My 95-year-old mother has difficulty going up and down stairs—two years ago she broke a vertebra and a rib while doing so—so Julia and I now insist on accompanying her up and down the seven-step staircase that joins her split-level ground floor. But because, for admirable reasons, she fiercely guards her independence, sometimes she tackles the stairs without alerting us. At those moments, I find myself internally reciting A. A. Milne’s “Disobedience.”
The “disobedient” party in this case is the mother of James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree. I’m the judgmental three-year-old.
Disobedience
James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George Dupree Took great Care of his Mother, Though he was only three. James James Said to his Mother, “Mother,” he said, said he; “You must never go down to the end of the town, if you don’t go down with me.”
James James Morrison’s Mother Put on a golden gown. James James Morrison’s Mother Drove to the end of the town. James James Morrison’s Mother Said to herself, said she: “I can get right down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea.”
King John Put up a notice, “LOST or STOLEN or STRAYED! JAMES JAMES MORRISON’S MOTHER SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN MISLAID. LAST SEEN WANDERING VAGUELY: QUITE OF HER OWN ACCORD, SHE TRIED TO GET DOWN TO THE END OF THE TOWN – FORTY SHILLINGS REWARD!”
James James Morrison Morrison (Commonly known as Jim) Told his Other relations Not to go blaming him. James James Said to his Mother, “Mother,” he said, said he: “You must never go down to the end of the town without consulting me.”
James James Morrison’s mother Hasn’t been heard of since. King John said he was sorry, So did the Queen and Prince. King John (Somebody told me) Said to a man he knew: If people go down to the end of the town, well, what can anyone do?”
(Now then, very softly) J.J. M.M. W.G.Du P. Took great C/0 his M***** Though he was only 3. J.J. said to his M***** “M*****,” he said, said he: “You-must-never-go-down-to-the-end-of-the-town if-you-don’t-go-down-with-ME!”
The poem appeared in When We Were Very Young, published in 1924. In other words, it was written at a time when British women were agitating for the right to vote—the Equal Franchise Act would pass four years later—and during the jazz age, when women enjoyed increased independence and sexual freedom. I mention these historical facts because they help us understand some of the currents flowing through this otherwise whimsical poem.
Basically, James’s mother is abandoning her sacred childcare duties to fulfill her own desires. The golden gown is a sign that she is at least going dancing, with a hint of more, and the fact that she takes a car speaks to the newfound sense of freedom that many women experienced with the automobile. My former colleague Michael Berger, who studies the history of cars, once wrote an article about how women driver jokes stemmed from male anxieties about this freedom.
And then there’s “town,” which stands in contrast with bucolic rural England and traditional values. (Some rural Americans see our cities in the same light.) Once women start going to town, the slippery slope to moral anarchy has begun. “If people go down to the end of the town–well, what can anyone do?” King John asks helplessly. No wonder he’s offering a forty-shilling reward!
What the reigning power structure regards as “wandering vaguely, quite of her own accord” may not be vague at all. Maybe James’s mother is Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier from The Awakening (only hopefully without the final suicide). In any event, she appears to have other things in mind than serving tea.
I love the imperiousness of the three-year-old James. Milne captures perfectly the bossiness of children at that age. After all, for them the whole point of mothers—and everyone else, actually—is to take care of them. The fact that this three-year-old has an over-the-top pompous name reinforces his sense of his own entitlement.
“You must never go down the stairs without consulting me?” How about if we just engage in a reasonable discussion about the matter?
So apparently that (relatively) tiny bulldozer and those (relatively) tiny tugboats played an important role in freeing the gigantic container ship stuck in the Suez Canal, leading my friend Glenda Funk to tweet out an allusion to The Little Engine That Could. The story, which celebrates the power of positive thinking, functions as American folklore, with no one individual able to take credit for it.
I’ve always found the little engine a bit too smug at the end of the story, but I think that’s because I was brought up not to pat myself on the back. If you do your job, a quiet satisfaction is all the reward you need. Even a triumphalist “I thought I could” isn’t allowed.
I’d make a lousy politician.
Christmas toys were not at stake in the Ever Given debacle. Billions of dollars, on the other hand, have apparently been lost.
