, Hrothgar says, the king will reap what he has sown:
Then finally the end arrives when the body he was lent collapses and falls prey to its death; ancestral possessions and the goods he hoarded are inherited by another who lets them go with a liberal hand. . . .
This warning will reappear in the course of the poem. For instance, the so-called “last veteran,” seeing his once glorious nation having become a shadow of its former self, buries himself (along with all his country’s treasure) in a funeral barrow. It is into this barrow—think of it as a dead monument to past greatness—that the dragon moves. This monster, which I interpret as depression, overtakes a society that is incapable of moving into the future. Instead it hoards the wealth it has accumulated, refusing to share. If anyone threatens to redistribute that wealth, it erupts in anger, burning down everything around it. Otherwise, however, it just hunkers down in its cave.
This is the dragon that Beowulf encounters at the end of his life. The question is whether he will be able to defeat the dragon and redistribute the treasure or whether he and his society will all go down together. This is the challenge for the United States as well: either we will become more and more mean-spirited and dragon-like, lamenting the end of past greatness without striding heroically into the future. Or we will build back better, modeling for the world a multicultural democracy while leading the fight against climate change and autocratic regimes.
I honestly don’t know if, in our case, Beowulf will be able to defeat the monsters of resentment and depression. I know, however, that we will be called upon to be heroic.
