Suddenly it’s not only liberal bloggers like myself who are invoking George Orwell’s 1984 to depict today’s GOP. About Donald Trump’s recent contention that Arizona’s Maricopa County erased its voter registration database to hide election fraud, Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, tweeted,
Wow. this is unhinged. I’m literally looking at our voter registration database on my other screen. Right now. We can’t indulge these insane lies any longer. As a party. As a state. As a country. This is as readily falsifiable as 2+2=5. If we don’t call this out….
GOP math also proved too much for those responsible for overseeing Maricopa’s election. Boston University history professor Heather Cox Richardson reports on their response to those Republicans attempting to throw out recount the results:
In a remarkable Twitter thread, the Maricopa County official account destroyed the effort by the private company Cyber Ninjas to recount the 2020 votes in that county. “The 2020 elections were run w/ integrity, the results certified by the county & state were accurate, & the 2 independent audits conducted by the County are the true final word on the subject,” the account said. “We know auditing. The Senate Cyber Ninja audit is not a real audit.” The account went on to list all the many ways in which this audit is simply a propaganda effort to shore up the Big Lie that the election was stolen.
I quote Richardson, whose daily e-mail posts on contemporary politics have become must reading for thousands, because her historian’s perspective is useful. When a party engages in shenanigans to overturn elections and shrink the electorate while failing to discipline out-of-control members (Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Green), it will alienate a critical number of its voters. Pushback from such members as Richer and principled conservative Liz Cheney, recently stripped of party leadership for telling the truth about the election, will take its toll. “The Republican Party,” she predicts, “is nearing the end of its dominant run in our democracy.”
Whether Richardson is right or not, it’s worth returning to Richer’s 2+2 allusion to understand how the Trump cultism operates. Winston at one point writes in a journal which he thinks is private,
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Later, right before he and Julia are arrested, he has a momentary vision of hope. Bleak though their own prospects are, they can share the future with children yet unborn if they pass along this vision of freedom:
You were the dead, theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.
Orwell’s novel then blots out this hope as Winston, under torture, surrenders that freedom. To be sure, he resists at first as O’Brien (a.k.a. Big Brother) questions him. Think of the electric shocks administered as the equivalent of Trump threats to any Republican that defies him:
“Do you remember,” he went on, “writing in your diary, ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four’?”
“Yes,” said Winston.
O’Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. “How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?”
“Four.”
“And if the party says that it is not four but five–then how many?”
“Four.”
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five.
By the end of the session, Winston is responding to the fingers question, “I don’t know. I don’t know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six–in all honesty I don’t know.”
O’Brien then explains his rationale to Winston:
Shall I tell you why we have brought you here? To cure you! To make you sane! Will you understand, Winston, that no one whom we bring to this place ever leaves our hands uncured? We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.
By the end of the book, Winston has changed:
Almost unconsciously he traced with his finger in the dust on the table:
2+2=5
“They can’t get inside you,” she had said. But they could get inside you. “What happens to you here is FOR EVER,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. Something was killed in your breast: burnt out, cauterized out.
I have a sense that something has been cauterized out of the current GOP. As some have noted, many appear to believe in nothing but their own reelection. In today’s Republican Party, one can be pro-free trade or anti-free trade, pro-infrastructure spending or anti-infrastructure spending, pro-regulation or anti-regulation. One can be elevated to a leadership position even if one voted against the Republican 2018 tax cuts, as we see with New Yorker Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, once a moderate Republican and now a Trump sycophant and election truther. The one thing Republicans are not allowed is to think for themselves.
In other words, with occasional exceptions, they have been cured. There was massive voter fraud in 2020, Trump was the real winner, the January 6 insurrection was tourists strolling through the Capitol, and 2+2=5.
I share today another section from Does Literature Make Us Better People? A 2500-Year-Old Debate, a book project currently undergoing revision. In the previous chapter I look at what Marx and Engels say about literature’s impact on people’s lives. In this chapter I look at Freud and Jung’s thoughts. Here’s what I say about Freud.Any feedback is welcome.
If Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud are sometimes paired in the history of thought, it is because Marx sees unseen forces moving the course of history and Freud sees unseen forces moving the lives of individuals. If literature helps us understand these foundational forces, then it does indeed have the potential to change lives. It’s just that where literary Marxists see literature making lives better in the aggregate, literary Freudians and Jungians see it doing so one person at a time.
Freud (1856-1939) was a Jewish psychologist practicing in Vienna. After receiving medical training at the University of Vienna and the Vienna General Hospital, Freud went into private practice, where he stumbled on “the talking cure” when his severely neurotic patient Anna O discovered that her symptoms were reduced when she recalled and recounted traumatic incidents from her childhood.
Other of Freud’s theories include the damage inflicted by repression, the dynamics of patient transference (from the love object to the analyst), the significance of dreams and (controversially) the existence of a subliminal death wish. Freud attracted a set of noteworthy followers, who spread the word about psychoanalysis, although some would evolve away from him and set up other schools. He spent his final years in London, having left Vienna to escape the Nazis.
