On Rereading During a Pandemic

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2020
Vallotton, Woman Lying Down and Reading (1904)

Wednesday

In recent weeks, I’ve read several articles on rereading, all connected in one way or another with the current pandemic. Two of them discuss how rereading comforts us while the third counters that the purpose of narrative is not to reassure us.

The New York Review of Books, probably with the pandemic in mind, recently reprinted a 2005 Larry McMurtry article on why he rereads. “Reversal of fortune,” he says, “can…be a spur to rereading; where once one had read for adventure, now one rereads for the safety of the unvarying text.”

McMurtry mentions the example of Virginia Woolf’s mother-in-law, who reread Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas “dozens of times” after her husband died. As McMurtry explains,

Marie Woolf didn’t expect her husband Sidney to die at age forty-seven, but one day in 1892 Sidney Woolf did just that. The much-respected Mr. Floyd, tutor to the young Woolfs and himself a Rasselas fan—he kept a copy in his pocket—probably suggested the book to Marie Woolf. Rasselas cannot have entirely consoled her for the loss of a husband, and yet it was something. The husband was gone, the book remained, a small comforting thing whose absolute sameness could be counted on.

I can see why Rasselas, which explores the elusiveness of human happiness, would speak to someone who has just lost her husband. It stimulates an active mind while offering up no easy answers (or any definitive answers whatsoever).

McMurtry then talks about what rereading has done for him:

I’ve spoken elsewhere of the effects of heart surgery on my own reading: the knife that takes away the flaw can also remove, for a time at least, the personality of the flawed. After that surgery, my name seemed to me to be no more than a loose rubric under which, at intervals, aspects of myself occasionally reassembled and functioned.

It was about that time that I too, like Marie Woolf, began to reread in my search for security. At first I reread a few great travel books—there are only a few great travel books. Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one and Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is another….Survival means adjustment, and, if reading has for a long time been the central activity of one’s life, as it has of mine, then a shift in the patterns of reading and rereading is no small thing.

I assume that, by shift in patterns, McMurtry means becoming more exploratory in his reading, something he chooses not to do at such moments.

Natalie Jenner for Literary Hub doesn’t mention the pandemic, but it may account for her writing her article at this time. Jenner is drawn to old favorites because of their familiarity:

First for me is voice. Certain authorial voices calm me down, like a child listening to its parent. Whenever I read Jane Austen or Edith Wharton, something about their syntax soothes me in the same way the measured, marching tone of a cantata by Bach does. Austen and Wharton’s matchless gifts for prose has run deep grooves into my brain upon every reread, and each time I open their books I get more satisfaction with less effort, until it feels like their voices and my own have merged. Lines like Wharton’s “they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world” or Austen’s “I am half agony, half hope” are as much music to me as anything I have ever heard.

As with McMurtry, Jenner rereads to reassure herself that things haven’t entirely changed:

[U]ltimately, I’d like to think we reread in order to recover a sense of the distance traveled between our younger and present selves, and how—despite the passage of time—we can be just as thrilled, moved, and satisfied by the very same things now as then. I rely on all my old favorites as touchstones for my own essential self—every time Father Ralph leaves Meggie Cleary on Matlock Island in The Thorn Birds, or Mr. Rochester finally comes clean with Jane Eyre and says he feels as if there is a little string running straight from his heart to hers, I feel the same romantic thrill that I did when I was 14, and I “own” the romanticism that has been my own folly, and guide, throughout my life.

David L. Ulin appears to react against reading for familiarity. In the early days of the pandemic, he writes, he wanted a “guide for living.” He therefore turned to practical non-fiction because he resists “the notion that literature should have to teach us anything, that it must necessarily be of use.”

Needless to say, this sentiment is at odds with my blog, which relentlessly insists that literature can be of use. Indeed, Ulin circles back to Faulkner before he’s done. But I understand why he would turn to practical essays first:

What I wanted were tips on how to make it through. What I wanted were assurances, a sense that everything was going to be OK. This, however, is not the purpose of narrative, which insists on a more rigorous perspective. We don’t read or write to be reassured — at least I don’t. We read and write to reckon with all the things we cannot know.

Ulin objects to “sentimental” rereading because he regards it as a desire to return to a normalcy that may never return. “The more you remember,” he quotes from Emily St. Mandel’s post-pandemic novel Station Eleven, “the more you’ve lost.” He, by contrast, rereads for insights he missed when circumstances were different:

I’ve carved a passage back to reading by discovering new reflections on life under the duress of quarantine or illness, while also revisiting older works that affirm for me a related point, which should be obvious — that nothing is unprecedented, even if it feels that way. What I mean is, disorder and plague are always with us. “[W]e’re all just a breath away from the end of our lives,” Jenny Diski wrote in her 2016 memoir, “In Gratitude,” one of the books I’ve been rereading.”

So literature becomes of use after all, addressing the isolation he is feeling. For all his protesting against reassurance, he is reading to reassure himself that he is part of a greater collectivity:

All the same, stories are (How can they not be?) connective, part of a collective narrative. That seems especially essential now that we find ourselves in isolation, not only physically but also emotionally. I remember how, as an adolescent, the books I read, and the people I met there, felt as real to me (or realer) than those with whom I dealt every day. Escape? Perhaps, but I prefer to think of it as a deeper engagement, a conversation across space and time. We are alone, yes, but there is togetherness — if only in the fact that we are all laboring under the same condition, which is the frailty and uncertainty of being human.

I particularly like what he says about Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying:

Not long ago, via email — or was it Zoom or Skype? — a friend commented that she missed Los Angeles. “I miss it too,” I responded, looking at the street outside my window, where I have lived for the last 15 years. There it was, on the other side of the glass, like a scene from a life that no longer belonged to me. It brought to mind Addie Bundren, the dying matriarch who catalyzes William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, “quilt … drawn up to her chin, hot as it is, with only her two hands and her face outside,” watching through her own window as her son Cash builds the coffin in which she will be committed to the void.

