A poem came readily to mind as I watched the moment, during last week’s vice-presidential debate between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris, when a fly nestled in Pence’s hair and remained there for a full two minutes. As one Dickinson-quoting wag put it, “I heard a fly buzz when I lied.” But that’s not the lyric I thought of.
In “To a Louse,” Robert Burns moralizes after witnessing a louse (or “crowlin ferlie”/ crawling marvel) in a fine lady’s hat. Writing in dialect, Burns notes that it would have been all very well if this “ugly, creepin, blastit wonner [occupant]” were found squatting [“squattle”] upon a beggar’s temple [“haffit”], a housewife’s flannel outfit [“flainen toy”], or a young boy’s waistcoat [“wyliecoat”]. Humiliating a beautiful lady by settling in her fine bonnet [or “Lunardi”], however, is a step to far. “How daur ye do’t?” he asks before considering administering a dose of poison [“mercurial rozet,/ Or fell, red smeddum.”]
In other words, do not strut boldly [“strunt rarely”] but carry yourself modestly. Jenny, who is proudly tossing her head and spreading her beauty abroad, is apparently too full of herself. The louse brings her down to earth.
As did Pence’s fly. Conservative columnist George Will, who once described the vice president as a cross between Elmer Gantry and Uriah Heep (here’s my blog post on his comparison ), set off a nation-wide google search with the descriptor “oleaginous” [oily or greasy]. As if to prove him right, it appears that the fly found a home in Pence’s oil-stiffened hair.
The sanctimonious Pence insisted on mansplaining to and talking over both Harris and moderator Susan Page. Would he consider it a gift to see himself as we see him? That would take more humility that we’ve seen him demonstrate.
To a Louse
Ha! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
Your impudence protects you sairly;
I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
Owre gauze and lace;
Tho’, faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
On sic a place.
Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,
Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner,
How daur ye set your fit upon her-
Sae fine a lady?
Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner
On some poor body.
Swith! in some beggar’s haffet squattle;
There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,
Wi’ ither kindred, jumping cattle,
In shoals and nations;
Whaur horn nor bane ne’er daur unsettle
Your thick plantations.
Now haud you there, ye’re out o’ sight,
Below the fatt’rels, snug and tight;
Na, faith ye yet! ye’ll no be right,
Till ye’ve got on it-
The verra tapmost, tow’rin height
O’ Miss’ bonnet.
My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out,
As plump an’ grey as ony groset:
O for some rank, mercurial rozet,
Or fell, red smeddum,
I’d gie you sic a hearty dose o’t,
Wad dress your droddum.
I wad na been surpris’d to spy
You on an auld wife’s flainen toy;
Or aiblins some bit dubbie boy,
On’s wyliecoat;
But Miss’ fine Lunardi! fye!
How daur ye do’t?
O Jenny, dinna toss your head,
An’ set your beauties a’ abread!
Ye little ken what cursed speed
The blastie’s makin:
Thae winks an’ finger-ends, I dread,
Are notice takin.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion:
What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,
An’ ev’n devotion!
In our polarized nation, some of the most severe divisions occur between various Christian communities, with white evangelicals leaning heavily towards Donald Trump and black evangelicals at least as heavily towards Joe Biden. White Catholics lean Trump (although not by overwhelming numbers), Latino Catholics toward Biden.
One saw similar polarization prior to the Civil War, where slavery was either a primal sin or God’s will, depending on which side you were on. (See my post on Uncle Tom’s Cabin on this matter. ) This provides some context for “Unity,” by abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier.
Any poem calling for all to embrace “our broad humanity” feels good these days.
Forgive, O Lord, our severing ways, The separate altars that we raise, The varying tongues that speak Thy praise!
Suffice it now. In time to be Shall one great temple rise to thee. Thy Church our broad humanity.
White flowers of love its walls shall climb. Soft bells of peace shall ring its chime, Its days shall all be holy time.