As I thought about the ship being freed, various poems about whales came to mind. After all, the Ever Given was meant for the vast vistas of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, not beached in a narrow canal. Scott Bates’s poem about soaring whales comes to mind:
Whales
Whales have a tendency to move heavily On land it’s all that blubber Keeps Whales from skipping down the street like little girls Or balls of rubber
For if by chance a Whale you should encounter Lumbering Down Madison Avenue On the first day of Spring
You would perhaps be reminded of The New York Public Library Trundling through the park On a midsummer’s eve surrounded by children Or of Noah’s Ark
Or of the Pennsylvania Station But if you should become a Gull Drifting quietly over the Antarctic Ocean Illimitable and cool
You would see Whales below like Swallows dance Like Swallows on a pond They would skip off lightly across the green water And soar without a sound
The Ever Given is (relatively speaking) soaring now, not lumbering or trundling. Our spirits, strangely, have been lifted.
Another appropriate whale poem: I’ve been reading Harry Eyres’s Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet, and came across a poem that Eyres wrote that fits the Ever Given even more–at least when it was still stuck.
It’s a strange poem to include in a book like this since it has only an elliptical connection with the Roman poet. Horace’s actual name was Quintus Horatius Flaccus, so the “flaccid” descriptor for the whale appears to apply to the poet as well. Horace was apparently short and fat and his ribald verse–which grew out of his own sexual appetites–immortalized him as the whale’s penis immortalizes the great beast. The giant whale’s skeleton, like Horace’s immense poetic achievement, lives on forever.
Whale Burial
Flaccid, beyond recognition, your soft remains are littered on the beach.
Flung up on this coast between continents a week ago, you had form and substance.
People came to inspect your unearthly proportions.
Once a generatin such a marvel happens, you give names to places.
You began to dry and rot simultaneously
You sagged and aged, a shi-sized bag of bones and juices.
Downwind it smelled like a fish factory, but you retained vestiges of yourself.
Now the dissolution has gone too far, it has become a public nuisance.
A small army of men, the burial party, a grave as big as a house.
The earth-scooper scrabbles ineffectualy, trying to trasp your slippery secretions.
It spreads you out farther and deeper.
Part of you seep into the sand, membranous sacs of blood and semen.
Your skeleton is distributed among the people.
Your jaws will be rejoined as an arch through which air and pilgrims pass.
Your penis will be hung up in a bar, a lewd and leathery baton
No reliquary can hold your bones, but still I am thinking of tht beach,
and those men, too many for the job, staring, with their hands in their pockets,
This past year, many have written essays about plague literature, most of them focusing on how people respond to social breakdown. (You can find links to all my own essays on the subject here.), including this blog. Now that an end is in sight, New Yorker’s Jill Lepore asks the follow-up question: what does plague literature teach us about how people respond to the return to normalcy.
To answer this, she sets aside those works where either everyone dies (as in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” or where humans are reduced to brutes (as in Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark). “Lately, waiting for a shot of a vaccine,” she writes, “I’m hoping for another ending. Do the humans get to be human again?”
One such work is Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, where the sole survivor of global pandemic
sets off in a boat whose scant stores include the works of Homer and Shakespeare. “But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me,” he writes, in the book’s last lines, “and in any port I can renew my stock.” He disappears in his “tiny bark,” as if the world were beginning all over again.
Many plague stories, Lepore notes, end similarly,
with a new beginning, a Lockean blank slate—and, sometimes, even a hint that the evils of the old ways might not come back. As Biden’s campaign put it, “Build back better!”
Among these is Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, where the end is celebrated as an unexpected miracle, after which life prepares to continue on as though there had been no interruption. Lepore writes,
The disease retreats so suddenly that people “cast off all Apprehensions, and that too fast.” One man, venturing forth, sees a crowd and throws his hands into the air, saying, “Lord, what an alteration is here! Why, last Week I came along here, and hardly any Body was to be seen.” Another man cries, “’Tis all wonderful, ’tis all a Dream.” Defoe, too, finishes his “account of this calamitous year” by giving thanks; his book is, like the lifting of the plague, “a visible Summons to us all to Thankfulness.”
We may find ourselves thanking the scientists and companies that developed the vaccines along with God, but I can very much imagine looking back at 2020 as though it were a dream. But if that’s the case, then the ending of Camus’s The Plague is particularly relevant to our situation.
