In Wednesday’s essay I shared the first part of the conclusion I’m writing for my current book project, Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate. I share the second half here, only noting that this is still in draft form and that I’m looking for feedback. As I noted earlier, I am using my blog deadlines as spurs to finish my book, which means that, this week, you are mostly receiving excerpts of the latter rather than freshly minted essays.
Literature’s power, for good or for bad, has been the constant theme for our theorists, going back to Plato. What is different is the audiences, which have expanded. It was easier to talk about literature’s impact when readers and playgoers looked like you—Athenian male citizens for Plato and Aristotle, Elizabethan courtiers for Sidney. That all began to change in the 18th century, to the consternation of authors like Pope and Swift, as the newly affluent middle class began demanding narratives and characters that spoke specifically to them. The franchise expanded even further as the working class, women, people of color, members of developing nations, LBGTQ folk and others called for true universality. Their demands have often led to heated debates.
We also saw the rise of literature missionaries, with literary experts spreading the news of literature’s good effects and declaiming against the bad. Johnson taught new readers how to appreciate Shakespeare and various contemporary poets while warning them away from novels. Matthew Arnold, seeing the potential in universal education, thought that the arts, led by poetry, could replace religion and usher in a new Renaissance, transforming the “philistine” middle class and the anarchic working class into model citizens. Teachers in this vision were to be the new missionaries, bringing enlightenment where before there had been only ignorance and darkness, including to women’s colleges and worker universities. Cambridge professor F.R. Leavis and his followers, regarding literature as the quintessential means of achieving a civilized society, persuaded schools to make literature instruction an integral part of their curricula.
This had the effect of transferring the inevitable political battles to the schools. As faculties and student bodies became more diverse, the question arose as to what a model citizen looks like. In the 1960s, with the rise of the various liberation movements, activists saw in literature the chance to awaken minds to a liberated consciousness. In the reactive 1980s, conservatives pushed back, contending that the great minds of the past were being sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. For all their disagreements, however, the one area of agreement between left and right was literature’s transformative potential, whether for good or for ill. Poems and stories were still seen to be firing bullets.
The ultimate threat to literature is not attack but indifference. That being acknowledged, literature has encountered indifference before and weathered the storm. Thomas Peacock, writing in the early days of utilitarianism (1820), voiced (albeit partially tongue-in-cheek) an early version of current STEM thinking when he contended that “the progress of useful art and science” was rendering poetry obsolete. (Shelley took the bait and responded with his magnificent Defence of Poetry.) Arnold shamed the money-obsessed middle-class with the “philistine” epithet, thereby triggering what Eagleton calls “the rise of English.” In 2018 Salman Rushdie, responding to the cascade of lies pouring out of the White House, pointed out that the classics will always remain powerful because of their commitment to truth. The STEM disciplines of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math may not be able to fight back effectively against assaults on evidence-based reality, including on science itself, but literature can.
Literature, in short, will remain a force for those who encounter it. Add film and television to that mix and few would argue, but even limiting ourselves to poetry, fiction, and drama, we will see their enduring impact. As long as there are books and people to read them, horizons will expand and lives will be changed, to the joy of some and the consternation of others.
At the moment, as I slog towards the end of my current book project (Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old Debate), I am using blog deadlines as book deadlines—which means subjecting you, dear reader, to various stages of the revision process. Today I’ll share my meditations on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I’m including in my chapter on popular or culinary literature. I include it there with a caveat, however, because I’m not entirely sure whether the novel appears in the lesser or greater literature category. I lean towards the second but hear me out on the matter.
One of the questions I address in my book is whether great literature has a greater impact than lesser literature and, if so, whether great literature is good for us and lesser literature bad. Or if not bad, at least not so good. Since most of my book points in a “yes” direction, then Uncle Tom’s Cabin, if it is no more than a melodramatic potboiler, presents me with a particular challenge. After all, it helped bring about the end of American slavery.
Of that, there’s little doubt. In his book Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America, Davis S. Reynolds makes a compelling case that Stowe tilted the playing field in abolition’s favor.
She did so in various ways. First, the novel rejuvenated and united the abolition movement, which until publication had been scattered. It also made it more likely that an anti-slavery candidate would be elected president (which contributed to the outbreak of hostilities) and hardened southern attitudes (which did the same). After the war had started, the novel, which was wildly popular in Britain, undermined British sympathy for the southern cause. It also may have helped stiffen Lincoln’s spine so that he signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
From a political science point of view, Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be said to have shifted the Overton window, which is the range of policies deemed politically acceptable at the time. Before the novel, many abolitionists were regarded as wild-eyed radicals. After the novel, it became respectable to debate the evils of slavery.
