Pachinko and the Miracle of Teaching

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2023


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Wednesday

Last week I finished listening to Pachinko, by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee, and was very impressed. In today’s post I turn to the very end (so spoiler alert) because it surprises us with a story of how one of the characters passes along a love of Dickens to a incidental figure, a man who occupies only three pages.. The story caught my eye in part because it captures a key aspect of teaching: we pour out our love of books to people whom, in most instances, we will never see again. I’m also struck by the strangeness of the author ending this lengthy book with this incident. It’s as though the transitory teacher-student relationship is so important that it can encapsulate the major themes of this almost 500-page novel.

Pachinko is the story of four generations of Koreans. It begins shortly before Japan annexes Korea in 1910, and we watch a family suffer through the occupation before moving to Japan. Sunja, the daughter, becomes pregnant after an affair with a married man and conceives a child—Noa—but is saved from ruin when a lodger in the family boarding house marries her. Isak, a Christian pastor, is a kind man who agrees to raise Noa as his own, and they move to Osaka, Japan, where he has a church waiting for him and where they have a second son. Sadly, Isak is jailed when his sexton refuses to worship the emperor, and they both die from the harsh treatment. Sunja and her two sons only survive because Noah’s biological father, now a member of a Korean organized crime syndicate (the Yakuza), takes care of them.

Because Noah is bright, this birth father secretly pays for his education, and he is thriving as an English major in a major Japanese university. He is in love with the great 19th century novelists, especially Dickens and appears to have a bright future. Lee writes,

Even after two years, he was still in thrall with just being at Waseda, with just having a quiet room to read in. Like a man starved, Noa filled his mind, ravenous for good books. He read through Dickens, Thackeray, Hardy, Austen, and Trollope, then moved on to the Continent to read through much of Balzac, Zola, and Flaubert, then fell in love with Tolstoy. His favorite was Goethe; he must have read The Sorrows of Young Werther at least half a dozen times.

At one point, there is a class discussion about George Eliot’s Daniel Derona, a novel in which the protagonist discovers that he is Jewish. The identity theme is relevant to Pachinko, which explores what it means to be Korean but raised in Japan. The teacher observes,

“Here we have a situation where a man does not know his own identity as an outsider. He is like Moses, the infant in Exodus who learns that he is Jewish and not Egyptian—” As [the teacher] was saying this, she glanced at Noa, but he was not aware of it, because he was taking notes.

Noa’s happiness ends when he learns that a member of the Yakuza is financing his life. A sensitive soul, he angrily cuts ties with his mother for accepting the help, drops out of school, and disappears. Years later his mother discovers that he has been working as a bookkeeper for a Pachinko operation. But when she tracks him down—by this time he is married with children and is passing himself off as Japanese—he commits suicide.

So cut to the novel’s end, when Sunja is visiting the grave of her husband Isak. The year is now 1989, and from a casual conversation with the groundskeeper, she discovers that, unknown to her, Noa has been visiting Isak’s grave faithfully for years. During that time he has made friends with this man, even offering to send him to school. And while the groundskeeper has rejected the idea, he has read the copies of Dickens novels that Noa brought him. When Sunja informs him that Noa is dead, he replies,

I am very sad to hear that, Boku-san. Truly, I am. I’d been hoping to tell him that after I finished all the books he’d brought me, I bought more of my own. I have read through all of Mr. Dickens’s books in translations, but my favorite is the first one he gave me, David Copperfield. I admire David.

So Noa, whose great potential seems to have been wasted—a pachinko bookkeeper, after all, is not a university professor—has passed along a precious gift in a chance encounter. And that seems to be one of the great themes of the book: despite all the suffering, tragedy and death, there are these chance intersections of human lives, never planned, that lead to luminous moments.

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Burns on December (and Austen on Burns)

By Robin Bates | Published: December 4, 2023
Robert Burns

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Tuesday

Here’s a Robert Burns poem to welcome in the twelfth month of the year. December may be grim, he tells us, but he welcomes the grimness because it allows him to wax poetic about “parting wi’ Nancy, oh! ne’er to meet mair”:

Thou Gloomy December
By Robert Burns

Ance mair I hail thee, thou gloomy December!
Ance mair I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care:
Sad was the parting thou makes me remember,
Parting wi’ Nancy, oh! ne’er to meet mair.
Fond lovers’ parting is sweet painful pleasure,
Hope beaming mild on the soft parting hour;
But the dire feeling, O farewell for ever!
Is anguish unmingled, and agony pure.

