William Blake illustration from Songs of Experience
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Christ the King Sunday
Today is “Christ the King” Sunday, which celebrates the prospect of Jesus reigning “over the minds of individuals by his teachings, in their hearts by His love, in each one’s life by the living according to His law and the imitating of His example” (to borrow Pope Pius XI’s description). As I read over today’s Gospel reading from Matthew (25:31-46), I found myself wondering what Trump-supporting Evangelicals think of the passage.
After all, the way today’s MAGA Republicans seek to slash programs for the poor while cutting taxes for America’s wealthiest—all the while cheering on a man who dreams of creating vast detention camps for the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country”—would seem to put them in Jesus’s goat category:
Jesus said, “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”
Perhaps some combination of prosperity theology and Calvinist predestination allows Trump “Christians” to think of themselves as sheep. Perhaps they imagine that they are bound for “eternal life” because they are amongst the elect while the poor deserve their punishment.
For me, Matthew’s passage is about the here and now rather than some future life-after-death. While I don’t much care for the monarchical metaphor, I read it as a vision of the paradise we should be working towards while still alive. The deep joy that comes with reaching out to those in need contrasts dramatically with the mental hell of resentment, anger and fear that arises when one ignores or contributes to suffering. The sadistic satisfaction that comes with watching Trump vent his spleen against his enemies ultimately leaves one feeling hollow, despite its temporary high. A deep love for others and a deep love for God (a.k.a. creation) is the only way to experience genuine peace and joy.
Which brings me to William Blake, who both calls out his hypocritical Christian society and imagines a world where the sun shines and thorn-free fields produce a bounty for all. Think of the sun here as an internal state. Despite their suffering, the children catch glimpses of it while they are singing their songs of joy. As Blake’s other “Holy Thursday” poem (the one in Songs of Innocence) describes the hymn-singing children, “Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song/ Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of Heaven among.”
Although we appear to be a rich and fruitful land, when it comes to our “many children poor,” we reveal ourselves as “a land of poverty.”
Holy Thursday
Is this a holy thing to see, In a rich and fruitful land, Babes reducd to misery, Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song? Can it be a song of joy? And so many children poor? It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine. And their fields are bleak & bare. And their ways are fill’d with thorns. It is eternal winter there.
For where-e’er the sun does shine, And where-e’er the rain does fall: Babe can never hunger there, Nor poverty the mind appall.
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Friday
In yesterday’s Thanksgiving sermon, our seminarian Michael Sturdy spoke about God’s greatest gift to us. Reflecting on Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (9:6-15), Michael essentially said that, when we open our hearts to God, the gift we get back is an open heart. In other words, offering up thanks is not for God’s benefit. It’s for our own.
After the service, I mentioned to Michael that this is a truth that Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost fails to understand. Because he has made his ego his god and has projected this outward, Satan thinks God is a being that hungers for praise. By the same reasoning, he thinks that, when one praises God, one diminishes oneself. The passage I have in mind occurs in Book IV when, in a rare moment of introspection, Satan questions why he rebelled. After all, what could be easier than praising God?
He deserved no such return From me, whom he created what I was In that bright eminence, and with his good Upbraided none; nor was his service hard. What could be less than to afford him praise, The easiest recompense, and pay him thanks, How due?
Satan, however, wants all this praise coming to him. Being, as archangel, one step below God, he longed to be the highest. He also experiences “endless gratitude” as a burdensome debt that can never be paid back. In other words, he sees God, as creator, using gifts to reinforce His/Her superiority:
Yet all his good proved ill in me, And wrought but malice. Lifted up so high, I ’sdained subjection, and thought one step higher Would set me highest, and in a moment quit The debt immense of endless gratitude, So burthensome, still paying, still to owe…
What Satan has forgotten, he admits, is that God’s gift doesn’t work this way. When we pay with our prayers of thanksgiving, the debt is automatically discharged. “A grateful mind,” Satan says, “by owing owes not” and so “what burden then?”