As I Lay Dying is another work to which I keep returning, not because it offers easy solace but because it does not. Faulkner makes that clear from his first description of Addie: “Her eyes are like two candles when you watch them gutter down into the sockets of iron candle-sticks. But the eternal and the everlasting salvation and grace is not upon her.”

The portrait is astonishing; even as she faces the inevitable, she is not willing to let go. The insight here? Acceptance of death is what we need, not preparation for it. It brings to mind a similar moment toward the end of “In Gratitude,” in which Diski listens as another patient wails in terror. “[S]he’s not ready,” a nurse explains. “She hasn’t thought enough about it and now it’s very hard for her.” The inference is that there’s work to be done, some preparation to ease our passage. But the truer lesson may be that readiness is immaterial, that acceptance is what we require. To imagine otherwise is a sentimental fantasy, which is a luxury we cannot (Could we ever?) afford.

By the end of the essay, Ulin concludes he treasures how older works help us persevere and become resilient. In tough times, he writes, we are reminded that this is literature’s most defining aspect. We think we are in uncharted territory and then discover that the great authors have already been there and charted it:

“How often,” Faulkner writes, “have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home.” It’s an open-ended question, but in its specificity — rain on a strange roof? — it offers something sustaining: a sense of what it means to live each moment on its own terms, and a reminder that in a time that feels unmapped and raw, we have been here before.

We can say of great literature what German philosopher and culture critic Walter Benjamin says of history. In his essay “On the Concept of History,” he writes that the past “can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized” and that we “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”

In other words, we see in the past what we need for the present. When we are experiencing moments of danger, works will flash up.

If we have read them, that is. This is an argument for reading extensively. We are storing up supplies, even though we don’t know how or when we will use them.

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Reading Montaigne While Confined

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2020
Branagh to play the Gentleman in Moscow

Tuesday

I’ve just begun reading Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, which seems just the book for those confined to their apartments because of the coronavirus pandemic (or perhaps not). In 1922 Count Alexander Rostov is deemed to be an unrepentant aristocrat and condemned to settle in place in the grand Moscow hotel where he lives, although he must relocate from his sumptuous apartment to much smaller quarters in the attic. If he ever leaves the Metropol, the Bolsheviks say they will shoot him.

Like many in these days of Covid-19, Rostov turns to a much-delayed project, in his case reading Montaigne’s Essais. The work at first appears well chosen (for us as well as for Rostov) as Montaigne himself was confined to his tower while writing parts of it because of the plague.

At the point where I currently am, however, Rostov is finding the work a tough slog. I wonder how many of my students over the years have gone through some version of what he experiences:

It was somewhere in the middle of the third essay that the count found himself glancing at the clock for the fourth or fifth time. Or was it the sixth? While the exact number of glances could not be determined, the evidence did seem to suggest that the Count’s attention had been drawn to the clock more than once.

We thereupon get a detailed description of the clock:

Made to order for the Count’s father by the venerable firm of Breguet, the twice-tolling clock was a masterpiece in its own right. Its white enamel face had the circumference of a grapefruit and its lapis lazuli body sloped asymptotically from its top to its base, while its jeweled inner workings had been cut by craftsmen known the world over for an unwavering commitment to precision. And their reputation was certainly well founded. For as he progressed through the third essay (in which Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero had been crowded onto the couch with the Emperor Maximilian), the Count could hear every tick.

Ten twenty and fifty-six seconds, the clock said.

Ten twenty and fifty-seven.

Fifty-eight.

Fifty-nine.

Why, this clock accounted the seconds as flawlessly as Homer accounted his dactyls and Peter the sins of the sinner.

But where were we?

Ah, yes: Essay Three.

The Count shifted his chair a little leftward in order to put the clock out of view, then he searched for the passage he’d been reading. He was almost certain it was in the fifth paragraph on the fifteenth page. But as he delved back into the paragraph’s prose, the context seemed utterly unfamiliar; as did the paragraphs that immediately preceded it. In fact, he had to turn back three whole pages before he found a passage that he recalled well enough to resume his progress in good faith.

I’m predicting that Montaigne will grow on Rostov as they have kindred sensibilities. Both are humane, cosmopolitan, curious about the world, and interested in others. At the moment, however, it’s not getting better:

But as the Count advanced through Essays Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen his goal seemed to recede into the distance. It was suddenly as if the book were not a dining room table at all, but a sort of Sahara. And having emptied his canteen, the Count would soon be crawling across sentences with the peak of each hard-won page revealing but another page beyond….

Well then, so be it. Onward crawled the Count.

At another point in those early days, Rostov worrisomely finds himself counting the minutes between meals:

For several days…he had been fending off a state of restlessness On his regular descent to the lobby, he caught himself counting the steps. As he browsed the headlines in his favorite chair, he found he was lifting his hands to twirl the tips of moustaches that were no longer there. He found he was walking through the door of the piazza at 12:01 for lunch. And at 1:35, when he climbed the 110 steps to his room, he was already calculating the minutes until he could come back downstairs for a drink. If he continued along this course, it would not take long for the ceiling to edge downward, the walls to edge inward, and the floor to edge upward, until the entire hotel had been collapsed into the size of a biscuit tin.

Looking for models, Rostov thinks of others sentenced to a life of confinement, some fictional, some real:

For Edmond Dantes in the Chateau d’If [Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo], it was thoughts of revenge that kept him clear minded. Unjustly imprisoned, he sustained himself by plotting the systematic undoing of his personal agents of villainy. For Cervantes, enslaved by pirates in Algiers, it was the promise of pages as yet unwritten that spurred him on. While for Napoleon on Elba, strolling among chickens, fending off flies, and sidestepping puddles of mud, it was visions of a triumphal return to Paris that galvanized his will to persevere.

