My faculty discussion group, having finished Dante’s Divine Comedy, has moved on to another monumental work, this one by the man who guides the character Dante through Inferno and Purgatory. In other words, we’re tackling Virgil’s Aeneid.
We don’t normally talk politics in our group, but our minds couldn’t help but turn to the January 6 insurrection when we got to the scene where the goddess Juno stirs up the winds to harass Aeneas’s fleet. At this point Neptune, angry at how another god has invaded his domain, does what Donald Trump chose not to do. He intervenes to end the chaos:
Neptune himself raises them [the Trojan ships] with his trident, parts the vast quicksand, tempers the flood, and glides on weightless wheels, over the tops of the waves. As often, when rebellion breaks out in a great nation, and the common rabble rage with passion, and soon stones and fiery torches fly (frenzy supplying weapons), if they then see a man of great virtue, and weighty service, they are silent, and stand there listening attentively: he sways their passions with his words and soothes their hearts: so all the uproar of the ocean died, as soon as their father, gazing over the water, carried through the clear sky, wheeled his horses, and gave them their head, flying behind in his chariot.
Virgil himself is being political in his epic simile since his reference is undoubtedly to his patron, Augustus Caesar.
Trump, on the other hand, has never been described as “a man of great virtue and weighty service.” There’s not much soothing of hearts in his repertoire. On his watch and at his instigation, stones and fiery torches flew.
According to polls, over half of all Republicans think that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election and that Donald Trump should actually be in the White House. As a number of commentators have pointed out, this is chiefly due to a steady stream of lies by the rightwing media—not only about this election but about fraudulent voter fraud charges going back years. Many of those who believe the “big lie” are good people so it’s painful to watch their delusion.
I am reminded of the much-abused Fantine in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. The mother of Cosette has undergone one abuse after another, including being bled dry by the execrable Thenardiers, who mistreat her daughter while claiming to care for her. Fantine has found work at the factory of the benevolent mayor of Montfermeil, who claims to be Monsieur Madeleine but is actually Jean Valjean, a wanted man. When words gets out about Fantine’s illegitimate daughter, she is fired but without Jean Valjean’s knowledge. Nevertheless, she holds him responsible for her downward spiral.
Here’s where I’m going with this. It’s possible to regard, as a monster, someone who actually wants to make your life better. If you live with a misunderstanding—or in the case of Trump supporters, with a lie—you may find yourself spitting on a man who is concerned about your well-being. That’s what happens when Fantine meets the mayor.
Everything has come to a head after Fantine, having struck a callous gentleman for playing an ugly prank on her, finds herself facing prison time. Madeleine, however, hears about her case and comes to her rescue. This doesn’t match up with the reality Fantine knows, however, and she commits another infraction:
At the instant when the soldiers laid their hands upon the unfortunate woman, who would not rise, he emerged from the shadow, and said:—
“One moment, if you please.”
Javert raised his eyes and recognized M. Madeleine. He removed his hat, and, saluting him with a sort of aggrieved awkwardness:—
“Excuse me, Mr. Mayor—”
The words “Mr. Mayor” produced a curious effect upon Fantine. She rose to her feet with one bound, like a spectre springing from the earth, thrust aside the soldiers with both arms, walked straight up to M. Madeleine before any one could prevent her, and gazing intently at him, with a bewildered air, she cried:—
“Ah! so it is you who are M. le Maire!”
Then she burst into a laugh, and spit in his face.
The saintly Jean Valjean, understanding her desperation, astounds her with his reaction:
M. Madeleine wiped his face, and said:—
“Inspector Javert, set this woman at liberty.”
Javert’s job, as he sees it, is to maintain hierarchy and keep the lower classes in their place. Nevertheless, Fantine can’t process what she has heard and strives for another explanation for the freedom she has just been granted:
“At liberty! I am to be allowed to go! I am not to go to prison for six months! Who said that? It is not possible that anyone could have said that. I did not hear aright. It cannot have been that monster of a mayor! Was it you, my good Monsieur Javert, who said that I was to be set free? Oh, see here! I will tell you about it, and you will let me go. That monster of a mayor, that old blackguard of a mayor, is the cause of all. Just imagine, Monsieur Javert, he turned me out! all because of a pack of rascally women, who gossip in the workroom. If that is not a horror, what is? To dismiss a poor girl who is doing her work honestly!