First of all, there’s a character who can’t stand the return to normal. Will we have our own versions of Cottard, whom Lepore describes as follows:
The death count keeps dropping, but one greedy and hard-hearted man, Cottard, who has profited from the plague, and failed to help the plague-stricken, begins to panic. “Do you really think it can stop like that, all of a sudden?” he wonders. The people of the town inch toward what they call “a return to normal life,” like animals emerging from a cave after a storm. Not Cottard. “He seemed unable to resume the obscure, humdrum life he had led before the epidemic. He stayed in his room and had his meals sent up from a near-by restaurant. Only at nightfall did he venture forth to make some small purchases.” The gates of the city are about to be opened. The people are rejoicing. “But Cottard didn’t smile. Was it supposed, he asked, that the plague wouldn’t have changed anything and the life of the town would go on as before, exactly as if nothing had happened?” Cottard gets out a gun and begins shooting at people in the street. He has gone mad.
It’s a grim fact of life in America that our normal includes mad men shooting people, so in our case we can’t attribute this to the plague. Camus’s novel does raise the issue, however, as to whether people will go mad when suddenly presented with a Covid-free society. What will happen to those Cottard-like grifters who have been making money off of our collective misery?
We make a mistake if we focus on them, however, since Camus doesn’t believe that they represent the true face of the plague. While it’s true that both Camus’s plague and our own has “pulled back the mask that hides the selfish, ruthless, viciousness of humans,” this is “not the last mask.” Beneath lies
a true face, the face of generosity and kindness, mercy and love. At the end of The Plague, its narrator unmasks himself: he reveals that he is a doctor, who, having cared for the disease’s sufferers, resolved to write, “so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.”
Our plague was not as deadly as most of those featured in plague literature but, even so, many have stepped up and done admirable things. We should indeed memorialize them.
I love this Marge Piercy Passover poem, which talks about the courage it takes to leave something familiar, even if that familiarity involves your slavery. It is, as Piercy puts it, “the courage to walk out of the pain that is known/ into the pain that cannot be imagined.”
In the course of the poem, Piercy expands her focus from the Israelites escaping from Egypt to Jews fleeing Russian pogroms and Hitler’s death camps. “We Jews are all born of wanderers,” Piercy writes, “with shoes/ under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours/ raining down.”
Even when successful, the journey to freedom has mixed results. They become strangers in a strange land and give birth to children “who could look down/ on them standing on their shoulders for having/ been slaves.” Nevertheless, on this night that is like no other night, “we honor those who let go of every-/ thing but freedom.”
“Maggid,” incidentally, is an itinerant preacher. The maggidim, according to the Jewish Encyclopedia, were less scholarly and more associated with the multitude than the establishment rabbis. Piercy, attuned to the almost invisible pains suffered by an uprooted people, may see herself as a kind of maggid.
As you read the poem, think of those Central American migrants who have given up everything to make the long journey to the United States. The Jewish story is a universal story.
Maggid By Marge Piercy
The courage to let go of the door, the handle. The courage to shed the familiar walls whose very stains and leaks are comfortable as the little moles of the upper arm; stains that recall a feast, a child’s naughtiness, a loud blattering storm that slapped the roof hard, pouring through.
The courage to abandon the graves dug into the hill, the small bones of children and the brittle bones of the old whose marrow hunger had stolen; the courage to desert the tree planted and only begun to bear; the riverside where promises were shaped; the street where their empty pots were broken
The courage to leave the place whose language you learned as early as your own, whose customs however dan- gerous or demeaning, bind you like a halter you have learned to pull inside, to move your load; the land fertile with the blood spilled on it; the roads mapped and annotated for survival.
