The Pit, the Pendulum, and Covid Relief

By Robin Bates | Published: March 18, 2021

 Friday

I am still amazed at the Covid relief package passed by Congressional Democrats, which will have a significant impact on the lives of suffering Americas. I see the absolute necessity of Democrats fanning out and explaining the different ways it will help people. Hungry families will be fed, people will escape eviction, patients will be able to afford medical help, school children will be able to return safely to school.

One line Democrats are using amuses me, however, accurate though it is: “Help is on the way!” I can’t help but think of how the line is delivered at the end of the 1933 Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, in my opinion their best film and most anarchistic film.

Finding his bunker surrounded by hostile forces, Groucho, as leader of Fredonia, sends out a desperate radio call for help. In response, we hear someone announce, “Help is on the way,” at which point we see a montage of forces apparently riding to the rescue. These include fire engines roaring out of their stations, motorcycle brigades riding down highways, rowing crews frantically sprinting towards the finish line, swimmers diving off piers, baboons swarming across a rope bridge, elephants charging across the savannah, and schools of dolphins leaping through the waves. It’s an altogether fitting end to the film.

For that matter, the war they are fighting has been declared in a Parliamentary session that resembles the chaos of Congress on January 6, albeit without the violence. Confusion reigns supreme until help shows up and Fredonia emerges triumphant. “We’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is more than she ever did,” Groucho says of Margaret Dumont as Duck Soup careens to its conclusion.

I started thinking of literary stories where help miraculously arrives in (to quote Rocky and Bullwinkle) the nick of time. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” came instantly to mind.

The tale is the ultimate claustrophobe’s nightmare (although “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are close seconds). Between a dark dungeon, a deep well, walls that heat up and close in, rats that swarm and bite, and a sharpened pendulum that slowly descends upon the bound victim, the Spanish Inquisition has fashioned an excruciating torture for the narrator. No sooner does he extricate himself from one danger than another presents itself.

A couple of weeks ago I compared life in the time of Covid to Jean Valjean’s sewer journey in Les Misérables. Poe’s tale presents us with its own parallels since we’ve found ourselves caught between the pit of the virus and the pendulum of unemployment and bankruptcy.

Fortunately, “help is on the way!” At the very moment we were about to be driven into the pit, the vaccines and the Covid relief bill have come riding in like the French army. Poe’s story ends thus:

I shrank back—but the closing walls pressed me resistlessly onward. At length for my seared and writhing body there was no longer an inch of foothold on the firm floor of the prison. I struggled no more, but the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair. I felt that I tottered upon the brink—I averted my eyes—

There was a discordant hum of human voices! There was a loud blast as of many trumpets! There was a harsh grating as of a thousand thunders! The fiery walls rushed back! An outstretched arm caught my own as I fell, fainting, into the abyss. It was that of General Lasalle. The French army had entered Toledo. The Inquisition was in the hands of its enemies.

Or, for us, in the hands of the scientists, doctors and Democrats.

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Austen’s Mixed Feelings about Gothics

By Robin Bates | Published: March 17, 2021

Thursday

I’m using today’s post to brainstorm about a chapter I’m writing in my book Does Literature Makes Us Better People? On the question of whether “lightweight literature” is good or bad for us, I reflect upon Jane Austen’s thoughts in Northanger Abbey about Anne Radcliffe’s gothic fiction. Whatever Radcliffe’s contribution to the gothic, she is no Jane Austen.

There probably was a time in her life when Austen actively explored whether she should take a Radcliffe route with her own fiction. After all, gothic fiction made Radcliffe rich and famous, two things Austen would very much have liked for herself. Northanger Abbey indicates, however, that Austen found the gothic too confining for the issues she wanted to explore.

She may, however, have captured her own youthful enthusiasm for Radcliffe’s gothics through Catherine’s love of them. Among other things, gothics provided opportunities for friendship bonding, just as works like Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games do today. In one passage, we see Catherine and her best friend Isabella Thorpe sharing their enthusiasm:

But, my dearest Catherine, what have you been doing with yourself all this morning? Have you gone on with Udolpho?”

“Yes, I have been reading it ever since I woke; and I am got to the black veil.”

“Are you, indeed? How delightful! Oh! I would not tell you what is behind the black veil for the world! Are not you wild to know?”

“Oh! Yes, quite; what can it be? But do not tell me—I would not be told upon any account. I know it must be a skeleton, I am sure it is Laurentina’s skeleton. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.”

“Dear creature! How much I am obliged to you; and when you have finished Udolpho, we will read the Italian together; and I have made out a list of ten or twelve more of the same kind for you.”

“Have you, indeed! How glad I am! What are they all?”

“I will read you their names directly; here they are, in my pocketbook. Castle of Wolfenbach, Clermont, Mysterious Warnings, Necromancer of the Black Forest, Midnight Bell, Orphan of the Rhine, and Horrid Mysteries. Those will last us some time.”

“Yes, pretty well; but are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid?”