The novel’s power lay foremost in its emotional appeal. Reynolds describes the reception:
Sympathetic readers were thrilled when the fugitive slave Eliza Harris carried her child across the ice floes of the Ohio River and when her husband George fought off slave-catchers in a rocky pass. They cried over the death of the angelic Eva St. Clare and the fatal lashing of the good Uncle Tom. They guffawed at the impish slave girl Topsy and shed thankful tears when she embraced Christianity. They loved to hate the selfish hypochondriac Marie St. Clare and the cruel slave owner Simon Legree. They were fascinated by the brooding, Byronic Augustine St. Clare. They were shocked by the stories of sexual exploitation surrounding enslaved women like Prue and Cassy.
Reynolds notes novelist Henry James’s response when reading it as a boy:
[The novel] knew the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which they didn’t sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried. . .
Part of the novel’s effectiveness, Reynolds notes, lies in the skillful way that Stowe merges two strains of popular fiction, the sensational and the sentimental. Sensational writings, he notes, were usually published as pamphlet novels and featured “criminals, pirates, or other social outcasts involved in nefarious deeds that were often bloody or transgressive.” Sentimental fiction, meanwhile, often was about people who had visions of angels and heaven. Stowe herself had written stories about sinless children whom she regarded as “living examples of Christian love.” Reynolds observes that Stowe was the first writer in American history to effectively combine the two.
That Stowe draws on these strains doesn’t automatically mean that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a work of lesser or culinary fiction. In my chapter on the subject, I note that great authors will often plug into the energies of lesser authors to produce great works. Kurt Vonnegut draws on the pulp sci-fi magazines of the 1950s, many featuring bug-eyed monsters, in Slaughterhouse Five, and Margaret Atwood borrows from 19th century penny dreadfuls and the sensationalist press in her award-winning Alias Grace. That Uncle Tom’s Cabin has elements of the sensational and the sentimental doesn’t automatically make it a lesser work.
What is determinative is whether the work plays mostly on the emotions or whether the head gets involved. Thomas Dixon, a racist author who hated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, used many of its techniques, including the merging of the sensational and the sentimental, in composing The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (1902)and The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). These are novels that have done a great deal of damage, solidifying Jim Crow segregation, resurrecting the KKK, and promulgating the noxious myth of “the lost cause,” with the damage compounded further by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film version of The Clansman. Plato, who fears how fictional immersion will unleash unruly passions, would be justified in excluding Dixon from his ideal republic.
In my eyes, however, Stowe’s use of sensation and sentiment is mixed with thoughtful reflection. Many of her characters are three-dimensional—including Uncle Tom, who in the novel is not the caricature he later came to be seen as—and her handling of different types of slavery and slave owners, not to mention northern liberals, is often nuanced. Earlier in my book I note that Friedrich Engels, while inveighing against literature with a political agenda, says that it’s not necessarily bad that poets are partisan, as Stowe undeniably is. It’s only bad when they can’t separate their political agendas from their responsibility to accurately describe reality.
If Stowe had given us nothing but sentimental caricatures of African Americans, then she would have denied their humanity no less than Dixon with his demonic depiction of Gus, the former slave who rapes the pure-of-heart Marion. (“A single tiger spring, and the black claws of the beast sank into the soft white throat and she was still.”) Whatever short-term good Uncle Tom’s Cabin did would be offset by a different kind of stereotyping.
In “note to self” Lucille Clifton describes this trap, talking of how “the merely human/is denied me still/and i am now no longer beast/ but saint.” In my view, Stowe does not show us saints (well, except for Little Eva) but three-dimensional people wrestling for their humanity within an evil system. When she shared this vision with the world, the world changed.
I’m in the final stages of my book–Better Living through Literature: A 2500-Year-Old-Debate–and share today what I’ve written so far by way of a conclusion. I’ve put off this moment for a long time but used today’s post as a deadline that would kick my butt. The conclusion is not concluded yet but it’s getting there.As always, I am very desirous of feedback.
When assessing literature’s capacity to improve lives, it always good to keep Terry Eagleton’s caution in mind: some people who don’t read literature lead good lives and some who do don’t. The boldest claims made by literature advocates don’t always stand up.
