Rockwell, —And Daniel Boone Comes to Life on the Underwood Portable
Tuesday
I’m currently completing my book on literature’s impact, which has been years in the making and which I’m currently entitling Does Literature Make Us Better People? Surveying a 2500-Year Debate, from Plato and Aristotle to Bertolt Brecht and Martha Nussbaum. (The title keeps changing.) In the book I seek to answer three sets of paired questions, of which the second one is
–Is there a difference between the effects of great literature and lightweight literature? –If so, is great literature good for us and lightweight literature bad?
It’s amazing how many answers people have given to that pairing. I briefly summarize some of them today.
What I call lightweight literature, incidentally, the French call “un roman à quatre sous” (a story worth four sous) and the Germans “U-Literatur” (for “unterhaltung” or entertainment and contrasted with E-Literatur, with the E standing for “ernste” or serious.) [Thanks to colleagues George Poe for the French and Reinhard Zachau for the German.]
One of my favorite terms is the Slovenian “trivialna literature,” while means what it looks like.
John Dryden and Alexander Pope – It appears that people first started attacking lightweight literature in the late 17th century when middle class readership exploded. John Dryden’s MacFlecknoe and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad called out large numbers of bad writers, which they feared were destroying all standards. The Dunciad concludes with an apocalyptic vision:
Nor public flame, nor private, dares to shine; Nor human spark is left, nor glimpse divine! Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored; Light dies before thy uncreating word: Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall; And universal darkness buries all.
Percy Shelley—While Shelley doesn’t talk about lesser literature, his distinction between the greatest literature and the runners-up helps set the terms of later discussions. The greatest poets (Homer, Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Milton) see to the very essence of humanity while figures like Euripides, Tasso, Lucan, Spenser, Voltaire and Rousseau get sidetracked by local concerns.
Marx, Engels and later Marxist scholars – Engels once complained about novels that, because they seek to be politically correct, fail to grasp actual historical conditions. He and Marx both claimed that they learned more about history from a genius royalist like Balzac than from novels written as socialist propaganda. Terry Eagleton builds on this idea, arguing that sometimes reactionary authors like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot capture the crisis of capitalism better than many progressive writers.
W.E.B. Du Bois –Although he once said, “I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda,” Du Bois actually took a stance similar to the Marxists. Pointing out how Blacks have been stereotyped in many works of literature, he thought the author’s responsibility was to describe them truthfully, even if the resulting images offended readers, black as well as white.
The Frankfurt School – Marxists, because they were interested in the masses, were the first scholars to make a concerted study of popular culture. They would also prove to be particularly critical of it, calling lightweight lit the opiate of the masses. In One Dimensional Man, Marcuse accuses such literature of leveling rather than raising the public.
Feminism – Feminists have grappled with the issues raised by lightweight literature, with many arguing that Harlequins and other formulaic romances socialize women into patriarchal modes of thinking. Others, more sympathetic, argue that these works allow women to voice deep grievances. Although many such works feature an attractive but imperious man who humiliates the heroine (think Pride and Prejudice), he often then suffers a reversal and must be saved or nursed by to heath by her. Yet even feminists who detect revenge and empowerment at work in this fantasy worry that, in the end, the woman sacrifices too much for a supposed happy ending.
Freud, Jung, and Their Descendants – To the extent that literature plays Aristotle’s therapeutic role, the question is whether great literature does a better job at this than lightweight literature. A good case can be made that stories that offer cheap wish fulfillments and formulaic hero’s journeys simply perpetuate neurosis whereas great literature shows a genuine way forward.
Ethical Criticism – Wayne Booth, who is one of my favorite theorists, compares books to friends and says that great literature helps us “improve our desires—to desire better desires.” The problem with lightweight literature is that, like a shallow friendship, it doesn’t get us to aspire to anything greater. In fact, it gets us to desire less, as can be seen with Peter Benchley’s bestselling novel Jaws:
[I]t is on the scales of otherness and range that this friend really lets me down. The range is extremely narrow—physical survival and physical pleasure are good; physical destruction or self-denial are bad. And whatever is really “other” is simply to be feared, not understood. Here we are, average, normal, comfortably familiar folks, and there they are, the threat. In short, my time with this friend so far has been a narrowing time, a time of bifurcating my world into stereotyped victims and stereotyped, villainous “others.” What had looked like a harmless bit of escape literature, useful for killing an hour or two with some excitement, appears in this view considerably more threatening to the spirit than Benchley intended with his sharks….The story tries to mold me into its limited shapes, giving me practice, as it were, in wanting and fearing certain minimal qualities and ignoring all others. I am to become if I enter this world, that kind of desirer, with precisely the kinds of strengths and weaknesses that the author has built into his structure.