Although he is considered the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud today is often taken more seriously by the literary community than by fellow psychologists. Some of the latter regard him more as a poet than a scientist—this is not a compliment—and it is true that he attributes many of his discoveries to the literature he encountered growing up, especially Shakespeare and the great Greek tragedians.
Psychoanalysis, in the words of Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, “was created to enable man to accept the problematic nature of life without being defeated by it, or giving in to escapism.” Works of art enter into the process, meanwhile, both by articulating our problems and by helping us achieve (in the words of sociologist and cultural critic Philip Rieff) “emotional stability” and “self-mastery.” Literature does this at two levels of engagement. Simply reading poems and stories and attending plays (in other words, immersing without significant reflection) takes us into and through debilitating inner conflicts. Literature delights us because we feel we can control psychological challenges.
On a more conscious level, however, when we analyze literature from a Freudian point of view, we come to better understand these conflicts and see our options. Furthermore, by studying our psychological responses to various works, we can diagnose what ails us. Literature, at this point, becomes instructive.
Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex is a good place to begin a discussion of Freud, in part because it allows us to further explore the study of audience response initiated by Aristotle, in part because we can see how Freud uses the play to formulate a number of his major ideas.
We have already noted that Aristotle attributes the intense emotional responses generated by Oedipus to pity and fear. We speculated that, for Athenian audiences, the intense emotions arose from identifying with characters who (consistent with Athenian optimism) thought they could control their destinies, only to discover that certain aspects of existence were beyond them. Freud, while fascinated by the intense emotions evoked by Oedipus and interested in Aristotle’s pity-fear dynamic, has a different explanation for why the play would have evoked such intense emotions.
For him, Oedipus articulates desires so socially taboo that we can’t even acknowledge we have them. The male child, who doesn’t think in nuance, desires to kill that father, who is usurping his rightful place as the center of his mother’s attention. Because the father is so powerful, however, the child imagines being punished for his murderous wishes, perhaps by castration. For self-protection, therefore, the child represses them, and what we repress becomes toxic. Freud may or may not have said, when asked to describe his theories, “secrets make us sick,” but in any event the formulation functions as a useful summation. Taboos have such a hold on our mind that we can feel nauseated at the mere mention of them, and when Oedipus discovers that he has actually acted them out, he symbolically castrates himself, poking out his eyes with Jocasta’s brooch to override the mental pain.
Therefore, when Greek audiences watched him slowly but inexorably learn that he has acted upon taboo desires, they would have been both horrified and relieved at seeing these desires expressed. They acknowledged the desires through identification (pity) and distanced themselves through denial (fear). In sum, they felt cathartic relief at the realization that they could approach and survive that which they dared not name. While Plato doesn’t specifically mention Oedipus in The Republic—the literary scenes he mentions are Hesiod’s misbehaving deities and Odysseus’s encounters with Hades and with food—one can see why he doesn’t want the great tragedians in his rational utopia. The emotional dynamite with which Sophocles is playing exceeds the capacity of philosopher guardians.
Without literature, however, society cannot achieve psychic health, which is why Aristotle lauds the emotional effects of catharsis. Renaissance playwright Christopher Marlow provides us a great example of this with his Doctor Faustus, who uses Homer and the lyre musician Amphion (from Greek mythology) as anti-depressants and suicide prevention treatment. Faustus is finding himself torn between his desires and religion’s strictures when he speaks of poetry’s benefits:
My heart’s so harden’d, I cannot repent: Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven, But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears, “Faustus, thou art damn’d!” then swords, and knives, Poison, guns, halters, and envenom’d steel Are laid before me to dispatch myself; And long ere this I should have slain myself, Had not sweet pleasure conquer’d deep despair. Have not I made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander’s love and Oenon’s death? And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then, or basely despair?
For Freud, repressing our socially forbidden desires takes such a mental toll that we must figure out ways to manage the situation. One way is through sublimation, in which we find a lofty substitute. Art fulfills this function so that, to take a famous literary example, the tormented protagonist in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice transmutes his unacceptable desire for an adolescent boy into poetry. When we read such works, rather than allowing ourselves to be pulled down by our guilt, we feel ennobled by our suffering.
Our dreams also come to our rescue. While our forbidden desires do damage when we push them into our subconscious, our dreams provide an outlet, transforming our mental distress into fictional narrative, poetic images, and dramatic enactments. That’s not the end of the process, however. Because, even when asleep, we still regard our desires as dangerous and unacceptable, our dreams disguise them. If we are to identity what troubles us, therefore, we must interpret them, and in Interpretation of Dreams, Freud contrasts the actual or “latent” content of our dreams with their surface or “manifest” content. He also tracks the dreamwork process, explaining why dreams take the shape that they do. According to Carl Jung, Freud had a remarkable ability to help patients interpret their dreams, an important step in lessening the effects of toxic repression.