The same caution goes for attacks against literature. Athenian youths who ran away in battle didn’t necessarily do so (despite Plato’s contention) because they had been softened up by Homer. Young 18th century men who drank and womanized didn’t necessarily do so because they had read Tom Jones. One can’t blame The Perks of Being a Wallflower for today’s young people experimenting with sex and drugs and questioning their sexual identities.
But while one should be wary of cause-and-effect claims regarding literature, there are reasons why, over the centuries, autocrats have consigned certain classics to the flames, why religious authorities have compiled lists of books that their members should not read, and why “concerned parent groups” have stormed school boards complaining about summer reading. By getting us to question prevailing wisdom, even if only by showing us alternative ways of thinking and being, literature plants seeds and starts conversations that can go in unpredictable directions.
In the introduction, I identified three sets of paired questions, and I think the answer to the first in all three sets is “yes.” Yes, great literature changes individual lives, yes it can change history itself, and yes, great literature does so better than lesser literature. Insofar as a broader perspective is good, then the change is for the better. Insofar as a more inclusive vision of humanity is good, then great literature is inherently progressive. And insofar as literature that refuses to sell out to our baser instincts is positive, then yes, great literature is better for us than lesser literature.
As we have seen in our survey of literary theorists, however, there is more to the discussion than simple yes answers. For instance, while great literature may well plant seeds, it’s not always clear where those seeds will take root and how long it will take them to germinate. Percy Shelley says hundreds of years in some cases.
As I’ve noted, this might seem to put into question his contention that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” How seriously should we take the strong female characters in the ancient Greek tragedies if women are still second-class citizens two thousand years later?
Yet it is also true that, when the time is right, such works will suddenly seem to speak with oracular power, providing aid and comfort to readers of a later age. Dramas that may have seemed comfortably old-fashioned to one generation take on a new urgency for another when, to apply Hans Robert Jauss’s formulation, the horizon of expectations changes. At such times, Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Euripides’s Medea take on a new urgency. To apply the words of Walter Benjamin, readers “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” as past works are “blasted out of the continuum of history” and become “charged with the time of the now.”
So perhaps Shelley is right after all. By showing us in our full humanity, the great authors uncork something that can never be entirely put back in the bottle. That the Greek tragedians did not support equal rights for women is no more relevant than the fact that America’s founding fathers didn’t intend women, slaves, and non-landowners to have full citizenship rights. Once you have said “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” these oppressed groups take those words to their bosoms and use them to direct future actions.
Shelley, Eagleton and others speak to what we are to make of great literature’s conservative or reactionary dimensions. While, at its core, great literature steps beyond local prejudice and identifies the universal, the local must still be accounted for. For Aristotle, this occurs when literature fails to follow “the law of probability and necessity”—when it behaves like idiosyncratic history—and for Johnson when it does not provide us with “a faithful mirror of manners and of life.” Engels, Du Bois, and Eagleton all critique literature than sacrifices truth to a political agenda, and Shelley and Booth both provide frameworks of separating out the universal from the local.
Booth, for instance, finds himself revisiting beloved authors like Jane Austen, Mark Twain, and D.H. Lawrence after reading feminist and race theory and identifying areas where they surrender to the prejudices of their age, even though at their best they transcend them. Shelley names only a handful of authors he regards as truly transcendent, and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt notes how one of them, Shakespeare, explodes local stereotypes right before our eyes. For instance, because Shakespeare was constitutionally unable to create a one-dimensional character, Greenblatt says in Shylock he creates a character so multi-dimensional—so far beyond the anti-Semitic tropes of the day—that he had to be dropped in Act V before he took over the entire play.
This also means, however, that literature doesn’t operate in a vacuum but must work in conjunction with history if its full vision is to be realized. Marx and Engels’s distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure is important here. Economic and social conditions have to be such for literature’s progressive vision to come to fruition. At the same time, without literature’s images and narratives—without, say, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders providing indelible images of indefatigable entrepreneurs—the rising middle class might have had more difficulty stepping into its powers.
Thus Frantz Fanon welcomed authors as indispensable allies in the struggle against colonialism, speaking of a literature of combat. To free their minds of racial assumptions, Civil Rights activists applied W. E. B. Du Bois’s dictum “all art is propaganda” to recognize which literature aided their cause and which literature was covertly racist or unhelpfully sentimental. Similarly, literary scholars played a key role in the 1970s feminist movement, showing how women were trapped inside certain narratives and finding literature that showed them ways to protest. Jane Eyre may have chipped away at Victorian patriarchy when it appeared in the mid-19th century, but the novel erupted into a full-throated roar 120 years later when readers identified with the madwoman in the attic.