And then, further on:
O Monsieur Javert! it was you who gave orders that I am to be set free, was it not?
When Madeleine, having now heard her story, steps forward with the intention of helping her with her rent. Fantine still can’t recognize the situation for what it is:
He said to Fantine, “How much did you say that you owed?”
Fantine, who was looking at Javert only, turned towards him:—
“Was I speaking to you?”
Then, addressing the soldiers:—
“Say, you fellows, did you see how I spit in his face? Ah! you old wretch of a mayor, you came here to frighten me, but I’m not afraid of you. I am afraid of Monsieur Javert.”
Javert isn’t about to let her go but is overruled by Jean Valjean. Fantine, not surprisingly, experiences a moment of cognitive dissonance:
She had just seen herself a subject of dispute between two opposing powers. She had seen two men who held in their hands her liberty, her life, her soul, her child, in combat before her very eyes; one of these men was drawing her towards darkness, the other was leading her back towards the light. In this conflict, viewed through the exaggerations of terror, these two men had appeared to her like two giants; the one spoke like her demon, the other like her good angel. The angel had conquered the demon, and, strange to say, that which made her shudder from head to foot was the fact that this angel, this liberator, was the very man whom she abhorred, that mayor whom she had so long regarded as the author of all her woes, that Madeleine! And at the very moment when she had insulted him in so hideous a fashion, he had saved her! Had she, then, been mistaken? Must she change her whole soul? She did not know; she trembled. She listened in bewilderment, she looked on in affright, and at every word uttered by M. Madeleine she felt the frightful shades of hatred crumble and melt within her, and something warm and ineffable, indescribable, which was both joy, confidence and love, dawn in her heart.
So here’s the question facing America. Will Trump supporters, after all they’ve heard, continue to regard Joe Biden as a demon leading them into socialist darkness? Will they still think this after he gets America vaccinated and back to work? Will they still think this if he manages to sign an infrastructure bill that aids red states no less than blue states? Will they still think this is he’s able to deliver on his promise of subsidized child care and college education? Or will the frightful shades of hatred crumble and melt within them, replaced by something warm and ineffable?
Biden has told America what he would like to accomplish. Here’s Madeleine’s promise:
I have heard you. I knew nothing about what you have mentioned. I believe that it is true, and I feel that it is true. I was even ignorant of the fact that you had left my shop. Why did you not apply to me? But here; I will pay your debts, I will send for your child, or you shall go to her. You shall live here, in Paris, or where you please. I undertake the care of your child and yourself. You shall not work any longer if you do not like. I will give all the money you require. You shall be honest and happy once more. And listen! I declare to you that if all is as you say,—and I do not doubt it,—you have never ceased to be virtuous and holy in the sight of God. Oh! poor woman.
The GOP hopes to ride the big lie to electoral victory. Biden hopes to break through to Trump supporters by helping them. How the story ends is up in the air.
As I continue to revise my book on the 2500-year-old debate over whether literature makes our lives better, I’m looking again at my chapter on Allan Bloom, whose Closing of the American Mind was at the center of the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s. I actually prefer his Shakespeare’s Politics, written 23 years earlier, which is more specific about why we need the bard in our lives.
Writing in 1964—before the counter-culture and student protests—Bloom begins his book with the same lament that he voices later: students aren’t reading the books that will serve them the best:
The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and their imagination. In general, they do not look at all to books when they meet problems in life or try to think about their goals; there are no literary models for their conceptions of virtue and vice.
The problem, as Bloom sees it, is that students instead are guided by “popular journalism” and “the works of ephemeral authors.” Bloom doesn’t name any of these authors, but my sense from the following passage is that Bloom’s bar is so high that the number of non-ephemeral authors is in single digits:
The civilizing and unifying function of the peoples’ books, which was carried out in Greece by Homer, Italy by Dante, France by Racine and Moliere, and Germany by Goethe, seems to be dying a rapid death. The young have no ground from which to begin their understanding of the world and themselves, and they have no common education which forms the core of their communication with their fellows.