The hymn, long sought, shall then be heard, The music of the world’s accord, Confessing Christ, the inward word!
That song shall swell from shore to shore, One faith, one love, one hope restore The seamless garb that Jesus wore!
I look forward to the Nobel Literature Prize because it often introduces me to authors I don’t know. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that I barely know the poetry of American poet Louise Glück, this year’s recipient, but I like what I’m finding on the web.
In “Mother and Child,” a mother finds herself attempting to explain to her child who we are and why we are here. Other existential questions are why we suffer and why we are ignorant. In her search for answers, she looks both to the biological history of the human race and to the child’s specific genetic lineage.
Answers are elusive and she acknowledges that she, like all of us, has had to improvise. What else can we do as “cells in a great darkness”? Knowing that her child will be just as driven to find answers as she has been, she encourages him or her to follow the ancient line of thought. “It is your turn to address it,” she says.
By framing it within a mother and child framework, she gives the question a special intimacy and a special urgency. The address to a child follows a poetic tradition that I wrote about recently that includes W. B. Yeats and Anthony Hecht and, in fiction, Marilynne Robinson (Gilead).
We’re all dreamers; we don’t know who we are.
Some machine made us; machine of the world, the constricting family. Then back to the world, polished by soft whips.
We dream; we don’t remember.
Machine of the family: dark fur, forests of the mother’s body. Machine of the mother: white city inside her.
And before that: earth and water. Moss between rocks, pieces of leaves and grass.
And before, cells in a great darkness. And before that, the veiled world.
This is why you were born: to silence me. Cells of my mother and father, it is your turn to be pivotal, to be the masterpiece.
I improvised; I never remembered. Now it’s your turn to be driven; you’re the one who demands to know:
Why do I suffer? Why am I ignorant? Cells in a great darkness. Some machine made us; it is your turn to address it, to go back asking what am I for? What am I for?
Few new novels in recent years have hit me as hard as Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, and I’ve been equally impressed with Lila and Home. Now, with a New York Review of Books Review of the recently released Jack—perhaps the last book in what has become a tetralogy—I have a clearer sense of why. Robinson invests her characters with a deep humanity.
In an essay discussing literature’s civic virtues, philosopher Martha Nussbaum identifies this as literature’s great gift:
[T]he great contribution literature has to make to the life of the citizen is its ability to wrest from our frequently obtuse and blunted imaginations an acknowledgement of those who are other than ourselves, both in concrete circumstances and even in thought and emotion. As Ellison put it, a work of fiction may contribute “to defeat this national tendency to deny the common humanity shared by my character and those who might happen to read of his experience.” This contribution makes it a key element in higher education.
In her review, Hermione Lee uses Robinson’s own words to make a similar point. Creating a character is a way of getting at the “comprehensible complexity—spiritual, intellectually, and emotional—of anyone we encounter.” Lee says that Robinson draws upon Shakespeare, Puritan writings, and American authors such as Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens to capture the sacred selfhood of each individual. As Robinson puts it, with these writers she shares
a fascination with the commonest elements of life as they are mediated and entertained by perception and reflection…. Sacredness is realized in the act of attention…. The exalted mind could understand the ordinary as visionary.
Lee observes,
Clearly this is her own model for writing fiction. She says that she is exploring “intuition.” She wants to “simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting.” Fiction for her is “an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.” She is trying to get as close as she can to the soul of an imagined human being, who becomes real to her, and to us, in the process. She thinks of character as having “a palette or a music,” “a kind of coherency of tone and manner…a repertory of behavior.” She works “from a sense of the experience of human presence,” without passing judgment. Hence the slow deliberation of the narratives and the minute internal details of the workings of a mind.
Here’s a sample from Gilead. The narrator is a minister who, knowing he is dying, is writing a letter that his infant son will one day be able to read when his father is long gone. I love John Ames’s open-hearted mediation upon the world:
I really can’t tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.