“Yes, quite sure…

As she reflects on the immense popularity of novels, Austen must battle against the notion that all novels are lightweight, not just the lightweight ones. “Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world,” she complains, “no species of composition has been so much decried.” What passes for serious reading, she points out, has far less creativity to it:

And while the abilities of the nine-hundredth abridger of the History of England, or of the man who collects and publishes in a volume some dozen lines of Milton, Pope, and Prior, with a paper from the Spectator, and a chapter from Sterne, are eulogized by a thousand pens—there seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and undervaluing the labor of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

The same goes for Addison and Steele’s Addison and Steele’s Spectator essays, which by the time Austen wrote Northanger Abbey would have been almost a century old:

Now, had the same young lady been engaged with a volume of the Spectator, instead of such a work, how proudly would she have produced the book, and told its name; though the chances must be against her being occupied by any part of that voluminous publication, of which either the matter or manner would not disgust a young person of taste: the substance of its papers so often consisting in the statement of improbable circumstances, unnatural characters, and topics of conversation which no longer concern anyone living; and their language, too, frequently so coarse as to give no very favorable idea of the age that could endure it.

Elsewhere in the passage Austen holds up Fanny Burney’s Cecilia and Camilla and Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda as models of what the novel is capable of:

“I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read novels—It is really very well for a novel.” Such is the common cant. “And what are you reading, Miss—?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

Yet for all her defense of novels, Austen sees some problems with Radcliffe. After all, they lead Catherine to believe that General Tilney has either killed his wife or locked her away. This leads to Henry Tilney’s painful rebuke, which ends with Catherine running away in tears:

If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from?

A number of feminist critics have come to Catherine’s defense, noting that gothic novels haven’t totally misled her. General Tilney may not have locked in wife in a dungeon, but she has in fact been trapped in an unhappy marriage with a tyrannical man. Feminist Tania Modleski, in Loving with a Vengeance: Mass Produced Fantasies by Women, notes that paranoia is at the heart of the gothic and that paranoia grows out of extreme power imbalance:

In his massive study on The Paranoid Process, William Meissner claims that the paranoid usually comes from a family whose power structure is greatly skewed: one of the parents is perceived as omnipotent and domineering, while the other is perceived (and most usually perceives him/herself) as submissive to and victimized by the stronger partner…

Gothic novels, Modleski explains, give expression

to women’s hostility towards men while simultaneously allowing them to repudiate it. Because the male appears to be the outrageous persecutor, the reader can allow herself a measure of anger against him; yet at the same time she can identify with a heroine who is entirely without malice and innocent of any wrongdoing.

Throughout Northanger Abbey, Catherine is periodically made aware of her relative lack of power. At one point, in a parody of a gothic abduction, she is carried off against her will by the wannabe rake John Thorpe. She sees how General Tilney domineers over Henry and his sister and suffers herself when he expels her from Northanger Abbey with no explanation given. Of the literature readily available to her, the gothic does a pretty good job of capturing her sense of vulnerability.

But does it do as good a job as Jane Austen’s novels would? Over and over we see Austen women negotiating their vulnerability in patriarchal society—the Dashwood sisters in Sense and Sensibility, the Bennett sisters in Pride and Prejudice, Fanny Price in Mansfield Park, Anne Elliot in Persuasion. If Catherine needs a guide for the world in which she lives, wouldn’t these novels serve her better?

Charming as were all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the works of all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in the Midland counties of England, was to be looked for. Of the Alps and Pyrenees, with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation; and Italy, Switzerland, and the south of France might be as fruitful in horrors as they were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and even of that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western extremities. But in the central part of England there was surely some security for the existence even of a wife not beloved, in the laws of the land, and the manners of the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. Among the Alps and Pyrenees, perhaps, there were no mixed characters. There, such as were not as spotless as an angel might have the dispositions of a fiend. But in England it was not so; among the English, she believed, in their hearts and habits, there was a general though unequal mixture of good and bad. Upon this conviction, she would not be surprised if even in Henry and Eleanor Tilney, some slight imperfection might hereafter appear; and upon this conviction she need not fear to acknowledge some actual specks in the character of their father, who, though cleared from the grossly injurious suspicions which she must ever blush to have entertained, she did believe, upon serious consideration, to be not perfectly amiable.

Although the Austen novels that Catherine needs haven’t been written yet, there are others available, most notably the works of Samuel Richardson, whom Austen admired. While Isabella Thorpe shudders at the thought of Richardson, Catherine is open to Sir Charles Grandison, perhaps Austen’s favorite novel. Isabella begins:

“It is so odd to me, that you should never have read Udolpho before; but I suppose Mrs. Morland objects to novels.”

“No, she does not. She very often reads Sir Charles Grandison herself; but new books do not fall in our way.”

“Sir Charles Grandison! That is an amazing horrid book, is it not? I remember Miss Andrews could not get through the first volume.”

“It is not like Udolpho at all; but yet I think it is very entertaining.”

“Do you indeed! You surprise me; I thought it had not been readable.

Charles Grandison was Richardson’s response to Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, which Samuel Johnson accused of leading young men astray by making vice seem attractive. Austen appears to agree with Johnson and makes Tom Jones the favorite novel of Isabella’s doltish brother, who undoubtedly enjoys Tom’s drinking and womanizing. Grandison, by contrast, is a sensitive and noble man who saves the abducted heroine and then refuses a duel challenge from her captor because of his moral objections to dueling. Henry Tilney, resembling Grandison rather than Tom Jones, represents a new kind of man.