Jocasta is partially right, partially wrong when, in response to Oedipus’s fears, she tells him, “Do not worry you will wed your mother. It’s true that in their dreams a lot of men have slept with their own mothers, but someone who ignores all this bears life more easily.” She is right that the incest wish is the stuff of dreams (although Freud would say it is usually disguised) but wrong that such desires can be ignored. Repressed, they return as neurosis, which in the play is symbolized by the plague that has broken out in Thebes. Only by facing up to the dark desires can we keep them from tearing us apart. Sophocles captures this in the sequel to Oedipus that he wrote at the end of his life, Oedipus at Colonus. Oedipus may be overwhelmed by self-horror at the end of the first play, but by the end of the sequel he has achieved spiritual mastery.
Literature has a special relationship to dreaming. As Rieff puts it, a work of art, like a dream, works in part as “a safety valve, a form of exhibitionism, in which the tension accumulated by private motives is drained off in public display.” That being said, a work of art is also different than a dream, in ways which Freud lays out in his essay “Creative Writers and Day Dreaming.”
As the title indicates, Freud describes imaginative writing as a form of conscious dreaming. In other words, creative authors tap into the same repressed desires that lead to dreams, only in this case they can consciously shape the dream material. As Freud describes the process in his essay on “The Uncanny,”
In the main we adopt an unvarying passive attitude towards real experience and are subject to the influence of our physical environment. But the storyteller has a peculiarly directive influence over us; by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions, to dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another.
The author achieves a certain mastery over emotional turbulence by composing the work and audiences achieve that inner mastery by reading it.
Freud spells out some of the turbulence in his daydreaming essay. Look carefully at stories, he says, and you will see them dealing with sides of ourselves that shame us: ambition phantasies for men, love phantasies for women. Repression has entered in because (at least at the time Freud was writing)
the well-brought up young woman is only allowed a minimum of erotic desire, and the young man has to learn to suppress the excess of self-regard which he brings with him from the spoilt days of his childhood, so he may find his place in a society which is full of other individuals making equally strong demands.
Although such phantasies are to be found in all literature, Freud says they are particularly evident in what Freud kindly calls works by “less pretentious authors.” Today we may refer the genres as “chick lit” and “dick lit.” Literature, like dreams, disguises these shameful desires so that readers can approach them without revulsion or shame, thereby robbing them of their toxic power and allowing us to achieve stability and mastery. Sounding like Plato, who regards poets as “deceivers” who trick us through beauty, Freud says writers “bribe” us with formal technique: they soften “the character of [our] egoistic daydreams by altering and disguising it.” This allows us “to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame,” thereby liberating the “tensions in our minds.” This release, as Freud sees it, is one of a novel’s chief pleasures.
It sounds as though Freud’s only distinction between greater and lesser literature is that great writers bribe us better. If so, I would disagree: as I argue in the feminism and Jane Austen chapters, great literature serves us better psychologically than “less pretentious” potboilers because one is far better off if one reads substantive treatments of underlying anxieties (such as, say, Sophocles’s Oedipus). One may get momentary tension relief from reading about the girl getting the guy or the guy getting the bad guys, but that’s it. The work you put into a great work returns dividends in the form of better understanding your state of mind. In short, you get the literary therapy you pay for.
I conclude my summation of Freud with a quick glance at literature’s therapeutic process as it occurs in two genres. People generally read fairy tales and horror fiction without looking for deeper meaning, which gives us the opportunity to look at the benefits literature bestows (from a Freudian point of view) at both the pre-reflective and reflective levels.
In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, prominent Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheimtalks about how children need folk fairy tales to find meaning in their confusing lives:
Just because his life is often bewildering to him, the child needs even more to be given the chance to understand himself in this complex world with which he must learn to cope. To be able to do so, the child must be helped to make some coherent sense out of the turmoil of his feelings. He needs ideas on how to bring his inner house into order, and on that basis be able to create order in his life. He needs…a moral education which subtly, and by implication only, conveys to him the advantages of moral behavior, not through abstract ethical concepts but through that which seems tangibly right and therefore meaningful to him.
Folk fairy tales, Bettelheim says, confront children with basic human predicaments—maturation, conflict, aging, death, the limits of our existence—respecting them for their anxieties and reassuring them that they can achieve satisfactory resolutions. Different fairy tales specialize in different anxieties, as a quick glance indicates. In “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, children replay (among other things) abandonment fears; in “Snow White,” conflict with the mother; in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” conflict with the father; in “Cinderella,” sibling rivalry; in “Little Red Cap,” anxieties about growing up; in “Sleeping Beauty,” turbulent adolescence. The child instinctively recognizes that these stories speak to primal concerns, providing images and a language for what otherwise would feel like murky chaos.
“Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, sees the panicked children, confronted with adult problems, reverting to an infantile state, so that they gorge themselves on the gingerbread house. In the witch’s cannibalism, however, they come to recognize “the danger of unrestrained oral greed and dependence.” To survive, they must develop initiative and realize that their only resource lies in intelligent planning and acting. They must exchange subservience to the pressures of the id for acting in accordance with the ego.” By the end of the story, they have acquired new treasures: “new-won independence in thought and action, a new self-reliance which is opposite of the passive dependence which characterized them when they were deserted in the woods.” Bettelheim conducts similar analysis of the other fairy tales he mentions.
Freud’s essay on the uncanny (a.k.a. the spooky) is particularly useful to understanding why we often find ourselves simultaneously repulsed by and attracted to the works of E.T.A. Hoffman, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and other masters of gothic horror. It’s because we sense something recognizable in the monsters. “We have met the enemy and he is us,” Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly once wrote, riffing off an Admiral Perry quote, and Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness talks of “the fascination of the abomination.” The energy we put into denying our commonality comes back to us in feelings of dread, what Freud calls “the return of the repressed”: the more we deny, the greater the horror. We see this dynamic played out in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde where Jekyll does all he can to deny his hidden Hyde self, which is at odds with his sense of himself as a civilized gentleman. Jekyll uses strong drugs to suppress the self he “hides,” but as a result Hyde only grows in power, trampling on children and clubbing people to death. Reading such fiction allows us to approach, acknowledge, and thereby defuse our guilt and shame over our unsavory selves.
All this occurs at the pre-reflective level. Once we understand the process, however—once we begin applying Freud’s tools to understand why we respond as we do—we open up new windows into the psyche, both our own and those of others. Watching a child responding to a favorite fairy tale gives us a better grasp of his or her fears. With horror, meanwhile, we can probe the literary monster that we find the most frightening because this one will give us the deepest understanding of our own anxieties. If we interpret our responses to literature as Freud interprets dreams, we can achieve at least a modicum of self-knowledge and self-mastery.
This past week Christians celebrated the moment when Jesus, after having spent time with his disciples following the Resurrection, ascended into heaven. This is a prelude to Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit, the “advocate with the Father” that Jesus promised his followers, descended upon them, causing them to discover the god within.
One of the best Ascension poems I know is that of the 17th century Welsh mystic Henry Vaughan, who laments that, while others (including his recently departed brother) have ascended, he is still on earth. As is often the case with Vaughan, crystalline imagery contends with “dull and hoary” complaints. (See my post on “The World.”) The dead, he says, are like stars that glow and glitter above “some gloomy grove,” trying to penetrate Vaughan’s “cloudy breast” and ignite his “cold love.” Vaughan laments that, when he tries to look past the dust of death, he has trouble imagining the shining mysteries. It is like looking at a bird’s nest and trying to imagine the fledgling bird that has flown. (“But what fair well or grove he sings in now/That is to him unknown.”)
Unknown, perhaps, but at least Vaughan can catch glimpses. Angels send bright dreams that allow us to peep into glory. It is as though we are tombs in which a star is confined. If we could only fully acknowledge her (Vaughan genders the soul female) “she’ll shine through all the sphere.”
The last stanza has Vaughan begging God to disperse the mists that “blot and fill my perspective.” Either that or allow the poet to ascend, like Christ, so that he may see God face to face.
They Are All Gone into the World of Light By Henry Vaughan
They are all gone into the world of light! And I alone sit ling’ring here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.
It glows and glitters in my cloudy breast, Like stars upon some gloomy grove, Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest, After the sun’s remove.
I see them walking in an air of glory, Whose light doth trample on my days: My days, which are at best but dull and hoary, Mere glimmering and decays.
O holy Hope! and high Humility, High as the heavens above! These are your walks, and you have show’d them me To kindle my cold love.
Dear, beauteous Death! the jewel of the just, Shining nowhere, but in the dark; What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust Could man outlook that mark!
He that hath found some fledg’d bird’s nest, may know At first sight, if the bird be flown; But what fair well or grove he sings in now, That is to him unknown.
And yet as angels in some brighter dreams Call to the soul, when man doth sleep: So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes And into glory peep.
If a star were confin’d into a tomb, Her captive flames must needs burn there; But when the hand that lock’d her up, gives room, She’ll shine through all the sphere.
O Father of eternal life, and all Created glories under thee! Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall Into true liberty.
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill My perspective still as they pass, Or else remove me hence unto that hill, Where I shall need no glass.
When Donald Trump contended that his response to Hurricane Maria was a success, ignoring the 3000 people who died, I compared the coverup to the banana massacre coverup described in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude–which incidentally was based on an actual cover-up . Now that the current GOP, taking its cues from its dear leader, is striving to do the same with the January 6 insurrection, I return to Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece.
In the novel, the government massacres striking workers at an American-run banana plantation and then claims that no one died. Trump started the ball rolling on the GOP’s own erasure attempts when he contended that the insurrection had posed “zero threat”:
“Right from the start, it was zero threat,” he said. “Look, they went in — they shouldn’t have done it — some of them went in, and they’re hugging and kissing the police and the guards, you know? They had great relationships. A lot of the people were waved in, and then they walked in, and they walked out.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, the ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has also downplayed the insurrection, saying,
I knew those are people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law, so I wasn’t concerned,
Had the protesters been Black, he added, that would have been a different matter.