Wild as the winter now tearing the forest,
‘Till the last leaf o’ the summer is flown,
Such is the tempest has shaken my bosom,
Since my last hope and last comfort is gone!
Still as I hail thee, thou gloomy December,
Still shall I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care;
For sad was the parting thou makes me remember,
Parting wi’ Nancy, oh! ne’er to meet mair.

While I find Burns to be enjoyable, I can no longer think of him the same way after reading what Charlotte Heywood in Jane Austen’s Sanditon says about him.

Her comments are in response to Sir Denham, the inept rake who rhapsodizes about Robert Burns in an attempt to seduce her. “Burns,” he declaims, “is always on fire. His soul was the altar in which lovely woman sat enshrined, his spirit truly breathed the immortal incense which is her due.”

Charlotte enjoys Burns well enough, she replies, but says that his philandering raises doubts about the depth of his affections for Nancy or Highland Mary or the other women who function as his poetic muses. Her concluding summation of the poet is short, sweet, and deadly:

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

Austen wields a satiric stiletto like few others. One of literary history’s great tragedies is her dying before she completed Sanditon.

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George Eliot’s Humanism

By Robin Bates | Published: December 3, 2023
English novelist George Eliot (1819 – 1880)

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Monday

For my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in Literature, I’m featuring one of his more dubious ideas. But since it highlights one of my favorite passages in literature, which appears in one of my favorite novels, I can at the very least thank Fletcher from getting me to think about them in new ways.

The work is George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which Fletcher claims helped develop the idea of secular humanism. The invention is the author’s use of “you and me,” which we see surface in chapter 73 and again in the famous final passage, which is the one that ranks so high with me. In the earlier passage, Eliot writes,

Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
May visit you and me.

It’s a sentiment we encounter in the Phil Ochs/Joan Baez song, “There but for fortune.”

To appreciate the final passage in Middlemarch, it’s first useful to know a little about the plot. There are a number of very sympathetic characters who want to do good in the world and whose efforts fall far short of their desires. One of these is Dorothea Brook, one of my favorite characters in all of literature, who thinks she is marrying a Milton but instead finds her husband to be a stuffy academic. So instead of assisting to bring a great work into the world, she finds herself cooped up in a loveless marriage. In her final summation of Dorothea’s life, Eliot writes,

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it….

Eliot goes on to say that, although Dorothea ended up in quiet channels rather than in a famous river, she still had a significant impact on the lives she came into contact with. In fact, the world is a better place because it has Dorotheas in it, even though they live hidden lives and go on to lie in unvisited graves. Without them, our lives are more likely go badly:

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me [my italics] as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

 Here’s what Fletcher has to say about Eliot’s “invention”:

“You and me” occurs rarely in literature and for good reason. It has a shorter and more elegant synonym: us….But “you and me”…does have a practical use in daily speech: it helps our brain bond to other people. Unlike “us,” which accepts that we’re already bonded, “you and me” stimulates when we’re not bonded yet, that feeling wraps our consciousness around a new coalition; in cases when we’re bonded already, it renews our sense of the union….That coming together isn’t an assumed fact of life, and it needs to be emphasized to make sure that the parties involved understand.

And what’s the larger significance of this? Fletcher sees Eliot’s novel as forwarding the idea of humanism as a sacred cause. When the German philosopher Feurbach tried to advance the notion that we should have a religious faith, not in God, but in people, he was roundly denounced. Christians considered him blasphemous while atheists thought him not atheist enough. But Eliot figured the vision could be conveyed through novels, and in fact I carry this vision away from Middlemarch. It may be one reason I like it so much.

Fletcher has one more example of “you and me.” During the Great Depression, Woody Guthrie objected to the song “God Bless America,” with its focus on God-bestowed blessings. So he wrote a counter song to get at his humanistic vision. As Fletcher explains, his song highlighted “every human being that travels here in plain view.” It is, of course, “This Land Is Your Land,” with its refrain, “This land was made for you and me.”