When they saw me coming, of course the joking stopped, but I could see they were still laughing to themselves, thinking what the old preacher almost heard them say.
I felt like telling them, I appreciate a joke as much as anybody. There have been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to say that. But it’s not a thing people are willing to accept. They want you to be a little bit apart. I felt like saying, I’m a dying man, and I won’t have so many more occasions to laugh, in this world at least. But that would just make them serious and polite, I suppose. I’m keeping my condition a secret as long as I can. For a dying man I feel pretty good, and that is a blessing. Of course your mother knows about it. She said if I feel good, maybe the doctor is wrong. But at my age there’s a limit to how wrong he can be.
That’s the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There’s a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn’t really expect a find it, either.
Life seems immeasurably rich when one is in the grip of one of Robinson’s characters.
Lucille Corcos, illus. from Craik’s Little Lame Prince
Wednesday
When I watched an infirm Donald Trump take a vanity ride around Walter Reed Hospital and then gasp for breath as he returned prematurely to the White House, I thought of the dying king in Maria Mulock Craik’s The Little Lame Prince (1875), a fairy story that riveted me when I was young. Trump may not be dying, but he suddenly seems what Robert Frost would call “a diminished thing.”
As a small child, lame Prince Dolor is spirited off to a tower prison in the desert when his uncle, the regent, usurps the throne. The prince grows up knowing nothing of what has happened, but his fairy godmother provides him with various supports, including a magical traveling cloak and a magpie guide to explain things.
Eventually Dolor learns his history and desires to see the usurper. The magpie knows of a hole in the palace roof that will allow them access. Think of it as the transparency that Trump’s doctors, at his command, are denying the American public:
But the boy hesitated. “Isn’t it rude?—won’t they think us intruding?”
“O, dear, no! There’s a hole like this in every palace, dozens of holes, indeed. Everybody knows it, but nobody speaks of it. Intrusion! Why, though the royal family are supposed to live shut up behind stone walls ever so thick, all the world knows that they live in a glass house where everybody can see them and throw a stone at them. Now pop down on your knees, and take a peep at his Majesty!”
The prince expects something marvelous—“His Majesty!”—but what he finally sees does not impress:
The Prince gazed eagerly down into a large room, the largest room he had ever beheld, with furniture and hangings grander than anything he could have ever imagined. A stray sunbeam, coming through a crevice of the darkened windows, struck across the carpet, and it was the loveliest carpet ever woven—just like a bed of flowers to walk over; only nobody walked over it, the room being perfectly empty and silent.
“Where is the King?” asked the puzzled boy.
“There,” said Mag, pointing with one wrinkled claw to a magnificent bed, large enough to contain six people. In the center of it, just visible under the silken counterpane,—quite straight and still,—with its head on the lace pillow, lay a small figure, something like wax-work, fast asleep—very fast asleep! There was a number of sparkling rings on the tiny yellow hands, that were curled a little, helplessly, like a baby’s, outside the coverlet; the eyes were shut, the nose looked sharp and thin, and the long gray beard hid the mouth and lay over the breast. A sight not ugly nor frightening, only solemn and quiet. And so very silent—two little flies buzzing about the curtains of the bed being the only audible sound.
“Is that the King?” whispered Prince Dolor.
“Yes,” replied the bird.
He had been angry—furiously angry—ever since he knew how his uncle had taken the crown, and sent him, a poor little helpless child, to be shut up for life, just as if he had been dead. Many times the boy had felt as if, king as he was, he should like to strike him, this great, strong, wicked man.
Why, you might as well have struck a baby! How helpless he lay, with his eyes shut, and his idle hands folded: they had no more work to do, bad or good.
I remember, as a child, gazing at the Lucille Corcos illustration (from the 1948 edition) of the prince gazing down at the tiny king, who is swallowed up by the vast bed. The impressive splendor once used to impress the masses has been stripped away.