Great literature’s adherence to truth, finally, means that literature that settles for less will inevitably be less good for us, if not do us active harm. Jane Austen’s views of such works provide a good guide. By all means enjoy the gothics of Ann Radcliffe, the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, and the love poetry of Robert Burns. Just recognize them for what they are and make sure you don’t neglect the works of, well, Jane Austen and others in her sphere.
I’m re-running a post I wrote three years ago about a Salman Rushdie essay because it remains as relevant as ever. Rushdie mentions the disinformation that people spread about vaccines, which we’ve now see people applying to the Covid vaccines. It now appears that disinformation from Fox “News” and various GOP politicians prevented us from reaching Joe Biden’s goal of 70% adult vaccinations by July 4. (I believe we got to 67%.)
Rushdie essentially says that we are in constant danger of being buried by mounds of bullshit and that literature presents us with a safe space where we can reconnect with truth. In other words, think about the classics as a “no bullshit zone.”
Reposted from June 7, 2018
Few contemporary authors are better qualified to talk about “fake news” than Salman Rushdie. In a past post, I discussed how he raises the issue in Midnight’s Children, at one point saying of Pakistan and its military dictatorship,
in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case.
Therefore, I was not surprised that he would write a smart reflection for The New Yorker on novelists’ special responsibility in combatting Trumpism.
Rushdie starts the article with a telling exchange between Hal and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part I:
“What, art thou mad? Art thou mad?” Falstaff demands of Prince Hal, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. “Is not the truth the truth?” The joke, of course, is that he has been lying his head off, and the prince is in the process of exposing him as a liar.
In modern parlance, we could also say that Falstaff is gaslighting Hal. Rushdie observes that the passage is only too relevant to today’s politics:
In a time like the present, when reality itself seems everywhere under attack, Falstaff’s duplicitous notion of the truth seems to be shared by many powerful leaders. In the three countries I’ve spent my life caring about—India, the U.K., and the United States—self-serving falsehoods are regularly presented as facts, while more reliable information is denigrated as “fake news.”
Unfortunately, Rushdie says, we cannot return to some golden age where “truth was uncontested and universally accepted.” That’s because “truth has always been a contested idea.”
Rushdie gives a brief history of 19th century literary realism to make this point:
[I]n the nineteenth century there was a fairly widespread consensus about the character of reality. The great novelists of that time—Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and so on—could assume that they and their readers, broadly speaking, agreed on the nature of the real, and the grand age of the realist novel was built on that foundation. But that consensus was built on a number of exclusions. It was middle-class and white. The points of view of, for example, colonized peoples, or racial minorities—points of view from which the world looked very different to the bourgeois reality portrayed in, say, The Age of Innocence, or Middlemarch, or Madame Bovary—were largely erased from the narrative. The importance of great public matters was also often marginalized. In the entire œuvre of Jane Austen, the Napoleonic Wars are barely mentioned; in the immense œuvre of Charles Dickens, the existence of the British Empire is only glancingly recognized.
I’ve written several posts making this point (including this one), noting that figures such as Bertolt Brecht and Antonio Gramsci (writing about class), W. E. B. Du Bois and Chinua Achebe (writing about race), and Rachel Blau DuPlessis (writing about gender) have shaken up what previously passed for reality. In our pluralistic world, classic realism is no longer an option for authors who want to convey the truth of life. Rushdie mentions what has taken its place:
In the twentieth century, under the pressure of enormous social changes, the nineteenth-century consensus was revealed as fragile; its view of reality began to look, one might say, fake. At first, some of the greatest literary artists sought to chronicle the changing reality by using the methods of the realist novel—as Thomas Mann did in Buddenbrooks, or Junichiro Tanizaki in The Makioka Sisters—but gradually the realist novel seemed more and more problematic, and writers from Franz Kafka to Ralph Ellison and Gabriel García Márquez created stranger, more surreal texts, telling the truth by means of obvious untruth, creating a new kind of reality, as if by magic.
If the magical realism of García Márquez, Isabel Allende, Gunter Grass, Toni Morrison, Haruki Murakami, and Rushdie is so powerful, it is because it captures the modern world’s “conflicting and often incompatible narratives”:
I have argued, for much of my life as a writer, that the breakdown in the old agreements about reality is now the most significant reality, and that the world can perhaps best be explained in terms of conflicting and often incompatible narratives. In Kashmir and in the Middle East, and in the battle between progressive America and Trumpistan, we see examples of such incompatibilities. I have also maintained that the consequences of this new, argumentative, even polemical attitude to the real has profound implications for literature—that we can’t, or ought not to, pretend it isn’t there. I believe that the influence on public discourse of more, and more varied, voices has been a good thing, enriching our literatures and making more complex our understanding of the world.