Evidence of this is his enjoyment of novels. If real men in our own age like quiche, then real men for Jane Austen understand muslin (as Tilney does in an earlier scene) and aren’t afraid to openly love Radcliffe novels. Catherine begins the conversation:

“But you never read novels, I dare say?”

“Why not?”

“Because they are not clever enough for you—gentlemen read better books.”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid. I have read all Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and most of them with great pleasure. The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again; I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.”

All of which to say is that Austen believes that, while good novels can do good in the world, lightweight novels (into which category she would include Tom Jones as well as Mysteries of Udolpho) can do harm. It’s all very well if one can see them for what they are, as Tilney does. But for a superior understanding, one needs a Richardson or a Burney.

Or an Austen.

Further thought: Throughout her novels Austen shows herself cautious about literature that emotionally carries the reader away. In Sense and Sensibility, Marianne and Willoughby bond over the passionate poetry of William Cowper and the historical romances of Sir Walter Scott while admiring “no more than is proper” the poetry of Alexander Pope, which balances passion with reason (as in Essay on Man). The Bertrams and Crawfords lose themselves in the illicit relationships of Elizabeth Inchbald’s Lovers’ Vows in Mansfield Park and, by the end of the novel, Henry and Maria have broken society’s rules. Meanwhile, Captain Benwick and Louisa Musgrove prove they have less substance than Captain Wentworth and Anne Elliot when they bond over Scott’s Lady of the Lake and Marmion and Lord Byron’s Giaour and The Bride of Abydos. Talking to Benwick, Anne discovers that he is

intimately acquainted with all the tenderest songs of the one poet, and all the impassioned descriptions of hopeless agony of the other; he repeated, with such tremulous feeling, the various lines which imaged a broken heart, or a mind destroyed by wretchedness, and looked so entirely as if he meant to be understood, that she ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry, and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

At least Scott and Byron contributed to her own happiness, however. They lure Louisa away from Wentworth, leaving him free to marry Anne:

She saw no reason against their being happy. Louisa had fine naval fervor to begin with, and they would soon grow more alike. He would gain cheerfulness, and she would learn to be an enthusiast for Scott and Lord Byron; nay, that was probably learnt already; of course they had fallen in love over poetry. The idea of Louisa Musgrove turned into a person of literary taste, and sentimental reflection was amusing, but she had no doubt of its being so.

To cite one other instance of literature’s dangers, wannabe rake Sir Edward Denham in Sanditon uses poetry to seduce, prizing above all the “illimitable ardor” of Robert Burns:

If ever there was a man who felt, it was Burns. Montgomery has all the fire of poetry, Wordsworth has the true soul of it, Campbell in his pleasures of hope has touched the extreme of our sensations—’Like angel’s visits, few and far between.’ Can you conceive anything more subduing, more melting, more fraught with the deep sublime than that line? But Burns—I confess my sense of his pre-eminence, Miss Heywood. If Scott has a fault, it is the want of passion. Tender, elegant, descriptive but tame. The man who cannot do justice to the attributes of woman is my contempt. Sometimes indeed a flash of feeling seems to irradiate him, as in the lines we were speaking of—’Oh. Woman in our hours of ease’—. But Burns is always on fire. His soul was the altar in which lovely woman sat enshrined, his spirit truly breathed the immortal incense which is her due.”

Charlotte doesn’t dispute the spirit but is suspicious of Burns’s promiscuity:

“I have read several of Burns’s poems with great delight,” said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak. “But I am not poetic enough to separate a man’s poetry entirely from his character; and poor Burns’s known irregularities greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his lines. I have difficulty in depending on the truth of his feelings as a lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a man of his description. He felt and he wrote and he forgot.

While literature’s ability to arouse the passions is good, it becomes dangerous when it jettisons reason and morality. Again, Austen offers a healthy balance.        

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A Fiddler for St. Patrick’s Day

By Robin Bates | Published: March 16, 2021
Gerard van Honthorst, The Merry Fiddler

Wednesday – St. Patrick’s Day

What would St. Patrick’s Day be without a Yeats poem? Our fiddler claims to be involved in rituals more holy that conventional Catholicism, and given the strength of his simple belief, who’s to say he’s wrong?

The Fiddler of Dooney
By W. B. Yeats

When I play on my fiddle in Dooney.
Folk dance like a wave of the sea;
My cousin is priest in Kilvarnet,
My brother in Mocharabuiee.

I passed my brother and cousin:
They read in their books of prayer;
I read in my book of songs
I bought at the Sligo fair.

When we come at the end of time
To Peter sitting in state,
He will smile on the three old spirits,
But call me first through the gate;

For the good are always the merry,
Save by an evil chance,
And the merry love the fiddle,
And the merry love to dance:

And when the folk there spy me,
They will all come up to me,
With “Here is the fiddler of Dooney!”
And dance like a wave of the sea.