Forgetful what from him I still received; And understood not that a grateful mind By owing owes not, but still pays, at once Indebted and discharged—what burden then?
We only feel like poor debtors if we’re not grateful. Once we pour out thanks, we realize that doing so brings us ecstatic joy. Which is what God (or, if you will, the universe) has wanted for us all along.
Milton takes a stab at describing this ecstatic joy in the dance of the angels. Perhaps Dante’s Paradiso (see illustration above) is Milton’s inspiration here:
No sooner had th’ Almighty ceased, but all The multitude of angels with a shout Loud as from numbers without number, sweet As from blessed voices, uttering joy, Heav’n rung With jubilee, and loud Hosanna’s filled Th’ eternal Regions…
And then there is there harp playing—which, as any musician will tell you, is its own reward:
[T]heir golden harps they took, Harps ever tun’d, that glittering by their side Like quivers hung, and with preamble sweet Of charming symphony they introduce Their sacred Song, and waken raptures high; No voice exempt, no voice but well could join Melodious part, such concord is in Heav’n.
In short, giving general thanks for all our blessings is a lot of fun. Whereas keeping account of who owes what to whom is the quickest way to internal hell.
If you celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday, I hope you had a chance to experience the heaven that comes with expressing gratitude. And if, instead, you chose to spend the holiday in jealous resentment—well, that is the “lowest deep” that can devour you utterly.
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Thursday – Thanksgiving
For this week’s poetry column in the Sewanee Mountain Messenger, my Thanksgiving poem was somewhat unusual. Most people don’t think of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” (full title below*) as a poem about a family coming together to express gratitude. But I think it works.
Wordsworth recounts revisiting a spot overlooking the banks of the Wye River after a five-year absence. While five years may not sound like a long time, in Wordsworth’s case it feels like a lifetime. That’s because, during those five years, he has witnessed the French Revolution, had an affair and a child with a French woman, seen the Revolution morph into a reign of terror, and fled back to England.
During his time away, he talks about how, when he needed peace, he would focus on memories of the Wye River prospect. He reports how
oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet..
Now he’s back and this time he’s not alone. His “dear, dear sister” Dorothy is with him. “In thy voice,” he says,
I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes.
To which he adds, “Oh! yet a little while may I behold in thee what I was once.”
So now it’s time for his prayer of thanks. Knowing that his joy in the Wye River landscape is deep and genuine—after all, Nature never betrays “the heart that loved her”—he predicts this moment will lead “from joy to joy” for the rest of their lives.
And they will need this memory given that they will face many dark moments. Wordsworth lists them:
— evil tongues, –rash judgments, –the sneers of selfish men, –greetings where no kindness is, –the dreary intercourse of daily life.
And a little later:
— solitude, –fear, –pain, –grief.
Luckily, the Wye River spot has now impressed them both with its quietness and beauty. Bolstered by lofty thoughts, the poet is confident that the bad times will never
prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
Here’s the excerpt I shared with Messenger readers.
For thou art with me here upon the banks Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend, My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once, My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ’tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within us, so impress With quietness and beauty, and so feed With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues, Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men, Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all The dreary intercourse of daily life, Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold Is full of blessings.
But the poem doesn’t end here. To this point, Wordsworth has been focused more on the two of them. Now he imagines that Dorothy, in her future, will be able to recall this moment for her own needs. When she does so, she will remember standing here with her brother and recalling how much the spot meant to him as well as her—not only because of its beauty but because he stood there enjoying it with her.
Isn’t an important part of a Thanksgiving gathering the later memories we have of it? In our other gathering today, I will come together with friends that shared a Thanksgiving with my family 67 years ago. When I was growing up, three faculty families—the Bateses, the Degens, and the Goodsteins—would gather every year for a joint meal. When my mother died a year ago, the last of the older generation left us, but our Thanksgiving this year will have two additional generations. As always, we will be together in our house in the beautiful Sewanee woods.
As Wordsworth puts it earlier in the poem, “in this moment there is life and food for future years.”
