How great literature can change your life

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951@gmail.com and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

Tuesday

I will spend the rest of this week reposting essays from this past year that I particularly like. Of the issues that have most concerned me as a lover of literature is the outbreak of book banning. When these bans extend to Shakespeare and (as noted in the essay below) Milton, one realizes that no book of substance is safe.

The good news is that those attacking teachers and librarians are beginning to experience blowback. One of the most noxious aspects of Trumpism is how it provides bullies with a permission structure to engage in outrageous behavior, but standing up to bullies—grabbing Grendel in a strong handgrip, as it were—is the best response. Citizens have been seizing back school boards from MAGA bigots while recently a federal judge ruled—as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment—an Arkansas law seeking to create criminal liability for librarians for distributing content that state legislators consider “obscene” or “harmful to minors.”

Reprinted from January 12, 2024

In the early 1990s I became involved in a Toni Morrison controversy in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, where I taught for 36 years. One of my former students, David Flood, was teaching a unit at Leonardtown High School in which he paired Huckleberry Finn with Morrison’s Song of Solomon. A student was offended by three pages in Morrison’s novel—probably the scene where Milkman trades trash talk with a man he meets in a country store—and his mother took the offending pages to the school superintendent. She in turn banned the teaching of the novel in all St. Mary’s County public high schools, a ban (I believe) that is still in effect.

I visited the superintendent’s office to complain—it didn’t do any good—but that’s not where I’m going with today’s post. Rather, I am recalling a response I wrote to someone who wrote a letter to the local newspaper claiming that Morrison was a mediocre author not worth studying. (The Nobel Prize, in his view, was not based on merit but was literary affirmative action.) At the time, the so-called canon wars were underway, and his argument was that teachers should be teaching great authors, not figures like Morrison.

Not only did I contend that Morrison had more than earned her place in the pantheon of great authors—I consider her comparable to Faulkner among America’s novelists—but I pointed out that there were other authors in the canon who had passages far more graphic than anything in Song of Solomon. Among the works I mentioned was Paradise Lost.

I had meant this as a dig at those who worship the canon without truly seeing it—there were many like this in those days, including Secretary of Education William Bennet and National Endowment of the Humanities chair Lynne Cheney—but I didn’t anticipate that, one day, someone would actually ban Paradise Lost for its salacious content. Thanks to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, however, that has now happened. Apparently Milton’s immortal epic is among the works pulled from school library shelves in Orange County, Florida.

According to the Orlando Sentinel,

A total of 673 books, from classics to best-sellers, have been removed from Orange County classrooms this year for fear they violate new state rules that ban making “sexual conduct” available to public school students.

The list of rejected books, which the district began compiling during the summer, will get another review from Orange County Public Schools staff, so some could eventually be put back on shelves. But for now, teachers who had them in their classrooms have been told to take them home or put them away so students cannot access them.

In addition to Paradise Lost, the books pulled include John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, Morrison’s Beloved, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Alice Walker’s Color Purple, and Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Also on the list are popular novels by Stephen King, Sue Monk Kidd, Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and John Irving.

According to dissenting Orange County School Board member Karen Castor Dentel, the books pulled represent “over censorship” by media specialists who fear they will be held responsible for every item on their shelves. Dentel said that the Florida law is “creating this culture of fear within our media specialists and even teachers who just want to have a library in their classrooms, so kids have access.”

The Sentinel article reports that the new state training required for all media specialists is warning them to “err on the side of caution” when approving books. If they approve inappropriate books, they “can face criminal penalties and the loss of their teaching certificates.”

So imagine a State Board confronting a media specialist who failed to remove Paradise Lost with the following passages from Book II. First there’s Satan having sex with his daughter Sin, who has sprung Athena-like from his head. Sin is describing to her father and lover how he got her pregnant:

…familiar grown,
I pleas’d, and with attractive graces won
The most averse, thee chiefly, who full oft
Thy self in me thy perfect image viewing
Becam’st enamored, and such joy thou took 
With me in secret, that my womb conceived
A growing burden.