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Song of Hope: The Night Cloud Is Hueing

By Robin Bates | Published: March 15, 2021
Ernst August Becker, Early Morning in the Alps

Tuesday

Things have been so bleak for the past four years that it’s hard to believe we can begin to hope again. Nevertheless, with the United States now administering two million vaccinations daily (with 4.5 million vaccinations given out Saturday) and Joe Biden’s historic Covid relief bill promising to cut child poverty in half (along with many other remarkable benefits), there are grounds for optimism.

I therefore turn to a hopeful poem from an unlikely source.  One wouldn’t normally expect Thomas Hardy to compose a “Song for Hope,” but he is imagining a “gleaming”—“dimmed by no gray”–that “soon will be streaming” come “sweet Tomorrow.”

Given how much damage the Trump administration has inflicted upon us, I am particularly open to Hardy’s image of mending and tuning a broken fiddle. It’s time to shed our black clothing and put on our red dancing shoes (or “shoon”).

To be sure, all of this will happen tomorrow, not today. “Hope springs eternal in the human breast:/ Man never is, but always to be blest,” Alexander Pope informs us in Essay on Man. I can imagine Hardy’s song being sung by workingmen in a rural pub, buoyed up by momentary optimism. Still, in America today, the night cloud does indeed appear to be “hueing,” which means taking on color.

Tomorrow shines soon.

Song of Hope
By Thomas Hardy

O sweet Tomorrow! –
After today
There will away
This sense of sorrow.
Then let us borrow
Hope, for a gleaming
Soon will be streaming,
Dimmed by no gray –
No gray!

While the winds wing us
Sighs from The Gone,
Nearer to dawn
Minute-beats bring us;
When there will sing us
Larks of a glory
Waiting our story
Further anon –
Anon!

Doff the black token,
Don the red shoon,
Right and retune
Viol-strings broken;
Null the words spoken
In speeches of rueing,
The night cloud is hueing,
Tomorrow shines soon –
Shines soon!
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Stronger in the Broken Places

By Robin Bates | Published: March 14, 2021
Cooper and Hayes in Farewell to Arms

Monday

In Joe Biden’s primetime address last Thursday evening, he quoted a line from Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. It’s a powerful image on its own and even more so when seen in the context of the novel.

Among Biden’s objectives for the address were to (1) honor those who have died of Covid, (2) report on progress being made, (3) instill hope that an end is insight, and (4) advocate for maintaining Covid precautions since a premature relaxing of sanctions (such as we’re seeing in a number of states) will lead to new outbreaks. “I need your help,” the president said, looking straight at the camera.

Hemingway was invoked as Biden honored the 530,000+ who have died. “And so many of you, as Hemingway wrote, being strong in all the broken places,” Biden said.

The passage occurs at a special time in Farewell to Arms. Frederic Henry has escaped the nightmare of World War I, where he has seen Italians mowed down by Austrian firepower and Italians executing their own officers for retreating. He himself, having deserted, will be shot if he is caught. Yet it’s worth it because he has fallen in love with Catherine, an army nurse. The two have found momentary respite in a northern Italian resort:

At night, there was the feeling that we had come home, feeling no longer alone, waking in the night to find the other one there, and not gone away; all other things were unreal. We slept when we were tired and if we woke the other one woke too so one was not alone. Often a man wishes to be alone and a girl wishes to be alone too and if they love each other they are jealous of that in each other, but I can truly say we never felt that. We could feel alone when we were together, alone against the others. It has only happened to me like that once. I have been alone while I was with many girls and that is the way that you can be most lonely. But we were never lonely and never afraid when we were together. I know that the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist, and the night can be a dreadful time for lonely people once their loneliness has started. But with Catherine there was almost no difference in the night except that it was an even better time.

Then comes the best-known passage from the book, the one that provides Biden with his quote. F. Scott Fitzgerald apparently wanted Hemingway to end his book with it (Fitzgerald knew all about killer endings), but I can understand why Hemingway didn’t. He uses it to foreshadow the actual ending (more on that in a moment) as it sums up beautifully his philosophy of life:

If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

In other words, the world will break those who stand up for what is right—in this case, a couple declaring love in the face of war and death—and those people, if they manage to survive, will turn their hurt into strength. Biden has become an effective consoler-in-chief in part because losing a wife and two children has made him strong at the broken places.

Not all will survive the world’s hurt, Hemingway acknowledges. Some of “the very good and the very gentle and the very brave” will be killed. But one might as well act in accordance with these values, regardless of the cost, because we are all going to die eventually (the world “will kill you too but there will be no special hurry”). Best to have something to show for it.

Blogger Arshan Dhillon alerts me to a David Foster Wallace passage (from a magnificent Commencement address given at Kenyon College) that clarifies what Hemingway might mean by “the very good and the very gentle and the very brave”:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. This is real freedom.

Catherine and Frederic are willing to devote the attention, awareness and discipline that truly caring for each other involves. Therefore, even though the world kills Catherine at the end of the novel, Frederic can look back at his precious moments with her. To spur your own memories of time spent with a loved one, here’s the continuation of the memory:

I remember waking in the morning. Catherine was asleep and the sunlight was coming in through the window. The rain had stopped and I stepped out of bed and across the floor to the window. Down below were the gardens, bare now but beautifully regular, the gravel paths, the trees, the stone wall by the lake and the lake in the sunlight with the mountains beyond. I stood at the window looking out and when I turned away I saw Catherine was awake and watching me. “How are you, darling?” she said. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” “How do you feel?” “I feel very well. We had a lovely night.” “Do you want breakfast?” She wanted breakfast. So did I and we had it in bed, the November sunlight coming in the window, and the breakfast tray across my lap.