If you and I see ourselves as Dorotheas, quietly working on behalf of the human community, then we are living out Feurbach’s and Eliot’s vision. And we, of course, are beneficiaries of others doing the same, including when we pick up a novel to read. As Fletcher points out,

For such is the marvel of George Eliot’s invention that you can carry it into every novel that you read. All you need to do is pause when the novel is done—and think of all the nameless acts of love that helped create it.

Think of all the people who gave their hours to provide the novelist’s bread. Think of all the hands that built the schoolrooms where she learned. Think of all the strangers who labored in shadow to give her pen and ink and paper, strangers whome she’d never see.

Then think of her, wrestling against confusion and self-doubt and endless false starts to carry her narrative to its last shining word.

And all of it for readers whom she’d never see.

All of it for you and me.

I’ve always been deeply grateful, in my bones, for those who provide me with the literature I love. I have also seen it as my life’s work to share the gift of literature with students, and it doesn’t matter whether or not they remember me or the class, just as long as they were somehow touched. We’re all part of this vast human enterprise, with wealth and fame ultimately being far less important than what we give.

I’m still unsure about “you and me” being an invention. But that Eliot’s novels–Middlemarch and Silas Marner and Adam Bede and Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda–all convey the sense that there is a broader human community that we are part of and that we owe our lives to—now that I totally buy.

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A Shadow Falls, the Book Glows

By Robin Bates | Published: December 2, 2023
Väinö Hämäläinen, A Man Reading

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First Sunday in Advent

My dear friend Pastor Sue Schmidt alerted me to a Rilke poem that provides a beautiful entry into the Advent season. Advent is a time when, in the face of darkness, we search and pray for the numinous. When the poet says of himself, “I am dark. I am a forest,” I think of the opening of Dante’s Inferno:

Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood. How shall I say

what wood that was! I never saw so drear,
so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.

Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
(trans. John Ciardi)

In Rilke’s telling, however, the numinous is always present, even though we don’t always notice it. “Of all who move through the quiet houses, / you are the quietest,” he writes, and “your  shadow falls over the book we are reading/ and makes it glow.”

This glow enters the dark forest as well:

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer…

The poem concludes with an image of a wheel “whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,/ revolve me nearer to the center.” Always with Rilke there is this play of dark and light that is central to Advent . Sue writes, “I really like the idea of moving into the center of the wheel – to God – and then seeing that all I do widens. When I work with God, then what I do has so much more impact.”

Let this poem bring light to you as the days get colder and darker and as the world, whether in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza, or here at home, does what the world too often does. Listen for that presence that comes and goes, swinging the door so gently that it closes “almost without a shudder.”


You Come and Go
By Rainer Maria Rilke

You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow. For all things
sing you: at times
we just hear them more clearly.

Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark. I am a forest.

You are a wheel at which I stand,
whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up,
revolve me nearer to the center.
Then all the work I put my hand to
widens from turn to turn.

(Poem 45 from The Book of Hours, trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

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Why the GOP Is Quoting 1984

By Robin Bates | Published: November 30, 2023
Film still from 1984

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Friday

Gil Duran of the FrameLab blog has written an interesting reflection on how American fascists are appropriating George Orwell’s 1984 for their own purposes. The claim should be preposterous, of course, since Orwell is targeting totalitarianism, not democratic rule. Still, we shouldn’t be surprised: claiming that 2+2=5 is, as Orwell famously points, basic to authoritarian rule.

Duran concludes his piece with a set of suggestions on making sure we get our arithmetic right.

The article begins with Winston Smith’s declaration that freedom is “the freedom to say two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

This, of course, is not what Big Brother’s party asserts:

In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it … For, after all, how do we know two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works?  Or that the past is unchangeable?

Duran then provides examples of American authoritarians quoting Orwell’s novel:

“We are living Orwell’s 1984,” wrote Donald Trump’s son, Don Jr., to his millions of followers on Twitter after the platform banned Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection. “Free-speech no longer exists in America.” 

In October, Elon Musk — currently promoting the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory on Twitter — posted a photo of his new t-shirt, which was emblazoned with the words “What would Orwell think?” alongside a Big Brother-like eye.