Jane Austen on Lightweight Literature–Jane Austen takes regular potshots at lightweight literature, which she sometimes sees doing active harm. To summarize briefly one of the chapters in my book, she shows how
–gothic potboilers lead Catherine Morland astray in Northanger Abbey; –Marianne and Willoughby indulge in the romantic sensibilities of William Cowper and Sir Walter Scott while admiring Pope “no more than is proper”; –the Bertrams and Crawfords in Mansfield Park are led astray by the steamy German melodrama Lovers’ Vows, which allows them to vicariously imagine illicit love. By the end of the novel, Maria Bertram and Henry Crawford will literally engage in such love. –Captain Benwick seeks solace for his lost fiancé in the poetry of Scott and Byron. We see how ultimately shallow he is when he chooses a woman who shares his reading tastes (Louisa Musgrove) over the sublime Anne Elliot.
I think of lightweight lit the way I think of donuts: they’re fine from time to time but one mustn’t make a steady diet of them. Healthy foods taste so much better anyway.
Francis Haymen, Lovelace preparing to abduct Clarissa
Monday
The Literary Hub website has alerted me to a work about my scholarly field of expertise that I’ve got to get my hands on. Apparently Ritchie Robertson’s The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680-1790 contends that novels played a critical role in teaching empathy to an exploding middle class readership.
In an excerpt from the book, we see Ritchie focusing on epistolary novels, particularly Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa. Ritchie writes,
New scope for empathy was offered by the epistolary novel. By presenting a character’s experience through letters, the novelist brings us close to that experience as it happens. We follow the character’s thoughts and feelings in real time, as uncertain as they are about what will happen next. When a novel offers letters from several different people, we have something further: we understand characters’ experience from the inside while appreciating the diversity of characters. We are invited to feel the humanity even of those we dislike, and we are encouraged to feel intensely the sufferings of persecuted victims. Stories told in letters involve their readers far more intimately than stories recounted from the distant perspective of an impersonal narrator.
Given that the 18th century became known for proclaiming the rights of man (Thomas Paine) and the rights of women (Mary Wollstonecraft), one can see why teaching empathy would be a big deal. Ritchie writes that reading novels
helped people in the 18th century to put themselves in other people’s shoes, and sensitized them to cruelty in everyday life, savage punishments and abuses of human rights: In reading, they empathized across traditional social boundaries between nobles and commoners, masters and servants, men and women, perhaps even adults and children. As a consequence, they came to see others—people they did not know personally—as like them, as having the same kind of inner emotions.
Clarissa is about a rake who kidnaps the heroine under the pretext of rescuing her and who, when she continues to resist his advances, sedates her with opium and rapes her. Over a million words long, Richardson’s novel plunges us deeply into the psychology of numerous characters, especially Clarissa and Lovelace:
Lovelace stylizes himself as a Restoration rake and casts Clarissa as a proud beauty who must be conquered. His stale language of gallantry (“on the wings of love, I fly to my charmer”) contrasts with Clarissa’s directness and honesty, her “plain dealing,” which he fails to understand. Immediately after the rape, Clarissa’s distress emerges from a series of barely coherent draft letters, while Lovelace appears callously impenitent; but even as a victim Clarissa shows herself the stronger character. Her inner strength enables her to prepare for death, face it calmly, and write letters of forgiveness to all her family and even to Lovelace, while he tries to evade the fact of death by his fantasy of embalming her body and preserving her heart in a golden casket.
Ritchie particularly appreciates how French philosophe Denise Diderot sees Richardson “disclosing the evil concealed behind flattering self-deceptions in the dark recesses of the self.” Diderot writes of Richardson,
It is he who carries the torch into the depths of the cavern; it is he who learns to perceive the subtle and disreputable motives hidden and disguised beneath other motives which are respectable and which are eager to display themselves first. He breathes upon the sublime phantom that presents itself at the entrance to the cavern; and the hideous Moor behind the mask is revealed.