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s fascinating film After Life has the premise that, after death, we are to choose a memory in which to spend eternity. We watch characters struggle over their choices—they are guided away from a day in Disneyland—and some, unable to choose, spend eternity in limbo. The memory I have chosen is lying on a large bed in Ljubljana (where I spent two Fulbright years) on a Sunday morning with Julia, reading aloud to our three sons. Since then I have lost one of those sons, but he still lives on in the picture I carry around within me.

Though Justin’s loss broke me, I am stronger in that broken place. Joe Biden knows this can be true for us all in the face of this pandemic. How wonderful that he has Hemingway to provide the words to express it.

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Come Down, O Christ, and Reach Thy Hand

By Robin Bates | Published: March 13, 2021
Gustave Brion, detail from Christ and Peter on the Water

Spiritual Sunday

Today’s Lenten poem is Oscar Wilde’s “E Tenebris,” Latin for “out of darkness.” Addressing Christ, the speaker feels that he is drowning in a stormier sea “than Simon on thy lake of Galilee” and that his heart “is as some famine-murdered land,/Whence all good things have perished utterly.” (Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner talks of being unable to pray because his heart is “as dry as dust.”) Were he to call out to Christ, the speaker feels that he would receive no more response that the pagan prophets received from Baal in their fire-starting contest with Elijah.

Incidentally, the poet’s sense of being abandoned by God—” He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase”—reminds me of a passage in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles. When Tess is raped, Hardy asks about divine protectors:

But, might some say, where was Tess’s guardian angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be awaked.

The poet is reassured in the last three lines of the sonnet. Christ’s wounded hands and “weary human face” indicate that he has not in fact abandoned us. He is down here after all, suffering along with us.

E Tenebris

Come down, O Christ, and help me! reach thy hand,
For I am drowning in a stormier sea
Than Simon on thy lake of Galilee:
The wine of life is spilt upon the sand,
My heart is as some famine-murdered land,
Whence all good things have perished utterly,
And well I know my soul in Hell must lie
If I this night before God’s throne should stand.
“He sleeps perchance, or rideth to the chase,
Like Baal, when his prophets howled that name
From morn to noon on Carmel’s smitten height.”
Nay, peace, I shall behold before the night,
The feet of brass, the robe more white than flame,
The wounded hands, the weary human face.

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WandaVision and Grendel’s Mother

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2021
Olsen as Wanda, the Scarlet Witch

Friday

A great review of WandaVision by the Washington Post’s Sonny Bunch has me making an unexpected comparison: Wanda as Grendel’s Mother. Hang on while I explain.

Disney’s nine-episode series, which concluded this past week, features a superhero who is so traumatized by the death of her robot husband that she creates a fantasy world in which he is still alive. To do so, she takes over an entire town, turning it into a replica of those idyllic sit-com towns from my childhood, like Leave It to Beaver’s Mayfield. All the town’s inhabitants are drafted, against their will, into Wanda’s grieving fantasy.

The show’s most interesting theme, Bunch believes, is that wallowing in grief can turn people into monsters.

This is not to deny that Wanda has many reasons to grieve. In the episode where she revisits various tragic episodes from her life, we understand why she has retreated into a fantasy world. Unfortunately, other people pay for her grief:

But in “WandaVision,” Wanda is processing this trauma by taking an entire town hostage, trapping the people there in a variety of TV sitcoms as she tries to work through her grief by using magic to resurrect Vision and give them twin sons.

It’s a genuinely monstrous act, and for a moment, the show acknowledges that. Freed from Wanda’s curse by fellow witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn), one of the townspeople begs Wanda to let her see her 8-year-old daughter again: The little girl has been locked in her home for the entirety of the so-called Scarlet Witch’s reign, a grotesque act of child separation. Another confesses he’s exhausted: She doesn’t let them sleep in natural cycles, a violation of the Geneva Conventions. When they are allowed to sleep, they suffer her worst nightmares. “Please let us go,” one character begs. And, failing that?

“If you won’t let us go, just let us die,” Sharon (Debra Jo Rupp) croaks after Wanda has literally choked them into silence.

Rather than explore this further, however, the show leaves us with the line, “What is grief, if not love persevering?”, which Bunch believes sidesteps the horror: 

And yet, the show feels the need to recast Wanda’s ultimate decision to give up her imaginary family, as well as her hold over the town, as an act of heroic altruism. “They’ll never know what you sacrificed for them,” says Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), a secret agent turned friend of Wanda, in the final episode.

Rambeau’s line is a moral atrocity, an effort to recast Wanda as the hero of the show, the savior of all these little people. But it’s not what she did for the people of Westview that matters. It’s what she did to them. And what she did to them is horrifying, a form of mind-rape and torture that extended for weeks, maybe months.