The courage to walk out of the pain that is known into the pain that cannot be imagined, mapless, walking into the wilderness, going barefoot with a canteen into the desert; stuffed in the stinking hold of a rotting ship sailing off the map into dragons’ mouths,
Cathay, India, Siberia, goldeneh medina leaving bodies by the way like abandoned treasure. So they walked out of Egypt. So they bribed their way out of Russia under loads of straw; so they steamed out of the bloody smoking charnelhouse of Europe on overloaded freighters forbidden all ports—
out of pain into death or freedom or a different painful dignity, into squalor and politics. We Jews are all born of wanderers, with shoes under our pillows and a memory of blood that is ours raining down. We honor only those Jews who changed tonight, those who chose the desert over bondage,
who walked into the strange and became strangers and gave birth to children who could look down on them standing on their shoulders for having been slaves. We honor those who let go of every- thing but freedom, who ran, who revolted, who fought, who became other by saving themselves.
I see that Rep. Deb Haaland, who has just been confirmed as Secretary of the Interior (she’s our first Native American Cabinet Secretary), is a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, which is also Leslie Marmon Silko’s tribe. If Haaland’s vision of the environment is anything like that of the acclaimed novelist, which I believe it is, then America’s public lands are in good hands.
Silko’s Ceremony is my favorite Native American novel. In it, Silko describes a sickness overtaking America as it grows away from the land. Her protagonist, a World War II veteran who has survived the Bataan Death March, must reconnect with the earth if he is to overcome his own fragile mental state, brought about by mother abandonment, childhood bullying, PTSD from his war experiences, survivor guilt, white racism, and Indian prejudice against his mixed race. The odds are formidable but, by tapping into tribal ceremonies (thus the novel’s title) he finds a way forward, both for himself and for the planet at large.
I’ve written several times (including here) about Silko’s vision of the “witchery” that she believes is destroying the planet. Her poem about a witch’s prediction of a white invasion pretty much captures the Trump administration’s vision of the environment, including its desire to sell off and desecrate public lands:
Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and animals. They see no life When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and rivers are not alive the mountains and stones are not alive The deer and bear are objects They see no life
They fear They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.
In search of cattle that whites have stolen from his uncle, Tayo finds them on land that was once used by Indians and that has now been fenced in to keep Indians out. This sets off a reflection on what the whites have lost in thinking they can own the land:
If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves and they knew it.
And further on:
The [Indians] had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed ohoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.
Grim though this picture is, Ceremony wrestles though to a positive conclusion, with Tayo providing a model for healing. His quest acknowledges our need for a healthy environment, solid relationships, and meaningful work. When he returns with the cattle, which are environmentally friendly (they can survive in barren environments), he gives the elders reassurance that the young will carry on tribal traditions. Their wisdom has guided him and he will ensure that the old customs continue on. There’s a balance between young and old, continuity and change, and nature and humans that bodes well.
While Haaland may not be able to undo all the damage wrought by the Trump administration, let alone all that Indians have suffered over the centuries, she has those issues in her sights. According to a Red River Radio article,
She’s promising to begin repairing a legacy of broken treaties and abuses committed by the federal government toward tribes. It’s one pillar of a long and ambitious to-do list of reforms the administration is planning at the sprawling agency that is the federal government’s most direct contact with the nation’s 574 federally recognized — and sovereign — tribes.
And:
Nationwide, tribal leaders believe the injustices of the past might start to be reversed under Haaland. The Biden administration has indicated it’s reinstating an Obama-era rule requiring consultation with tribes, meaning that any future lands development or right of way projects like pipeline must be signed off on by affected tribes.
No one is expecting miracles, but Haaland’s appointment represents an important step. As Silko makes clear, it’s not only the future of Native Americans that’s at stake.
The Evergreen cargo ship, stuck and blocking the Suez Canal
Thursday
I owe today’s post to my son Tobias Wilson-Bates, who saw pictures of the cargo ship blocking the Suez canal and immediately thought of a passage from Merchant of Venice. Before sharing it, however, I note that someone turned the above picture into a meme to which I can very much relate. The ship is “writing project,” the bulldozer “motivation.”
Okay, back to Shakespeare. Antonio needs money for his shipping enterprise and famously promises Shylock a “pound of flesh” if anything goes wrong and he is unable to pay him back on time. Shylock knows just how unreliable ships can be:
No mention of canals but you get the point. Pray that the Evergreen owners have provided more reasonable collateral than Antonio as it appears that the ship won’t be going anywhere soon.