I’ll have to see who else Ritchie treats in the book and hope he doesn’t overlook Daniel Defoe, who also got readers to enter the minds of people very much unlike themselves. In the first person narration of Moll Flanders, readers find themselves identifying with a thief, prostitute, and bigamist, in that of Roxana with a courtesan.
Other epistolary novels of the time include Fanny Burney’s Evelina and Tobias Smollett’s Humphrey Clinker. Smollett’s novel especially gets at the discord experienced by traditionalists at the influx of foreign trade and the mixing of classes. Ritchie is right that epistolary novels were particularly effective at capturing the effects.
A confusing century required a new (or novel) genre to do it justice. Richardson and others stepped forward.
Today’s Gospel reading contains Jesus’s famous rebuke to Peter, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” I find it interesting that, when Milton employs the line in Paradise Regained, it is not metaphorical. Jesus directs it literally to Satan.
That being said, however,I’ve long seen “Satan” as a metaphor for our dark desires. I read the desert temptations as an internal dialogue with Jesus, having just had a revelation thanks to John’s baptism, try to figure out what it means. What is involved with being the Son of God?
Does it mean the ability to perform miracles? To defy death? How about achieving worldly wealth and power. Ultimately, he concludes, it means bringing God to earth so that God fills all of humanity.
Peter, expecting to reap the rewards of a worldly messiah doesn’t get it. In fact, he won’t until after the crucifixion. Jesus, however, has planted the necessary seeds, first by the rebuke (which gets Peter’s attention) and then through a series of apparently contradictory statements:
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Paradise Regained, like Paradise Lost, was written after Milton had witnessed the collapse of the Puritan republic, which he had hoped would bring God’s kingdom to earth in a literal sense. I think of those Trump-worshipping evangelicals who see their idol doing the same, some of them applauding a golden statue of Trump wheeled out in this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Milton’s passage begins with Satan’s offer:
“All these which in a moment thou behold’st, The Kingdoms of the world to thee I give; For giv’n to me, I give to whom I please, No trifle; yet with this reserve, not else, On this condition, if thou wilt fall down, And worship me as thy superior Lord, Easily done, and hold them all of me; For what can less so great a gift deserve?” Whom thus our Savior answer’d with disdain. “I never liked thy talk, thy offers less, Now both abhor, since thou hast dared to utter The abominable terms, impious condition; But I endure the time, till which expired, Thou hast permission on me. It is written The first of all Commandments, Thou shalt worship The Lord thy God, and only him shalt serve; And dar’st thou to the Son of God propound To worship thee accurst, now more accurst For this attempt bolder then that on Eve, And more blasphemous? which expect to rue. The Kingdoms of the world to thee were giv’n, Permitted rather, and by thee usurp’t, Other donation none thou canst produce: If given, by whom but by the King of Kings, God over all supreme? if giv’n to thee, By thee how fairly is the Giver now Repaid? But gratitude in thee is lost Long since. Wert thou so void of fear or shame, As offer them to me the Son of God, To me my own, on such abhorred pact, That I fall down and worship thee as God? Get thee behind me; plain thou now appear’st That Evil one, Satan forever damned.
For too many self-proclaimed Christians have been falling down and worshipping power and wealth as their superior Lord. We know what Jesus would say to them.
Last week, I gashed myself while cutting firewood, and what then transpired resembled the scene where the White Queen pricks herself with her brooch in Alice through the Looking Glass.
I’m happy to report that the cut itself was not serious. Using the axe as a hatchet to cut kindling, I hit an unexpected knot, which caused the axe to glance off the log and cut the top of my hand just over the bone at the base of my index finger. There was little bleeding and only four stitches were required.
Initially, as the White Queen is explaining to Alice “the effect of living backwards,” we see her bandaging her finger.
Shortly thereafter, she begins to scream:
Alice was just beginning to say ‘There’s a mistake somewhere—,’ when the Queen began screaming so loud that she had to leave the sentence unfinished. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ shouted the Queen, shaking her hand about as if she wanted to shake it off. ‘My finger’s bleeding! Oh, oh, oh, oh!’
Her screams were so exactly like the whistle of a steam-engine, that Alice had to hold both her hands over her ears.
‘What is the matter?’ she said, as soon as there was a chance of making herself heard. ‘Have you pricked your finger?’
‘I haven’t pricked it yet,’ the Queen said, ‘but I soon shall—oh, oh, oh!’
Finally, there’s the actual injury:
‘When do you expect to do it?’ Alice asked, feeling very much inclined to laugh.