I’ve written a number of times about how Grendel’s Mother is one of literature’s great depictions of destructive grief. Any Anglo-Saxon warrior, unhinged by the loss of a comrade, could become a Grendel’s Mother, lashing out indiscriminately. The poet genders the anger female, I think, because warrior society could think of no anger more powerful than that of a mother who has lost her child.

We see Grendel’s Mothers all around us today. Whenever someone lashes out in grief and anger, they have become a Grendel’s Mother. Often innocent parties are killed, like Aeschere in Beowulf and Saddam Hussein following 9-11. In my book How Beowulf Can Save America (2012), I surmise that the radical right’s destructive behavior is connected with the death of their cherished dream that America can once again become Mayfield. (Of course, for people of color that image was never reality.)

Lashing out is only one of the responses to grief that we encounter in Beowulf. Another is dragon depression, where characters retreat into mental caves. At one point we see Wanda retreat into such a solitude, and in Beowulf we see a series of kings do so as well (Hrothgar for a few moments, Heremod, Hrethel, the Last Veteran). The original anger is still there, it just blows cold rather than hot. (It can blow hot is prodded, however, just as hot anger can become cold fury, as it does when Grendel’s Mother retreats into her cold underwater cave.) Neither lashing out nor withdrawing is a healthy way to grieve.

Beowulf defeats hot rage with a giant sword that he finds deep within himself. Wanda does as well, her sword being the realization that grief is “love persevering.” That part the series gets right, even if it glides too quickly over the collateral damage.

I note that Wanda has a couple of Wiglafs, Beowulf’s companion in the dragon battle, in Vision and Monica Rambeau. Both of them help her defeat her dragon self–which is to say, loving support can prevail when we are losing it.

In the end, Wanda lets go and ventures out, just as Beowulf emerges from the undersea cave. Once they have done so, both can once again begin to engage productively with the living world.

Further thought: My one disagreement with Bunch’s analysis is that he thinks that the show gets the acting direct of SWORD wrong:

The only character who has the correct response to Wanda is the acting director of SWORD (Sentient Weapon Observation Response Division), Tyler Hayward (Josh Stamberg), who calls in a drone strike on the monstrously wicked and dangerously powerful Wanda. Yet he is cast as a villain despite being the only person who recognizes the dangers presented by this overpowered war criminal.

Putting aside how we should deal with war criminals, the way to deal with dangerous grieving is not through force. Beowulf learns this when he tries using first his arm strength (will power) and then Unferth’s sword (conventional force) against Grendel’s Mother. Only something from the spirit works with such people. Monica Rambeau realizes this when she says she wants to understand Wanda, not take her out. Because such understanding occurs, Wanda overcomes her inner darkness.

For comparison’s sake, Wanda can be compared with another superhero that goes Grendel’s Mother after losing a loved one. In Season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, lesbian witch Willow Rosenberg goes ballistic after a man rapes and kills her partner. Her anger is so large that, after skinning him alive, she threatens to take down the whole universe. She recovers only after another member of the group soothes her with tender childhood reminiscences, which remind her of her best self. The essay I wrote on the episode was one of this blog’s first posts.

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Our Time in the Covid Sewers

By Robin Bates | Published: March 10, 2021
Jean Valjean (Harry Baur) in Paris sewers (Les Miserables, 1934)

Thursday

Tuesday, as I was awaiting my first Covid shot (!), I was listening to the scene in Les Misérables where Jean Valjean is groping his way through the sewers of Paris. The elation I felt upon receiving the shot bears some resemblance to what Jean Valjean experiences upon seeing the glimmer of the exit light after his nightmarish trek. In fact, the entire episode is a fitting image for the world’s Covid experience this past year.

Jean Valjean’s first descent into the sewer is as disorienting as the early days of the pandemic:

By degrees, we will admit, a certain horror seized upon him. The gloom which enveloped him penetrated his spirit. He walked in an enigma. This aqueduct of the sewer is formidable; it interlaces in a dizzy fashion. It is a melancholy thing to be caught in this Paris of shadows. Jean Valjean was obliged to find and even to invent his route without seeing it. In this unknown, every step that he risked might be his last. How was he to get out? should he find an issue? should he find it in time? would that colossal subterranean sponge with its stone cavities, allow itself to be penetrated and pierced? should he there encounter some unexpected knot in the darkness? should he arrive at the inextricable and the impassable? would Marius die there of hemorrhage and he of hunger? should they end by both getting lost, and by furnishing two skeletons in a nook of that night? He did not know. He put all these questions to himself without replying to them. The intestines of Paris form a precipice. Like the prophet, he was in the belly of the monster.

When I was 11 and visiting Paris sites with my family, the boat trip we took through the sewers of Paris was a far cry from Jean Valjean’s experience. As he carries the unconscious Marius, he encounters a patrol that fires at him, a rat that bites him, and quicksand that very nearly swallows him up. This final ordeal almost proves too much, even though he manages to escape:

However, although he had not left his life in the fontis, he seemed to have left his strength behind him there. That supreme effort had exhausted him. His lassitude was now such that he was obliged to pause for breath every three or four steps, and lean against the wall. Once he was forced to seat himself on the banquette in order to alter Marius’ position, and he thought that he should have to remain there. But if his vigor was dead, his energy was not. He rose again.