Bloom can’t entirely get away with saying that the academy has abandoned Shakespeare because it never has. To this day, the bard still reigns supreme in Introduction to Literature courses, and every English Department has well-attended courses devoted to him. Bloom therefore shifts his critique and complains that people aren’t teaching Shakespeare correctly. In 1964, he had a point as the New Critics focused more on issues of form (say, looking for image patterns) than on Shakespeare as a guide for life. By contrast, writing as a political philosopher, Bloom believes Shakespeare can make us better citizens and better leaders.
Because I have been so immersed in the uses to which literature can be put, I recognize Bloom’s influences. Like Plato, he believes that life should be about the true and the good although he doesn’t agree with Plato’s suspicion of poetry. Like Aristotle, he sees literature as essential to the life of the state although he gives poetry the same status as philosophy, which it’s not clear that Aristotle does. Bloom channels the Roman poet Horace in seeing poetry’s mission as to simultaneously delight and instruct, writing,
Shakespeare wrote at a time when common sense still taught that the function of the poet was to produce pleasure and that the function of the great poet was to teach what is truly beautiful by means of pleasure.
Continuing on with influences, Bloom seems to be channeling Elizabethan Renaissance courtier Sir Philip Sidney when he talks about poetry inspiring heroic virtue. He is also following Samuel Johnson, who in his own work on Shakespeare wrote, “From his writings indeed a system of social duty may be selected.”
Bloom sounds very Johnsonian when he writes that Shakespeare “shows most vividly and comprehensively the fate of tyrants, the character of good rulers, the relations of friends, and the duties of citizens.” When Shakespeare does so, “he can move the souls of his readers, and they recognize that they understand life better because they have read him; he hence becomes a constant guide and companion.”
Or at least, Bloom says, that’s the way it was in the old days, when people turned to Shakespeare “as they once turned to the Bible.”
Finally, Bloom uses the same descriptor for today’s students that Matthew Arnold applied to the economically successful but culturally illiterate middle class. Because the classic authors are no longer “a part of the furniture of the student’s mind, once he is out of the academic atmosphere,” we have the following situation:
This results in a decided lowering of tone in their reflections on life and its goals; today’s students are technically well-equipped, but Philistine.
Moving from Shakespeare to poetry in general, Bloom says that literature moves people as other forms of knowledge cannot. For instance,
The philosopher cannot move nations; he speaks only to a few. The poet can take the philosopher’s understanding and translate it into images that touch the deepest passions and cause men to know without knowing that they know. Aristotle’s description of heroic virtue means nothing to men in general, but Homer’s incarnation of that virtue in the Greeks and Trojans is unforgettable. This desire to depict the truth about man and to make other men fulfill that truth is what raises poetry to its greatest heights in the epic and the drama.
This means, Bloom says, that the poet has a double task: “to understand the things he wishes to represent and to understand the audience to which he speaks. He must know about the truly permanent human problems; otherwise his works will be slight and passing.”
Bloom examines three Shakespeare plays and the lessons they teach. Merchant of Venice and Othello, he notes, are both set in Venice, which had the reputation as a place “where the various sorts of men could freely mingle, and it was known the world over as the most tolerant city of its time.” It’s interesting that Bloom, who later would be cited by conservatives in the culture wars, actually seems to be advocating for a liberal social vision. By showing us Shylock and Othello in their full humanity, he says, Shakespeare makes it harder for us to be anti-Semites and racists:
Shakespeare, while proving his own breadth of sympathy, made an impression on his audiences which could not be eradicated. Whether they liked these men or not, the spectators now knew they were men and not things on which they could with impunity exercise their vilest passions.
Writing in the heyday of the civil rights movement, Bloom could be talking about America when he writes,
Venice did not fulfill for [Shylock and Othello] its promise of being a society in which men could live as men, not as whites and blacks, Christians and Jews, Venetians and foreigners.