‘When I fasten my shawl again,’ the poor Queen groaned out: ‘the brooch will come undone directly. Oh, oh!’ As she said the words the brooch flew open, and the Queen clutched wildly at it, and tried to clasp it again.
‘Take care!’ cried Alice. ‘You’re holding it all crooked!’ And she caught at the brooch; but it was too late: the pin had slipped, and the Queen had pricked her finger.
‘That accounts for the bleeding, you see,’ she said to Alice with a smile. ‘Now you understand the way things happen here.’
‘But why don’t you scream now?’ Alice asked, holding her hands ready to put over her ears again.
‘Why, I’ve done all the screaming already,’ said the Queen. ‘What would be the good of having it all over again?’
To recap life in Looking Glass Land, bandage first, scream second, prick yourself third.
My own Looking Glass sequence began with a Christmas gift of special “cooling field towels,” designed for those times when one can’t take a regular shower. My wife’s gift didn’t make sense at the time since, as I am retired, I can take a shower whenever I need one.
Then, two weeks ago, I had a tetanus shot, recommended by my doctor during my annual check-up. “You haven’t had one for a while,” he observed.
At the check-up, I scheduled a follow-up appointment to monitor a new medication. That check-up was scheduled for 9:30 last Thursday.
I cut myself at 8:45.
It so happens that I had forgotten about the follow-up appointment. Julia, after first pouring peroxide into my wound, called our doctor, only to be told that I was already scheduled to see him.
So instead of
–cutting myself; –scheduling an appointment; –getting a tetanus shot; — and dry washing myself,
I followed the White Queen’s example and reversed the order: buy special washing equipment, receive a shot, schedule the doctor, cut myself.
It’s Lewis Carroll’s world. The rest of us are just living in it.
Conservative columnist Bret Stevens, who regularly engages in a New York Times dialogue with liberal columnist Gail Collins, offered up a choice observation about Texas Senator Ted Cruz following the latter’s Cancun vacation trip during the Texas freeze. I’m still trying to untangle it:
Gail, first of all, my heartfelt sympathies and condolences to all of our friends suffering in Texas, and not just because Ted Cruz is one of their senators.
Also, isn’t the whole Cancún Caper such a perfect encapsulation of Cruz’s character? He’s what happens when All the King’s Men meets National Lampoon’s Vacation. He’s Shakespeare’s Richard III as interpreted by Mr. Bean. He is to American statesmanship what Fifty Shades of Grey was to English prose writing, minus the, um, stimulus.
Cruz, trying to imitate Donald Trump, would like to be Willie Stark, the man-of-the-people-turned-autocrat in the Robert Penn Warren classic. Booking a week at the Cancún Ritz-Carton while your constituents suffer through a catastrophic deep freeze, however, sounds more like the opening premise of a catastrophic Chevy Chase road trip. Incidentally, both movie and Cruz feature dog incidents. Cruz left his dog Snowflake behind in their Texas apartment while, in an instance of black humor, the character played by Chase forgets he has tied a dog (a particularly mean dog, foisted on him– along with a senile aunt–by unscrupulous relatives) to the car’s fender. Unlike Snowflake, the dog in the movie doesn’t make it.
Cruz may fancy himself a shrew political manipulator a la Richard III, but a number of people have pointed out that, had he been Trump, he would have brazened out his Cancun vacation. Instead, like an inept Mr. Bean, he first tried to apologize—in the process of which he blamed the trip on his daughters—and then got the news media to show him loading bottled water into someone’s car. To call this a cheap publicity stunt is to give cheap publicity stunts a bad name.
As far as Fifty Shades of Grey goes, it’s true that Cruz has a sadistic streak, so maybe that’s why that particular novel comes to mind. Stevens’s point, however, is that Cruz is as far from a statesman as E. L. James is from a readable author. James, however, at least titillates us whereas Cruz just makes us cringe.
The best line I’ve heard about the Texas senator comes from another conservative, Matthew Dowd. Why do people take an instant dislike to Ted Cruz? Answer: It saves time.