Rushdie is aware of the conundrum at which he has arrived, however. If there are conflicting realities, then who determines which one should have precedence? What is to prevent an autocrat from declaring his own preferred reality as the truth and using the power of the state to back it up? Drawing on One Hundred Years of Solitude, yesterday I described Trump’s determination to dictate the reality of Puerto Rico and Hurricane Maria. Here’s Rushdie setting forth the problem:
How can we argue, on the one hand, that modern reality has become necessarily multidimensional, fractured and fragmented, and, on the other hand, that reality is a very particular thing, an unarguable series of things that are so, which needs to be defended against the attacks of, to be frank, the things that are not so, which are being promulgated by, let’s say, the Modi Administration in India, the Brexit crew in the U.K., and the President of the United States? How to combat the worst aspects of the Internet, that parallel universe in which important information and total garbage coexist, side by side, with, apparently, the same levels of authority, making it harder than ever for people to tell them apart? How to resist the erosion in the public acceptance of “basic facts,” scientific facts, evidence-supported facts about, say, climate change or inoculations for children? How to combat the political demagoguery that seeks to do what authoritarians have always wanted—to undermine the public’s belief in evidence, and to say to their electorates, in effect, “Believe nothing except me, for I am the truth”? What do we do about that?
Literature has a special role in combatting this, Rushdie says, and for that he draws on the idea of universal human nature, which was big in the 1950s and 1960s (think of Edward Steichen’s 1955 Family of Man exhibit) but then fell into disfavor with the deconstructionists and, after them, the new historicists. Rushdie writes,
[W]hen we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most. We can make people agree, in this time of radical disagreement, on the truths of the great constant, which is human nature.
In my opinion, deconstruction was a useful skepticism, getting us to challenge received truths, but ultimately it descended into nihilistic relativism. New historicism, like cultural anthropology, had its own contributions to make and its own limitations. Rushdie argues that the truth we experience with great literature gives us a unifying foundation to fight back against tyranny:
[A]s far as writers are concerned, we need to rebuild our readers’ belief in argument from factual evidence, and to do what fiction has always been good at doing—to construct, between the writer and the reader, an understanding about what is real. I don’t mean to reconstruct the narrow, exclusive consensus of the nineteenth century. I like the broader, more disputatious view of society to be found in modern literature. But when we read a book we like, or even love, we find ourselves in agreement with its portrait of human life. Yes, we say, this is how we are, this is what we do to one another, this is true. That, perhaps, is where literature can help most.
Rushdie concludes by referencing German authors following World War II. Having seen their society “poisoned by Nazism,” they wrote “rubble literature (“Trümmerliteratur”), which was literature designed to rebuild their shattered language and their shattered country. Authors face a similar call today:
We stand once again, though for different reasons, in the midst of the rubble of the truth. And it is for us—writers, thinkers, journalists, philosophers—to undertake the task of rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality, their faith in the truth. And to do it with new language, from the ground up.
Having taught two Rushdie novels this past semester, one in Magical Realism (Midnight’s Children) and one in British Fantasy (Two Years, Eight Months, and 28 Days), I can testify that he is doing his part. Fantasy, when combined with a deep understanding of human nature, gives us space to imagine healthy alternatives to the deadening realities that threaten to crush us. Rushdie acknowledges multiple cultural voices in his fictions, even while also capturing our shared humanity.
I won’t say that reading good contemporary literature will solve our problems. It is, however, a powerful ally as we mount a resistance.
I put my nine-year-old grandson Alban on a flight back to Washington, D.C. yesterday after 10 magical days with him. It didn’t start well because he had to watch his great grandmother being loaded onto an ambulance on his first evening. (She fell while we were washing the dishes and fractured her pelvis.) The rest of the time was positive, however, as we played board games, cards, and ping pong, went hiking and swimming, hit a tennis ball around, and (of course) read novels.
One of my favorites has now, gratifyingly, become one of his. Cecil Day-Lewis, a one-time Professor of Poetry at Oxford (he beat out C.S. Lewis for the position) and the English poet laureate following John Masfield, immediately after World War II wrote a children’s book. The Otterbury Incident is about two gangs of middle schoolers who reenact war battles before joining forces to help out one of their members. In the process, they uncover and take down a counterfeiting and black-market ring.