Although the president may rebound, I sense that he is shrinking in the eyes of all but his most fervent supporters. His tax returns show him to be a failed businessman while his illness proves his reassurances to be hollow, self-serving, and dangerous.
Little Lame Prince, as a fairy tale, concludes with the country coming to its senses and returning the prince to his rightful place. Many of us would like such an ending for ourselves.
Further thought: I also thought of the diminished Wizard of Oz after the screen comes down and of the Red Queen being shaken into a kitten by Alice at the end of Through the Looking Glass. Think of Alice as an America public fed up with the non-stop carnival we have been witnessing:
At this moment she heard a hoarse laugh at her side, and turned to see what was the matter with the White Queen; but, instead of the Queen, there was the leg of mutton sitting in the chair. ‘Here I am!’ cried a voice from the soup tureen, and Alice turned again, just in time to see the Queen’s broad good-natured face grinning at her for a moment over the edge of the tureen, before she disappeared into the soup.
There was not a moment to be lost. Already several of the guests were lying down in the dishes, and the soup ladle was walking up the table towards Alice’s chair, and beckoning to her impatiently to get out of its way.
‘I can’t stand this any longer!’ she cried as she jumped up and seized the tablecloth with both hands: one good pull, and plates, dishes, guests, and candles came crashing down together in a heap on the floor.
‘And as for you,’ she went on, turning fiercely upon the Red Queen, whom she considered as the cause of all the mischief—but the Queen was no longer at her side—she had suddenly dwindled down to the size of a little doll, and was now on the table, merrily running round and round after her own shawl, which was trailing behind her.
At any other time, Alice would have felt surprised at this, but she was far too much excited to be surprised at anything now. ‘As for you,’ she repeated, catching hold of the little creature in the very act of jumping over a bottle which had just lighted upon the table, ‘I’ll shake you into a kitten, that I will!’
She took her off the table as she spoke, and shook her backwards and forwards with all her might.
The Red Queen made no resistance whatever; only her face grew very small, and her eyes got large and green: and still, as Alice went on shaking her, she kept on growing shorter—and fatter—and softer—and rounder—and—
—and it really was a kitten, after all.
Trump is no cute kitten but he needs a good shaking.
The invaluable website Literary Hub has alerted me to a fascinating article about how American hardboiled detective fiction inspired and influenced the man some consider as the 20th century’s greatest philosopher. Who knew that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler would figure into Ludwig Wittgenstein’s groundbreaking theories about philosophy and language?
According to Philip K. Zimmerman in CrimeReads, “During the last two decades of his life, Wittgenstein read such fiction compulsively.” Zimmerman then lays out how both Wittgenstein’s theories and his very identity as a philosopher drew strength from what most people of the time regarded as pulp fiction.
Zimmerman sums up Wittgenstein’s philosophic concerns as follows:
Wittgenstein’s central question, the conundrum that haunted him throughout his life, was what can and cannot be said. With time his position on this question changed, but even at his most expansive, he remained skeptical about the ability of words to capture, or even explore, universal truths—precisely what most philosophers believe their words to be doing. The young Wittgenstein thought it was impossible to say anything truly meaningful about God, the soul, ethics, the nature of being or virtually any of the other subjects that philosophers go on about. His claim was not that these things don’t exist but merely that words can’t touch them.
Here, a tragedy looms. It appears we’re being asked to accept that the most profound dimensions of our experience—more or less all the things that make life tolerable—are incommunicable, that as soon as we have the guts to admit the truth about language, the door locks on our cage of existential solitude. But happily (if that’s the word I’m looking for), Wittgenstein continued to believe in ways of showing what cannot be directly said and of understanding what cannot be directly thought. By arranging our ideas correctly, we reveal the ineffable connections between them; by looking at the world in a certain way, we permit its true nature to show through. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein calls this “the mystical”: a communication beyond the articulable and an understanding beyond the limits of reality. Because mysticism also cannot be spoken of, it occupies very little space in the Tractatus, yet in a sense it is what the whole book is about. By delimiting language, Wittgenstein hoped to open us up to what lies beyond it.