In Julius Caesar, as Bloom sees the play, Shakespeare provides a profound lesson in politics. In Caesar, one finds an extraordinary mixture of vision and practicality that only the greatest leaders possess:
Caesar seems to have been the most complete political man who ever lived. He combined the high-mindedness of the Stoic with the Epicurean’s awareness of the low material substrate of political things. Brutus and Cassius could not comprehend such a combination…
Yet the two conspirators also provide important models for future generations:
Their failure, as Brutus saw, won them more glory than Octavius and Antony attained by their success, for they are the eternal symbols of freedom against tyranny. They showed that men need not give way before the spirit of the times; they served as models for later successors who would reestablish the spirit of free government. Their seemingly futile gesture helped, not Rome, but humanity. Men in foreign lands and with foreign tongues have looked to Rome and to the defenders of its liberties against Caesarism for inspiration in the establishment of regimes which respect human nature and encourage a proud independence. Shakespeare, the teacher of the Anglo-Saxon world, was such a man.
In Shakespeare, Bloom writes, we have someone who can understand the need for a free man and good citizen to balance “his passions and his knowledge.” Art speaks to our emotions, political theory to our reason, and Shakespeare, maybe better than anyone, brought the two together:
We are aware that a political science which does not grasp the moral phenomena is crude and that an art uninspired by the passion for justice is trivial…[W]e sense that [Shakespeare] has both intellectual clarity and vigorous passions and that the two do not undermine each other in him. If we live with him a while, perhaps we can recapture the fullness of life and rediscover the way to his lost unity.
I wonder if I would have followed Bloom if I had had him as a teacher in college. Because I was turned off by the way my Carleton English professors—in the grip of New Criticism—separated literature out from history and life, I chose instead to major in history, turning only to English in graduate school. On the other hand, I might have been turned off by the way that Bloom insisted that other authors had to be put down in order to raise the greatest authors up. There’s an elitism there that doesn’t sit well with me, even though I deeply respect Bloom’s project.
You live by toxic masculinity, you die by toxic masculinity. This was my thought when reading a recent column by Never-Trump conservative Matt Lewis about the current GOP. For years we watched politicians like former House Speaker Paul Ryan waving Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in the air as they heaped scorn on people who can’t pull themselves up by their own bootstraps but rely on government services. These moochers want to use the social safety net as a hammock, Ryan sneered as he aspired to be a John Galt, a Nietzchean Ubermensch, an alpha male.
When people like Ryan encounter someone who is even more alpha, however, they invariably crumple like a cheap suit (to use an analogy that shows up frequently in hardboiled detective novels). Ryan thought he was a master of the universe until he encountered a man who boasted about grabbing women by the pussies. Then, when he objected that this was going too far, Trump cut him off at the knees, and that was the beginning of the end for Paul Ryan.
According to Lewis, the current Republican Party is full of Paul Ryans:
The Republican Party says it wants to be a working man’s party, but this feels more like wine than beer to me. The only John Wayne they have left is Donald Trump. He’s the alpha male, and the betas all cower before him. What we’re left with is a GOP full of neutered opportunists—snowflakes paying their dues, biting their tongues, and hoping to retire with a gold watch.
Lewis singles out Ted Cruz, who now pals around with Trump “despite Trump implying Cruz’s wife is ugly—and alleging that Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination.” Cuz thinks he can reclaim his manhood by degrading others, most recently America’s “woke and emasculated” military, whom he said Democrats are trying to turn into “pansies.”
By lashing out at others while sheltering under Trump’s umbrella, Cruz reminds me of various toadies in literature. Tolkien’s Wormtongue comes to mind, as do Vincent Crabbe and Gregory Goyle, the two bullies who follow in Draco Malfoy’s wake in the Harry Potter books. And of course, Malfoy himself folds like our cheap suit when Voldemort turns against his family. Being a bully is a losing proposition.
Crabbe provides an object lesson. Having discovered Harry, Hermione and Ron in the Chamber of Secrets, he thinks he can destroy them with a curse, only to discover a curse can backfire:
A roaring, billowing noise behind [Harry] gave him a moment’s warning. He turned and saw both Ron and Crabbe running as hard as they could up the aisle toward them.