As exciting as it is, what sets it apart is the first-person narrator, who adds all the dramatic flourishes that can be expected from a literate 12-year-old. Alban and I, for instance, enjoyed George’s description of their war games, such as this line:
Bodies, locked in mortal combat, were rolling about everywhere: the air was rent with the screams of the dead and the dying.
And George’s dramatic summation of the day:
One advantage I have over the ordinary historian is that I don’t have to bother about a lot of dates, which are sickening things, to my mind, and quite unnecessary. It all happened over the weekend. First, a great victory; then the moment when disaster stared us in the face; then the recovery from this crippling blow and the turning of the tables on a dastardly enemy…
Here’s his description of a critical turning point:
Then the idea came to him which was destined to write a new chapter in the history of Otterbury.
And of his efforts to become a detective:
Anyway, as we walked back into the town, I was revolving in my mind all that I knew of the criminal mentality—which, I admit, comes chiefly from books, though Mr. Robertson did say once that for a Rogue’s Gallery and Chamber of Horrors rolled into one, nobody need go further than the Upper Fourth at our school.
It’s particularly enjoyable watching George wrestle with literary conventions. The Lewis Carroll-King of Hearts advice he gets (“Begin at the beginning, go to the end, and there stop”) conflicts with “Jump right into the deep end of the story, don’t hang about on the edge.” And then there’s the problem with descriptions, which he encounters when he needs to describe two of the villains:
I’d better try to describe this pair of blisters. Personally, speaking for myself, I always skip the bits in novels where they describe people: you know—“He had a strong, sensitive face and finely chiseled nostrils,” or, “Her eyes were like pools of dewy radiance, her lips were redder than pomegranates”—that sort of thing doesn’t get one anywhere, I mean, it doesn’t help you to see the person, does it?
He cites a line from a Robert Browning poem at one point, and I think “wild surmise” from “Upon First Reading Chapman’s Homer” shows up twice. Anyway, I understand why a reading crazy tweenager such as I was loved the book and why Alban is drawn to it now. We even read the exact copy that I checked out from Sewanee’s Thurmond Library in the early 1960s as my parents saw it in a library sale years later and bought it for me.
In a future post I’ll tell you about reading Alban the French children’s book The Knights of King Midas, by Paul Berna, which is another book about a gang of children who come together to work on a common project. A man overheard us reading it in the airport and was so entranced that he took a photo of the cover so that he could track it down.
Maybe kids are just an excuse that adults use for revisiting childhood favorites.
Ralph Waldo Emerson has written one of the best poems to read on the 4th of July. “A Nation’s Strength” does not engage in patriotic idolatry, where men worship wealth and military power and strut their superiority before the world. God, Emerson writes, has struck such pride down “in ashes at his feet.”
No, a nation is strong only when it has “men who for truth and honor’s sake/ Stand fast and suffer long.”
Remember those words: Truth and Honor. And use it as criteria to judge our current leaders.
Happy July 4th.
A Nation’s Strength By Ralph Waldo Emerson
What makes a nation’s pillars high And its foundations strong? What makes it mighty to defy The foes that round it throng?
It is not gold. Its kingdoms grand Go down in battle shock; Its shafts are laid on sinking sand, Not on abiding rock.
Is it the sword? Ask the red dust Of empires passed away; The blood has turned their stones to rust, Their glory to decay.
And is it pride? Ah, that bright crown Has seemed to nations sweet; But God has struck its luster down In ashes at his feet.
Not gold but only men can make A people great and strong; Men who for truth and honor’s sake Stand fast and suffer long.
Brave men who work while others sleep, Who dare while others fly… They build a nation’s pillars deep And lift them to the sky.
Shelley wouldn’t like how Willard’s Spirit of ’76 (1875) celebrates war
Friday – July 4th Weekend
July 4th should be a time when Americans look both back and ahead, back to the founding ideals and ahead to how they can continue to be true to those ideals in the face of a changing world. This past week I have been writing about how strong nations experience trouble when they become overly nostalgic about a certain vision of the past, which is some of what we’ve been seeing in Trumpism. Percy Shelley’s “Hellas” is therefore an appropriate poem for this Independence Day.
Shelley wrote the play Hellas, best known for the poem below, in support of the Greek fight for independence from the Ottoman Turks. Among other issues, Shelley was concerned that the Greeks would rely too heavily upon past glory—and by past he meant the Athenian Golden Age 1200 years earlier. He’s not against celebrating “the glory that was Greece” (to quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s “To Helen”) but he wants an update. If that happens, “the golden years” may indeed return.