Rostov ultimately settles on Daniel Defoe’s most famous creation:

But the count hadn’t the temperament for revenge; he hadn’t the imagination for epics; and he certainly hadn’t the fanciful ego to dream of empires restored. No. His model for mastering his circumstances would be a different sort of captive altogether: an Anglican washed ashore. Like Robinson Crusoe stranded on the Isle of Despair, the Count would maintain his resolve by committing to the business of practicalities. Having dispensed with dreams of quick discovery, the world’s Crusoes seek shelter and a source of fresh water; they teach themselves to make fire from flint; they study their island’s topography, its climate, its flora and fauna, all the while keeping their eyes trained for sails on the horizon and footprints in the sand.

Rostov thereupon counts up his assets, especially the many gold coins he has squirreled away in the legs of his desk, and figures out how to convert them into useful items.

Like Betteredge in Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone, Rostov has discovered better living through Robinson Crusoe.

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Making Charn Great Again

By Robin Bates | Published: May 17, 2020
Pauline Baynes, The Magician’s Nephew

Monday

Some days it seems impossible to fully capture the disastrous Trump presidency. His efforts to “Make America Great Again” by dismantling all that has made us great is a slow-moving but inexorable nightmare. Regarding the pandemic, his assaults on science and the Center for Disease Control, along with his willingness to tolerate hundreds of thousands of deaths, are beyond believing.

It’s one reason I turn to literary comparisons, which can dramatize what we are experiencing through compelling images and narratives. Today I invoke a scene from C.S. Lewis’s Magician’s Nephew, although I do so with a caveat. In comparing Trump to Queen Jadis, I risk downplaying Trump’s actual cowardice when faced with challenges. Literary allusions are illuminating for the contrasts as well as the comparisons, however, and I will be looking at both.

Through the use of magic transport rings, Digory and Polly have found themselves in an ancient city devoid of human life. Through striking a bell, Digory awakens the last ruler of the city, and from her we learn what has happened. Think of her as Donald Trump, prepared to use any means necessary, including sacrificing countless American lives, to defeat the Democrats:

“It is silent now. But I have stood here when the whole air was full of the noises of Charn; the trampling of feet, the creaking of wheels, the cracking of the whips and the groaning of slaves, the thunder of chariots, and the sacrificial drums beating in the temples. I have stood here (but that was near the end) when the roar of battle went up from every street and the river of Charn ran red.” She paused and added, “All in one moment one woman blotted it out forever.”

“Who?” said Digory in a faint voice; but he had already guessed the answer.

“I,” said the Queen. “I, Jadis, the last Queen, but the Queen of the World.”

The two children stood silent, shivering in the cold wind.

“It was my sister’s fault,” said the Queen. “She drove me to it. May the curse of all the Powers rest upon her forever! At any moment I was ready to make peace—yes, and to spare her life too, if only she would yield me the throne. But she would not. Her pride has destroyed the whole world. Even after the war had begun, there was a solemn promise that neither side would use Magic. But when she broke her promise, what could I do? Fool! As if she did not know that I had more Magic than she. She even knew that I had the secret of the Deplorable Word. Did she think—she was always weakling—that I would not use it?”

“What was it?” said Digory.

“That was the secret of secrets,” said Queen Jadis. “It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it. But the ancient kings were weak and soft-hearted and bound themselves and all who should come after them with great oaths never even to seek after the knowledge of that word. But I learned it in a secret place and paid a terrible price to learn it. I did not use it until she forced me to it. I fought and fought to overcome her by every other means. I poured out the blood of my armies like water——”

“Beast!” muttered Polly.

“The last great battle,” said the Queen, “raged for three days here in Charn itself. For three days I looked down upon it from this very spot. I did not use my power till the last of my soldiers had fallen, and the accursed woman, my sister, at the head of her rebels was half way up those great stairs that lead up from the city to the terrace. Then I waited till we were so close that we could see one another’s faces. She flashed her horrible, wicked eyes upon me and said, ‘Victory.’ ‘Yes,’ said I, ‘Victory, but not yours.’ Then I spoke the Deplorable Word. A moment later I was the only living thing beneath the sun.”

“But the people?” gasped Digory.

“What people, boy?” asked the Queen.

“All the ordinary people,” said Polly, “who’d never done you any harm. And the women, and the children, and the animals.”

“Don’t you understand?” said the Queen (still speaking to Digory). “I was the Queen. They were all my people. What else were they there for but to do my will.”

“It was rather hard luck on them, all the same,” said he.

Given Trump’s own fear of accountability, I’m struck by how Jadis blames others for the devastation. For their part, Digory and Polly sound like impotent citizens, invoking constitutional principles, democratic norms, and basic humanity as those in charge destroy all around them. Jadis puts them in their place:

I had forgotten that you are only a common boy. How should you understand reasons of State? You must learn, child, that what would be wrong for you or for any of the common people is not wrong in a great Queen such as I. The weight of the world is on our shoulders. We must be freed from all rules. Ours is a high and lonely destiny.

In the prior administration or under Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush, America would have been leading the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, with the Center for Disease Control carrying the flag. As we move rapidly towards 100,000 deaths, the world is alternatively laughing at us and pitying us. I don’t know if we could have limited our deaths to 232 (Norway) or 262 (South Korea), but the fact that we are soaring far beyond Spain (27,563) or Italy (31,763) should shake us to the core. Trump is making America as small as he is, and he has gotten the Republican Party to go along with him.

I promised a contrast and here it is. Jadis, despite being a tyrant, is a courageous tyrant (although it’s easier to be so if you have access to the Deplorable Word). Trump, a wannabe tyrant, panicked when Covid hit, thinking he could retreat into magical thinking. Now, although he’s willing to pour out American blood like water, the enemy is at his gates.