“Like it hot, scum?” roared Crabbe as he ran.
But he seemed to have no control over what he had done. Flames of abnormal size were pursuing them, licking up the sides of the junk bulwarks, which were crumbling to soot at their touch.
Crabbe perishes in flames he himself has unleashed. Take heed, Sen. Cruz.
The alternative to toxic masculinity is seeing society as interdependent, with each of us contributing our gifts to the whole. That means respecting others and being tolerant of human frailty. This is also the best way to govern a country, as it turns out. Unfortunately, it not in the GOP’s current playbook.
While some people are into bird sightings, I’m into literature sightings. (Okay, so I do some bird watching as well.) The latest is Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, mentioning Waiting for Godot on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show Friday night.
The reference was to the way Republicans keep stringing Democrats along on the possibility of compromise, only to back out when agreement is near. They did this constantly with Barack Obama, and they’ve been trying to do it again as Democrats craft an infrastructure bill and set up a Congressional committee to investigate the January 6 insurrection. When Nancy Pelosi agreed to House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy’s conditions about the investigation, McCarthy refused to take “yes” for an answer and backed off.
Normally people mention “Lucy and the football,” a gag that recurred for years on Peanuts when Lucy assured Charlie that this time she wouldn’t pull the football away when he ran up to kick it–only to, once again, pull it away at the last moment so that Charlie, once again, falls flat on the ground. While the Peanuts episode captures the situation well, so does Samuel Beckett’s play.
In it, we see Vladimir and Estragon awaiting the arrival of one Godot, whom we can think of as bipartisan compromise. They’ve been waiting for a long time and they are still waiting at play’s end. The play has such interchanges as the following:
ESTRAGON: Let’s go. VLADIMIR: We can’t. ESTRAGON: Why not? VLADIMIR: We’re waiting for Godot. ESTRAGON: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You’re sure it was here? VLADIMIR: What? ESTRAGON: That we were to wait. VLADIMIR: He said by the tree.
And this:
ESTRAGON: He should be here. VLADIMIR: He didn’t say for sure he’d come. ESTRAGON: And if he doesn’t come? VLADIMIR: We’ll come back tomorrow. ESTRAGON: And then the day after tomorrow. VLADIMIR: Possibly.
At the end of Act I, a boy messenger shows up and informs them, “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.”
In Act II, some time has passed—we know this because there are a few more leaves on the tree—and Estragon and Vladimir are still waiting. Every time they seem on the verge of giving up, a tiny vestige of hope flairs up:
VLADIMIR: We’ve nothing more to do here. ESTRAGON: Nor anywhere else. VLADIMIR: Ah Gogo, don’t go on like that. Tomorrow everything will be better. ESTRAGON: How do you make that out? VLADIMIR: Did you not hear what the child said? ESTRAGON: No. VLADIMIR: He said that Godot was sure to come tomorrow. (Pause.) What do you say to that? ESTRAGON: Then all we have to do is to wait on here.
At the end of act II, the boy—or maybe a different boy, it’s not clear–shows up again:
VLADIMIR: You have a message from Mr. Godot. BOY: Yes Sir. VLADIMIR: He won’t come this evening. BOY: No Sir. VLADIMIR: But he’ll come tomorrow. BOY: Yes Sir. VLADIMIR: Without fail. BOY: Yes Sir.
The boy could be both the same and not the same if we think of the first as John Boehner—head of GOP House Republicans during the Obama administration—and the second time as current head McCarthy. In neither case is the identity of the boy important.
So is bipartisan compromise our Godot? Will GOP members of Congress enter into responsible governance. We can look to Beckett’s words for the answer:
VLADIMIR: What does he do, Mr. Godot? (Silence.) Do you hear me? BOY: Yes Sir. VLADIMIR: Well? BOY: He does nothing, Sir.
Some say the play is about waiting for God. We can read it as waiting for Gop.