Further thought: Just to give you a taste of a genuine populist, here’s Willie Stark delivering the speech where he turns on the establishment. Stark, who has been drafted to (unbeknownst to him) split what he will call “the hick vote,” withdraws to throw his support behind the other “hick candidate.” If Cruz ever attempted a speech like this, he’d come across as an even bigger fraud that he already is:
“I have a speech here,” he said. “It is a speech about what this state needs. But there’s no use telling you what this state needs. You are the state. You know what you need. Look at your pants. Have they got holes in the knee? Listen to your belly. Did it ever rumble for emptiness? Look at your crop. Did it ever rot in the field because the road was so bad you couldn’t get it to market? Look at your kids. Are they growing up ignorant as you and dirt because there isn’t any school for them?”
Willie paused, and blinked around at the crowd. “No,” he said, “I’m not going to read you any speech. You know what you need better’n I could tell you. But I’m going to tell you a story.”
Willie goes on to explain how he has been duped and then, after he has (accidentally) pushed the establishment representative into the orchestra pit, concludes with his new announcement:
“Let the hog lie, and listen to me, you hicks. Yeah, you’re hicks, too, and they’ve fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me. For that’s what they think we’re for. To fool. Well, this time I’m going to fool somebody. I’m getting out of this race.”
Last July I collected all the essays I had written on Covid into a single post, with the first appearing almost exactly a year ago. This week, as we mark the once-inconceivable 500,000th official Covid death, I update that list. It has all been too tragic for words, but words are what we have.
May 8, 2020 – Some in the GOP have expressed a willingness to write off old people as the cost of doing business during the pandemic. As an old person, I cite Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Mary Oliver in my desire to stay alive. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/choose-life-over-needless-sacrifice/
June 29, 2020 – The spy/scout in M.M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions about the British in 19th century Afghanistan has the same success in warning the British army about impending disaster as our scientists and health care workers have been with Donald Trump. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/our-embattled-health-care-workers/
November 1, 2020 – Because Sophocles’s Philoctetes deals with compassion—or lack of it—for a man who is sick, it’s appropriate that Joe Biden should quote a passage from a Seamus Heaney translation of the play. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/hope-rhymes-with-history/
January 5, 2021 – Jacqueline Winspear’s Maisie Dodd mysteries about World War I and World II capture the drama of living under attack and the particular tragedy of dying in the final days of a war, which is where we currently are with regard to Covid, what with cases declining and a final end in sight. https://betterlivingthroughbeowulf.com/the-dangerous-final-months-of-covid/
Charles X, a temporary relief after the tumultuous Napoleonic years
Tuesday
In Les Miserables, which I’m currently listening to, Victor Hugo periodically sets his characters aside to discourse on great historical themes. What he has to say about “the restoration” of the Bourbon monarchy following Waterloo put me in mind of Joe Biden’s election.
This surprised me in that the two situations seem polar opposites. Trump, not Biden, represented an attempt to roll history back to a less egalitarian time, whether it be to when whites or when kings reigned supreme.
Hugo, however, says the reaction to the Napoleonic years was in part a yearning for tranquility. What with the 1789 French Revolution, the 1793 Vendée uprising, the 1793-94 reign of terror, and finally the Napoleonic years (1799-1815), France has seen non-stop drama for a quarter of a century. After Napoleon’s final defeat, Hugo is relieved that France has reached “a halting place.” “Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men,” he writes, “thank God, we have seen enough”:
The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place.
These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition, to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. “What a good little king was he!” We have marched since daybreak, we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed.
Devotion which is weary, heroism which has grown old, ambitions which are sated, fortunes which are made, seek, demand, implore, solicit, what? A shelter. They have it. They take possession of peace, of tranquillity, of leisure; behold, they are content.
“The King of Yvetot,” incidentally is a William Makepeace Thackeray poem about a Normandy king who “let all thoughts of glory go,/ And dawdled half his days a-bed.” Prusias, from what I can tell, is chiefly famous for having remained neutral during some of Rome’s wars. Trump, while no Napoleon, left a similar mess behind. Biden appears willing to let all thoughts of glory–or headlines–go in order to clean things up.
The historical contrasts are as illuminating as the parallels. Hugo says that, although France tried to turn the clock back, the energies released by the 1789 revolution—what he calls “accomplished facts”—could not be bottled up. The restored monarchs could no more stop a new, more egalitarian society from emerging than Trump could put a stop to an increasingly diverse and multicultural society. While the kings might think they were “granting” new liberties, it was actually history that was pushing them, just as it pushed Britain’s restored Stuart monarchy following the Puritan republic:
At the same time that weary men demand repose, accomplished facts demand guarantees. Guarantees are the same to facts that repose is to men.