In the latest development, he’s hoping that “Obamagate,” backed up by his Justice Department, will prove to be his Deplorable Word. If that doesn’t work, he’s sure to come up with many more before election day.

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A World Charged with God’s Grandeur

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2020
Ernest Lawson, Spring Morning

Spiritual Sunday

Today’s Gospel reading is Jesus assuring his disciples that, after he leaves, God will provide “another Advocate, to be with you forever.” This advocate, he elaborates, is “the Spirit of truth.” “You know him,” he explains, “because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”

In “God’s Grandeur,” Gerard Manley Hopkins lays out how this advocate, the Holy Spirit, enters and fills us. It flames out “like shining from shook foil” and it “gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed.” Hopkins says we experience the grandeur especially on beautiful spring days.

We can be filled with God’s grandeur even in the midst of our capitalist existence, where “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil.” This is a challenge, however, because the poet points to generations trodding down the ground so that “the soil is bare now.” Furthermore, because we are shod with shoes, we cannot feel God’s earth.

Hopkins’s line about “the last lights off the black West” going out reminds me of a passage from Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” another poem where the speaker gazes from a dark shore:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Hopkins, however, counters that this is not enough to stop the spirit. “And for all this,” he proclaims, “nature is never spent;/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Morning will spring “because the Holy Ghost over the bent/ World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

That “ah!” captures the rapture of the renewal, whether of dawn, of spring, or of God’s love. We are protected when we need protecting, as though by a mother bird. Then, when the right moment comes, we are released. At this moment, it’s as though we ourselves have bright wings.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
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The Good Place & Dante’s Inferno

By Robin Bates | Published: May 14, 2020
Tahani, Eleanor, Jason and Chidi in The Good Place

Friday

To go deep into a “representative masterpiece” (the Sewanee course I have just finished teaching), try comparing it with a modern version. In her final essay for me, Gray Shiverick compared Dante’s Inferno to The Good Place, the highly lauded television series.

In Good Place (spoiler alert) four people with dodgy pasts find themselves—seemingly mistakenly—assigned to Heaven rather than to Hell. Eventually, however, Eleanor figures out that they are actually in the Bad Place. Having grown weary of tortures taken out of Dante, the demons now torture sinners in a new way: they group them together and watch them torture each other.

The show has undoubtedly been inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit rather than Inferno, but given that Sartre himself draws on Dante, the comparison still works. To veer for a moment into No Exit, three recently departed sinners, expecting to be greeted with “racks and red-hot pincers and all the other paraphernalia,” instead find Second Empire couches and each other.

In what sounds like a joke, a coward, a lesbian and a nymphomaniac are all stuck in a room together and proceed to drive each other crazy. The coward needs the lesbian’s approval, the lesbian lusts after the nymphomaniac, and the nymphomaniac craves the man. Towards the end of No Exit, Gacin voices the play’s most famous line—“Hell is other people”—and decides he would rather face medieval torture instruments:

Open the door! Open, blast you! I’ll endure anything, your red-hot tongs and molten lead, your racks and prongs and garrotes–all your fiendish gadgets, everything that burns and flays and tears—I’ll put up with any torture you impose. Anything, anything would be better than this agony of mind, this creeping pain that gnaws and fumbles and caresses one and never hurts quite enough.

In a similar revelation, Good Place’s Eleanor figures out what the demons are up to at the end of Season I:

Tahani tortured Jason by constantly trying to get him to talk, Jason tortured me because I was sure he would blow our cover, which was torture for Chidi, because he was responsible for me, which made Chidi seem like the perfect soul mate, and that tortured Tahani because he didn’t love her.

There are Inferno dynamics here as well, as Gray points out in her essay. First of all, that Eleanor sees the Good Place as a good place rather than a place of torment is like Dante’s sinners seeking out the circle of hell that fits them best. The damned don’t see Inferno as hell but as the condition that they’ve chosen while still alive. As Gray puts it, “For those suffering the punishments, it seems like normal life with their sins all-consuming. Hell is just an eternal place for sinners to suffer just as they did on Earth.”

Gray analyzes Tahani, a woman whose relentless need for approval leaves her in a constant state of agitation. (Gray compares her with the lustful in Dante’s Second Circle, who are blown about incessantly by hot winds.) In Good Place, Tahani’s “soul mate” at first appears to be a Buddhist monk who, because he is committed to a vow of silence, never affirms her. When it turns out he’s actually a stupid gamer, the situation is no better because now his affirmation is worthless.

Meanwhile, as Gray points out, the disguised demons who populate the Good Place “never give Tahani the satisfaction of achievement, of being the best at everything.”

Operating this way, the demons resemble Dante’s demons, who torture the damned in ways that are metaphorical equivalents for how the sinners tortured others and tortured themselves while still alive.

Gray doesn’t analyze the other characters, but one can see the same dynamics at work. Eleanor, who has spent her life pulling things over on people, thinks she’s pulled one over on Heaven itself. She can’t enjoy the Good Place, however, because she lives in constant fear she will be found out. Jason, the non-monk who proves to be monumentally shallow, is condemned to shallow relationships, including one with a robot.

Finally Chidi, a philosophy professor who is tormented by pathological indecision, is tormented by having a narcissist (Eleanor) for a soul mate. Having read and taught Plato’s famous work about soul mates (The Symposium) and being well acquainted with Aristotle’s concept of the good, he is driven to distraction by Eleanor’s inability to grasp higher ethical principles. In other words, he believes she should respect his obsessive need to find the best and most perfect solution to every problem, even though it drives himself and everyone around him crazy.