Zimmerman connects this with hardboiled fiction in that the latter also communicates indirectly. If a sense of dread pervades, say, Chandler’s The Big Sleep, it is because the menace is never explicitly laid out but only hinted at. Zimmerman identifies the genre’s minimalism as key:
The hardboiled style is highly adept at the magic trick of saying without actually saying, of using indirect means such as tone and mood, atmosphere and scene, symbolism and choice of detail to conjure up an understanding, or simply a feeling, that is all the stronger, and perhaps all the truer, for never being stated explicitly.
Hardboiled detective fiction is hardly the only narrative form that operates in this way. Joseph Conrad and Henry James come immediately to mind as authors who permit the true nature of the world to shine through without explicitly naming it. Zimmerman, however, says that Wittgenstein wasn’t only attracted to the genre’s indirect style. He identified with the hardboiled detectives themselves.
To explain why, Zimmerman goes into the history of crime fiction and how it evolved from the soft-boiled detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle to the hard edge of the Americans. In the former, the detective looks for patterns in the evidence before propounding, often in a comfortable setting, a theory that connects all the dots. This, Zimmerman notes, is how classical philosophy operated before Wittgenstein radically broke from it.
Early in his career, he notes, Wittgetstein did what other philosophers did:
During that time, he was one of several philosophers trying to analyze our knowledge of the world down to its most basic parts, an approach to philosophy known as logical atomism. One of the central ambitions of logical atomism was to construct an absolute theory of meaning, one that would explain with mathematical precision just how the elementary units of meaning, namely words and propositions, relate to their ostensible objects, namely things and states of affairs. The Tractatus is perhaps the work that best succeeds in taking this strand of logical atomism to its logical conclusions—and, for the same reason, perhaps also the work that best demonstrates how unsatisfactory such an approach to language ultimately is. The theory of meaning put forth in the Tractatus is, to put it mildly, somewhat narrow. As Wittgenstein points out, the book itself, if judged by its own ruthless standards, is largely meaningless.
Wittgenstein needed Hammett, Chandler, Mickey Spillane and others to give him the courage to break with this model. Instead of an armchair detective a la Dupin and Holmes, he became philosophy’s equivalent of the street-smart private eye. Zimmerman uses Hammett’s introduction to The Maltese Falcon to elaborate:
Rejecting the detective as master logician, perhaps best embodied by Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin, these writers [Hammett, Carroll John Daly] developed a more naturalistic, pragmatic type of hero who distrusts abstractions and solves crimes instead with a blend of street smarts, gut instinct and the occasional right hook to the jaw: a figure we now recognize immediately as the hardboiled detective.
Hardboiled investigations proceed not by logical links between clues but from scene to scene and suspect to suspect. Formal reasoning rarely has much to contribute. Questions are posed and solved—or not solved—by messier, more tentative, ultimately more human rules of play. In his 1934 introduction to The Maltese Falcon, Hammett, who himself had been a Pinkerton detective, described how Sam Spade differed from his famous predecessors: “Spade has no original […] For your private detective does not […] want to be an erudite solver of riddles in the Sherlock Holmes manner; he wants to be a hard and shifty fellow, able to take care of himself in any situation, able to get the best of anybody he comes in contact with […]”
That a crime has been committed, Hammett knew, does not necessarily mean that a plan has been carried out. Plotting and scheming are things people usually do in response to a crime, not in preparation for one. And since most crimes are not clean in the first place, their solutions probably aren’t either. To search for logic in a murder case is to expect to find what was likely never there.