My friend Rebecca Adams, in reading over a draft of the book I’m currently writing on “Does Literature Makes Us Better People?”, suggested that I include my own intellectual journey. Otherwise, she noted, the intro (which I shared with readers two weeks ago) looks too much like a book prospectus. I agreed and have enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Here’s what I came up with.
I was born in 1951 to two parents who read voraciously. My father was a French professor at the University of the South at Sewanee (in Tennessee) and my mother ran Sewanee’s weekly town newsletter. We were one of the only families in town without a television because (so my parents reasoned) who needs television when one has books?
Every evening, my father would read novels and poems to me and my brothers, a chapter and a poem for each of us. We also read on our own, of course, making no distinction between good and bad. At the same time that I was immersed in Alice in Wonderland, the Narnia series, Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings, I was also reading the Hardy Boys and the Bobbsey Twins.
I realized that higher stakes were involved in reading, however, when my father read us Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird at age eleven. At the time, my brothers and I were amongst the plaintiffs in a landmark civil rights case, brought by four black families and four white. The NAACP supported our suit against the Franklin County Board of Education for denying us our right to attend integrated schools, as mandated by the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling.
Because the other kids knew who the plaintiffs were, I was called an “n-word lover” numerous times, but Atticus’s discussion of the phrase with Scout helped me see it for what it was. In Huckleberry Finn, meanwhile, the famous scene where Huck says he will “go to hell” rather than betray Jim inspired me to stand up for what I thought was right, even as classmates and much of Tennessee thought otherwise. When Ronnie Staten became the first Black student in our seventh-grade class, I made a point of reaching out to him.
Reading-intensive literature classes helped offset my unhappiness at attending a military high school (Sewanee Military Academy), and I devoured everything put before me. Meanwhile, history continued to swirl around me, with the 1968 assassinations, the urban race riots, the escalating Vietnam War, and the protest movement. Yet when I entered Carleton College in the fall of 1969, I was startled when none of my English classes acknowledged the momentous developments. My composition instructor was even contemptuous of the anti-war marches and only begrudgingly allowed us to miss class to attend the October moratorium.
I was later to learn that English departments at the time were in the grip of formalism, known as the New Criticism. The close examination of a work’s formal attributes predominated, with historical context, the life of the author, and the responses of the reader deemed largely irrelevant. Political science, however, seemed too dry so I chose history for my major. History, after all, had stories.
Fortunately, I could work literature into my history major, with Phil Niles’s medieval history class helping me make the connection. We were studying Beowulf, not as an aesthetic text, but as resource material for figuring out the workings of Anglo-Saxon warrior society. A long-time fan of fantasy literature, I decided to focus on the monsters and wrote an essay entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” (At the time, I didn’t know that Tolkien was a Beowulf expert and the scholar most responsible for elevating its reputation.)
I still remember where I was when I had my conceptual breakthrough. It was two in the morning and I was diagramming my essay on the blackboard in one of the library’s all-night study rooms. Suddenly I realized, at a deep level, that the monsters represented the historical forces that threatened social stability. The Grendels represented warrior dissatisfaction and the prospect of blood feuds, the dragon greedy kings and the destructive consequences of hoarding. When warriors were loyal and kings were generous, all was well. When they were not, the fragile societies disintegrated.
That literature is inextricably intertwined with history I found to be exhilarating. Suddenly I saw literary study as something more than the examination of disembodied texts.
Yet even this wasn’t enough. I wanted to know whether literature could not only reflect history but change history. If it could, then maybe a book lover like me could find his place in transforming the world, which was the dream of many young people in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We wanted a more just and equitable society, and we wanted to end the Vietnam War. Could literature help us get there?
I found some of the guidance I wanted in Karl Wiener’s “Marxist Intellectual History” class, which introduced me to Italian activist Antonio Gramsci, who died in a Mussolini prison. Gramsci argued that battles about power are often conducted in the realm of ideas and art, with each side striving for “hegemonic control.” Wiener also introduced me to the Marxist Frankfurt School, especially Herbert Marcuse, who had come to the United States fleeing Hitler and who argued that works like Madame Bovary voiced a “great refusal” of capitalist oppression. And then there was Marx’s own thinking about economic base and ideological superstructure, which saw art and ideas not only reflecting class relations but influencing how we see them. With all this swirling around in my head, I wrote my senior project on whether French Enlightenment figures like Diderot and Rousseau had caused the French Revolution.