Most recently we have Republican Congressman Clyde saying,
Watching the TV footage of those who entered the Capitol and walked through Statuary Hall showed people in an orderly fashion staying between the stanchions and ropes, taking videos, pictures. You know, if you didn’t know the TV footage was a video from January the 6th, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
Meanwhile, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy refuses to meet with DC Metopolitan police officer Michael Fanone, who had a heart attack and concussion during the attack and who wants the GOP to stop averting its eyes. Rep. Liz Cheney, the third ranking Republican in the house, has just been ousted from her leadership position in the party for having the same wish. To draw a parallel from the novel, Fanone and Cheney resemble Jose Arcadio Secondo, the one survivor of the massacre who, upon returning to the village, discovers that the massacre has vanished into thin air:
The official version, repeated a thousand times and mangled out all over the country by every means of communication the government found at hand, was finally accepted: there were no dead, the satisfied workers had gone back to their families, and the banana company was suspending all activity until the rains stopped. Martial law continued with an eye to the necessity of taking emergency measures for the public disaster of the endless downpour, but the troops were confined to quarters. During the day the soldiers walked through the torrents in the streets with their pant legs rolled up, playing with boats with the children. At night, after taps, they knocked doors down with their rifle butts, hauled suspects out of their beds, and took them off on trips from which there was no return. The search for and extermination of the hoodlums, murders, arsonists, and rebels of Decree No 4 was still going on, but the military denied it even to the relatives of the victims who crowded the commandants’ offices in search of news. “You must have been dreaming,” the officers insisted. Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened, and nothing ever will happen. This is a happy town.” In that way they were finally able to wipe out the union leaders.
The erasure is so complete that, when the military find their way to Jose Arcadio’s house, in magical realist style they literally cannot see him, even though he is sitting there before them. He, meanwhile, becomes a hermit, obsessed with proving that the massacre actually took place.
I wonder if the same thing will happen to Liz Cheney. Will her Republican colleagues render her essentially invisible, ignoring her as she walks through the halls of Congress. If any of them has any sense of shame—a big if, I know—she will function as a painful reminder. I also wonder if she will suffer Jose Arcadio’s fate, dreaming of a return to sanity that never comes. In the novel, years later Jose Arcadio’s brother stumbles upon him still doing research after everyone has forgotten about him:
Jose Arcadio Segundo, devoured by baldness, indifferent to the air that had been sharpened by the nauseating vapors, was still reading and rereading the unintelligible parchments. He was illuminated by a seraphic glow. He scarcely raised his eyes when he heard the door open…
“There were more than three thousand of them,” was all that Jose Arcadio Segundo said. “I’m sure now that they were everybody who had been at the station.”
Of course, downplaying or denying the insurrection is part and parcel of an even bigger lie, that the election was stolen. Publicly, Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell put on a reasonable face, contending that of course Joe Biden won the election and why would people ever think Republicans thought differently. At such moments, they are the soldiers rolling up their pants legs and playing with children in the rain.
At night, however, they push voter suppression measures, fire responsible election officials, claim non-existent voter fraud, and do all they can to rig the game. The January 6 insurrection may have just been a dress rehearsal for the 2022 and 2024 elections.
Does truth stand a chance in all of this? Garcia Marquez is not optimistic.
Tom Phillips, Iris Murdoch (in National Portrait Gallery)
Thursday
Maria Popova, whose Brain Pickingsis one of my favorite blogs, recently wrote about Iris Murdoch’s musings about literature. What Popova surfaces coincides so well with the book that I’m currently writing (Does Literature Make Us Better People? A 2500-Year-Old Debate) that I use today’s post just to marvel at some of Murdoch’s observations.
For instance, there’s this one about how literature helps give form to life’s shapelessness—and how it comes to us naturally because we are by nature storytellers:
Literary modes are very natural to us, very close to ordinary life and to the way we live as reflective beings. Not all literature is fiction, but the greater part of it is or involves fiction, invention, masks, playing roles, pretending, imagining, story-telling. When we return home and “tell our day,” we are artfully shaping material into story form. (These stories are very often funny, incidentally.) So in a way as word-users we all exist in a literary atmosphere, we live and breathe literature, we are all literary artists, we are constantly employing language to make interesting forms out of experience which perhaps originally seemed dull or incoherent. How far reshaping involves offences against truth is a problem any artist must face. A deep motive for making literature or art of any sort is the desire to defeat the formlessness of the world and cheer oneself up by constructing forms out of what might otherwise seem a mass of senseless rubble.