Zimmerman then spells out the parallel:
Wittgenstein wanted to slash through the Gordian knot of logical analysis, rescuing language from its abstract philosophical uses and restoring it to its natural functions. The hardboiled writers, meanwhile, were hard at work extricating the detective from the airless realm of riddles and reinjecting him or her into social reality, seedy underbelly and all.
Wittgenstein did eventually develop a method for his new philosophy. The key insight was that language is not a logical system of denotation after all. Rather, language is a form of social behavior—a set of conventions and nothing more…
This view radically depreciates supposedly philosophical language (which Wittgenstein continued to believe was mostly nonsense) and radically appreciates everyday speech. The philosopher achieves clarity, Wittgenstein now believed, by discarding generalizations and focusing instead on concrete circumstances.
Zimmerman has fun applying the hardboiled analogy to a philosopher who seems as far removed as possible from the grimy streets of southern California:
The Continental Op never solved a crime by abstraction. He took to the streets, diving headfirst into the flow. He cracked cases not by steps in logic but by steps on the pavement. Similarly, we can take Wittgenstein to be saying that philosophers have gone wrong by adopting the method of the armchair detective, who solves the mystery at a distance and because of that distance….Wittgenstein’s new philosophy embraced closeness, challenging philosophers to finally get up from their armchairs, so to speak, and hit the streets. It was in this fundamentally hardboiled sense that he called his late masterpiece the Philosophical Investigations.
Explaining why Wittgenstein would identify with the Continental Op, Zimmerman points out that the fiction we love allows us to occupy our deepest selves. At his core, he says, Wittgenstein was a hardboiled philosopher:
And in fact the hardboiled hero is a model he embodied with admirable consistency, in his own intellectual way. Sangfroid, indifference to popular opinion, contempt for authority, unflinching determination to face our human limits—these were all hallmarks of his personal style. Wittgenstein, we might say, was a hardboiled thinker. Like a hardboiled hero, he was obsessed by right and wrong but only on his own terms, and he refused to preach about it. Like a hardboiled hero, when faced with the choice between misunderstanding and silence, he chose silence. His primary loyalty was to himself and his work—which in the final analysis were the same thing.
In this description, I think of Sam Spade explaining to Brigit O’Shaughnessy why he’s turning in for the murder of his partner, even though he loves her:
Spade pulled his hand out of hers. He no longer either smiled or grimaced. His wet yellow face was set hard and deeply lined. His eyes burned madly. He said: “Listen. This isn’t a damned bit of good. You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once more and then we’ll give it up. Listen. When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away with it. It’s bad all around–bad for that one organization, bad for every detective everywhere. Third, I’m a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and then let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the natural thing
When a philosopher is searching for the truth, he or she has got to follow it to the end. If he or she doesn’t, it’s bad for every philosophers everywhere. Asking a philosopher to let go of the search is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the philosophic thing.
New SCOTUS pick announcement violated D.C. rules about large gatherings
Monday
It appears that Donald Trump’s gathering to celebrate his new Supreme Court pick may have been a Covid superspreader event, with members of Congress, Trump aides, attendees, and Trump himself coming down with the virus. The Washington Post described the situation as Shakepearean tragedy:
[T]he jarring contrast between the carefree, cavalier attitude toward the virus on display in the Rose Garden last Saturday and the pernicious awakening that occurred Thursday night resembles a Shakespearean tragedy.
The White House’s handling of the period between the first known symptoms — those of Hicks on Wednesday — and the president’s infection, which was confirmed about 1 a.m. Friday, is what experts considered a case study in irresponsibility and mismanagement.
I’m not the only one to question the Shakespearean designation. Before voicing my own doubts, let me note some of the clever twitter pushback the article has received.