In response, Duran quotes Max Fawcett in Canada’s National Observer, who is 2021 wrote that these “Orwell-enthralled conservatives” think 1984’s critique of authoritarianism

validates their maximalist view of free speech on anything from COVID-19 conspiracy theories to bigotry directed at minorities, immigrants and the LGBTQ community. Any attempt to curtail hate speech or contain the spread of misinformation is, in their eyes, a textbook example of the ‘thought police’ from the book’s fictional superstate of Oceania.”

Duran elaborates further:

The skewed conservative interpretation of Orwell holds that freedom means the freedom to spread lies about topics like the 2020 election, COVID, vaccines or anything else. It depicts any effort to challenge falsehoods as an attack on this supposed freedom, and as a form of “thought control” in line with 1984’s totalitarian Big Brother. It vilifies fact-checkers, journalists and social media content moderation policies as enemies of freedom. According to its twisted upside-down logic, liars are defenders of liberty and truth is a form of oppression.

“What could be more Orwellian,” Duran follows up, “than claiming Orwell would have supported authoritarians and lies?” Indeed, Orwell would be horrified at how fascists are using his book. After all, as a socialist he fought against the fascists in Spain while as a lover of democracy he wrote Animal Farm and 1984 to call out Stalinism. Duran notes the author “clearly believed that objective facts do exist — and that those who deny the existence of objective facts are the villains.”

In point of fact, Trump appears to be using Big Brother’s playbook, not Orwell’s novel, to guide his own behavior, whether it’s claiming that Barack Obama was born in Kenya or insisting that he actually won the 2020 election. He went further than any previous president, including Nixon, in attempting to weaponize the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service against his opponents, yet he complains incessantly that these entities have been weaponized against him. It has become common practice for him and his followers to accuse their opponents of doing what they themselves do or want to do. As many have noted, with them every accusation is a confession.

Orwell’s most penetrating insight is one that Trump has thoroughly internalized. The main point of his lies is not to change minds but to test loyalty. The more outrageous the lie, the bigger the chance to prove you are a true believer. As Orwell explains, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” Believing the lie that Trump beat Biden has become the entry exam for today’s Republicans. If you don’t reject the factual evidence, you’re out. 

Rejecting evidence, it so happens, is Winston’s official job. Behaving like many in today’s GOP, he deletes select facts from the official archives on behalf of the Ministry of Information. As Duran explains, 

The goal of the Ministry of Information is to eliminate unsavory facts and truths, thus changing history to suit the whims of the totalitarian dictatorship. Its chilling motto — “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past” — makes clear that true power is the power to manipulate the perception of reality.

In 2018, Trump’s non-stop lying prompted Indian author Salman Rushdie to write a New Yorker article on our need for the literary classics, which are defined in part by their commitment to truth. Seeing literature as essentially a “no bullshit” zone, Rushdie wrote that the job of contemporary writers is “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”

Literature can’t save us by itself. But it’s an indispensable ally in our efforts to save democracy.

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Hamlet Taught Us a New Way to Grieve

By Robin Bates | Published: November 29, 2023
Branagh at Hamlet

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Wednesday

For my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look at what he says about Hamlet, the current focus of my faculty reading group. As Fletcher sees it, Shakespeare’s play invented a new way to grieve.

In fact, if the play proved the most popular of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the 17th century—and if it continues to pack a punch today—it’s because (Fletcher says) it aids us in this most challenging of all emotions.

Fletcher begins his discussion of Hamlet as a “Sorrow Resolver” with a look at previous plays that grappled with grief. Foremost of these are many of the great Greek tragedies. As he notes,

Greek tragedies revolved around characters who’d lost parents, siblings, children. And although those bereaved characters responded to loss in different ways, a common pattern quickly emerged: mourning took the form of a plot.

Greek audiences, Fletcher notes, especially liked the revenge plot.

I am put in mind of the words of Beowulf after watching Danish king Hrothgar lose himself in despair after Grendel’s Mother kills his best friend. “It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” he declares, before setting off to confront the monster in her underwater lair. Greek tragedy appeared to agree as it came up with elaborate revenge stories. For instance, there’s Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra lures her husband “into a bathtub, entangles him with a net, and then drops an axe upon his head.” From then on, Fletcher says, revenge plots “grew steadily more elaborate”:

A quarter century after the Oresteia, Athenian audiences were introduced to Euripides’s Medea, a barbarian princess who delivered comeuppance to her unfaithful Greek lover by stabbing his two sons, assassinating his new wife with a poisoned wedding gift, and finally , escaping in a dragon chariot hijacked from the gods.