The issue of whether “reshaping involves offenses against truth” is a big one. Plato accuses poets of being liars, creating an imitation of an imitation of an imitation, but Aristotle is more in agreement with Murdoch, arguing that, poets look to the “law of probability and necessity” when they have their characters speak or act. “It is this universality,” Aristotle writes, “at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages.”
About literature’s relationship to truth, Murdoch writes,
A poem, play or novel usually appears as a closed pattern. But it is also open in so far as it refers to a reality beyond itself, and such a reference raises… questions about truth… Art is truth as well as form, it is representational as well as autonomous. Of course the communication may be indirect, but the ambiguity of the great writer creates spaces which we can explore and enjoy because they are openings on to the real world and not formal language games or narrow crevices of personal fantasy; and we do not get tired of great writers, because what is true is interesting…
And elsewhere:
Beauty in art is the formal imaginative exhibition of something true….Training in an art is largely training in how to discover a touchstone of truth…
Some of the theorists whose ideas I explore in my book insist on literature’s truth-telling mission. These include Samuel Johnson (who lauds Shakespeare on this score), Percy Shelley, Friedrich Engels, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Although Engels wrote political pamphlets himself, he wants artists to stay away from politics and just tell the truth. He, Shelley, and Du Bois all believe that progressive aims will be fulfilled through such truth-telling because the arc of history bends towards truth and justice. Therefore, they don’t want artists to sacrifice their art to an agenda. Murdoch thinks along the same lines:
A citizen has a duty to society, and a writer might sometimes feel he ought to write persuasive newspaper articles or pamphlets, but this would be a different activity. The artist’s duty is to art, to truth-telling in his own medium, the writer’s duty is to produce the best literary work of which he is capable, and he must find out how this can be done.
And further:
A propaganda play which is indifferent to art is likely to be a misleading statement even if it is inspired by good principles….Any society contains propaganda, but it is important to distinguish this from art and to preserve the purity and independence of the practice of art.
Because truth is so important to the advancement of society, artistic freedom is absolutely vital—which explains why democracies are so much more vibrant, not to mention economically successful, than autocracies. Murdoch writes,
A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.
Murdoch elaborates on what a bad society would not want to see. Her distinction between fantasy and imagination is important. Fantasy (by which she does not mean the genre of fantasy but shallow wish fulfillment) is preferred by autocracies because it feeds our smallness:
Good art is good for people precisely because it is not fantasy but imagination. It breaks the grip of our own dull fantasy life and stirs us to the effort of true vision. Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves. Literature stirs and satisfies our curiosity, it interests us in other people and other scenes, and helps us to be tolerant and generous.
Sounding somewhat like Shelley, but also Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum, Murdoch says that great literature encourages tolerance:
I would like to say that all great artists are tolerant in their art, but perhaps this cannot be argued. Was Dante tolerant? I think most great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centers of reality which are remote from oneself. There is a breath of tolerance and generosity and intelligent kindness which blows out of Homer and Shakespeare and the great novelists. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image.
It is any surprise, then, that she says “[t]here is always more bad art around than good art, and more people like bad art than like good art.” That’s because good art challenges us rather than feeds what we already think. Great literature is hard.
Tim O’Brien of Bloomberg had a perfect response to a threat the other day from Lindsey Graham, Trump sycophant and senator from South Carolina. He simply tweeted out a passage from George Orwell’s 1984:
Graham on Trump opponents, including in his own party:
The people who are trying to erase him are going to wind up getting erased.
O’Brien’s tweet:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
Those who most loudly decry “cancel culture” are the most interested in canceling others.
While we’re on the subject of the novel, let’s remind ourselves of one of its most important observations: autocrats lie, not because they expect to be believed, but to test their followers’ loyalty. Donald Trump tested his followers with his 30,500+ lies while president, and now GOP politicians must sign on to the Big Lie about a stolen election (or at least not publicly dispute it) if they want to remain in the party. As Orwell puts it,
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Orwell understands well why the GOP is currently attempting to don a populist mantle while, at the same time, opposing labor unions, a rise in the minimum wage, and higher taxes on the wealthy.Orwell has Stalin’s Soviet Union in mind as he describes the Party’s hypocrisy:
The official ideology abounds with contradictions even when there is no practical reason for them. Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason. It systematically undermines the solidarity of the family, and it calls its leader by a name which is a direct appeal to the sentiment of family loyalty.
We’re getting such policy incoherence from the GOP across the board at the moment: they are for and against free trade, for and against big deficits, for and against a strong executive, for and against free speech, for and against law and order. It all makes sense, however, if their real aim is power. As Big Brother explains to Winston,
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
I once remember contending, in a 1984 faculty panel on 1984, that Orwell’s dystopia was no longer relevant. It struck me at the time as hysterical and overly gloomy. I now consider it an indispensable account of how autocracies and autocratic thinking work. Orwell studied Hitler and Stalin and got it right.