Note how, in “Hellas,” all the adjectives are comparative: a “brighter Hellas,” a “loftier Argo” (Jason’s famous boat), a “fairer Tempes” (the garden of the Greek gods), a “sunnier deep” for the Cyclade islands. If Greece is to prevail, there must be a “new Peneus” (a legendary Greek river), another Orpheus, a new Odysseus on a new quest to leave Calypso and return home. “Another Athens” must arise.
“Oh, write no more the tale of Troy,” Shelley tells the Greeks—don’t keep looking back to your greatest military victory and all the buried bodies (with earth functioning as “Death’s scroll”). In fact, don’t glorify feats of arms at all. The reference to “Laiain rage” may be to Oedipus killing his (unbeknownst to him) father King Laius in a fit of road rage. (They have a fight over who has right of way.) He doesn’t want such emotions contaminating “the joy which dawns upon the free.”
After the killing, Oedipus goes on to solve the riddle of the sphinx, which has been terrorizing Thebes, so maybe Shelley is saying that modern political riddles, asked by a “subtler Sphinx,” are harder to solve. It certainly feels as though our current “riddles of death” are more challenging than those encountered by our own mythic founders.
When Shelley writes that the new Athens should bequeath, “like sunset to the skies,” the “splendor of its prime,” I think he’s saying that we can’t relive the splendor of the past. Our future may not match up with our rosy vision of the American Revolution, but we can still recreate a republic that is continuous with yet distinct from the past. The golden age of Saturn and the reign of Love can “burst” out again.
But not, Shelley cautions, by means of money and violence. Instead we need “votive tears and symbol flowers.” Which is to say, we need July 4th to celebrate genuine democracy, including those who have shed blood, sweat and tears to preserve it. January 6 insurrectionists who claim exclusive rights to America’s revolutionary past are not welcome.
A new America cannot arise if “hate and death return.” If they do, we can indeed prophesize a bitter future. Although both Greece’s and America’s glory were forged in blood, the world is weary of that particular past. In Shelley’s vision, strife, whether from the right or from the left, will not lead to a new “great age.” In place of “faiths and empires,” which are like “wrecks of a dissolving dream,” think of the renewal of spring.
When Shelley asks, at the end of “Ode to the West Wind,” “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” there’s critical debate over whether he’s asking a rhetorical question (as in, “Of course, spring isn’t far behind”) or a genuine question (as in, “I honestly don’t know”). This is the first July 4th in our history where the loser of the previous year’s presidential election has not yet conceded so I don’t know if renewal is in our immediate future or not.
When I’m feeling pessimistic, Matthew Arnold’s must-cited passage from “La Grande Chartreuse” come to mind. Visiting an ancient monastery in the Alps and contemplating his age’s loss of faith, Arnold describes himself as
Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head…
But for this July 4th, I am choosing to believe that democracy, despite the battering it has taken recently, is shedding her old snakeskin and being born again. Certainly, Joe Biden is doing all he can to bring America back after a year that ranks amongst our very worst. Those who wish the best for America should hope he succeeds.
Hellas By Percy Shelley
Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendor of its prime;
The world’s great age begins anew, The golden years return, The earth doth like a snake renew Her winter weeds outworn: Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
A brighter Hellas rears its mountains From waves serener far; A new Peneus rolls his fountains Against the morning star. Where fairer Tempes bloom, there sleep Young Cyclads on a sunnier deep.
A loftier Argo cleaves the main, Fraught with a later prize; Another Orpheus sings again, And loves, and weeps, and dies. A new Ulysses leaves once more Calypso for his native shore.
Oh, write no more the tale of Troy, If earth Death’s scroll must be! Nor mix with Laian rage the joy Which dawns upon the free: Although a subtler Sphinx renew Riddles of death Thebes never knew.
Another Athens shall arise, And to remoter time Bequeath, like sunset to the skies, The splendor of its prime; And leave, if nought so bright may live, All earth can take or Heaven can give.
Saturn and Love their long repose Shall burst, more bright and good Than all who fell, than One who rose, Than many unsubdu’d: Not gold, not blood, their altar dowers, But votive tears and symbol flowers.
Oh cease! must hate and death return? Cease! must men kill and die? Cease! drain not to its dregs the urn Of bitter prophecy. The world is weary of the past, Oh might it die or rest at last!