I’m a little sorry that Gray didn’t apply to Dante’s Vestibule of Hell to Chidi, which is where those people go who refused to make difficult decisions on earth. While alive, Chidi’s inability to make up his mind causes multiple catastrophes, including the wrecking of his best friend’s wedding. Dante’s punishment perfectly captures the interior life of such people:

Virgil: “No word of them survives their living season.
Mercy and Justice deny them even a name.
Let us not speak of them: look, and pass on.”

I saw a banner there upon the mist.
Circling and circling, it seemed to scorn all pause.
So it ran on, and still behind it pressed

a never-ending rout of souls in pain.
I had not thought death had undone so many
as passed before me in that mournful train.

…

These wretches never born and never dead
Ran naked in a swarm of wasps and hornets
that goaded them the more the more they fled,

and made their faces stream with bloody gouts
of pus and tears that dribbled to their feet
to be swallowed there by loathsome worms
     and maggots.

We don’t see Chidi’s face literally streaming with drops of pus and tears, but he’s in perpetual mental agony, his mind circling and circling. His buzzing inner thoughts are like being perpetually pursued by wasps and hornets.

Gray goes on to make the point, however, that Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani don’t really belong in Dante’s Inferno because they are willing to become better people. Dante, Gray points out, has a moral compass whereas his sinners don’t think of anything but their own desires:

In the Inferno, Beatrice is a guiding figure who helps Dante become a better person. Dante is able to look up to a model person compelled by love to help him. We can see this through Beatrice’s introduction:

Beatrice am I, who do bid thee go;
I come from there, where I would fain return;
Love moved me, which compelleth me to speak.”

Beatrice is able to lead Dante toward heaven by improving his moral compass and his life. This character can be compared to Chidi,…who teaches Eleanor all about philosophy and morals so that she can become a better person. As a group, the four subjects could be compared to Beatrice as they all help to improve each other by using the best aspects of themselves put together. Eleanor explains this to Michael [the head demon], saying, “We improved each other, and the four of us became a team. So, the only thing you succeeded in doing was bringing us all together.”

The Good Place characters would quickly become boring if they were static and unable to change. Such stasis can be found in Inferno, especially frozen-in-ice Satan in the ninth circle. We need growth potential if our characters to engage our sympathies, and viewers of subsequent seasons (I’ve only seen the first) can tell me if the Good Place is at all like Purgatorio, where people work to shed the sins that weighed them down in life.

As we see in Purgatorio’s vestibule—Ante-Purgatorio—even a reprobate who has repented on his or her death bed has a shot at Paradisio. George Bernard Shaw has a hilarious parody of such figures in Androcles and the Lion, where the troublemaker Spintho figures he can sin all he wants as long as he ends up a Christian martyr since “every martyr goes to heaven, no matter what he’s done.” But Dante’s point is a good one: if we have even a tiny inkling of goodness, we have something to work with.

Some of literature’s most memorable characters, from Lear to Scrooge, fall into this category, and I suspect the Good Place characters do as well.  Those who know the show, please let me know.

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Ride with an Outlaw, Die with Him

By Robin Bates | Published: May 13, 2020
Jake Spoon and Dan Suggs in Lonesome Dove

Thursday

As mind-blowingly abysmal as Donald Trump has been as president, even more stunning is how the GOP has capitulated. Nor does it appear that Republican legislators or Congressional members will ever abandon him. His banning Muslims, putting kids in cages, trashing the intelligence services, cozying up to Putin, and pressuring Ukraine to slime Joe Biden wasn’t enough, nor apparently is his inept and corrupt handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Many appear to be engaging in their own version of Trumpian magical thinking: if you don’t say anything and keep a low profile, maybe you can sneak your way to reelection without anyone noticing. Or as MSNBC host Joe Scarborough recently put it, “GOP politicians have long believed that ignoring Trump’s unfitness for office is their best political play…”

These Republicans remind me of Jake in Larry McMurtry’s frontier masterpiece Lonesome Dove. Somewhat by chance, he falls in with an outlaw gang and in the end pays for failing to distance himself from them.

A former Texas ranger who has ridden with the greats (Call and Gus), Jake always follows the path of least resistance. Rather than stand upon principle, he does what is most self-serving. Any sense of right and wrong gets left by the wayside.

Riding under the protection of the gang initially appears to provide Jake an easy escape from a past that is catching up with him. Like many in the GOP, however, he discovers to his horror that he has signed up for much more than he bargained for. The outlaws prove to be homicidal maniacs intent upon leaving a trail of blood across Texas and Kansas.

The drama, as it is for formerly reasonable Republicans, lies in watching how Jake tries to escape responsibility for what his comrades are doing. First, there are regrets:

Almost at once, before the group even got out of Texas, Jake had cause to regret that he had ever agreed to ride with the Suggs brothers….Their talk, it seemed, was mostly of killing. Even Eddie, the youngest, claimed to have killed three men, two nesters and a Mexican. The rest of the outfit didn’t mention numbers, but Jake had no doubt that he was riding with accomplished killers.

Jake finds himself wondering what has happened:

Somehow he had slipped out of the respectable life. He had never been a churchgoer, but until recently had had no reason to fear the law.

There are moments when things look up. Maybe Republicans were experiencing Jake’s “lucky feeling” in January, figuring they had paid no political price for Mueller’s findings, Trump’s impeachment, and all the rest:

The lucky feeling came to him as he rode, and the main part of it was his sense that he was about to get free of the Suggs brothers. They were hard men, and he had made a bad choice in riding with them, but nothing terrible had come of it, and they were almost to Dodge. It seemed to him he had slid into bad luck in Arkansas the day he accidentally shot the dentist, and now he was about to ride out of it in Kansas and resume the kind of enjoyable life he felt he deserved.