The theater of Shakespeare’s time was in love with revenge plays. As Fletcher notes,

There were plots where avengers tricked their victims into kissing venomed skeletons. There were plots where revengers surprised their victims with lethal stage props. There were plots with hobnail hammers, scalding cauldrons, and falling trapdoors. There were plots and plots and plots and plots.

Shakespeare even put his hand to the genre with the gruesome Titus Andronicus. So when Shakespeare’s audience was greeted with Hamlet for the first time, it fully expected a traditional revenge tragedy. Claudius has killed Hamlet’s father so now it’s payback time.

But Shakespeare, Fletcher believes, had good reason to deliver a play that would go deeper into the mourning process than anything the world had seen. Three years earlier he had lost his son Hamnet—a name, at the time, interchangeable with Hamlet—so this play was personal. And even though three years had passed, that doesn’t mean that he had gotten over it. In fact, watching Hamlet’s response to his father death, it seems clear that Shakespeare hasn’t.

That’s because he may have been suffering from “complicated grief,” which is

a grief that doesn’t resolve itself naturally over time. Instead, it persists and even deepens, triggering psychic disturbances such as depression, detachment, and rage. These disturbances are what entangle Hamlet, inciting him to brood, to drift, and to lash out. And in Shakespeare’s play, as is typically the case in real life, the source of complicated grief is guilt.

The guilt is over feeling that what we do for our lost loved one is not enough. Fletcher notes how, from the very first, Hamlet attacks others for trying to move on with their lives. They, meanwhile, chastise him for being stuck in his grief, which his mother sees as not “common” and Claudius regards as “peevish.” Hamlet runs around the castle clothed in black, and he swears to his father’s ghost that he will do nothing other than remember him, pushing aside all other concerns:

Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!

The play, as Fletcher sees it, finds several ways to deal with complicated grief. First, it dispenses with plot which, like Beowulf, deals with the problem of grief by doing something. But the point is that more action doesn’t end grief. Therefore Hamlet, unlike previous revenge tragedies, had “a plot that seemed to be no plot at all.” As Fletcher notes, we see Hamlet wandering around the castle with a book while delivering long soliloquies. He raves about his inner doubts and he vents his disgust at life. When the ghost tries to get him back on track with the revenge plot, Hamlet botches it. Fletcher points out,

Instead of getting revenge, he disposed of an innocent man in a stairwell, tricked two casual acquaintances into getting royally butchered, and then jumped inside a grave: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, a fellow of infinite jest.”

Although it breaks revenge tragedy conventions, however, the play does important grieving work. First of all, it acknowledges the depth of the hurt and how inadequate are our responses, including the revenge response.

It also points out the inadequacy of public testimonial, the testimonial being in this case the theatrical scene that Hamlet composes and has the players perform. As Hamlet observes, and as Shakespeare knew as well as anyone, writing a play will get you only so far in your grieving. Everything about play acting seems fake, Hamlet thinks as he watches players performing emotions—in this case, Hecuba weeping for Trojan king Priam:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? 

As we watch a tormented Hamlet realize that neither revenge nor a public performance will assuage his grief, we feel grateful to Shakespeare. He understands the depth of our own grief.

And this recognition is what finally brings relief, how Hamlet works as a “sorrow resolver.” When we realize that others are suffering as we are, something lifts. Hamlet himself comes to this realization when watching Laertes, who after all has lost both father and sister. “For the first time since his father’s death,” Fletcher writes, “Hamlet acknowledges that someone else can feel like him”:

[A]lthough Hamlet initially accuses Laertes of feigned grief, he soon comes to grasp that the young knight’s suffering is genuine: “By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his.”

This is what happens, Fletcher says, 

when we see our grief mirrored back by other people. The mirroring reveals that we’re not alone in our sorrow; there’s a wider public that understands what it is to lose someone who can never be replaced. And with their understanding, that public helps not only support us through our bereavement, but also to relieve our anxiety that we haven’t done enough to commemorate our dead.