Here’s how the poem ends:
Therefore let the moon Shine on thee in thy solitary walk; And let the misty mountain-winds be free To blow against thee: and, in after years, When these wild ecstasies shall be matured Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, Thy memory be as a dwelling-place For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then, If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance— If I should be where I no more can hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence—wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came Unwearied in that service: rather say With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget, That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!
*Full title: “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798”
Sixty years ago, on the day that JFK was shot, I was in seventh grade in Sewanee Public School. While our classroom did not have a television, the sixth grade classroom did so I remember a number of classmates going over to watch the events although I don’t believe that I did. But I remember school being canceled the following day and experiencing a strange sense of stillness in the air.
Then the world got even crazier as the killer was himself shot. I think I heard that news when I got out of church, and it conveyed to me, even more than the assassination, that the world outside my safe enclave was chaotic and out of control. While it’s not like my childhood ended that day, something definitely shifted.
Something shifted for poet Lucille Clifton as well. In “november 21, 1988,” she finds herself, 25 years later, looking back and feeling that history that day became divided into a “before” and an “after.” “Before” was a time when “honor was honorable and/ good and right were good and right.” “After” was “the bubble clos[ing] over the top of the world.”
I interpret the bubble as a closing in. A sense of infinite possibility has given way to the grim reality of limited prospects. Until the moment in November, hope was in the air. August of that year had seen Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech.” And even though, a month later (in September), racists bombed a Birmingham church, killing four little girls, that was in reaction to a trajectory that seemed to be trending upwards.
Clifton would have been 27 at the time of the Kennedy killing, probably a young mother. I think she sensed, in a visceral way, that the forces of reaction would do anything to forestall “liberty and justice for all,” even if the president had to be killed to ensure it. (With today’s rightwing willing to tolerate a coup and Trump’s violent rhetoric, we’re much clearer about that now.) In 1988, when she wrote the poem, Ronald Reagan and the GOP were doing all they could to roll back the gains achieved by the civil rights, labor, and feminist movements. Also in the late 1980s, urban crime was soaring with the crack epidemic, talented young men were dying in the thousands from A.I.D.S., and wealthy Americans were making out like bandits. From that perspective, “this” was “not better than that.”
In short, “november 21, 1988” is a “good old days” poem. Or as Clifton puts it, “them days.”
november 21, 1988 25 years By Lucille Clifton
those days before the brain blew back mottled and rusting against the pink coat them days when the word had meaning as well as definition those days when honor was honorable and good and right were good and right them days when the spirit of hope reached toward us waving a wide hand and smiling toward us. Yes those days them days the days before the bubble closed over the top of the world. Not this is not better than that
Yesterday I wrote about how Angus Fletcher, in his work about literature’s “greatest inventions,” argues that Fielding invented romantic irony as a way to “ward off heartbreak.” Fletcher then claims that Jane Austen took romantic irony to a new level.
The problem with Fielding’s literary solution, Fletcher says, is that alternating back and forth “had yielded a half romance and a half dose of medicine.” That’s why, he believes, Tom Jones was only half as popular as Samuel Richardson’s heart-breaking Clarissa. What he needed, if he wanted to stay with his brand of irony, was a style that would allow him to be “entirely romantic and entirely ironic.” While this sounds impossible, Fletcher says that Austen pulled it off.
Her solution was “free indirect discourse,” what the French call “le style indirect libre.” Such a style involves entering into the minds of characters without the author directly signaling he or she is doing so (thus the “indirect”). An example from Madame Bovary is famous because it was used in a public indecency trial. Emma Bovary is reflecting on her adulterous liaison:
But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, “I have a lover! a lover!” delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium.
The prosecution argued that the passage is Flaubert celebrating adultery. The defense, in response, said that these are Emma’s thoughts, not Flaubert’s. The court acquitted Flaubert but found the style guilty of misleading people.
Of course we, who are well familiar with this style now (think Hemingway), have no difficulty in sorting things out.