In the course of writing this overly ambitious essay, I wondered at one point whether aesthetics, not only ideas, entered into causation. Were works of art more powerful than political pamphlets because of their artistry? While I didn’t explore the question, it seemed so important that I started investigating graduate literature programs.
After spending two years as a reporter on county newspapers—I felt I needed at least some exposure to the real world after having spent my entire life in academic settings—I enrolled in Emory University’s PhD program and was fortunate to encounter two mentors who put me in touch with the ideas I needed. My dissertation advisor, J. Paul Hunter, was researching the conditions that led to the emergence of the 18th century novel. His article “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Reader” argued that the novel was ushering in a new kind of solitude. Meanwhile, his book Before Novels talked of the many ways that novels spoke to the real-life needs and interests of young people. In short, this new literary form was having real world effects.
Victorianist Jerome Beaty, meanwhile, introduced me to the emerging field of reader response theory (also reception theory), especially the work of University of Konstanz scholar Hans Robert Jauss. Jauss believed that great literature could actually shift an audience’s “horizon of expectations.” Suddenly I was finding kindred souls. In my dissertation, completed in 1981, I looked at how the 18th century Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett helped audiences negotiate the confusing shift from a landed to a mercantile society.
I wasn’t the only young scholar interested in literature that could provide insight and perhaps inspiration to the pressing issues of our age. Others were interested in works by historically excluded voices, as well as how even revered works of literature sometimes offered up derogatory or sentimentalized depictions of women, people of color, the working class, members of the LBGTQ community, and formerly colonized populations. Literature was seen as having a role to play in the struggle for equality and civil rights, either positively (through opening up new human possibilities) or negatively (by perpetuating old stereotypes).
As a full-time English professor, for a year at Morehouse College and then for the rest of my career at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, I gradually began to expand the range of works I taught. I also engaged in the culture war battles of the late 1980s, taking a middle road. While I pushed against those figures on the right who denigrated multiculturalism, I also defended classical works against leftwing purists who wished to jettison authors who employed racist, sexist, classist, homophobic and other demeaning tropes.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s distinction between “the temporary dress” in which an author clothes his or her creations and “the eternal proportions of their beauty” proved useful. One could still admire Dickens, even while critiquing his one-dimensional female characters and his outsized fear of organized labor. Marxist Terry Eagleton’s defense of conservative writers like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot was also a help, as was “ethical critic” Wayne Booth’s balanced reassessment of classical works in light of the new insights offered up by feminism, race theory, queer theory, post-colonial studies, and other emerging schools of thought.
Not all my thinking was political, however. I quickly learned that the generation following mine did not have the same grand vision of transforming the world and that this was okay. In my teaching practice, my vision changed from how literature could impact history to how it could impact the lives of my students. I became more psychologically oriented, focusing on how literature could help students cope with their challenges, which I learned were considerable.
Providing me with a useful framework was the Freudian psychologist and literary scholar Norman Holland, who helped me understand why different students responded to literary texts in different ways. I also drew on what I had learned about Freud in a college philosophy class and about Carl Jung in a graduate school class. I began offering my students the opportunity to write about their own lives in their literature essays—always with the caveat that they grant the work its own autonomy—and started receiving insightful essays written with commitment.
I’ll stop my intellectual history here, not because I’ve stopped thinking and growing, but because this pretty much sums up my intellectual framework, how it developed and where it is now. What has occurred since is more along the lines of refining and elaborating.
Please feel free to send me your own intellectual breakthroughs. Just as I am fascinated by people’s favorite literary works, I love hearing how their thinking has evolved.
The horrific Atlanta shootings that took the lives of eight Korean-American women are only the latest manifestation of a race hatred that has always been with us although it accelerated following Donald Trump’s use of racist trope to characterize the Covid virus. This is a story that hits close to home as I have a biologically Korean daughter-in-law (raised American), making both her and my grandson potential targets for bigots, bullies, and worse.