This is what England demanded of the Stuarts after the Protector; this is what France demanded of the Bourbons after the Empire.
These guarantees are a necessity of the times. They must be accorded. Princes “grant” them, but in reality, it is the force of things which gives them. A profound truth, and one useful to know, which the Stuarts did not suspect in 1662 and which the Bourbons did not even obtain a glimpse of in 1814.
Because of the contradiction between monarchy and changing times, Hugo believes the 1830 “July Revolution” that overthrew the last of the Bourbons was inevitable. As much as the Louis XVIII and Charles X tried to change with the times, they could not change enough. Still, Hugo gives them credit for their peaceful regimes, in which “it was the turn of intelligence of have the word.” They allowed “equality before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions.” As a result, the 1830 revolution was largely peaceful and the Bourbon dynasty left the scene quietly:
This is the foundation of those famous acts which are called the ordinances of July. The Restoration fell.
It fell justly. But, we admit, it had not been absolutely hostile to all forms of progress. Great things had been accomplished, with it alongside.
Under the Restoration, the nation had grown accustomed to calm discussion, which had been lacking under the Republic, and to grandeur in peace, which had been wanting under the Empire. France free and strong had offered an encouraging spectacle to the other peoples of Europe. The Revolution had had the word under Robespierre; the cannon had had the word under Bonaparte; it was under Louis XVIII. and Charles X. that it was the turn of intelligence to have the word. The wind ceased, the torch was lighted once more. On the lofty heights, the pure light of mind could be seen flickering. A magnificent, useful, and charming spectacle. For a space of fifteen years, those great principles which are so old for the thinker, so new for the statesman, could be seen at work in perfect peace, on the public square; equality before the law, liberty of conscience, liberty of speech, liberty of the press, the accessibility of all aptitudes to all functions. Thus it proceeded until 1830. The Bourbons were an instrument of civilization which broke in the hands of Providence.
Biden differs from Louis and Charles in that he is working in concert with historical trends rather than against them. (If he didn’t, progressives would pressure him the way the July revolutionists pressured Charles.) As a result, there’s a chance that, in the new quiet, he may become one of the most consequential presidents in American history, taking on the major challenges of the 21st century at a time when we thought American government was broken beyond repair.
That’s not a prediction, by the way, and there’s much that could go wrong. Hugo makes it clear, however, that (1) societies need a halting place following incessant turmoil and (2) it’s better to work with history than against it.
With the Senate voting to acquit and various Republicans making pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring, does this mean that Donald Trump has once more dodged accountability? While many supporters have paid a price, like John Gay’s Mack the Knife it appears that Trump has once again evaded the noose.
Indeed, the popularity of Macheath may give us insight into Trump’s continuing allure. Given that 18th-century audiences loved watching the impudent rogue repeatedly slip through the law’s clutches and that Frank Sinatra thrilled fans as he swaggered through Brecht’s and Weil’s lyrics (“When the shark bites with his teeth, dear/ Scarlet billows start to spread”), one can see why Trump fans cheered as the president flouted the law, norms, and general civility. The glamorous lawbreaker has long captured the public imagination.
Gay, incidentally, made direct equations between his highway man and the country’s leading statesman, prime minister Robert Walpole. At one point Macheath sings,
Through all the employments of life Each neighbor abuses his brother; Whore and rogue they call husband and wife, All professions be-rogue one another. The priest calls the lawyer a cheat, The lawyer beknaves the Divine, And the statesman because he’s so great, Thinks his trade as honest as mine.
So will Trump continue to get away with his crimes? I think of an observation that Henry Fielding makes in Tom Jones on such matters. “There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers,” he writes,
who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
To be sure, the structure of Fielding’s novel refutes his pessimism in that Tom’s virture in fact wins him both the fair Sophia and a landed estate whereas the villainous Blifil is stripped of his title and reduced to marital fortune hunting and…ppolitics?! For much of history, literarary structure has in fact carried a moral message. Miss Prism articulates this vision in an interchange from The Importance of Being Ernest, which features Wilde’s characteristic topsy-turvy wit:
Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don’t like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Fielding makes a similar point as he looks back at Greek tragedy, where a god-in-a-machine (deus ex machina) would be lowered on stage at the end of a performance to ensure that justice prevailed:
In this the ancients had a great advantage over the moderns. Their mythology, which was at that time more firmly believed by the vulgar than any religion is at present, gave them always an opportunity of delivering a favorite hero. Their deities were always ready at the writer’s elbow, to execute any of his purposes; and the more extraordinary the invention was, the greater was the surprise and delight of the credulous reader.