Here a very timely Mary Oliver poem—I’ve shared it in the past—that captures the green wave that is sweeping over Sewanee at the moment. Oliver has a thing about bees, which show up in multiple poems. I think the image of bees diving into flowers captures her own sense of immersing herself, and coating herself, in nature. As she writes in “Plum Trees, “There’s nothing so sensible as sensual inundation.” In other words, there is no dividing line between reason and passion.
This emphasis on poetry’s sensuality reminds me of an Iris Murdoch observation about poetry. When talking about how literature arouses the emotions, Murdoch mentions the importance of physical sensations:
Literature could be called a disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions….I would include the arousing of emotion in the definition of art, although not every occasion of experiencing art is an emotional occasion. The sensuous nature of art is involved here, the fact that it is concerned with visual and auditory sensations and bodily sensations. If nothing sensuous is present no art is present. This fact alone makes it quite different from “theoretical” activities…
I imagine Oliver wholeheartedly agreeing. While she derives spiritual sustenance from nature, she simultaneously emphasizes “the flourishing of the physical body.” For Oliver, there is no separation between the physical and the spiritual realms.
I normally steer clear of political predictions that the sky is falling—we are exposed to far too much hyperbole as it is—but I’m now convinced that the Republicans are in training to overturn future elections and establish minority rule. What we have witnessed since the 2020 election, I now fear, is just a practice run or dress rehearsal for such a move. Along with the January 6 insurrection to stop the certification, I have in mind the 147 members of Congress who voted not to certify the 2020 results; the wave of voter suppression bills introduced by Republican state legislators (250 in 43 states); the GOP purging its election officials who certified that the election was fair; Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election as a litmus test for GOP membership; and the elevation of conspiracy-spouting fruitcakes (Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz) and power hungry cynics (Elise Stefanik, Josh Hawley) over principled conservatives (Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney). I’m no longer confident that enough people will play fair to make the system work.
When I think back to works where I developed my belief that fair play will prevail over treachery, C. S. Lewis’s Prince Caspian comes to mind. Narnia’s rebel forces, led by Peter, are trying to regain the throne for Caspian from the evil usurper Miraz. Because the Narnians are outnumbered and out-armed, Peter proposes what Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani proposed to Trump supporters prior to their storming the Capitol: trial by combat.
The combat is suspenseful as Miraz is the better fighter, but it has a couple of twists that struck me as a child. One is that, when Miraz stumbles on a tree root, Peter acts according to chivalric principles and doesn’t take advantage:
A great shout arose from the Old Narnians. Miraz was down—not struck by Peter, but face downwards, having tripped on a tussock. Peter stepped back, waiting for him to rise.
“Oh bother, bother, bother,” said Edmund [Peter’s brother] to himself. “Need he be as gentlemanly as all that? I suppose he must. Comes of being a Knight and a High King. I suppose it is what Aslan would like. But that brute will be up again in a minute and then——”
Miraz, however, has treacherous subordinates who have been eyeing the throne and who, in fact, tricked him into fighting with Peter in the first place. When Miraz goes down, they break the rules:
But “that brute” never rose. The Lords Glozelle and Sopespian had their own plans ready. As soon as they saw their King down they leaped into the lists crying, “Treachery! Treachery! The Narnian traitor has stabbed him in the back while he lay helpless. To arms! To arms, Telmar!”
They are gaslighting, of course. While there’s no video footage of the fight, everyone has seen what actually happened. And then there’s Glozelle doing to Miraz what Stafanik is doing to Cheney for a House leadership position. (Cheney, while an arch conservative, is on the outs with the GOP for insisting that Biden’s election was legitimate):
Peter hardly understood what was happening. He saw two big men running towards him with drawn swords. Then the third Telmarine had leaped over the ropes on his left. “To arms, Narnia! Treachery!” Peter shouted. If all three had set upon him at once he would never have spoken again. But Glozelle stopped to stab his own King dead where he lay: “That’s for your insult, this morning,” he whispered as the blade went home.
Glozelle and Sopespian have every reason to believe their treachery will work. After all, they have the superior forces. But because a higher principle governs Narnia, the good guys win. Aslan is “on the move” and has awakened the trees. In a scene very much like Tolkien’s Ents taking out the goblins in the Battle of Helm’s Deep, Narnia’s forces do the same to the Telmarines:
But almost before the old Narnians were really warmed to their work they found the enemy giving way. Tough-looking warriors turned white, gazed in terror not on the Old Narnians but on something behind them, and then flung down their weapons, shrieking, “The Wood! The Wood! The end of the world!”
But soon neither their cries nor the sound of weapons could be heard any more, for both were drowned in the ocean-like roar of the Awakened Trees as they plunged through the ranks of Peter’s army, and then on, in pursuit of the Telmarines. Have you ever stood at the edge of a great wood on a high ridge when a wild south-wester broke over it in full fury on an autumn evening? Imagine that sound. And then imagine that the wood, instead of being fixed to one place, was rushing at you; and was no longer trees but huge people; yet still like trees because their long arms waved like branches and their heads tossed and leaves fell round them in showers. It was like that for the Telmarines. It was a little alarming even for the Narnians.