As record heat temperatures in America’s west continue to show us the hellhole that awaits us if we fail to deal with climate change, I was struck by Washington governor Jay Inslee’s fear for the American west. Noting that Washington is known as “the evergreen state,” he painted a picture of crops dying, electric grids shutting down, and people dying. We in America have been given a gift in our west coast and we are squandering it.
The emphasis on “green” brought to mind William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem.” Appearing in his mystical and very difficult poem Milton, “Jerusalem” harkens back to a time when (so certain legends have it) Jesus visited England and walked upon “Englands mountains green.” Whether or not he actually did, the real issue is that “the Countenance Divine” once shone upon the land, only to be driven away by “dark Satanic Mills.”
For Blake, the mills were in part the textile factories and other industries that poured smoke into the atmosphere. We of course continue this practice to the point that we are changing our planet’s climate.
Blake resolves to do all he can to oppose the trend—he “shall not cease from Mental Fight”—with his “Bow of burning gold” and “arrows of desire” being his poetry. His “Chariot of Fire” is an allusion to Elisha, who moved between the spiritual realm and the earthly.
Blake’s final vision of “Englands green & pleasant Land” is what has made “Jerusalem” England’s de facto national anthem. The heartbreak we feel as pleasant pastures become drought and fire-ravaged landscapes should spur all of us to take up Blake’s struggle.
And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon Englands mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold: Bring me my arrows of desire: Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold! Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand: Till we have built Jerusalem, In Englands green & pleasant Land.
The Fleet of Aeneas Arrives in Sight of Italy (1535)
Wednesday
My Dante Discussion Group, which has morphed into a Virgil Discussion Group now that we’ve completed the Divine Comedy, encountered an Aeneid passage we agreed has interesting implications for declining world powers, including the United States. Aeneas, knowing that he destined to found a new empire but unsure where it is to be, momentarily thinks that Epirus on the Balkan Peninsula may be the place. Group member Ross McDonald, Sewanee’s British Renaissance scholar who is leading our discussions, says this is a particularly treacherous temptation.
It’s treacherous because it seems too easy. In an ironic reversal, Achilles’s brutal son, whom previously we have seen kill Priam and other Trojan nobles, has been killed and his kingdom has ended up in the hands of two Trojans, Priam’s son Helenus and Andromache, formerly Hector’s wife and then Pyrrhus’s slave. Aeneas has but to join his forces with them and, voila, he has his new Troy. It even looks like the old Troy, as Aeneas discovers when Helenus takes him around:
Walking along with him I saw before me Troy in miniature, A slender copy of our massive tower, A dry brooklet named Xanthus…and I pressed My body against a Scaean Gate. Those with me Feasted their eyes on this, our kinsmen’s town.
Andromache, meanwhile, appears to be spending all her efforts to maintain a mausoleum to her dead husband. Ross made the point that her seeing Aeneas as a ghost has truth to it: he is a ghost until he steps into his new destiny.
The Trojans attempting to “make Troy great again” involves looking only back, not forward. Once one does so, one comes up with no more than a pale imitation—a “slender copy” of a once massive tower, a “dry brooklet” instead of a mighty river, a replica of Troy’s fabled Scaean Gate. Aeneas cannot recreate past glory but must step into an entirely new vision, one that will surpass Troy and Greece both. In other words, Aeneas must venture out once more upon the seas, even though he knows the challenges before him are considerable.
Empires that decline are those that cling to past glory rather than imagining ways to renew themselves. Russia, whose revolution one inspired people around the world, is increasingly becoming a parasitic nation run by kleptocrats, with a leader who poisons opponents, trolls western democracies, bolsters autocrats and harbors computer hackers. Britain, nostalgically thinking it would stand tall again if it broke free from Europe, has only diminished itself in the process. America, ignoring its immigrant history, thought under Trump that it could roll back the years if it shut down its borders to keep new immigrants out. Nations shackled to their past become only slender copies and dry brooklets of what they once were.
Aeneas, by contrast, lets the wind belly out the canvas of sails (to use one of Virgil’s descriptions) and sails into an uncertain future. “Come my friends,” I imagine him saying in the words of his inveterate enemy Ulysses (as envisioned by Tennyson), “’T is not too late to seek a newer world.” Or in Shelley’s words (in Hellas), “The world is weary of the past,/ Oh, might it die or rest at last!”
Only, like the United States, the past doesn’t have to die entirely. Aeneas has a firm foundation upon which to build: the memory of a once vibrant city assures him that such entities can be raised again. The United States, meanwhile, has the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution, documents that have provided hope and inspiration even to those America originally tried to exclude.