For instance, there was a riff relying on Marx’s famous dictum (about Napoleon III) that great world historic facts and personages appear “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” The appearance of Covid is tragedy while Trump contracting it after calling it a hoax is farce. Only, as tweeter (((Curtis Perry))) essentially notes, for months we’ve essentially seen a whole series of farces. Or rather,
First as tragedy, then as farce, then as musical comedy, then as Blair Witch shakeycam, then as Shakespearean, then as theater of the absurd, then as The Sequel, then as muppets, then as a gritty reboot, then as Theater of Cruelty, then as a gothic reimagining, then as claymation
To which list tweeter Bradley Greenburg adds,
then as 80s MTV video, then as vaudeville, then as Monday night open mic at a comedy club in Ft Wayne, IN, then as a high school play staged by homeschoolers, and finally as a danse macabre
The same twitter thread also contained the following gem, which similarly undermines elevated claims of tragedy:
Chorus: “O mighty King of Thebes! rescue your people from this plague that afflicts our city!”
Oedipus: “Nah.”
Although I don’t hold out great hope, we’ll see if Trump changes now that he has contracted the disease. Someone else on twitter imagined him being visited by the ghost of Herman Cain, who died of Covid after attending Trump’s Tulsa rally (maskless, of course), who sets up meetings with the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future.
In other twitter responses, legendary Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe compared the attendees at the Rose Garden ceremony to the partygoers in Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” (Senator Mike Lee’s embracing multiple persons and then testing positive makes him a prime candidate for Poe’s story.) My son Toby Wilson-Bates, meanwhile, tweeted out a still from HBO’s Game of Thrones’ “Red Wedding” episode, where guests are lured into a wedding and then massacred.
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s gathering is indeed a “Rose Garden massacre” since if we’re lucky no one will die. But Trump inviting everyone together and then unleashing the illness upon them invites the comparison. Oh, and can we still call it the Rose Garden now that—in a very George Martin touch–Melania has uprooted all the roses? (Is there anything that Trump and those around him haven’t left in smoking ruins?!)
But back to “Shakespearean tragedy.” Perhaps the authors have in mind leaders who, after violating law and tradition, have their evil rebound upon them. In that case, the Post reporters might have in mind Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Richard III or—my favorite for Trump comparisons—King Lear. Or maybe they’re thinking of Hamlet, with the protagonist learns dark truths while a sketchy wedding is underway. Calling it a tragedy, however, dignifies a shameless hustler who, as Bob Woodward’s tapes make clear, has by lying through his teeth to us about this killer virus.
I’m therefore with the tweeters on this one. Trump contracting Covid has more in common with shakeycam than Shakespeare.
One of today’s Old Testament readings is Moses receiving the Ten Commandments, which gives me an excuse to share Milton’s account. In the opening lines of Paradise Lost, like Homer and Virgil before him, Milton invokes the muse. His muse, however, is not Calliope, the Greek muse of epic poetry, but God, who dictates Paradise Lost to Milton as He dictated the Law to his “shepherd” Moses atop Mt. Oreb and Mt. Sinai:
Sing Heavenly Muse, that on the secret top Of Orbe, or of Sinai, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heaven’s and Earth Rose out of Chaos…
In the Exodus version, God’s word is accompanied by impressive pyrotechnics:
When all the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they were afraid and trembled and stood at a distance, and said to Moses, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid; for God has come only to test you and to put the fear of him upon you so that you do not sin.”
In Milton’s version, we hear about God dictating the Commandments in Book XII, when the Archangel Michael tells Adam what is to come:
Doubt not but that sin Will reign among them [the Israelites], as of thee begot; And therefore was Law given them to evince Thir natural pravity, by stirring up Sin against Law to fight…
The reasoning here is a little contorted. Michael is saying that God gave the Israelites clear laws by whch they “can discover sin.” The laws, however, are not enough to counteract human’s natural depravity—in fact the laws actually stir sin up—so that their existence is most effective in getting people to see that something more than law is needed. That something more is Jesus Christ, a far more effective sacrifice than “the blood of bulls and goats”:
…that when they see Law can discover sin, but not remove, Save by those shadowy expiations weak, The blood of bulls and goats, they may conclude Some blood more precious must be paid for Man…
Although the Law is good in the short run, Michael tells Adam, ultimately it must be superseded by a new covenant of Grace, just as Moses is superseded by Jesus. Instead of coming to God through servile fear of laws, followers will instead embrace God with freely offered faith. Servile fear will give way to filial respect and love:
So Law appears imperfect, and but given With purpose to resign them in full time Up to a better Covenant, disciplined From shadowy Types to Truth, from Flesh to Spirit, From imposition of strict Laws, to free Acceptance of large Grace, from servile fear To filial, works of Law to works of Faith.