Fletcher admits that Austen didn’t invent free indirect discourse. He cites an instance of it 2000 years ago in the Roman author Horace. Chaucer, meanwhile, uses indirect irony to masterful comic effect in Canterbury Tales. Fletcher, however, claims that Austen was the first to write “ironic romance that inspires us to care about its characters. Or in other words, a satiric love story that genuinely touches our heart.”
(Actually, Chaucer gets me to care for the Wife of Bath. But, okay, not in a love story way.)
Austen uses the free indirect style most extensively in Emma. Check out the following example (cited by Fletcher) where we are informed that Emma’s beloved governess has just gotten married:
Sorrow came—a gentle sorrow—but not at all in the shape of any disagreeable consciousness.—Miss Taylor married. It was Miss Taylor’s loss which first brought grief.
Of course, it is only Emma who is sorrowful. Fletcher notes that, in the novel, there are “hundreds of these light pivots toward Emma’s personal sentiments.”
As always, Fletcher provides us with the neurological effects of this new literary technique:
[A]s Austen discovered, we’re perfectly capable of experiencing irony and love simultaneously. That’s because irony and love exist in different parts of our brain. Irony occurs in the perspective-taking circuitry of our outer cortex…, while love dwells in the inner emotion zones of our amygdala. So by focusing our cortex and our amygdala on different narrative objects, literature can inspire a neural mix of wry perspective and romantic feeling.
This, Fletcher contends, is very healthy for us:
The resulting cortex-amygdala blend draws us into experiencing an intimate human connection alongside a wry detachment from the greater world. Which is to say: it opens our heart to other people without duping us into mistaking our own desires for the laws of reality.
The ultimate result of reading Austen, Fletcher goes on to say, is that doing so eliminates
the friction and resentment that come from expecting our loved ones to be perfectly in sync with our own desires. And you might even say that it carries us a step closer to true love. Because isn’t that what true love is? Forgetting our self-involved fantasies to embrace a different heart?
I have two things to add to Fletcher’s literary history. First, he reports that, early in life when she was being courted by Tom Lefroy, both she and Tom loved Tom Jones. It was this love of a satiric romance that prompted Austen to innovate with indirect style. Yet I have always understood that Austen far preferred Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, which isn’t ironic at all. Indeed, in Northanger Abbey, she makes the loutish John Thorpe a Tom Jones fan while both the heroine and her sensible mother prefer Grandison.
Thorpe undoubtedly likes Tom’s drinking, womanizing, and possibly dueling whereas Grandison does none of these things. And in fact, the heroes in Jane Austen’s novels are generally more like Grandison, the villains more like Tom (only without Tom’s good heart). Thus, we see a preference for Tilney over Thorpe, Darcy over Wickham, Brandon over Willoughby, and Edmund Bertram over Henry Crawford. Maybe Austen’s own heartbreak over Lefroy led her to treat romance somewhat satirically. And if she and Lefroy, like Marianne and Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility, read Cowper and Sir Walter Scott together, maybe that’s she satirizes those poets later in her fiction. Maybe Jane Austen was Marianne until she had her heart broken.
And speaking of romance without a hint of satire, Fletcher says that one of the most famous instances of “Samuel Richardson’s swoon-inducing offspring” is Jane Eyre. With this in mind, Charlotte Bronte’s comments on Austen are revealing. When an admirer of both Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice persuaded Bronte to read P&P, she got back the comment, “A carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden with neat borders and delicate flowers. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses.”
In Bronte’s mind, Austen plays it too safe. Ironic distance allows one to do that. At the same time, I can imagine Austen shuddering at Jane’s unbridled passion, how she at one point turns Rochester into her god. (How Austen would respond to Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, meanwhile, is beyond imagining.) At times, Jane Eyre and Catherine Earnshaw are reckless in the way the way that Marianne Dashwood is reckless. Catherine dies and Marianne and Jane almost do.
So yes, Austen could well have invented “valentine armor” as a way to stave off a broken heart. Perhaps it’s even a way to have love and protection at the same time. But one loses something when one guards the heart, which may be why Charlotte Bronte doesn’t care for Austen.