At this point, however, he literally experiences a glimmer of hope. Think of it, perhaps, as the moment we learned that a successful Covid vaccine had been developed:

He walked on desperately, almost fast, proceeded thus for a hundred paces, almost without drawing breath, and suddenly came in contact with the wall. He had reached an elbow of the sewer, and, arriving at the turn with head bent down, he had struck the wall. He raised his eyes, and at the extremity of the vault, far, very far away in front of him, he perceived a light. This time it was not that terrible light; it was good, white light. It was daylight. Jean Valjean saw the outlet.

Despite his extreme fatigue and hunger, Jean Valjean is buoyed up:

A damned soul, who, in the midst of the furnace, should suddenly perceive the outlet of Gehenna, would experience what Jean Valjean felt. It would fly wildly with the stumps of its burned wings towards that radiant portal. Jean Valjean was no longer conscious of fatigue, he no longer felt Marius’ weight, he found his legs once more of steel, he ran rather than walked. 

He is not home free yet, however, as he discovers an impenetrable grating barring his accent. Some governors are also prematurely rejoicing, lifting mask mandates and dropping indoor gathering restrictions:

It certainly was the outlet, but he could not get out.

The arch was closed by a heavy grating, and the grating, which, to all appearance, rarely swung on its rusty hinges, was clamped to its stone jamb by a thick lock, which, red with rust, seemed like an enormous brick. The keyhole could be seen, and the robust latch, deeply sunk in the iron staple. The door was plainly double-locked. It was one of those prison locks which old Paris was so fond of lavishing.

On the other side of the grating is (in our case) prospects of neighborhood July 4th barbecues, visits to grandchildren, and normal Thanksgivings. Jean Valjean imagines escaping both the military patrols that are hunting down revolutionaries and Inspector Javert, who has been dogging his steps for years. Ahead is a return to his beloved adopted daughter Cosette:

Beyond the grating was the open air, the river, the daylight, the shore, very narrow but sufficient for escape. The distant quays, Paris, that gulf in which one so easily hides oneself, the broad horizon, liberty. On the right, downstream, the bridge of Jéna was discernible, on the left, upstream, the bridge of the Invalides; the place would have been a propitious one in which to await the night and to escape. It was one of the most solitary points in Paris…

Fortunately, in an unexpected twist, he escapes the sewers, and life returns to normal, with a heartfelt reunion and a wedding. Our own Paris awaits us, but we must stay patient and disciplined for a few more months.

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Does Lit Makes Us Better People?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2021
Francis John Wyburd, Portrait of a Woman Reading

Wednesday

I’m in the final stages of my book Does Literature Make Us Better People? Surveying a 2500-Year Debate and today share the introduction. I kick the book off with a Bertolt Brecht epigraph—“Every art contributes to the greatest art of all, the art of living”—and go from there. I’m still in the revision stage and am open to all reader suggestions.

Introduction

For at least as far back as Plato, people have been debating whether or not literature is good for us.  Plato, worried that Hesiod and Homer would incite immoral behavior in young people, banned poets from his ideal republic while his younger colleague Aristotle countered that tragedy would help audiences psychologically manage dangerous emotions. Both philosophers agreed on one thing, however: literature is a powerful force that profoundly affects the people it touches.

Throughout the ages, the terms of the debate have varied but the same paired questions keep coming up:

–Does literature in fact change individuals’ lives?
–If so, does it change them for the better or can it also change them for the worse?

–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?

–Can literature change not only individuals but history itself?
–If so, is great literature necessarily progressive or can it have a conservative or even reactionary impact?

Or course, these questions lead to many others. For instance, how do we characterize literature in the first place? Then, once we have a working definition, how do we determine whether a work is great or lightweight and whether its effects are good or bad? For that matter, is it the literature itself that changes behavior or might readers have changed as they did without literature?

With regard to audience subjectivity, what does it mean that different readers can respond to the same work in widely different ways and that, even if they respond similarly, they behave differently? Which readers should we study to determine impact? How do we measure change? Are generalizations about literary impact even possible?

There are also practical considerations. If the work is old, where do we find evidence of how audiences responded. For instance, can we determine if and how the behavior of Anglo-Saxon warriors was influenced by public recitations of Beowulf?

Questions of literary impact can get pretty murky, which is why many scholars have shied away from discussing them. In the period after World War II, the New Critics thought they had could skip readers altogether, dismissing their experiences as irrelevant. (They also dismissed as irrelevant authorial intentions and historical context.) W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley said that to judge a work based on its emotional affect was to commit “the affective fallacy.” They found it cleaner to look only at the text.

In so doing, they mimicked 1950s scientists, who employed a seemingly clean tool, the scientific method, to uncover the secrets of the natural world. If scientists’ thoughts and feelings were deemed irrelevant to the process, then couldn’t literary scholars be regarded as scientists of the text, coolly and dispassionately examining poems and novels to discover poetic laws? The New Critics thought so, as did a fair number of the structuralists and deconstructionists who followed them.