And so, with his dying words, Hamlet tells Fortinbras to tell the story of his own death:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

To which Horatio responds with what is, to my mind, the most beautiful farewell in all of literature. In the play W;t, Vivian’s former professor turns to the second line when Vivian succumbs to her cancer:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

Now it is up to us to tell Hamlet’s story, which we return to century after century. We have found time to grieve in its “drifting, eddying, dilating story” and we have recognized our own disdain, dismay and even anger at “clichéd funerals and formulaic condolences”—and in doing so, we have been both able to honor “the uniqueness of the life departed” and found a way to move on.

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Does Hamlet Speak for Generation Z?

By Robin Bates | Published: November 28, 2023
Alex Lawther as Hamlet

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Wednesday

My faculty reading group has plunged into Hamlet, and our engagement with the work has given me insights into a disturbing story I read recently. According to Ed Kilgore of The Atlantic, Joe Biden may not have the advantage over Trump with young voters that many of us have been assuming. With the caveat that the election is still almost a year away, Kilgore fears that Trump could carry the youth vote—or if not win it outright, at least considerably shrink the margins that Hillary Clinton and Biden racked up in the past two elections.

The article put me in mind of another I read recently—I can’t find it at the moment—that believes that young people don’t have the same kind of belief in the institutions of democracy that are sacred to people like me. And because they don’t, some may be drawn to Trump’s increasingly fascistic alternative.

Now, one shouldn’t panic too early. After all, Trump and the GOP are still on the wrong side of many issues that young people care about, from abortion to student loans to LGBTQ+ rights to climate change to gun control to economic fairness. Still, we can’t foreget that Hitler managed to generate a fair degree of enthusiasm amongst disaffected young people. (Think of all you’ve heard about “Hitler youth.”) The unimaginable could happen here.

Rereading Hamlet has given me insight into our situation. The prince of Denmark returns home from college to discover that his previously stable world has been turned upside down. His revered father is dead and, instead of his mother grieving as he thinks she should, she has married his dissolute uncle. (As he puts it, “The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.”). He’s in love with Ophelia but Polonius uses her to spy on him. She, obedient to a fault, goes along with her father, prompting Hamlet to wonder if all women are untrustworthy. (“Frailty, thy name is women,” he tells his mother at one point.) Two old friends, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, have also been commissioned to spy on him. There’s even a foreign threat, with Fortinbras longing to revenge Norway’s defeat at the hands of the Danes.

And to top it all off, there’s a ghost in the form of his father telling him that “murder most foul” has been committed and that he must revenge it. It’s not initially clear whether this ghost is to be believed, but Hamlet’s “mousetrap”—staging a play in which the murder is reenacted—elicits tangible truth that the ghost is telling the truth.

Still, murder is not something that one does easily, even with the facts, and young people today may be similarly confused about their options. That’s why I’m sympathetic. For the past seven years, our youth have watched Trump turn the world upside down and, with the impatience of their age, imagine that the Democrats’ measured response is a sign of weakness. After all, why is someone who tried to overthrow the government still leading the GOP. Furthermore, there are other ways that Biden (like Hamlet, Sr.) seems unable to protect them—they’ve seen the Supreme Court override him on matters of abortion and student debt. Like Hamlet, generation Z is living in a world where their elders appear helpless, hapless, and worse. Like Hamlet, they see something rotten in the state of Denmark.

In their response, we’re seeing some of the behavior we also see in Hamlet. First of all, the prince is surly with authority figures (the king and the queen). Then he feigns madness (although he may not need to do much feigning since he feels half crazed as it is). He famously contemplates suicide—or as he puts it, taking up “arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them.” He curses the fact that all the responsibility seems to be on his shoulders (“Oh cursed spite, that ever I was formed to set it right”). He lashes out against his girlfriend and his mom in some ugly ways. He also lurches from underreaction to overreaction—he comes up with a reason for not killing Claudius when he sees him praying and then impulsively puts a sword through someone behind a curtain (“I took thee for thy better,” he tells the dead Polonius). His revenge against the two hapless friends who are required to spy on him is out of proportion to their actual sins.

If our young people are acting a bit mad at times, should we be surprised? I am reminded of my own days in college (1969-73). Our generation had seen multiple assassinations, witnessed Jim Crow violence, watched riots on television, and seen the suffering caused by a war that no one could explain or justify—all the while being scolded for acting out in the various ways that we did. Hysterical Hamlet spoke for us.