Trump, however, doesn’t let allies escape his orbit, nor does the Suggs gang. Jack’s mood changes when he realizes the outlaws will not be going to Dodge:

Jake’s happy mood was gone, though the day was as sunny as ever. It was clear to him that his only hope was to escape the Suggses as soon as possible. Dan Suggs could wake up feeling bloody any day, and the next time there might not be sodbusters around to absorb his fury, in which case things could turn really grim.

When rangers Gus and Call, tracking the killing party, realize that Jake is with them, they are first surprised but then figure out what has happened:

Jake would gamble and whore—he always had. No one expected any better of him, but no one had expected any worse, either. Jake hadn’t the nerve to lead a criminal life, in Call’s estimation….

“It’s his dern laziness,” Call said. “Jake just kind of drifts. Any wind can blow him.”

Accountability, which has been in short supply for the Trump administration, comes at long last for Jake, who is captured along with the Suggs brothers. In the eyes of the Texas rangers, a man must answer for his decisions:

Call was thinking of Jake—that a man who had ridden with them so long could let such a thing happen. Of course, he was outnumbered, but it was no excuse. He could have fought or run, once he saw the caliber of his companions.

Gus, meanwhile, when told by Jake that he was “aiming to leave them first chance I got,” replies, “You should have made a chance a little sooner. A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow.”

We’ll see if the voters hold Republicans to account for not leaving after seeing the caliber of their companion. As Call lays it out for Jake,

Ride with an outlaw, die with him. I admit it’s a harsh code. But you rode on the other side long enough to know how it works. I’m sorry you crossed the line, though.

Jake’s reply fails to convince:

I never seen no line….I was just trying to get to Kansas without getting scalped.

In the end, with rough frontier justice, Jake’s former companions hang him along with the others. “Die he or justice must,” as God puts it in Paradise Lost.

Too many in the GOP have been trying to get to reelection without being scalped by Trump or Trump fanatics. Unfortunately, by riding with a racist, misogynist, authoritarian, and incompetent conman, they have lost sight of ethical lines. We’ll see in November whether there is a metaphorical hanging.

Further thought: Looking back, I see that I made exactly this comparison two years ago and apologize for repeating myself. In that post, which you can find here, I reflect on a passage that I’d forgotten about but which captures Trump himself to a T:

Jake just dreamed his way through life and somehow got by with it.

The pandemic death toll, however, like those killed by the Suggs gang, bring an end to such dreaming.

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Primal Hatred of Coyotes & Blacks

By Robin Bates | Published: May 12, 2020
Louis Agassi Fuertes, Howling Arizona, or Mearns, Coyote

Wednesday

Having been raised in segregated Tennessee in the 1950s and ’60s, I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by the depth of American racism, but I am. The recent shooting of jogger Ahmaud Arbery (Columbia journalism professor Jelani Cobb described it as “a suburban game hunt”) resembles the vigilante killing of high schooler Trayvon Martin almost exactly eight years earlier. Far too many Americans regard people of color the way hunters in Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer (2000) see coyotes.

I mention Kingsolver’s novel because it gets at how primal such hatred can be. Forest ranger Deanna Wolfe encounters hunter Eddie Bondo, who has come to the Appalachians to participate in the Mountain Empire Bounty Hunt. Their brief but passionate fling is like a love affair between an Obama and a Trump supporter, with Wolfe wanting to protect coyotes and Bondo to exterminate them. Wolfe understands Bondo’s hatred once she discovers he’s a Wyoming sheep rancher:

A sheep rancher. She knew the hatred of western ranchers toward coyotes; it was famous, maybe the fiercest human-animal vendetta there was. It was bad enough even here on the tamer side of the Mississippi. The farmers she’d grown up among would sooner kill a coyote than learn to pronounce its name. It was a dread built into humans via centuries of fairy tales: give man the run of a place, and he will clear it of wolves and bears. Europeans had killed theirs centuries ago in all but the wildest mountains, and maybe even those holdouts were just legend by now. Since the third grade, when Deanna Wolfe learned to recite the Pledge and to look up “wolf” in the World Book Encyclopedia, she’d loved America because it was still young enough that its people hadn’t wiped out all its large predators. But they were working on that, for all they were worth.

The mountain Empire Bounty Hunt is organized around the first day of May, which Wolfe knows is

the time of birthing and nursing, a suitable hunting season for nothing in this world unless the goal was willful extermination. It had drawn hunters from everywhere for the celebrated purpose of killing coyotes.

Race hatred is similarly intense. My own explanation for this (not only mine) is that almost every immigrant group, upon coming to America, could base its identity on a superiority to African Americans. Usually immigrants start off at the bottom of the social hierarchy into which they enter, but in this instance, they were given certain cultural capital from the get-go: another scapegoated race eventually diverted attention from themselves. Thus we have the strange phenomenon of certain Irish-Americans, Scottish Americans, Italian-Americans, Serbian-Americans, Polish-Americans and others becoming just as racist as the original slave owners, even though they themselves had been the target of ethnic attacks in the old country. If racism becomes part of your foundational identity, it feels primal.

Which helps explain Donald Trump’s popularity. He rose to political prominence on the basis of anti-Obama birtherism, and many white Americans, fearful of being submerged by growing diversity, feel a profound sense of gratitude. Because this television star is affirming deeply held prejudices that they have been told are shameful, they will forgive him anything, even loss of jobs and loss of life. “Build that wall!” and “Make America White Great Again” resonate to the core.

Kingsolver’s project, in both Prodigal Summer and Flight Behavior (where she tackles climate change), is to imagine ways in which a polarized America can talk to itself. In the course of Bondo’s brief relationship with Wolfe, his mind is opened, at least a little. He reads her thesis on coyotes and discovers the importance of predators to the food chain. He also discovers that coyotes don’t only eat lambs but “rodents and fruits and seeds and a hundred other things.”

When he goes, therefore, he leaves behind the ambiguous note, “It’s hard for a man to admit he has met his match.” While she may not have converted him, he at least spares the den of coyotes she has been lovingly watching. Dialogue, Kingsolver tries to show, is possible.

Will race dialogue ever be possible in this country? Obama thought so but failed to convince a significant segment of the population. If race hatred goes as deep as coyote hatred, we have some distance to travel.

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Is Golding’s Novel True? Sadly, Yes

By Robin Bates | Published: May 11, 2020

Tuesday

My English professor son alerted me to a fascinating Rutger Bregman Guardian article about a real-life Lord of the Flies incident with a different ending than Golding’s. In 1977 six boys from a boarding school in Tonga shipwrecked on a desert island and survived there for 15 months. There were no killings or savage rituals, however. According to the man who rescued them, they

set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination.”

Bregman observes that, “[w]hile the boys in Lord of the Flies come to blows over the fire, those in this real-life version tended their flame so it never went out, for more than a year.”

There were many other contrasts with the novel:

The kids agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarreled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song and prayer. Kolo fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat – an instrument Peter has kept all these years – and played it to help lift their spirits. And their spirits needed lifting. All summer long it hardly rained, driving the boys frantic with thirst. They tried constructing a raft in order to leave the island, but it fell apart in the crashing surf.

Worst of all, Stephen slipped one day, fell off a cliff and broke his leg. The other boys picked their way down after him and then helped him back up to the top. They set his leg using sticks and leaves. “Don’t worry,” Sione joked. “We’ll do your work, while you lie there like King Taufa‘ahau Tupou himself!”

They survived initially on fish, coconuts, tame birds (they drank the blood as well as eating the meat); seabird eggs were sucked dry. Later, when they got to the top of the island, they found an ancient volcanic crater, where people had lived a century before. There the boys discovered wild taro, bananas and chickens (which had been reproducing for the 100 years since the last Tongans had left).

Bregman said that the experience better captures how humanity actually works:

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

Does this mean that Golding is wrong? I came across an intelligent twitter rebuttal by one Abigail Nussbaum, who argues that the point of Lord of the Flies

isn’t to illustrate what would “really” happen if a group of boys was cast away on an island, but to hold up a mirror to the processes that allow fascism to take hold in even “civilized” societies.

Regarding the “civilized” society Golding had in mind, his 1951 novel features

a particular type of post-War, barely-post-Empire, public-school-educated white English male. And it was written in response to colonialist fantasies starring such people. These fantasies all turn on the assumption of the inherent leadership qualities, the inherent “civilizing” effect of that particular class. That’s why the officer who rescues the boys is such a crucial character. He expresses that belief and expectation.

Golding doesn’t claim that all people are jerks, Nussbaum says, but rather that assholes like Jack can manipulate them. In his own time Golding witnessed the rise of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Franco, and we today, to our sorrow, have seen a number of authoritarian Jacks come to power.

Is Ralph and Piggy’s reasonable response enough to stop them? Civilized impeachment hearings weren’t enough to dislodge Donald Trump, and we’ll see what happens in the November election. Trump’s success so far, however, suggests Golding is on to something.

Nussbaum makes some other smart points:

It’s…worth noting that the Tongan castaways had various advantages the characters in LotF lack. They knew each other. They were friends (and thus presumably didn’t have a Jack amongst them). They apparently also had at least some wilderness skills. (They also had the weird good fortune of landing on an island whose previous inhabitants, stolen away by slavers, had left behind remnants of civilization that could be used for survival. Which in itself feels like an ironic commentary on colonialism.)

If Lord of the Flies has become a canonical part of high school English curricula, it’s because it strikes a deep chord. Those who are bullied and see their childhood innocence ripped away recognize its truth. I remember, as a senior, comparing Lord of the Flies to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, concluding with Marlow’s rumination, “This too has been one of the dark places.” If I felt compelled to take this existential journey (I wrote the essay for myself, it wasn’t for any class), it’s because the issues were urgent. I identified with Ralph and Piggy because I shared their belief in decency and rationality.

Golding’s context was rising authoritarianism while mine was the racist American South and the Vietnam War. My whole life has been devoted to figuring out whether the highest achievements of culture—specifically literature—can prevail over barbarism. I took Golding’s book seriously because it provided a powerful challenge.

I don’t disagree with Bregman that humanity’s ability to cooperate is its “secret power.” This happens to be the central premise of my book How Beowulf Can Save America, which concludes with the inspiring vision of Beowulf and Wiglaf working together to slay the dragon. Golding’s dark perspective, however, makes us earn our optimism. The Jacks of the world will ruthlessly hunt down facile declarations of hope.

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Students as Beowulf vs. Covid

By Robin Bates | Published: May 10, 2020

Monday

I received insight into Covid’s impact on students through through several Beowulf essays I received recently. The connection is not a stretch since our students—like the rest of us—feel that a monster has invaded their safe spaces. Their responses demonstrate how literature helps us process trauma.

Teressa Colhoun, a political science major, sees similarities between Grendel and those Covid protesters carrying guns while refusing to wear masks or to practice social distancing. Teressa’s question: As a president or governor, how do you manage the chaos of resentment-crazed citizens taking the law into their own hands?

In the social contract that is foundational to all societies, both citizens and leaders have responsibilities, and beaching the contract imperils society as a whole. In Beowulf, Grendel is the archetype of the resentment-crazed warrior who puts his personal anger over the good of the whole. Danish King Hrothgar can only despair as his kingdom is ravaged by this anger:

Their mighty prince,
the storied leader, sat stricken and helpless,
humiliated by the loss of his guard,
bewildered and stunned, staring aghast
at the demon’s trail, in deep distress.

Teressa goes on to say that today’s leaders aren’t faring much better:

[I]t seems as though America’s “mead hall’ is under attack. Our leaders must grapple with dilemmas like those Hrothgar faced in his sixth-century Danish kingdom. Social contracts impose obligations on citizens; citizens are expected to act in accordance with these expectations. When they choose not to, we expect leaders to handle violations accordingly. Like Hrothgar, though, it seems our leaders still struggle to answer these questions.

To interject an observation here: Beowulf defeats Grendel with his mighty grip, which can be interpreted as applying a firm hand. Several foreign governments and certain of our own governors have had success applying firm measures. Unfortunately, our president is undermining these very measures, describing our weapons-toting Grendels as “very good people.” Trump’s inconsistent messaging is playing havoc as local leaders try to figure out what to do.

Teressa points out that Hrothgar sends out his own mixed messages in that he allows Unferth, someone who has killed kinsmen, a place of honor at his table. Unferth is the warrior who, “sick with envy,” challenges Beowulf upon his entrance. Here we have Grendelian resentment emanating from the upper reaches of the administration.

Eliza Hogan sees things slightly differently. In her own examination of Hrothgar’s handling of warrior resentment, she compliments him on how he puts ego aside in service of the higher good, key to leadership in Eliza’s eyes. Hrothgar, she notes, wisely allows a young warrior to help him with his Grendel problem. Rather than the Danes regarding Hrothgar as weak for doing so, the poet observes, “Yet there was no laying of blame on their lord, the noble Hrothgar; he was a good king.”

Eliza sees the dragon as the archetype of destructive egotism, with the bad king Heremod held up as the ultimate human exemplar. Hrothgar warns the young Beowulf against becoming a Heremod, but both Eliza and history major Thomas Simerville see dragon traits creeping in. Beowulf essentially sounds like Trump at one point, Thomas points out, essentially saying, “I alone can fix it.” Or to quote him directly prior to his battle with the dragon,

Men at arms, remain here on the barrow,
safe in your armor, to see which one of us
is better in the end at bearing wounds
in a deadly fray. This fight is not yours,
nor is it up to any man except me
to measure his strength against the monster
or to prove his worth.

Beowulf, as it turns out, is not up to the challenge. If the dragon battle is an internal one, he will lose because going it alone is a dragon trait. Only with the help of Wiglaf does he kill the monster.

Thomas gives Beowulf some credit for allowing Wiglaf to help him, comparing the young warrior to Dr. Fauci. Working together, they emerge victorious. Eliza, who is harder on Beowulf, says that, when our leaders let us down, it is up to us as individuals to become Wiglafs:

Wiglaf ultimately saves the kingdom, not Beowulf, because of his own selflessness. He shows the readers that great heroes and leaders rise from places of unselfishness, and despite differing backgrounds or homes, anyone can be a leader. This has been proven over and over amid the COVID outbreak. Not only great doctors and nurses, but postmen, cashiers at grocery stores, garbage men, perhaps some of the most unlikely and belittled members of society, have proven themselves leaders and heroes through their selfless commitments to their own work.

And in conclusion:

Not only our leaders hold great responsibility during coronavirus, but each one of us has a responsibility to sacrifice our own wants (to go to restaurants, to play with friends, to travel) for the health of others. As a young healthy person, I probably wouldn’t die if I contracted the coronavirus, so if I were to go out and ignore social distancing rules, I personally would probably be fine. However, I know that I would put others at risk by doing so, and therefore I will not. In order to beat the coronavirus, each one of us must sacrifice our wants for the good of others.

Ella Cobbs goes at our current crisis from a different angle, asking, “How do we keep our emotions from overwhelming us in a time of crisis.” The monstrosity of Grendel’s Mother is that her emotions lead her to destructive behavior. Beowulf’s heroism, by contrast, lies in his ability to keep a level head. If one sees his descent into the Grendels’ lake as a metaphor for being engulfed by emotions, then the giant sword he finds is the counterforce, a higher principle that Ella identifies as “devotion to the greater good.” She concludes her essay as follows:   

In times of stress and turmoil it is all too easy to let our emotions take the reins and control our thinking. Today we are living in a world dealing with overwhelming grief and uncertainty, and I know for me personally, I have wallowed in my own anger and sadness over the situation and often forgotten about the bigger picture. It takes our inner Beowulf to snap us back into reality, remind us that what we are feeling is momentary, and remember that we are a part of something larger than ourselves.

We are running the risk of becoming a world of Grendel’s mothers, and we need instead to follow in the footsteps of Beowulf. All of us are wracked with emotions, despair, depression, anger, loneliness, but we cannot let ourselves succumb to these emotions as Grendel’s mother does. If we selfishly let our loneliness influence our actions and we meet up with friends for a seemingly harmless gathering, we can be directly endangering the lives of others. Instead, we must be the Beowulfs of the world, keeping a level head and doing what we need to in order to protect everyone. Beowulf is a hero not only because of his immense physical strength, but because of the control he has over his emotions and his devotion to the greater good.

I’ll note one other essay which, while not explicitly about the pandemic, nevertheless touches on the depression many are experiencing. As Patrick Rodriguez sees it, Grendel and Grendel’s Mother represent forms of depression as experienced by young warriors, the dragon depression as experience by old men..

In battling depression, sometimes a young warrior, when tempted to become murderously resentful, can be redirected with a firm hand. The out-of-control rage of Grendel’s Mother—sometimes followed by sinking into deep depths of despair—can be countered by a higher ideal. But when one becomes an old man who, upon looking back over his life, sees nothing but a long string of meaningless deaths, all that can help is young people entering your life. If you open yourself to their vision and their energy, they may keep you from succumbing to dragonhood.

In other words, the five essays all seek to imagine ways forward when the world appears dark and overwhelming. God bless these students for refusing to be either cynical or fatalistic. And God bless Beowulf  for providing images and narratives that they can turn to.

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