I, on the other hand, feel blessed that I can turn to both authors. It all depends on whether I’m more in the mood for all-out romance or romantic comedy.
Bonus example of Austen’s free indirect style: My favorite line in all of Jane Austen provides us with a great example. In Sense and Sensibility, by getting disinherited, Edward Ferrars and Elinor Dashwood are able to escape having to live “on the best terms imaginable” with Mrs. Ferrars, John and Fanny Dashwood, and Lucy (Steele) and Robert Ferrars, all of them execrable people. Telling us what happens to them all in the future, Austen simultaneously takes us into their perspective and provides us with a satiric laugh:
They settled in town, received very liberal assistance from Mrs. Ferrars, were on the best terms imaginable with the Dashwoods; and setting aside the jealousies and ill-will continually subsisting between Fanny and Lucy, in which their husbands of course took a part, as well as the frequent domestic disagreements between Robert and Lucy themselves, nothing could exceed the harmony in which they all lived together.
I can hear more than one of the characters saying that “nothing can exceed the harmony of how we live together.” Of course, “setting aside” is doing some heavy lifting here.
For my weekly reporting on Angus Fletcher’s Masterworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I turn to a chapter featuring two of my favorite authors. I specialized in 18th British Literature in graduate school because I figured that any culture that had produced Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was worth studying. The fact that the century also produced Jane Austen cinched the deal.
Until I read Masterworks, however, I hadn’t really associated the two. Or at least, I hadn’t done so knowingly. In my favorite course, however, Tom Jones and Sense and Sensibility were key texts, and Fletcher has helped me see how they are related. First, some background.
In my course “Couples Comedy in the Restoration and 18th Century,” I looked at how the genre appears to be an oxymoron. After all, love opens the heart whereas comedy creates distance. The latter is especially true of Thomas Hobbes’s theory of comedy, expressed in Leviathan, which claims that we laugh at others to assert our superiority. Even the Earl of Shaftesbury’s gentler theory—that we laugh with rather than at–involves a different emotional engagement than love.
And yet, as we know, romantic comedy is one of our most popular genres. Shakespeare pioneered it with plays like Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, and As You Like it, and in my course I taught such 18th century plays as Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal, and Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem. Hollywood, meanwhile, has produced hundreds of rom-coms.
I placed Tom Jones (1749) at the center of my course, mixing as it does passionate romance (between Tom and Sophia) and comic distancing. Fletcher argues that the novel functions as “valentine armor.” At the same time that we are laughing at Fielding’s comedy, we are rooting for the love of Tom and Sophia. As Fletcher sees it, Fielding alternates between “Almighty Heart” and “lightly satiric narration.”
Fielding’s mixture, as Fletcher sees it, was in response to the way a new genre, the romance novel, was making us vulnerable as only love can. The key work here was Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740), which is about a serving maid who resists the advances of Lord B___, her employer. Ultimately Pamela so impresses him with her virtue that he marries her.
The danger of this new narrative, Fletcher says, is that is threatened women with broken hearts. Women
dashed again and again into love—only to discover to their miserable shock that the world was not, in fact, filled with would-be spouses. It was populated instead with carnal con artists, polite uninterest and mismatched affections. Over and over, [these women] rushed into kissing too fast. And over and over, they got dumped at the altar, their dreams ending in tears.
In an earlier work, Fielding had mocked Pamela in his novel Shamela, in which Shamela is a scheming seductress who takes Lord Booby (as Fielding renames Lord B___) for a ride. Her vaunted “virtue,” which Richardson celebrates, is in Fielding’s eyes no more than a bargaining chip that she uses skillfully to entrap Booby into marrying her.
Fletcher says that, in mocking the sentimental Pamela, Fielding was walking in the footsteps of his favorite novelist, Cervantes, whose great work mocked the way that chivalric romances pulled in a Spanish nobleman. As Fletcher puts it, “Irony had saved the chivalry-addled readers of Don Quixote, and it could now do the same for Pamela’s love-besotted readers.”