Even as Fielding questioned such fantasy interventions, moral accountability continued to be written into the structure of novels throughout the following century, and we find it in the fiction of Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Hugo, Tolstoy, pretty much everyone. When an author finally showed virtue ending in unhappiness (Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Ubervilles: A Pure Women), readers were outraged.
If we can’t count on justice for Trump in this world, how about the next? Cynics and atheists like John Wilmot have long dismissed afterlife punishment as mere fantasy wish fulfillment:
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules God’s everlasting fiery jails (Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools), With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door, Are senseless stories, idle tales, Dreams, whimseys, and no more.
Dante, of course, gives the most complete accounting of what happens to evildoers after they die. And while Wilmot might dismiss Dante’s vision as senseless stories (Inferno even features the dog), the Florentine is actually a bit more sophisticated. The hell that people suffer after death is just a metaphorical description of the hell their evil visits upon them while they are still alive. I’ve written several times of the perpetual hell in which Trump finds himself: his anger boils him, his greed drags him down, his own fraud gets him to fear the hooks of others, his resentment gnaws away at him perpetually.
But even if we agree that Trump will pay some price, interior if not exterior, that’s scant consolation to those whom he has swindled. Voltaire makes this point in Candide when his protagonist thinks that providence has just intervened to balance the moral ledger:
The French captain soon saw that the captain of the victorious vessel was a Spaniard, and that the other was a Dutch pirate, and the very same one who had robbed Candide. The immense plunder which this villain had amassed, was buried with him in the sea, and out of the whole only one sheep was saved.
“You see,” said Candide to Martin, “that crime is sometimes punished. This rogue of a Dutch skipper has met with the fate he deserved.”
“Yes,” said Martin; “but why should the passengers be doomed also to destruction? God has punished the knave, and the devil has drowned the rest.”
Needless to say, people have been grappling with these ethical issues since the dawn of human history so there’s no easy reassurance to be had. Just keep in mind that, although life can certainly be unfair, Plato, Buddha, Jesus and others have compellingly argued that heaven is to be found in a virtuous life and hell in a vicious one.
Lent began this past week with Ash Wednesday so here’s Walter Bruggeman’s “Marked by Ashes.” The poet plays with the idea that the season begins mid-work week, which find us “burden[ed] with the tasks of the day.” Beginning with “committees and memos” and “calls and appointments,” he moves on to “failed hopes and broken promises,” “forgotten children and frightened women,” all of which leave a “taste of ash in our mouth.” Given the chain of associations, one can’t help but wonder about the poet’s experiences with office work.
But because it is Wednesday, we are also “halfway home,” so that our “ashness” is counterbalanced with anticipation of Easter victory. We are “half frazzled, half expectant,/ half turned toward you [God], half rather not.” Even as we face up to our ashes-to-ashes mortality, we look forward to “the Easter parade of newness.”
“Come here and Easter our Wednesday with/ mercy and justice and peace and generosity,” the poet calls. This of this as the ultimate hump day poem.
Ruler of the Night, Guarantor of the day… This day — a gift from you. This day — like none other you have ever given, or we have ever received. This Wednesday dazzles us with gift and newness and possibility. This Wednesday burdens us with the tasks of the day, for we are already halfway home halfway back to committees and memos, halfway back to calls and appointments, halfway on to next Sunday, halfway back, half frazzled, half expectant, half turned toward you, half rather not.
This Wednesday is a long way from Ash Wednesday, but all our Wednesdays are marked by ashes — we begin this day with that taste of ash in our mouth: of failed hope and broken promises, of forgotten children and frightened women, we ourselves are ashes to ashes, dust to dust; we can taste our mortality as we roll the ash around on our tongues.
We are able to ponder our ashness with some confidence, only because our every Wednesday of ashes anticipates your Easter victory over that dry, flaky taste of death.
On this Wednesday, we submit our ashen way to you — you Easter parade of newness. Before the sun sets, take our Wednesday and Easter us, Easter us to joy and energy and courage and freedom; Easter us that we may be fearless for your truth. Come here and Easter our Wednesday with mercy and justice and peace and generosity.
We pray as we wait for the Risen One who comes soon.