In other words, no longer will thunder and lightning be required. Just internal guidance from the Holy Spirit.
Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, who argues that miracles and other dramatic shows are required to command faith, would not agree. Milton, however, has more faith in the human heart.
A New York Review of Books article by Peter Brooks article about Honoré de Balzac has persuaded me to return to the French author. (Thanks to Literary Hub for the alert.) As a French minor in college, I read Eugénie Grandet and Pere Goriot, but I’ve never appreciated Balzac, largely because I was repulsed by his nakedly materialistic characters. Their obsession with money made me feel grubby.
Brooks makes me realize I was blaming the mirror for the reality it reflected—a mirror comprised of 2,472 individual characters:
Oscar Wilde noted in one of his truest paradoxes that the 19th century as we know it is largely Balzac’s invention. The invention takes the form of a remarkable set of life stories that marshal the dynamic forces of a new era, its entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, doctors, musicians, detectives, actors and actresses, moneylenders, peasants, professors, prostitutes—the list extends to cover all social spheres and all careers in a world where the assigned identities of the Ancien régime have given way to an uncertain new order where everything seems to be up for grabs, if you can find some way to get the money you need to acquire things, name, reputation, fortune.
Balzac was apparently was conservative who shared my own revulsion with materialism. Despite his distaste, however, he was fascinated by the emerging order:
Balzac proclaimed himself a political conservative in reaction to an era of unregulated change, in which the individual ego seemed to have become the sole measure of things. His nostalgia for a past organic society where people knew their place and social rank was evident in dress and manner is matched by his fascination with the new possibilities for each individual to forge a unique destiny. The growing city of Paris, the increase in social mobility, and the ambitions unleashed by capitalism and nascent democracy all called for a new semiotics of modern life, new ways to read who people are, what their clothes and accessories and ways of walking and speaking say about where they come from and where they are going. The sum of those invented destinies is The Human Comedy.
Balzac is a great argument for why one shouldn’t apply political touchstones to literature. Max Engels uses Balzac to make this point, preferring him to the left-leaning Emile Zola and noting, “I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.” If you want to see the contradictions that will bring down the existing order, Engels said, read Balzac:
Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply – the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favorite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found – that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.
Brooks echoes Engels here. By setting his fiction in 1920s France–which is to say, during the restoration of the monarchy following Napoleon’s fall–he achieved a “retrospective view of society” that
allowed him to become the first writer truly to seize the meaning of the emergent modern world, its nascent capitalism, its valuation of money above all else, its competition for social and political prominence, promoting the individual above social cohesion. He saw also the new importance of the city as provincials streamed to it, either to work in bottom-level jobs and become the urban proletariat or, like his ambitious young men (and some women also), to seek to conquer and to dominate the social order.
Balzac’s focus on these energies, Brooks believes, resembles post-modernism’s fascination with our own highly diverse and globalized world. “[I]f high modernism, in literature as in architecture, preferred a certain pared-down formalism,” he writes, “the reaction against such austerity brought a new appreciation for the excessive and melodramatic dimensions of Balzac’s mode of representation.” Even if we no longer feel that we have time for Balzac’s voluminous writings, the television serial
is nothing if not Balzacian. It is a medium he would have loved to master given the chance. And indeed, adaptations of Balzac for both film and television are myriad.