Hamlet does find his bearings at the end of the play and attempts to reconcile with Laertes. He learns to see beyond his own confusion into the pain of another man. As it turns out, his efforts come too late—the wheels have already been set in motion that will end in his death—but we see that madness doesn’t get the last word.

So here’s hoping that our young and disaffected will come to see where their true interests—and where democracy’s true interests—lie. It may help that the one who sits on the throne is no Claudius but one who has come to his position legitimately. Joe Biden also genuinely cares for his Hamlets as Trump never will. That, in the end, may make a big difference.

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Biden and Auden’s Unknown Citizen

By Robin Bates | Published: November 27, 2023
President Joe Biden

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Tuesday

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic has a way of voicing much of what is on my mind, and in yesterday’s newsletter he articulated a recurring anxiety: that Joe Biden will lose the 2024 election to Donald Trump because people see him as boring. Even though the president has an impressive list of White House accomplishments to his name—as opposed to Trump, who had virtually none (and who attempted a coup to boot)—Nichols says that the American voter “has come to expect celebrity and excitement from the White House, and they pay little attention to policy.”

Which brings to mind a W.H. Auden poem about a boring man. I agreed with Auden’s satiric point when I was in high school, but now, in light of rising fascism, I see it very differently.

Before getting to it, however, let’s look at some of Biden’s accomplishments. I owe the following to Up North News, a Madison WI website that follows political matters.

 When the Democrats held Congress during the first two years of his presidency, the president can be credited with lowering healthcare and drug costs (including insulin); fighting climate change; reducing energy costs; investing in mental health care; and investing in American manufacturing and infrastructure. During that time he also signed into law the most consequential federal gun safety legislation in decades, canceled up to $20,000 in federal student loans for millions of Americans, dramatically increased domestic microchip manufacturing, and reformed the U.S. postal service to ensure its long-term stability.

Oh yes, and he led the international effort to support Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, oversaw the reauthorization of the Violence against Women Act, nominated the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, and pardoned all prior federal offenses of simple marijuana possession.

I would go on and on only I’m afraid of, well, boring you. I’ll just add all those things the Biden has not done, including cost the country a million lives by botching a pandemic response, pardon cronies in jail, channel government money to himself, undermine NATO, cozy up to Vladimir Putin, stack the Supreme Court with rightwing ideologues, separate immigrant families from their children and, oh yes, incite his followers to attack the Capitol.

And if Biden is reelected, he will not try to end Obamacare, ban abortions nationwide, place millions of immigrants in camps, separate children from their immigrant families, make life hard for LGBTQ+ folk, prevent Muslims from coming into the country, and fill the Justice Department, the military, and the federal work force with rightwing extremists.

Of course, if Biden did do these things, he’d be far more exciting. But you get my point.

Now for Auden’s “Unknown Citizen.” Until I looked it up, I was sure that it was written during the 1950s, but it was actually composed in 1939, prior to World War II. “Prior” is important since I expect Auden would have been worried about other things than faceless bureaucrats once England, France and Poland started fighting the Nazis.

The poem became a hit in the 1950s when Americans were worried about faceless corporate jobs and cookie cutter housing developments. At the time we lamented that modern life and consumer culture were blotting out individuality. The idea, however, of someone who “served the Greater Community” in everything he did, who was pro-union, and who never interfered in his children’s education (in other words, assumed the teachers were professionals who could do their jobs) actually sounds pretty good these days. Here’s the poem:

The Unknown Citizen
By W.H. Auden

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

Of course, one of Auden’s targets here is the surveillance state—the “we” in the poem—and that is indeed something to be concerned about. Our ability to get information about individuals far exceeds Auden’s worst fears.

Otherwise, however, the poem describes many members of what NBC’s Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation.” If we can’t appreciate these men and women, Nichols believes, it’s because “bored and sated voters are more prone to reward showmanship, overblown promises, and made-for-TV rage than competence.” Auden undervalues Unknown Citizen’s ability to do his job well.

Biden may not be, “in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,” a saint. But he’s a lot closer than many in Washington. And as he himself is fond of saying, “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”

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Bloom: The Bard Invented the Human

By Robin Bates | Published: November 26, 2023


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Monday

For the past few weeks, I’ve been fine-tuning my book manuscript for publication. Thanks to my periodical failure to record page numbers, the endnotes alone have taken me three weeks to complete and I had to master the Chicago Manual of Style to boot. Fortunately, I now can see the finish line.