I love this Scott Cairns poem, which seems appropriate for Christians celebrating Pentecost. In “Possible Answers to Prayer,” Cairns shows God as a slightly bemused but infinitely patient administrator reassuring fallen humanity that their petitions “have been duly recorded.” He knows who is praying by the anxieties that show up in our prayers. Their “constant, relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value” give us away. (Cairns’s God is throwing a little shade here.)
In the battle between repentance and resentment, resentment at first seems to have the upper hand. Thankfully, God can penetrate resentment’s “burgeoning yellow fog.” (Cairns borrows the yellow fog image from T. S. Eliot’s lost-in-a-fog Prufrock.) Fortunately God can see that we have “intermittent concern for the sick,/ the suffering, the needy poor,” even though the sick, the suffering, and the needy poor may not see our concern. (More shade)
And as for all those people who offend us—after all, it feels “lipsmackingly” good to be indignant about them—well, God adores them. God is close to them, which means that God must be close to us as well, judgmental though we may be. Once we burn away our angers, our zeal, and our righteous indignation and begin loving those we passionately hate, we will apprehend how near God is.
This discovery is what Pentecost is all about.
Possible Answers to Prayer By Scott Cairns
Your petitions—though they continue to bear just the one signature—have been duly recorded. Your anxieties—despite their constant,
relatively narrow scope and inadvertent entertainment value—nonetheless serve to bring your person vividly to mind.
Your repentance—all but obscured beneath a burgeoning, yellow fog of frankly more conspicuous resentment—is sufficient.
Your intermittent concern for the sick, the suffering, the needy poor is sometimes recognizable to me, if not to them.
Your angers, your zeal, your lipsmackingly righteous indignation toward the many whose habits and sympathies offend you—
these must burn away before you’ll apprehend how near I am, with what fervor I adore precisely these, the several who rouse your passions.
With the onset of summer and the ebbing of the pandemic, America will start traveling again. Many will head for our national parks, which took a hit under four years of Donald Trump. When I think of his assault on our natural treasures, an angry John Clare poem comes to mind.
The National Park Conservation Association lists 145 ways the Trump administration degraded our parks. Jonathan Jarvis and Gary Machlis, two men long associated with the National Park Service, single out some of the low points:
We watched in dismay as the Trump administration systematically dismantled the last 50 years of conservation successes for our national parks and public lands and waters. Focused on grift and privatizing what belongs to all Americans, Donald Trump and his appointed officials took advantage of weak laws, a distracted public, hard-to-follow administrative actions, and their own deep animus against science and professional land managers to profoundly harm American conservation.
We should all be shocked by how easy it was. In just four years, Trump opened 9 million acres to oil and gas development, made it easier to kill migratory birds without consequence and opened drilling next to Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. His administration made it legal to shoot female grizzly bears with cubs in their dens, undermined scientific integrity and decimated the professional and scientific workforce. He reduced Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument to an inadequate remnant. That is far from a full list of the administration’s inventory of harms.
John Clare (1793-1864) was a peasant-turned-writer who has been described as “the quintessential Romantic poet.” Until his collection Rural Life gave him a financial alternative to farming, he made his living by gardening, ploughing, threshing, and lime-burning.
In his lengthy poem The Village Minstrel (1817), he inveighs against the enclosing of the commons, which was land that had long been used as communal property. The despoliation is witnessed by Lubin, a peasant poet, whose use of the word “improvement” refers to how those confiscating the land trumpeted enclosure as progress:
But who can tell the anguish of his mind, When reformation’s formidable foes With civil wars ‘gainst nature’s peace combin’d, And desolation struck her deadly blows, As curst improvement ‘gan his fields inclose: O greens, and fields, and trees, farewell, farewell! His heart-wrung pains, his unavailing woes No words can utter, and no tongue can tell, When ploughs destroyed the green, when groves of willows fell.
There once were springs, when daisies’ silver studs Like sheets of snow on every pasture spread; There once were summers, when the crow-flower buds Like golden sunbeams brightest luster shed: And trees grew once that sheltered Lubin’s head; There once were brooks sweet whimpering down the vale: The brooks no more — kingcup and daisy fled; Their last fallen tree the naked moors bewail, And scarce a bush is left to tell the mournful tale.