But Shamela was nowhere near as successful as Pamela, which is what prompted Fielding to add genuine romance to Tom Jones. The result, Fletcher says,
was a mix of epic-length intimate disclosure and mock-epic irony, a back-and-forth between Pamela and Don Quixote, that elevated our heart while also restraining it.
The 1980’s was a good time to teach Tom Jones because irony was all the rage. In fact, the Italian theorist and novelist Umberto Eco argued that irony was the language of postmodernism. We can no longer make straightforward declarations of love such as are found in the torrid Regency novels of Barbara Cartland, he contended, because language has been devalued. We can, however, express love through irony. The postmodernist attitude, he wrote, is
that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say, “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly.”
To further convey this idea, I would often refer to one of my students’ favorite films, which for a while was The Princess Bride (1987). That film does a version of what Fletcher says Tom Jones does, which is alternate between celebrating true love and mocking the true love cliché. Sometimes we are immersed in the world of the romance, sometimes (through the story’s frame narrative) we are watching that world from an ironic distance. Audiences get to have their cake and eat it too.
If we are drawn to romantic comedies, maybe it’s because we too want the love without the vulnerability and get that through Fletcher’s “valentine armor.” I’ll discuss tomorrow how Fletcher thinks that Jane Austen went Fielding one better when, rather than alternating back and forth between sentiment and comic irony, she found a way to convey them simultaneously.
Among the Anglican communion’s Old Testament options this week are fascinating but disturbing episodes from Judges featuring women. I also share a tripartite poem by a woman rabbi, who is just as fascinated and disturbed by these figures as I am.
The stories of Deborah, Jael, and Yiftach’s (or Jephthah’s) daughter appear in the lectionary at a disturbing time, given the horrors we witnessed in Israel and the counter-horrors we are now seeing in Gaza. In the Judges stories, we see historical violence, which raises the question of bloodshed in a sacred text. Which in turn leads me to an interesting essay I just read on the Journey to Jesus website.
In it, the wonderfully sensitive Christian writer Dan Clendenin addresses the question by observing that, in this section of the Bible, “[s]laughtering your enemies and then celebrating it in poetry seems to have divine sanction.”
He points out that first Jael is celebrated for driving a tent peg through the skull of a rival general (!), and then the supposed healing prophetess Devorah does an in-your-face victory dance taunting the man’s grieving mother. First, here’s Jael, presenting herself as loving hostess:
Jael went out to meet Sisera and said to him, “Come, my lord, come right in. Don’t be afraid.” So he entered her tent, and she covered him with a blanket.
“I’m thirsty,” he said. “Please give me some water.” She opened a skin of milk, gave him a drink, and covered him up.“Stand in the doorway of the tent,” he told her. “If someone comes by and asks you, ‘Is anyone in there?’ say ‘No.’”
But Jael, Heber’s wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died. Just then Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. “Come,” she said, “I will show you the man you’re looking for.” So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple—dead.
And now for Deborah and Barak’s victory song, which recounts Jael’s assassination before concluding with the following taunt. The rival general’s mother, they imagine, thinks her son is late because he’s dividing up Israeli plunder and Israeli women:
“Through the window peered Sisera’s mother; behind the lattice she cried out, ‘Why is his chariot so long in coming? Why is the clatter of his chariots delayed?’ The wisest of her ladies answer her; indeed, she keeps saying to herself, ‘Are they not finding and dividing the spoils: a woman or two for each man, colorful garments as plunder for Sisera, colorful garments embroidered, highly embroidered garments for my neck— all this as plunder?’
“So may all your enemies perish, Lord! But may all who love you be like the sun when it rises in its strength.”
As in the current Middle East conflict, no one comes off looking good.
Addressing the appearance of such stories in the Scriptures, Clendenin mentions how some have argued that they’re merely descriptive (he puts “merely” in quotes) rather than prescriptive. The problem is that they were seen as prescriptive by the Crusaders and those who carried out genocide against Native Americans.