Regular readers, however, refuse to regard their literary encounters as irrelevant, and if so many over the centuries have insisted that literature has changed their lives, we should at least look into the matter. New Criticism may have temporarily put the issue on hold, but in the years that followed scholars took it up again. Marxists, feminists, post-colonialists, queer theorists, and other literary activists have made the case for literature’s impact, and so have various religious and so-called values-oriented conservatives. Reader Response Theory and Reception Theory have become respected approaches, studied along with other schools of thought in literary methods classes.

The special challenges haven’t gone away, however. Look at Plato’s claims that Homer corrupts young people, for instance. How does he know that young Athenians, after hearing talented orators recite Achilles’s lament to Odysseus about being dead, will turn cowards on the battlefield? Plato, after all, hasn’t conducted surveys, and even if he is relying on anecdotal evidence, that would have the drawbacks of all such evidence. Perhaps he is just raising a theoretical possibility—what philosophers call a thought experiment—that may or may not reflect actual human behavior.

Whether or not it does, Plato has had a lot of company in the centuries that have followed. Sir Philip Sidney battled a Plato-citing opponent who attacked poetry, Samuel Johnson worried that novels would corrupt the morals of young people, and today we see religious groups and others wishing to censor English teachers and school libraries.

Even empirical studies of literary impact may not settle the matter. Although various social scientists have indeed taken up that challenge, some going so far as to conduct brain scans of people reading novels, the results are still inconclusive. Sometimes the more one attempts to pin down literary impact, the more elusive it appears.

Perhaps the best we can do is examine the arguments that have been put forth over the ages and dig into the various claims. That is the approach I have taken here. By summarizing major thinkers on the subject and scrutinizing the assumptions that undergird their theories, I seek what Hippolyta in Midsummer Night’s Dream calls “a great constancy.” Hippolyta finds a connecting thread in the lovers’ accounts of the night’s events—a coherent picture emerges when they are all assembled together—even though Theseus compares them to poetic delusions. I have followed Hippolyta’s lead here, looking for patterns in what has been written on the subject.

As for what constitutes literature, the definition has shifted over the centuries. When it comes to reader impact, however, one aspect of literature has figured more prominently than all others: its ability to pull us into its imaginary worlds. Cervantesfamously dramatizes this power in Don Quixote, taking it to an extreme, but all great works and plenty of bad ones demonstrate it as well. Phenomenologist Georges Poulet dramatically captures the phenomenon as follows:

As soon as I replace my direct perception of reality by the words of a book, I deliver myself, bound hand and foot, to the omnipotence of fiction. I say farewell to what is, in order to feign belief in what is not. I surround myself with fictitious beings; I become the prey of language. There is no escaping this takeover. Language surrounds me with its unreality.

Indeed, we can say that, without this power, literature would not have generated the controversies it has, leaving most to regard it as a harmless past-time. It’s because literature threatens to change human behavior that people take it seriously. To borrow a line delivered by a character in the film Grand Canyon when confronted by a gang member, “You don’t have the gun, we’re not having this conversation.”

If Plato hadn’t witnessed Homer reciters (rhetors) holding the same kind of sway over audiences as political demagogues did, he might have accepted them into his republic. If Aristotle hadn’t seen audiences emotionally wrenched by Oedipus Rex and Iphigenia in Aulis, he might not have placed tragedy at the center of his Poetics. If a London bishop, 18th century German parents, and an evangelical congregation in Lewiston, Maine hadn’t watched young people disappear into the novels of Henry Fielding, Goethe, and J.K. Rowling respectively, they wouldn’t have (1) accused Tom Jones of causing the 1750 London earthquakes, (2) blamed The Sorrows of Young Werther for adolescent suicides and (3) publicly burned copies of Harry Potter.

For that reason, I focus my attention on those literary genres that take over our minds, immersing us in their worlds and, at least for a moment, persuading us to accept an alternate reality—which is to say, fiction, drama, and poetry. Percy Shelley may have labeled certain philosophers, historians and scientists as poets but, for the purposes of this study, I do not. While we can lose ourselves in creative non-fiction, it may not be clear whether we are moved more by the language or what the language points to. When Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland is enthralled with Anne Radcliffe’s gothics, it’s a different conversation than if she were swept away by, say, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essays.

It is because of their hypnotic sway that poetry, drama, and fictional prose have figured prominently in theoretical debates. Time and again, one of these three has been selected to represent literature in general. Theorists have generally chosen whichever genre was most popular at the time so that, just as Plato singled out epic and Aristotle tragedy, Sir Philip Sidney focused on heroic poetry, Percy Shelley on lyric poetry, and Bertolt Brecht on drama. Since the 18th century, the novel in particular has held sway, although its primacy has been challenged in the past one hundred years by other narrative art forms, such as cinema, radio drama, television, comic books, video games, and various internet fantasies.

Always, however, audience immersion has been at the center of the discussion. Literature casts its spell, people applaud or panic, and theorists rush in to understand. In Part I of this book, I survey what the major theorists have had to say about literary impact. In Part II, I use Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a test case for their theories, reflect upon what Jane Austen had to say about the impact of lightweight literature, and conclude by discussing various ways that you, dear reader, can assess how literature has changed you.

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