I came across Clare’s poem while reading Wendell Berry’s Remembering, the subject of Tuesday’s post. Berry is attacking big agriculture, which is engaged in its own version of enclosure. The National Parks are our commons, and we need every poetic voice in the struggle to beat back these “formidable foes.”
One of humanity’s enduring political questions is why leaders who have made people’s lives worse escape accountability. Donald Trump still rules over the GOP, even though any of those he beat out in the 2016 primaries would have handled the Covid pandemic better than he did. In the figure of the pharmacist in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary we get some insight into Trump’s enduring popularity.
Homais, who claims to be Charles Bovary’s friend, decides it will be to the village’s glory if the town’s mediocre doctor can operate successfully on the club foot of Hippolyte, the local porter. Forget the fact that Bovary lacks the surgical skills to pull off such a feat. Homais, acting like a Trump publicist (which is to say, like Trump himself), cares only about the newspaper article he will be able to write:
[A]s he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations for strephopody or club-foot.
“For,” said he to Emma, “what risk is there? See—” (and he enumerated on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), “success, almost certain relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor Hippolyte of the ‘Lion d’Or’? Note that he would not fail to tell about his cure to all the travellers, and then” (Homais lowered his voice and looked round him) “who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?”
Weak-willed Charles is pressured into go along while Homais persuades Hippolyte to vote for Trump undergo the operation. “You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain,” he tells him, adding, “it is a simple prick, like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns.”
How Bovary botches the operation is indescribably painful to read. Then, before seeing the results, we get Homais’s press release announcing success. It’s like Trump awarding his administration an A+ for its handling of the pandemic while demanding the Nobel Prize:
Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man called Hippolyte Tautain, stableman for the last twenty-five years at the hotel of the “Lion d’Or,” kept by Widow Lefrancois, at the Place d’Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was a veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The operation, moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a few drops of blood appeared on the skin, as though to say that the rebellious tendon had at last given way beneath the efforts of art. The patient, strangely enough—we affirm it as an eye-witness—complained of no pain. His condition up to the present time leaves nothing to be desired. Everything tends to show that his convalescence will be brief; and who knows even if at our next village festivity we shall not see our good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve and his capers his complete cure? Honour, then, to the generous savants! Honour to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their vigils to the amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honour, thrice honour! Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to the successive phases of this remarkable cure.’”
Now for the reality:
The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to break it…With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb, the box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines of the foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed about to burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous machine.
And further on:
At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much surprised at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with blisters here and there, whence there oozed a black liquid…
Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him with eyes full of terror, sobbing—
Hippolyte loses his leg and is lucky not to lose his life. Yet despite all that has happened, he does not bring charges against Charles. He even protests that his new artificial leg—which is covered with cork, has spring joints, and ends in a patent-leather boot—is too fancy for everyday use. His faith in authority is such that he looks past what has happened to him. As Emma observes later, “He doesn’t even remember any more about it.”
Trump is the smooth talking Homais and the incompetent Charles rolled into one. Perhaps Charles too would prescribe bleach for Covid. On second thought, however, Charles at least reads medical journals prior to surgery, and he also feels guilty for what he has done. Nor does he toot his own horn. So it’s actually Homais we should focus on.
We realize that the pharmacist has has been undercutting Charles just as Trump undercuts former allies. (“Everything that Trump touches dies” is how former Republican consultant Rick Wilson memorably phrased it.) Charles is more the Mike Pence in this set of parallels. Homais, on the other hand, suffers no consequences, despite his hand in the debacle, and the book ends with the following announcement:
Since Bovary’s death three doctors have followed one another at Yonville without any success, so severely did Homais attack them. He has an enormous practice; the authorities treat him with consideration, and public opinion protects him.
He has just received the cross of the Legion of Honour.
It’s as if people are making pilgrimages to a Florida resort to pay homage to him. For the moment, the bullshit artist has won.