One strategy people have used to counter the violence is to privilege certain sections of the Bible over others—say, Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” over the stories in Judges. But of course, as Shakespeare reminds us in Merchant of Venice, “the devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.” Christian, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists—in fact, all kinds of faiths–have used sacred texts to justify atrocities.
Another strategy is to treat the Bible strictly as an historical text reflecting the ideology of the time. Clendenin points out that Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan reads 1-2 Kings as
self-serving imperial records that portray Israel’s kings as they saw themselves and wanted others to see them — God loves us and hates our enemies. He blesses us with their treasure. From that perspective, no war crime is too heinous as a means to these delusional ends…
As Berrigan sees it, these stories are entirely made up. After all, they were written about 500 years after the purported events, and there’s “little to no” archaeological support for them.
Another way that Biblical violence is glossed over is by reading it allegorically, not literally. The enemies are not without but within. Clendenin observes similar reasoning among those Muslims that “insist that the true jihad or holy war is waged in the inner soul rather than against external enemies.”
Quoting Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (1984), Eric Seibert’s The Violence of Scripture (2012) and Philip Jenkins Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses (2012), Clendenin observes that this too is a dubious way out. After all, people read allegories differently.
To cite a recent instance, new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who has said that the “Bible comes first over the Constitution,” uses the text as a rationale to condemn LBGTQ+ folk, same sex marriage, abortion, divorce, separation of church and state, and certain forms of birth control. A few weeks ago, sounding like an Old Testament prophet, he called America “dark and depraved,” described the culture as “irredeemable,” and said that a “time of judgment” has arrived. My sense is that he elevates the Book of Judges over Jesus’s “Sermon on the Mount” and the command to love our neighbors.
My own take is that the Bible, along with all its editorial background (what has gone in, what is left out) is a rich but flawed document of humanity wrestling with the most profound questions. As also occurs in great literary works, there are parts of Bible that are at war with other parts. Nor should this surprise us. After all, however divinely inspired, it came to us through scores of authors and editors. We should also note that, when we critique religious violence, we often do so from a perspective that has been shaped by this very religion.
We should always keep in mind that, while parts of the Bible have inspired—and been used to justify—human horrors, others parts have led (I’m limiting myself to literature here) to Dante’s soaring vision of “the love that moves the sun and others stars,” to Milton’s version of the creation story, to Father Zosima’s account (in The Brother’s Karamazov) of God’s love as a force that embraces and animates all living things. Much of what is best about our culture and our civilization is grounded in Scripture.
And on that note, I’ll turn to Rabbi Rachel Barenblat of the Velveteen Rabbi website, who does what the best religious leaders do, which is to engage with holy texts in a soulful way. What she sees here is (1) prophetess Devorah who, while focused on justice, also appears to sanction Jael’s tent peg murder of Sisera; (2) Jael, who finds her story appropriated by church patriarchs for their own purposes and who acknowledges—as they do not—the pain of Sisera’s mother; and (3) Yiftach (a.k.a. Jephthah) who follows through on a horrific pledge made to God, one that involves sacrificing his own daughter.
Note that Barenblat searches for God in each of the stories, sometimes without success. In Devorah’s case, words may fall from her mouth like honey but the honey bee still carries a sting. And while, in her victory song, she reports being awakened by the people to come out and celebrate Israel’s victory, we are told that she has been dreaming of the murder, with the tent peg echoing the bee sting.
The Kennites were neutral in the wars, which makes Jael’s action particularly startling. And while the patriarchal rabbis claim her as a “righteous convert,” she knows that—like Sisera’s mother—she will “never be the same.” The rabbis’ simplistic explanation doesn’t do justice to what she did and why she did it.
And with regard to Yiftach’s Daughter, whose story appears later in Judges, Barenblat points out the horrific price that is paid for victory. We are never told whether God, who appears to have granted Yiftach his victory, approves of the sacrifice. The story ends with weeping women.
Where is God in Israel and Gaza at the moment? While some, quoting passages like the ones from Judges, think they know, poets like Barenblat are questioning.
JUDGES TRYPTICH
1. Devorah
Beneath her palm tree, