On Friday I wrote that Wilkie Collins’s humorous depiction of a reader’s obsession with Robinson Crusoe could function as a parody of this blog. As house steward Gabriel Betteridge in The Moonstone sees it, Daniel Defoe’s novel is the key to better living. In his eyes, the book has all the answers to life’s questions.
Do you see me making the same claims for literature generally?
Upon further
reflection, I realized that Gabriel Betteridge uses Robinson Crusoe as
Crusoe himself uses the Bible. That, in turn, has led me to reflect the extent
to which my own interactions with the Bible have influenced this blog. I share
that with you today.
A
number of years ago, I took—and then taught—the Episcopal Church’s four-year
course Education for Ministry. Founded by the father of my best friend
in middle school (Charlie Winters), EFM is designed for those who want to
better understand the Bible. When I took the course, the first year was devoted
to the Old Testament, the second to the New, the third to church history, and
the fourth to theology.
The study is not altogether academic, however. In the course, the participants share personal stories that are surfaced by the Bible reading for that day. As a result, the Bible is transformed into a living guide that helps us grapple with the most pressing issues we face. The participants apply the methods used to unlock the Bible to unlocking a “slice of life” that one of them shares. The resulting realizations are sometimes profound.
As I was involved in the course, I realized that I could apply the same method to works of literature. I therefore adjusted my teaching (allowing, of course, for the different situations), with the result that my students began applying the literature we were reading to their lives. This blog owes its existence in part to Education for Ministry.
A
couple of thoughts come to mind as I say this. One is that the practice of “close
reading,” which literary study came to prize highly in the 20th century, itself has been traced back to Talmudic study of the Torah. In the 19th century, the study of literature—when it was studied at all—involved historical
anecdotes, author biographies, and random associations. The belief that
literature could offer up precious truths—that students could be initiated into
its sacred mysteries if they were taught to examine texts in a disciplined
manner—owes something to the influx of Jewish students into the universities.
These students were willing to study in a way that privileged young men with their “gentleman’s C’s” were not, and they began changing college culture. For a while, certain universities saw this as a problem and set up quotas limiting Jewish admission.
In the end, however, these students prevailed, academic “drudges” were no longer held in contempt, and colleges became more than social finishing schools. Many of our most prominent literary scholars have been Jewish, with Lionel Trilling, Stanley Fish, Stephen Greenblatt, Carolyn Heilbrun, Elaine Showalter, and Harold Bloom coming immediately to mind.
In
short, that I related studying the Bible to studying literature is no accident.
I also think of how Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold saw literature as replacing religion in our increasingly secular society, given that both religion and literature command immense emotional and experiential power. If religion could no longer control the potentially rebellious working class, Arnold argued, perhaps literature could do the job.
When I was in my twenties and thirties, I myself didn’t see the point of religion. After all, as I told the rector of our local church, I had the rich symbolic language of literature. I no longer think this, and each plays a vital role in my life
But if I sometimes sound evangelical as I advocate for literature—well, you’re not just imagining things.
I’m currently on a Wilkie Collins kick, having just started on The Moonstone after finishing The Woman in White. In Moonstone there is a wonderful instance of a character whose use of literature could serve as a parody of my blog. House steward Gabriel Betteridge believes in Better Living through Robinson Crusoe.
Betteridge has been called to give his account of the events leading up to the disappearance of the fabled moonstone. Daunted by the task, he turns to Defoe’s novel, his guide in all things. The book falls open to the following passage:
Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.”
Betteridge finds consolation that someone else has experienced
what he is going through:
Two hours have passed since Mr. Franklin left me. As soon as his back was turned, I went to my writing-desk to start the story. There I have sat helpless (in spite of my abilities) ever since; seeing what Robinson Crusoe saw, as quoted above—namely, the folly of beginning a work before we count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with it. Please to remember, I opened the book by accident, at that bit, only the day before I rashly undertook the business now in hand; and, allow me to ask—if that isn’t prophecy, what is?
Betteridge then explains the importance of the book
for him:
I am not superstitious; I have read a heap of books in my time; I am a scholar in my own way. Though turned seventy, I possess an active memory, and legs to correspond. You are not to take it, if you please, as the saying of an ignorant man, when I express my opinion that such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again. I have tried that book for years—generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco—and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life. When my spirits are bad—Robinson Crusoe. When I want advice—Robinson Crusoe. In past times when my wife plagued me; in present times when I have had a drop too much—Robinson Crusoe. I have worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in my service. On my lady’s last birthday she gave me a seventh. I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and Robinson Crusoe put me right again. Price four shillings and sixpence, bound in blue, with a picture into the bargain.
Later in his account, Betteridge recalls how Robinson Crusoe came to his aid when he was eased out of his position as bailiff into the less arduous one of house steward:
The perturbation in my mind, in regard to thinking about it, being truly dreadful after my lady had gone away, I applied the remedy which I have never yet found to fail me in cases of doubt and emergency. I smoked a pipe and took a turn at Robinson Crusoe. Before I had occupied myself with that extraordinary book five minutes, I came on a comforting bit (page one hundred and fifty-eight), as follows: “Today we love, what tomorrow we hate.” I saw my way clear directly. Today I was all for continuing to be farm-bailiff; tomorrow, on the authority of Robinson Crusoe, I should be all the other way. Take myself tomorrow while in tomorrow’s humour, and the thing was done. My mind being relieved in this manner, I went to sleep that night in the character of Lady Verinder’s farm-bailiff, and I woke up the next morning in the character of Lady Verinder’s house-steward. All quite comfortable, and all through Robinson Crusoe!
At another point, he turns to Crusoe when asked to venture out into the rain to track down the mysterious foreigners who have been seen around the house:
It was all very well for him [the master] to joke. But I was not an eminent traveller—and my way in this world had not led me into playing ducks and drakes with my own life, among thieves and murderers in the outlandish places of the earth. I went into my own little room, and sat down in my chair in a perspiration, and wondered helplessly what was to be done next. In this anxious frame of mind, other men might have ended by working themselves up into a fever; I ended in a different way. I lit my pipe, and took a turn at Robinson Crusoe.
Before I had been at it five minutes, I came to this amazing bit—page one hundred and sixty-one—as follows:
“Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about.”
The man who doesn’t believe in Robinson Crusoe, after that, is a man with a screw loose in his understanding, or a man lost in the mist of his own self-conceit! Argument is thrown away upon him; and pity is better reserved for some person with a livelier faith.
I second Betteridge but expand his contention: those who don’t believe in literature generally have a screw loose in their understanding. Argument is thrown away upon them.
Further thought: I just realized that Betteridge uses Robinson Crusoe as Crusoe himself uses the Bible. Perhaps that is where he (or Wilkie Collins himself) got the idea. In a practice known as bibliomancy, Crusoe lets the good book fall open at moments of crisis. Here’s an example following his panic after witnessing the cannibals on his island:
[W]hen I had done praying I took up my Bible, and opening it to read, the first words that presented to me were, “Wait on the Lord, and be of good cheer, and He shall strengthen thy heart; wait, I say, on the Lord.” It is impossible to express the comfort this gave me. In answer, I thankfully laid down the book, and was no more sad, at least on that occasion.
Like much of the world, I’m breathing a sigh of relief as it appears that we will avoid a shooting war with Iran. While the long-term repercussions Qasen Soeleimani’s assassination look to be severe, we may have escaped something comparable to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, which remains the gold standard for foreign policy stupidity.
I’m coming to see Donald Trump as Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Although she dominates center stage by ordering anyone who crosses her to be beheaded, the axe never actually falls. We learn this somewhat late in the book from the Gryphon:
They very soon came upon a Gryphon, lying fast asleep in the sun…”Up, lazy thing!’ said the Queen, ‘and take this young lady to see the Mock Turtle, and to hear his history. I must go back and see after some executions I have ordered’; and she walked off, leaving Alice alone with the Gryphon. Alice did not quite like the look of the creature, but on the whole she thought it would be quite as safe to stay with it as to go after that savage Queen: so she waited.
The Gryphon sat up and rubbed its eyes: then it watched the Queen till she was out of sight: then it chuckled. ‘What fun!’ said the Gryphon, half to itself, half to Alice.
‘What is the fun?’ said Alice.
‘Why, she,’ said the Gryphon. ‘It’s all her fancy, that: they never executes nobody, you know.
To be sure, Trump executed Soleimani. And just because we’re not engaged in another Middle East war—at least not yet—doesn’t mean that many people haven’t suffered from Trump’s commands. His bungling, indeed, will likely lead to much worse. The great irony of the assassination is that it makes more likely the fulfillment of Soleimani’s dream, which is the United States leaving Iraq.
I don’t chuckle like the Gryphon at Trump’s bombast, as many of his supporters do. But I’m relieved that, in this case, he hasn’t followed through with his threats.
Further thought: In some ways, Nancy Pelosi, especially in the impeachment proceeding, is playing the role of Alice at the end of Wonderland. Here’s the passage of Alice’s confrontation:
‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’
‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.
‘I won’t!’ said Alice.
‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’
At first, standing up to a bully like Trump can appear to unleash a firestorm, and all the cards rise up against Alice in a scene that terrified me as a child. When all is said and done, however, the firepower dwindles to some stray leaves:
At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.
‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister; ‘Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!’
One day we will wake up from this nightmare. Imagine living at some future time, looking back at our time in the rabbit hole, and wondering whatever possessed this country we love.
Carl Rosin, an occasional contributor to this blog, uses its
philosophy in his English classrooms at Radnor High School in Radnor, PA. We recently
enjoyed serving on a panel together at the National Council of Teachers of
English (NCTE) national convention in Baltimore, along with Jennifer Fletcher,
Glenda Funk, and Carol Jago.Carl left a software engineering job to become a teacher and has
won various local and regional awards along with PLATO’s (Philosophy Learning
and Teaching Organization) national high school Philosophy Teacher of the Year
award for 2014-15; he also served on the National Humanities Center’s Teacher
Advisory Council for 2018-2019.
By Carl Rosin, English Teacher,
Radnor High School
I, like many of you, am stubborn. I have always
thought of this as a badge of honor, at least as long as my stubbornness stands
in defense of truth and justice and fairness, and as long as I retain my
willingness to defer if I happen to be proven wrong.
John Adams, the American patriot, served admirably and successfully as defense attorney for the British soldiers who perpetrated the Boston Massacre. He famously praised a particularly welcome form of stubbornness in his argument:
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence….
Adams, often quoted for this line (N.B.: he elaborates on a phrase that predates him by more than a half-century), would probably be befuddled if not horrified by today’s political America, a place that is well on its way to earning the tragic label “post-truth.” New York Times reviewer emerita Michiko Kakutani writes an end-of-decade op-ed that decries President Trump and his surrogates’ various efforts at “nihilistically trying to undermine public faith” in institutions, science, norms, and, by extension, the idea of truth itself.
Authoritarians incessantly pursue their desire to “make themselves the sole arbiters of truth and reality,” she writes. She quotes the president himself from January 2017, when he told reporters that his assaults on the press were designed “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
Facts too stubborn for you? Have you tried
devaluing the idea that truth exists?
This epitomizes “gaslighting,” the term derived
from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, which George Cukor made
into the 1944 film noir classic Gaslight. Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar
for her portrayal of a character whose husband’s sophisticated, nefarious campaign
of psychological manipulations makes her question her sanity. “To gaslight”
entered the language as a useful way to describe such manipulations, especially
insofar as they are part of a strategy to undermine an observer’s perceptions. A
person or organization that can convince us not to trust our senses or our
memory is one that has access to tremendous power over us.
Orwell’s 1984 brought forth the menacing sentence, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” which Prof. Bates investigated only days after President Trump’s inauguration. (Professor Bates has written on gaslighting on several other occasions, including here, here, and here.)
The word is having an extended moment. It was Oxford English Dictionary’s runner-up Word of the Year for 2018. I see it constantly in the media, including in the title of anti-Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter’s book Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us, which traces the history of political uses of the word and outlines its threat to a reality-based world. Journalists Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa run a prominent weekly podcast called Gaslit Nation. There is plenty of material worth addressing under these titles. Too much.
Just in the past few days, Vox responded to House minority leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) claim that the FBI spied on the president illegally – a claim that had already been debunked by Trump’s own Justice Department – by calling him out for gaslighting; the same day, lawyer and conservative Never-Trumper George Conway called out Sen. Ron Johnson (R-OR) for “mendacious gaslighting” when Sen. Johnson invoked another debunked theory about 2016 Democratic party collusion with Ukraine.
On Dec. 23, the president spoke in Florida, claiming, among other things, “There’s no impeachment.” White House advisor Kellyanne Conway – George Conway’s wife – crowed about the coming of “alternative facts” back in 2017; examples have proliferated almost too fast to be counted.
But “gaslighting” is not unique to the Trump era.
Its lineage traces back through Pres. Clinton and Pres. Nixon, back past Cukor’s
film and Hamilton’s play. Indeed, it finds one of its most evocative
implementations in William Shakespeare’s 1590s comedy – I think of it as quite
a dark comedy, although it does contain plenty of good humor – Taming
of the Shrew. Deception plays a role in almost every Shakespeare play,
tragedies and histories as well as comedies, but nowhere does it evoke the term
“gaslighting” as plainly as in the controversial Taming.
The motif germinates in the Induction, an introductory
act that frames the action we know as Taming of the Shrew – Shakespeare
uses this framing device only for Taming – in which a wealthy Lord
decides to play a prank on a passed-out drunkard named Christopher Sly by pretending
that Sly is a rich lord himself. He tells his attendants,
Sirs, I will practice on this drunken man. What think you, if he were conveyed to bed, Wrapped in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers, A most delicious banquet by his bed, And brave attendants near him when he wakes, Would not the beggar then forget himself? (Induction.1.37-43)
While robbing someone
of poverty and discomfort is better than robbing someone of wealth and comfort, a la the Hamilton play and Cukor film, a patina of disrespect discolors the
scene. The Lord laughingly disparages Sly as “monstrous,” “foul,” “loathsome,”
and a “swine.” Deceiving him will be “pastime passing excellent.” My students
did find this funny, especially when Sly starts to go along with the prank
after “discovering” that he has a beautiful wife, really the Lord’s page in
disguise.
The well-known plot of Taming is introduced
when the Lord hires players to entertain Sly and the rest with a silly play
about romantic machinations in Padua. An elder sister, the independent-minded
and “shrewish” Katherine (Katherina), has an obedient and “modest” younger sister,
Bianca. Their father, Baptista, insists on marrying off the elder – who has no
suitors – before the younger – who has two and soon three vying for her hand.
The play continues with the usual comedic disguises
and lies, but it eventually fires up toward gaslighting. The wealthy young man
Lucentio has switched identities with his servant Tranio so as to be able to
court Bianca surreptitiously; Tranio, in the guise of “Lucentio,” has promised great
wealth to Baptista, and now needs someone to provide his bona fides to back up
these promises. Tranio tricks a traveling merchant into going along with the
deception: the merchant will be protected from an imaginary threat as long as
he pretends to be Lucentio’s father Vincentio. Meanwhile, the real Vincentio
comes to town on a surprise visit. Tranio and his fellow servant to Lucentio, a
boy named Biondello, have to make a choice: admit their deception to Vincentio
(their real master’s real father) or double down on the lies they have been
building.
It wouldn’t be comedy if they didn’t double
down.
When Vincentio addresses Biondello, the scamp
replies, “No, sir. I could not forget you, / for I never saw you before in all
my life” (5.1.51-52). The horror of Vincentio, who is appropriately baffled by
this bald-faced lie, only multiplies when he encounters Tranio, disguised as
Lucentio. Tranio tells Vincentio, with the feigned civility common to
gaslighters, “Sir, you seem a sober ancient gentleman by your habit, but your
words show you a madman” (5.1.74-76). The scene further spirals out of control
when Baptista piles on against Vincentio, who is the only one telling the
truth. Vincentio, justifiably upset and on the verge of being arrested for his
defiance of the story that the gulls have accepted, is saved only by the
appearance of his son, who finally sets the record straight.
But the real king of gaslighting is the antihero
of the play, Petruchio. He had arrived on the scene to face the challenge of “taming”
Katherine the “shrew,” and threw himself wholeheartedly into the task. At
first, his gambit is relatively unoffensive. He presents himself to Baptista
with uncommon praise for Katherine:
PETRUCHIO Pray, have you not a daughter Called Katherina, fair and virtuous? BAPTISTA I have a daughter, sir, called Katherina. (2.1.45-47)
The reply from Baptista, whose unwillingness to defend his daughter’s dignity seems central to the action, always strikes me as potentially one of the play’s funniest lines, although it is wrought unpleasantly at her expense. Petruchio continues with more unwarranted praise for her:
PETRUCHIO I am a gentleman of Verona, sir, That hearing of her beauty and her wit, Her affability and bashful modesty, Her wondrous qualities and mild behavior, Am bold to show myself a forward guest Within your house, to make mine eye the witness Of that report which I so oft have heard…. (2.1.50-56)
Well, no, he has not “so oft” heard that. But he is committed. He soliloquizes about his plan to “woo her with some spirit”:
Say that she rail, why then I’ll tell her plain She sings as sweetly as a nightingale. Say that she frown, I’ll say she looks as clear As morning roses newly washed with dew. Say she be mute and will not speak a word, Then I’ll commend her volubility And say she uttereth piercing eloquence. If she do bid me pack, I’ll give her thanks As though she bid me stay by her a week. If she deny to wed, I’ll crave the day When I shall ask the banns, and when be marrièd. (2.1.178-188)
There are worse things than praising someone
even when they haven’t earned it. This wouldn’t fully deserve the name
gaslighting if that’s all he did, though.
He keeps it up when he meets Katherine, who is
not receptive. He tells her “I am he born to tame you, Kate, / And bring you
from a wild Kate to a Kate / Conformable as other household Kates” (2.1.291-293).
Her will is clearly against this, but in patriarchal Padua, with pathetic
Baptista’s complicity, the die is cast. Perhaps Petruchio will tame her with more
kindness and praise?
Nope. After humiliating her at their wedding, Petruchio
drags Katherine away from the bridal dinner while ratcheting up the gaslighting.
Nobody comes to Katherine’s defense, despite her explicit objections, when
Petruchio claims that he is not forcing her to leave against her will but
actually “rescuing” her when they are “beset with thieves.” As her husband, he insists
on being
master of what is mine own. She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, My household stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything. And here she stands, touch her whoever dare. (2.1.235-239)
This speech sounds ominous for her independent
streak. He carries her off to end Act 3, on the long trip to his home that is
described in comic style as being messy and painful for Katherine.
His plan to win her obedience has two main
prongs: starving her and depriving her of sleep, with an added element of
ruining anything else that might provide her some comfort. Later, when they are
on their way back to Padua for Bianca’s and Lucentio’s wedding, Petruchio shows
that he has not quit his campaign to exasperate and humiliate his wife:
PETRUCHIO Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon! KATHERINE The moon? The sun! It is not moonlight now. PETRUCHIO I say it is the moon that shines so bright. KATHERINE I know it is the sun that shines so bright. PETRUCHIO Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself, It shall be moon, or star, or what I list, Or e’er I journey to your father’s house. To Servants. Go on, and fetch our horses back again.— Evermore crossed and crossed, nothing but crossed! (4.5.2-11)
It’s the emperor’s new clothes: she who dares to tell the truth will be accused of crossing the infallible ruler and harassed into compliance…unless she cares as little as he does for decorum and, even more alarmingly, for the respect of others.
A student of 21st century political gaslighting would recognize this shamelessness as a component of the potential for a race to the bottom. If Katherina does not comply with her commanding, brazen master, he will force her to miss her sister’s wedding. Their fellow traveler, Petruchio’s friend Hortensio, begs her – notice that he does not beg Petruchio – to comply, and she does, at the price of her dignity. Capitulation is apparently her only option.
HORTENSIO [to Katherine] Say as he says, or we shall never go. KATHERINE Forward, I pray, since we have come so far, And be it moon, or sun, or what you please. And if you please to call it a rush candle, Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me. PETRUCHIO I say it is the moon. KATHERINE I know it is the moon. PETRUCHIO Nay, then you lie. It is the blessèd sun. KATHERINE Then God be blest, it is the blessèd sun. But sun it is not, when you say it is not, And the moon changes even as your mind. What you will have it named, even that it is, And so it shall be so for Katherine. (4.5.12-25)
He’s not done. Soon, they come across an older
man, and Petruchio continues to humiliate Katherine by making her assent to
more of his foolishness. This older man is the aforementioned Vincentio, who is
about to be gaslit himself by Tranio and Biondello in the scene described
above. But it’s all in good fun, I guess, as Vincentio appears to forgive his
gaslighters before joining the party after his son’s wedding in Act 5.
A theme of Shakespeare’s play: gaslighting works.
At Bianca’s bridal dinner, in the denouement, Petruchio makes and wins a bet
that his Katherine has been tamed into the most obedient of the three new wives
in attendance. What’s more, she berates the other two wives for their
shrewishness. The gaslighter triumphs, and the gaslit woman not only sacrifices
her dignity but also spreads the gaslighter’s philosophy to embarrass other
women. It’s hard to accept that Katherine’s ignominious defeat is truly all in
good fun.
While I’m here: if you are among the many who have
heard that Taming is a feminist play, you may have gotten gaslit
yourselves. But we’ll save that argument for another day.
Although I
don’t often write about authors like Tom Clancy, his mention in connection with
the recent assassination of Qasem Soleimani warrants some reflection. According
to Malcolm Nance, former naval officer and intelligence expert, Tom Clancy has,
at the very least, given Donald Trump and the neocons a narrative framework for
the killing.
Following the incident Nance tweeted,
Trump is executing Tom Clancy’s “Ryan Doctrine” which was all foreign leaders will be killed if they sponsor a terrorist attack. Soleimani is literally the last page of Executive Orders where Jack Ryan orders CIA to assassinate leader of Iran during a speech announcing doctrine.
Nance is no fan of Soleimani, having fought against his operatives in the Middle East in the 1980s. Nevertheless, as Commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—which Nance says is comparable to a combination of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Vice President of the United States—Soleimani was too big to take out. It breaks international norms, resembles too closely Israel’s targeted assassinations, heightens the risk of war, and makes Americans less safe.
Nance elaborated on his Clancy observation over the weekend for MSNBC’s Joy Reid. The intelligence community, Nance said, has the acronym TCCC, for Tom Clancy Combat Concepts. This applies to those instances when a civilian decision maker reads something in a Tom Clancy novel and tries to pass it off as the basis for a political decision. In Executive Orders, President Jack Ryan orders the killing of an Iranian Ayatollah.
Since I haven’t read any of
Clancy’s novels, even though he was a big favorite in the Maryland county where
I taught (where there was a Naval Air Force base and where long lines formed
whenever he came to the area for a reading), I turn to the responses that Nance’s
tweet elicited. The general consensus appears to be that Clancy’s early novels
were excellent but have in recent years become too tainted with ideology. For
instance, Grant Stern responded,
I loved his novels until The Bear and the Dragon, when President Ryan bellicosely started a war and bragged about it, like a power drunk neo-con. Clancy’s (d)evolution matched the GOP.
Genre novels are capable of embracing the complexity of life (witness Jane Austen’s romance novels), but when they become formulaic or opt for cheap fantasy, they can become reactionary, if not dangerous. Rather than stimulating thought, they generate emotional venting. Bertolt Brecht leveled this charge against the sentimental bourgeois theater of his day, and it can be leveled against Clancy’s fiction today.
The difference between great literature and lesser is that the former always appeals to more than base impulses. It appeals to the head and the soul as well as to the emotions. It calls upon us to think things through and to invoke a higher ethical perspective.
I don’t know that the major decision makers in the Soleimani assassination–Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo–read Clancy novels. Nance admits that it may be just coincidence that the killing follows the Ryan Doctrine so closely. Nevertheless, the novels contribute to a world view that appears to have taken over the White House.
It’s hard to overstate just how dangerous this all is.
A Chris Hayes’s podcast interview with playwrights Tony Kushner and Jeremy O. Harris alerted me to an absurdist play which captures the nightmare currently unfolding between Trump and Iran. Think of Trump as Ubu Roi, “the shit king.”
Alfred Jarry’s play came up when the playwrights were asked what drama best captures the GOP’s utter capitulation to Trump. One of them (I can’t remember which) mentioned that Republicans were behaving like the townspeople in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, a point I myself have made in the past.
The other, however, argued they were like Ubu’s followers, which I agree works even better. In the version directed by Peter Brooks, Ubu’s generals blindly run into a wall when he orders them to.
Ubu Roi grew out of a high school farce attacking an unpopular teacher. With references to Macbeth, Hamlet, and other classical plays, it features a gluttonous, cowardly, miserly, sadistic narcissist who is more a satiric grotesque than an actual individual. Ubu overthrows the King of Poland, kills his family (except for the youngest son Bougrelas, who escapes with his mother), raises everyone’s taxes, betrays his supporters, is attacked and defeated by both the Russians and Bougrelas, and in the end escapes. He has a grotesque wife (Madame Ubu), throws around obscenities (the first word in the play is “merdre” [shit]), eats everything in sight, runs away whenever there is danger, is gutted a couple of times (but always recovers), and in the end runs off to Spain.
The more I describe him, the more he sounds like a certain American president. I am currently watching in horror the news out of Iran as Trump boasts of his destructive capacities, promises to destroy world heritage sites, and trades taunts with Iranian leaders. What kind of a leader does this?!
Ubu possesses both Trump’s bragaddocio and his cowardice. Here’s the battle scene:
PAPA UBU. Let’s go, gentlemen. Let’s take up our positions for the battle. We’re going to stay on this hill and won’t commit the blunder of descending to the bottom. I will hold the middle like a living citadel and the rest of you will circle around me. I recommend that you put in your rifles as many bullets as they’ll hold, because eight bullets can kill eight Russians and that’s a few less I won’t have on my back. We’ll put the infantry at the bottom of the hill to receive the Russians and kill them a little, riders behind to throw themselves into the confusion, and the artillery around the windmill here to fire into the heap… OFFICERS. Your orders, Lord Ubu, will be executed.
Incidentally, I played the role of Bougrelas in a Carleton College production of the play. I still remember my stilted speech as my mother dies in my arms (in the snow, no less) and, Hamlet Sr.-like, the ghost of one of my ancestors delivers me a sword with which to enact vengeance. I provide the dialogue to further convey the farcical nature of the play:
Bougrelas: Ah, it tragic to see oneself, alone at 14, with a terrible vengeance to pursue.
(His ancestors appear)
THE GHOST. Learn, Bougrelas, that I was during my life Matthias Lord of Koenigsberg, the first king and founder of our house. I place upon you the responsibility of exacting our vengeance. (He gives him a big sword.) Let this sword not rest until it has caused the death of the usurper.
(All disappear, and Bougrelas rests alone in an attitude of ecstasy.)
Ubu Roi (1896) had a major influence on Surrealism, Dadaism, and the Theater of the Absurd. In a number of ways, it captures the Trump drama more effectively than realistic theater might, especially the president’s utter lack of accountability.
Observations by South African playwright and academic Jane Taylor help us understand the allure of both Ubu and Trump. The two pull their followers down to their own infantile level. Their supporters get to act out their infantile rages and indulge in infantile desires without taking responsibility.
Taylor describes Ubu as “notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification.” While the responsible part of us is shocked, a more primitive part takes a secret delight:
There is a particular kind of pleasure for an audience watching these infantile attacks. Part of the satisfaction arises from the fact that in the burlesque mode which Jarry invents, there is no place for consequence. While Ubu may be relentless in his political aspirations, and brutal in his personal relations, he apparently has no measurable effect upon those who inhabit the farcical world which he creates around himself. He thus acts out our most childish rages and desires, in which we seek to gratify ourselves at all cost.
Jarry was targeting stodgy middle class respectability, as were the Surrealists and Dadaists. I have to say, however, that such stodginess looks pretty good when contrasted with rampant irresponsibility. We elected an entertainer as a president when what we needed was a responsible adult, no matter how dull. Hillary didn’t excite, but she would have been competent.
We chose to live in an Ubu world and the results look worse all the time.
Further note: After some googling, I see that Charles Simic compared Trump to Ubu in a 2016 New York Review of Books article. Ubu is the only literary character who comes close to Trump, Simic argues. Simic’s examples remind us how extraordinary Trump seemed in his first year and how we must struggle to refrain from normalizing such behavior:
Since Trump became president, every time I told myself this man is bonkers, I remembered Ubu, realizing how the story of his presidency and the cast of characters he has assembled in the White House would easily fit into Jarry’s play without a single word needing to be changed. Everyone, I imagine, is familiar with the spectacle of his entire cabinet taking turns telling him how much they admire him. “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people,” Mike Pence said. After every member of his cabinet was through slobbering, and he himself had stopped nodding in agreement, he took the opportunity to heap additional praise on himself, declaring that he is one of the most productive presidents in American history—with perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt coming close—and everyone present concurred.
Even more Ubu-esque was that scene of a dozen pastors who came to the Oval Office to lay on hands and pray for the president, supernatural wisdom, guidance, and protection. “Who could ever even imagine,” one shaken participant said afterward, “we are going to see another great spiritual awakening?” Or how about that touching moment when the president signed a bill into law rolling back the regulation for people with mental illness to purchase guns? Or the spectacle of the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the White House economic adviser, Gary Cohn, pledging to American people that the wealthy are not getting a tax cut under the president’s plan?
Mural by 19th century Benedictine monks, Conception Abbey, Conception, Mo.
Spiritual
Sunday
Journey for Jesus’s Dan Clendenin alerted me to this epiphany poem by Scottish poet George Mackay Brown. In simple parable-like language, Brown describes the magi encountering frustrating obstacles. Experiencing God’s apparent silence (“salt, snow, skulls”), they meet under a dry star.
Then the star begins to sing.
Epiphany Poem
The red king Came to a great water. He said, Here the journey ends. No keel or skipper on this shore.
The yellow king Halted under a hill. He said, Turn the camels round. Beyond, ice summits only.
The black king Knocked on a city gate. He said, All roads stop here. These are gravestones, no inn.
The three kings Met under a dry star. There, at midnight, The star began its singing.
The three kings Suffered salt, snow, skulls. They suffered the silence Before the first word.
Record high temperatures and high winds have caused wildfires to break out all over Australia, with no end in sight
Friday
Given the fires that are devastating Australia, I’m updating
a post I wrote five years ago citing Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” From its ravaged
coral reefs to its burning interior, Australia is showing itself to be one of
the world’s climate change canaries.
“Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in ice,” Robert Frost writes in his well-known poem, and it increasingly appears that everyone is right. Australia’s inferno follows terrifying reports of Greenland’s accelerating ice melt. According to National Geographic this past October,
Today, the Greenland ice sheet is losing mass about six times faster than it was just a few decades ago, whatever tenuous balance that existed before long since upended. Between 2005 and 2016, melt from the ice sheet was the single largest contributor to sea level rise worldwide, though Antarctica may overtake it soon.
Within the past 50 years, the ice sheet has already shed enough to add about half an inch of water to the world’s oceans, and that number is increasing precipitously as the planet heats. During this summer’s extreme heat wave that parked over Greenland for a week and turned over half its surface ice to slush, meltwater equivalent to over 4 million swimming pools sloughed into the ocean in a single day. Over the month of July, enough melt poured into the ocean to bump sea levels up by an easily measurable half a millimeter.
Frost, who may have Milton’s hot hell and Dante’s cold hell in mind, is writing about relationships, not climate change. As he sees it, the relationship is in trouble whether the partners are fiery passionate or icy cold. Fire is louder and more flamboyant, but the silent workings of cold can be just as deadly:
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.
The poem is just as relevant to our current situation, however, where apocalypse is looking increasingly likely.
Speaking of apocalyptic accounts that get at our situation, here are two that I’ve cited in the past, one from The Iliad and one from C. S. Lewis’s Last Battle. I wrote the following last August about the burning of the Amazon rainforests:
My anger finds some articulation in a horrific scene in The Iliad. Because Hector has killed his dearest friend, Achilles reengages in the war and goes on a killing spree so bloody that the River Scamander reacts in horror. When Achilles clogs its channels with dead Trojans, it rises up in a giant wave and bears down on the Greek warrior.
Because Achilles is beloved by the Gods, however, the iron-working god Hephaistos enters the fray, and his technology is brought to bear. I think of the Amazon’s unparalleled biological diversity as I read what happens next:
Then against the river Hephaistos turned his bright flame, and the elms and tamarisks and willows burned away, with all the clover, galingale, and rushes plentiful along the winding streams. Then eels and fish, in backwaters, in currents, wriggled here and there at the scalding breath of torrid blasts from the great smith, Hephaistos…
And further on:
[The river] spoke in steam, and
his clear current seethed,
the way a caldron whipped by a white-hot fire
boils with a well-fed hog’s abundant fat
that spatters all the rim, as dry split wood
turns ash beneath it. So his currents, fanned
by fire, seethed, and the river would not flow
but came to a halt, tormented by the gale
of fire from the heavenly smith, Hephaistos.
This isn’t the only time that Achilles is associated with devastating fire. In an earlier passage, Homer uses fire imagery to capture his slaughter:
A forest fire will rage through deep glens of a mountain, crackling dry from summer heat, and coppices blaze up in every quarter as wind whips the flame: so Akhilleus flashed to right and left like a wild god, trampling the men he killed and black earth ran with blood. As when a countryman yokes oxen with broad brows to tread out barley on a well-bedded threshing floor, and quickly the grain is husked under the bellowing beasts: The sharp-hooved horses of Akhilleus just so crushed dead men and shields. His axle-tree was splashed with blood, so was his chariot rail, with drops thrown up by wheels and horses’ hooves. And Peleus’ son kept riding for his glory, staining his powerful arms with mire and blood.
Achilles may be Iliad’s hero, but Homer fully intends for us to experience the tragedy of what happens. Once the most humane of the Greeks, as Caroline Alexander points out in her superb book The War that Killed Achilles, Achilles has lost all perspective and grinds to dust everything that is human and sacred: Nature is ravaged, bodies are desecrated, and people’s hearts are torn apart. One can plausibly argue that The Iliad is the world’s greatest anti-war work as it exposes the colossal waste of armed conflict.
The war that today’s humans are waging against nature is occurring on an epic scale and is having epic consequences. Unlike in TheIliad, however, reactive nature will dole out consequences that even heavenly fire cannot resist. Our descendants will curse us for the world we have left them.
***
Now on to sea-level rise. Here’s the passage I cited from the last of the Narnia Chronicles in which C. S. Lewis rewrites the Book of Revelation:
At last something white—long, level line of whiteness that gleamed in the light of the standing stars—came moving towards them from the eastern end of the world. A widespread noise broke the silence: first a murmur then a rumble, then a roar. And now they could see what it was that was coming, and how fast it came. It was a foaming wall of water. The sea was rising. In that tree-less world you could see it very well. You could see all the rivers getting wider and the lakes getting larger, and separate lakes joining into one, and valleys turning into new lakes, and hills turning into islands, and then those islands vanishing. And the high moors to their left and the higher mountains to their right crumbled and slipped down with a roar and a splash into the mounting water; and the water came swirling up to the very threshold of the Doorway (but never passed it) so that the foam splashed about Aslan’s forefeet. All now was level water from where they stood to where the waters met the sky.
When fire and ice team up, we’re in trouble like we’ve never seen before. As a character tells Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the popular television series by that name,
When I saw you stop the world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you. It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural of apocalypse.
Previous posts on literature that cast light upon issues raised by climate change:
Many of my posts have been about climate change denial.
For instance:
Kingsolver Explains Climate
Denial — Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior includes
a deep dive into why poor Appalachian whites don’t believe that climate change
is happening.
Civil War Battle, Image of
Climate Denial – Ambrose Bierce’s famous short story
“Chickamauga” helps us understand why people ignore the facts about our
changing climate.
Donne’s Warning about Climate
Change – Donne mentions the movement of the spheres in his poem
“Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” but they are distant, and he makes the
important point that we only see the effects of nature that occur right before
our eyes, not the larger patterns. Think of Senator James Inhofe bringing a
snowball to the Senate to disprove global warming.
Tolstoy and Climate Change
Denial – We can see that climate change denialists follow in
the footsteps of the Moscow aristocrats in War and Peace, who
can’t believe that Napoleon will take the city.
Out of Denial and into
Responsibility – Jack Burden in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men gives
us a great description of the philosophy of denial, which he calls “idealism.”
By the end of the novel, fortunately, he decides to face up to reality.
Obama: A Hard Rain’s A Gonna
Fall – Poet Henry Vaughan decries fools who “prefer dark night
before true light,” and Alexander Pope in The Dunciad goes
after the dunces who turn their backs on science, intelligence, and logic.
GOP Denies a Giant Problem –
For another instance of denial, it is hard to top Jonathan Swift’s
Lilliputians, who refuse to believe that other men like Gulliver could exist.
Their philosophers conclude that he must have dropped from the moon.
Haiyan, Climate Change, and
King Lear – King Lear also closes his eyes to the family and
political storms that he has triggered. His most trustworthy counselor
advises him to “See better, Lear,” thereby earning banishment.
When American Fantasies Are
Dangerous – In American Gods, Neil
Gaiman gives us a great example of denial: southern slave owners refuse to
acknowledge that there has been a successful slave rebellion in Haiti.
Melville and Climate Change
Denial – Another instance of slave society denial occurs with
Captain Delano in Melville’s fine novella Benito Cereno refusing
to see the rebellion going on right before his eyes..
Will Warm Days Never Cease —
Classic poems like Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” suddenly look different as climate
change has its way with us.
Still Falls the Rain –
Hurricane Harvey, exacerbated by human-caused climate change–invites
comparisons with the London blitzkrieg, as described by Edith Sitwell.
How Will the Future Judge Us
for Trump? — Jane Hirshfield has a poem that gets us to look at
ourselves from a future perspective, including what we did not do in the face
of disaster.
Caves of Ice, Prophecies of War –
Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” poem came to mind as I heard the catastrophic news
about the breakup of arctic ice.
Climate Action Will Lead to
Dystopia – Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker is
about nuclear holocaust, not climate change, but it captures the same disregard
and contempt for future generations that climate denialists are exhibiting.
Hydrocarbons Unleash an Angry
God – Euripides’s The Bacchae shows how nature responds when we try
to impose our will upon it. The control freak King Pentheus is torn apart at
the order of Dionysus.
This Is the Way the World Ends –
Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice” sounds as though it was written for climate
change. Will the world end in fire or ice? How about both?
Will Californians Become the
New Okies? – The droughts that climate change is visiting upon
California (not to mention other parts of the world) bring to mind the
ecological nightmare described by John Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath.
The Mariner’s Advice to College
Students – Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient
Mariner can be read as an ecological parable—the arrogance
that the mariner exhibits by shooting the albatross unleashes “life in death”
upon the world.
Some authors provide useful advice for climate
activists:
Kingsolver Tries to Save the
Planet – Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior directly
takes on the issue of climate change as it shows disruptions in the migratory
patterns of monarch butterflies. Most usefully, Kingsolver shows various
constituencies that must learn to talk to each other if we are to address the
issues.
Being Right on the Climate Is
Not Enough – Along these lines, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People has
important lessons for climate activists: if you want to change people’s minds,
avoid self-righteousness.
Climate Change: Signs of
Witchery – Leslie Marmon Silko, a Laguna Pueblo writer, vividly
captures environmental devastation in her novel Ceremony but
also has her protagonist discover a healthier way of living in the world.
Climate Hope Shines in Dark
Times – Madeleine L’Engel has a wonderful Advent poem that I
shared after the world gathered in Paris this past December to combat
climate change. Despite the grim forecasts, we experienced a glimmer of hope.
And finally, if you are in the mood for light verse about the
environment,here are a number of poems by my father, a deep
lover of nature:
The Washington Post just ran an extensive article about Georgia Southern University students burning Cuban American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s memoir Make Your Home Among Strangers, assigned to all first-year students to raise racial awareness. As one who grew up in the segregated south and who has spent much of his professional life working to raise racial consciousness (my own as well as that of my students), I find the story to be both heartbreaking and familiar.
One student comment stood out to me. While not among the book-burners, the student defended them, opining,
She [Crucet] made a lot of assumptions about white people in general. I didn’t choose my race. It’s not my fault I’m white.
I feel this student’s pain. It’s horrible when strangers make negative assumptions about you. But here’s the thing. This pain, which led students to burn books, is a pain that people of color experience daily. Privilege lies in being regarded as an individual, not as a race, and many minorities are seen mainly through the race lens.
They would much rather be accepted for who they are and not have to think about their race or ethnicity. In other words, they would love to be privileged.
If we can get white students to understand this, major breakthroughs are possible.
Simply calling white students privileged or racist doesn’t work, however. Or rather, it works only with those sensitive souls who are already willing to engage in tough introspection. While I treasure such students, we need to extend the dialogue to a wider audience if we are to achieve social justice.
Literature is a particularly powerful tool in this endeavor. The best novelists, poets and dramatists of color (and not just of color) can present people of all races in their full complexity. Because “the poet, he nothing affirms” (Sir Philip Sidney), a great novel, poem or play doesn’t appear to have any agenda other than moving beyond conventional beliefs and listening to the deepest parts of ourselves.
To cite the novel I will be teaching this coming semester in Sewanee’s Composition/Literature course (focus: Identity Struggles), Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon features a series of black characters, some of whom are justifiably angry but unhinged (Guitar), some of whom are spiritually dead (Macon Dead), some of whom are lost (Hagar), and some of whom are intent on finding themselves (Milkman). White students and black students alike respond positively to the novel, but my white students, in addition to identifying with Milkman’s existential search for meaning, also get glimpses into the black experience. It’s harder to reduce African Americans to narrow preconceptions after intense immersion in a Morrison novel.
When I teach Lucille Clifton (I will include some of her poems in the course), I often point out how much richer and more colorful life becomes once you move beyond stereotypes. When you are no longer a slave to your fears, I tell them, everything becomes multi-dimensional. Not only do other people become more interesting, but you discover new aspects of yourself.
My former colleague Jeff Coleman, who teaches Minority Lit at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, is always careful to include an ethnic author (say, Korean-American) that is unrepresented amongst the students taking the class. That way, everyone is entering unknown waters together. Back when I used to teach the course, I still remember an African American student finding herself sounding like the white students when we were studying Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko. It was a real revelation to her.
Even before the Charlottesville Nazi demonstration, Trump’s inflammatory language, and the recent rise in hate crimes, we had Trayvon Martin shot by a vigilante, Charleston parishioners killed by someone trying to start a race war, and numerous innocent African Americans gunned down by police who regarded them as threatening. The health of our republic depends on our acknowledging and valuing our diversity.
College can provide the necessary education if it does it right.