I’m shaken today, having just learned that an old friend has died. I vividly remember my last conversation with Judy Rhodes, who was my wife’s high school senior English teacher and a formative influence on her. We would look up Judy and her husband Steve whenever we visited Julia’s Iowa relatives.
Judy had severe allergies, which in retrospect may have had some connection with the kidney and brain cancer that broke out suddenly this past year and killed her. I vividly remember her talking about how Monsanto herbicides have polluted all of the state’s drinking water and her difficulty with finding non-contaminated fruits, vegetables, and meat. (Jane Smiley talks about farmers polluting the water table in A Thousand Acres.) Judy would have liked the book I’m currently reading, Wendell Berry’s novel Remembering, which takes an axe to current farming practices.
The protagonist is a former agricultural journalist who has gone back to his roots and started farming, just as his parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did (we learn about them all in the book). Andy’s lightbulb moment occurs when he is writing a Scientific Farming feature on a successful farmer. What he sees so appalls him that he falls out with his editor and quits rather than write the piece.
The farmer, Andy notes,
was the fulfillment of the dreams of his more progressive professors. On all the two thousand acres there was not a fence, not an animal, not a woodlot, not a tree, not a garden. The whole place was planted in corn, right up to the walls of the two or three unused barns that were still standing. Meikelberger owned a herd of machines. His grain bins covered acres. He had an office like a bank president’s. The office was a carpeted room at the back of the house, expensively and tastefully furnished, as was the rest of the house, as far as Andy saw it. It was a brick ranch house with ten rooms and a garage, each room a page from House Beautiful, and it was deserted.
As he interviews Meikelberger, Andy discovers all is not well. Meikelberger is deeply in debt, and the stresses of his job have led to severe ulcer problems. Nevertheless, the farmer ignores all warning signals and pushes on:
[T]here was nothing, simply nothing at all, that Meikelberger allowed to stand in his way: not a neighbor or a tree or even his own body. Meikelberger’s ambition had made common cause with a technical power that proposed no limit to itself, that was, in fact, destroying Meikelberger, as it had already destroyed nearly all that was natural or human around him.
Shortly after the interview, Andy chances upon an Amish farmer and sees farming from a different perspective. The man has only 80 acres but, as he points out, it’s enough to take care of everyone living on it. When Andy is invited to share supper, he notes a dramatic contrast between the man’s house and Meikelberger’s:
It was a pretty place, its prettiness not so much made as allowed. It was a place of work, but a place too of order and rest, where work was done in the condition of acknowledged blessedness and of gratitude. As they ate, they talked, making themselves known to each other.
Remembering has special import for my wife, who grew up on a small Iowa farm. Unfortunately, her father, who once dreamed of going to college and who had a reverence for learning, was victimized by the scientific farming mentality. He listened seriously when agricultural professors preached that
bigger was better and biggest was best; that people coming into a place to use it need ask only what they wanted, not what was there; that whatever in humanity or nature failed before the advance of this mechanical ambition deserved to fail; and that the answers were in the universities and the corporate and government offices, not in the land or the people.
Because of ag professors, Lawrence didn’t collect his pig and cattle manure—petroleum-based chemical fertilizers were all the rage—and he built a special hog confinement shed. Most seriously, he expanded the farm at just the moment when both land and petroleum prices were at their height (the late 1970s), after which they plummeted, causing a full blown depression in America’s heartland. Because Lawrence died of a heart attack around that time, he didn’t see the family lose the farm.
Julia contrasts him with a cousin of hers who went the natural route, not confining the hogs but letting them roam free, as her family had when she was growing up. As a result, this cousin now sells to specialty markets at premium prices, and his farm, though small, is still thriving forty years later. Julia’s brother, on the other hand, had to give up his dream of farming and instead went to college and became a nurse (so that he could stay in the area and live in the family home). He has, however, held on to a few acres, which is under a government conservation program. He plants wild oats and various clovers to provide a habitat for pheasants and other birds, thereby staying in touch with the land. It’s not, however, what he envisioned.
We don’t know for certain that the stresses of big agriculture killed Julia’s father or that polluted water and food led to Judy’s cancer. If they were characters in a Berry novel, however, those factors would loom large.