The hope here is that some deep dimension of the nation will save the day. For Lewis, a combination of Christianity, English decency, and a spiritualized nature come to the rescue. I’ll still put my hopes in The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, an independency judiciary, and also common decency.
Today being Mother’s Day, here’s Dante’s celebration of Jesus’s mother in the final canto of The Divine Comedy, which my Dante discussion group has just—well—discussed. Guided at this stage in his journey by St. Bernard, Dante is gazing at an enormous celestial rose, representing God’s love. Bernard offers up a prayer, asking Mary to intercede on Dante’s behalf.
Bernard mentions how God ennobled her, transforming her into one through whom He could “create Himself His creature.” The warmth of her womb, a “timeless peace,” quickened the seek of “this immortal bloom”:
O Virgin Mother, Daughter of thy Son Lowliest and loftiest of created stature, Fixed goal to which the eternal counsels run,
Thou art that She by whom our human nature Was so ennobled that it might become The Creator to create Himself His creature,
Thy side were made a shelter to relume [rekindle] The Love whose warmth within the timeless peace Quickened the seed of this immortal bloom;
High noon of charity to those in bliss, And upon earth, to men in mortal plight A living spring of hope, thy presence is.
Then comes Bernard’s intercession request for the pilgrim who has traveled all the way from the deepest pits of hell:
This man, who witnessed from the deepest pit of all the universe, up to this height The souls’ lives one by one, doth now entreat
That thou, by grace, may grant to him such might That higher yet in vision he may rise Towards the final source of bliss and light.
Bernard also asks Mary to cleanse Dante’s sight “till in the highest bliss it shares”:
And further do I pray thee, heavenly Queen Who canst all that thou wilt, keep his heart pure And meet when such great vision he has seen.
After gazing upon Bernard and Dante, Mary looks up to God. No other human can gaze so fixedly:
The eyes which God doth love and reverence, Gazing on him [Bernard] who prayed, to us made plain How prayers, devoutly prayed, her joy enhance.
Unto the eternal light she raised them then: No eye of living creature could aspire To penetrate so fixedly therein.
The mention of “prayers, devoutly prayed” reminds me of Milton’s Adam and Eve praying straight from the heart prior to bedtime in Book IV of Paradise Lost. Heartfelt prayers require no special ritual:
…other rites Observing none, but adoration pure Which God likes best, into their inmost bower Handed they went.
Thanks to Mary’s intercession on his behalf, Dante discovers that he can look directly at the heavenly light:
For now my sight, clear and yet clearer grown, Pierced through the ray of that exalted light, Wherein, as in itself, the truth is known.
What he sees cannot be rendered into words or recalled by memory:
Henceforth my vision mounted to a height Where speech is vanquished and must lag behind, And memory surrenders in such a flight.
Conveying to his reader what he saw–the goal of Divine Comedy, is like recalling a dream:
As from a dream one may awake to find Its passion yet imprinted on the heart, Although all else in canceled from the mind,
So of my vision now but little part Remains, yet in my inmost soul I know The sweet instilling which it did impart.
Mary has enabled the pilgrim to see the love at the core of the universe:
In that abyss I saw how love held bound Into one volume all the leaves whose flight Is scattered through the universe around;
How substance, accident, and mode unite Fused, so to speak, together, in such wise That this I tell of is one simple light.
Yea, of this complex I believe mine eyes Behind the universal form—in me, Even as I speak, I feel such joy arise.
And further:
That light doth so transform a man’s whole bent That never to another sight or thought Would he surrender, with his own consent;
For everything the will has ever sought Is gathered there, and there is every quest Made perfect, which apart from it falls short.
The canto ends, along with The Divine Comedy, by Dante extolling one last time the great wheel of love that moves all things:
Yet, as a wheel moves smoothly, free from jars, My will and my desire were turned by love,
The love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Say it again: through mothers we gain access to the love that moves the sun and the other stars.
Further thought: Reading The Divine Comedy with other literature professors has alerted me to Dante’s influence on poets I know and love. I’ve mentioned Milton above and in previous blog posts (for instance, here). I’ll add here Dante’s influence on Percy Shelley, who identifies with Dante’s struggle to express what is beyond expressing. Both poets use the image of scattered pages, which are ultimately designed to come together in one book. Dante writes:
In that abyss I saw how love held bound Into one volume all the leaves whose flight Is scattered through the universe around
In “Ode to a West Wind,” meanwhile, Shelley puns on leaves, equating dead tree leaves with pages of poetry. Like Dante, he knows his words can’t fully capture his vision but hopes that they will “quicken” a spark in readers, causing them to momentarily glimpse the divine:
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth! And, by the incantation of this verse, Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth The trumpet of a prophecy!
Donne too picks up in the image in his famous “Meditation 17.” Just as “no man is an island” but inextricably bound up with the rest of humankind, so also are the leaves of God’s book:
[A]ll mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another;