At the risk of jumping to conclusions, it seems fairly clear that the killer represents a toxic mixture of rightwing evangelicalism, repressed sexuality, and white supremacism. In her survey of Asian American literature, scholar Elaine Kim speaks of how white Americans have exoticized Asian sexuality, emasculating Asian men and hyperfeminizing Asian women. (The “dragon lady” is the most famous instance of the latter.) Kim writes that
Asian women are only sexual for the same reason that Asian men are asexual: both exist to define the white man’s virility and the white race’s superiority.
It didn’t matter to the killer that the women he killed were mostly elderly. In his mind, they were Asian women connected with massage parlors, and his fevered imagination did the rest.
In her frequently assigned poem “When I Was Growing Up,” Chinese-American poet Nellie Wong alludes to this exoticizing, both how she was expected to be an “exotic gardenia” and how Asian men were caricatured as small and frail. All she wanted when young was to fit in. As the poem makes clear, fitting in meant being white.
When I Was Growing Up By Nellie Wong
I know now that once I longed to be white. How? you ask. Let me tell you the ways.
when I was growing up, people told me I was dark and I believed my own darkness in the mirror, in my soul, my own narrow vision.
when I was growing up, my sisters with fair skin got praised for their beauty and I fell further, crushed between high walls.
when I was growing up, I read magazines and saw movies, blonde movie stars, white skin, sensuous lips and to be elevated, to become a woman, a desirable woman, I began to wear imaginary pale skin.
when I was growing up, I was proud of my English, my grammar, my spelling, fitting into the group of smart children, smart Chinese children, fitting in, belonging, getting in line.
when I was growing up and went to high school, I discovered the rich white girls, a few yellow girls, their imported cotton dresses, their cashmere sweaters, their curly hair and I thought that I too should have what these lucky girls had.
when I was growing up, I hungered for American food, American styles coded: white and even to me, a child born of Chinese parents, being Chinese was feeling foreign, was limiting, was unAmerican.
when I was growing up and a white man wanted to take me out, I thought I was special, an exotic gardenia, anxious to fit the stereotype of an oriental chick
when I was growing up, I felt ashamed of some yellow men, their small bones, their frail bodies, their spitting on the streets, their coughing, their lying in sunless rooms shooting themselves in the arms.
when I was growing up, people would ask If I were Filipino, Polynesian, Portuguese. They named all colors except white, the shell of my soul but not my rough dark skin.
when I was growing up, I felt dirty. I thought that god made white people clean and no matter how much I bathed, I could not change, I could not shed my skin in the gray water.
when I was growing up, I swore I would run away to purple mountains, houses by the sea with nothing over my head, with space to breathe, uncongested with yellow people in an area called Chinatown, in an area I later learned was a ghetto, one of many hearts of Asian America.
I know now that once I longed to be white. How many more ways? you ask. Haven’t I told you enough?
Further note: In “the way it was” Lucille Clifton provides an African American version of Wong’s drama:
mornings i got up early greased my legs straightened my hair and walked quietly out not touching
in the same place the treethe lot the poolroomdeacon moore everything was stayed
nothing changed (nothing remained the same) i walked out quietly mornings in the ‘40’s a nice girl not touching trying to be white
In “trying to be white,” however, Clifton talks about shedding this identity, as Wong also has. After all, there’s no future in it:
hey music and me only white, hair a flutter of fall leaves circling my perfect line of a nose, no lips, no behind, hey white me and i’m wearing white history but there’s no future in those clothes so i take them off and wake up dancing.
Here’s a D. H. Lawrence poem to welcome in the spring, which officially began Saturday. While fiery passion is usually coded red, this poem is brought to you by the color green. Lawrence pushes against the conventional color symbolism with “bonfires green,” “this blaze of growing,” and “this leaping combustion of spring.” The “flame-filled bushes,” meanwhile, recall Moses’s burning bush, a vision of the divine descended to earth.
“What fountain of fire am I among?” the poet asks in wonder. His final image refers to the way that a fire casts our shadow on the wall, buffeting it so that it leaps and dances (“a wild gyration”). When Lawrence talks about being a shadow “gone astray” and finding itself lost, I think he’s referring to being in the grip of desires beyond his control. Faces of people stream across his gaze.
Spring has that effect on people.
The Enkindled Spring By D. H. Lawrence
This spring as it comes bursts up in bonfires green, Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes.
I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze.
And I, what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that’s gone astray, and is lost.