What happens next is a nightmarish birth scene in which their child, Death, tears through Sin’s birth canal. Sin describes this horrendous birth as she introduces Satan to his son:

At last this odious offspring whom thou seest
Thine own begotten, breaking violent way
Tore through my entrails, that with fear and pain
Distorted, all my nether shape thus grew
Transform’d…

Believe it or not, the worst is yet to come. After being born, Death doesn’t waste any time but straightway proceeds to rape his mother, engendering a pack of hell hounds that emerge from her now reptilian nether regions:

I fled, but he pursued (though more, it seems, 
Inflamed with lust then rage) and swifter far,
Me overtook his mother all dismayed,
And in embraces forcible and foul
Engendering with me, of that rape begot
These yelling Monsters that with ceaseless cry 
Surround me… 

Earlier we have gotten a depiction of these hounds. The hideous birth has transformed Sin’s nether regions into something snake-like:

The one seemed Woman to the waist, and fair, 
But ended foul in many a scaly fold
Voluminous and vast, a Serpent armed
With mortal sting: about her middle round
A cry of Hell Hounds never ceasing barked
With wide Cerberian mouths full loud, and rung 
A hideous Peal: yet, when they list, would creep,
If aught disturbed their noise, into her womb
And kennel there, yet there still barked and howled
Within unseen.

These hounds, meanwhile, continue to interbreed so that more are

                                    hourly conceived
And hourly born, with sorrow infinite
To me, for when they list into the womb
That bred them they return, and howl and gnaw
My Bowels, their repast; then bursting forth [ 800 ]
A fresh with conscious terrors vex me round,
That rest or intermission none I find.

It’s a nightmare straight out of Dante’s Inferno (is that on the Orange County list?), a powerful image of how sin is perpetually breeding more sin.

And now let’s turn to the Adam and Eve episodes. The two wander around naked, engaging first in good sex (this before the fall) and then bad sex (this after the fall). Milton was controversial in having them engage in sex before the fall but his point is that sex itself isn’t bad. In fact, it’s a gift that God “declares pure and commands to some, leaves free to all.” Those who think otherwise—who bid us abstain from sex—are parroting Satan. His words apply well to the Orange County School Board:

Whatever Hypocrites austerely talk
Of purity and place and innocence, 
Defaming as impure what God declares
Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all.
Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain
But our Destroyer, foe to God and Man?

Where sex goes wrong, in Milton’s eyes, is when it becomes bound up with power and ego. Lustful sex, he would say, is what the Chairman of the Florida Republican Party and his wife, the co-founder of Moms for Liberty, were having with a third party, a relationship that ultimately culminated in a rape. Here’s Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s bad sex:

                 …but that false Fruit
Far other operation first displayed,
Carnal desire enflaming, he on Eve
Began to cast lascivious Eyes, she him
As wantonly repaid; in Lust they burn: 
Till Adam thus ‘gan Eve to dalliance move…

And a little later:

So said he, and forbore not glance or toy
Of amorous intent, well understood 
Of Eve, whose Eye darted contagious Fire.
Her hand he seized, and to a shady bank,
Thick overhead with verdant roof embowered
He led her nothing loath; Flowers were the Couch,
Pansies, and Violets, and Asphodel, 
And Hyacinth, Earth’s freshest softest lap.
There they their fill of Love and Love’s disport
Took largely, of their mutual guilt the Seal,
The solace of their sin, till dewy sleep
Oppressed them, wearied with their amorous play.

The thrill that Adam and Eve experience comes from their disobedience. As Norman Mailer once wrote, guilt gives sex an existential edge. Whether or not one agrees with Milton, he includes sex in his work because, like all great authors, he is exploring all that goes with being human, which includes the sexual component. It’s what those other great works banned by Orange County—East of Eden, Madame Bovary, Beloved, Color Purple, Love in the Time of Cholera—are also doing.

The real perverts are not the authors who explore sex and the teachers and librarians who teach their works. The real perverts are those who, like Pentheus in Euripides’s The Bacchae, refuse to see sex as a gift and a joy. When Pentheus is condemning the women of the city, who have joined Dionysus to dance in the countryside, the prophet Teiresias tells him,

I am sorry to say it, but you are mad. Totally mad.
And no drug could help you, even though you’re as sick
as if you had been drugged.

Think of how many MAGA politicians and activists this describes.