For the most part, I’ve just been line editing but occasionally I’ve seen the need to add material. I report today on what I’m saying about Harold Bloom.

I include Bloom in the chapter about cultural conservatives. Previously, I had given him short shrift by not discussing his Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Since my book is about how literature changes lives and since Bloom contends that Shakespeare invented personality as we now understand it, it’s essential that I say something.

I’m intrigued by the project itself. Bloom is famous for his notion that writers are anxious about being influenced, and it’s clear whom Bloom is competing with and has anxieties about: Samuel Johnson

In 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote what his Pulitzer-winning biographer Walter Jackson Bate describes as ““one of the landmarks in the history of literary criticism.” Johnson changed the way we see Shakespeare, placing him “above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature; the poet that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and of life.”

Johnson is particularly impressed by Shakespeare’s characters, observing,

His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion. In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual; in those of Shakespeare it is commonly a species.

It’s clear to me that Bloom felt, if he were to be the Johnson of our own age, he needed to write his own Preface to Shakespeare. And in fact, it’s the same kind of book, with a magisterial introduction followed by comments on the individual plays. I sense that Bloom wants to be for our time what Johnson was to “the Age of Johnson” (1745-1798).

Bloom also follows in the footsteps of Percy Shelley, the subject of Bloom’s early studies. I think he takes to heart what Shelley, in Defence of Poetry, says about authors who change the world. At one point Shelley writes that

it exceeds all imagination to conceive what would have been the moral condition of the world if neither Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Calderon, Lord Bacon, nor Milton, had ever existed; if Raphael and Michael Angelo had never been born; if the Hebrew poetry had never been translated; if a revival of the study of Greek literature had never taken place.

Thinking, like Shelley, that an author like Shakespeare can change “the moral condition of the world,” Bloom sets out to spell out how.

 Bloom contends that Shakespeare “altered life” by changing the way we think about ourselves. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Elaborating on what he means by this, Bloom writes,

Personality, in our sense, is a Shakespearean invention, and is not only Shakespeare’s greatest originality but also the authentic cause of his perpetual pervasiveness. Insofar as we ourselves value, and deplore, our own personalities, we are the heirs of Falstaff and of Hamlet, and of all the other persons who throng Shakespeare’s theater…

By “deplore,” Bloom is partly thinking of Shylock. Shakespeare’s powerful depiction of the Jewish money lender who literally demands a pound of flesh may, he thinks, have incited more anti-Semitism than The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the infamous 1903 Russian tract about “Jewish global domination” that played a role in the Holocaust). In other words, once Shakespeare unleashed fully three-dimensional characters upon world, they didn’t always lead to good. Shakespeare may have changed the very way we experience feelings—Bloom says that he “pragmatically reinvented” us—but those feelings could have bad as well as good consequences.

So although Bloom is like Shelley in the way he sees Shakespeare as having changed history, unlike Shelley Bloom doesn’t connect the Bard with the struggle for social and political liberation. In fact, he has derided those who embrace a multicultural canon. Bloom speaks unapologetically about Shakespeare’s ability to transcend history, something which Shakespeare’s fellow playwright also noted when he said that he “was not of an age but of all time.”

Bloom is not at all a fan of various historical approaches to Shakespeare and speaks derisively of “Feminists, Marxists, Afrocentrists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists and Deconstructors.” Calling them “the school of resentment,” he attacks them for reducing figures like Shakespeare to their own narrow agendas.

In my experience, Bloom caricatures his opposition here. Most literature teachers I know tend to be rather eclectic in their approach to texts, using whatever tools seem most appropriate for the task at hand. There are relatively few doctrinaire feminists, Marxists, etc in the academy. Likewise, those who insist on Shakespeare’s universality are no longer adverse to looking at him through historical, psychological, and other lenses as well. In fact, a play like Merchant of Venice, which Bloom has problems with, cries out for an examination of how 16th century Britain regarded Jews.

But whatever reservations I have about The Invention of the Human—for instance, I think some credit for the invention should go to the Chaucer and, before him, to the great Greek playwrights—I share his admiration for figures like Hamlet, Falstaff and others. It really does feel like such characters actually existed.

As Bloom observes, “even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.”

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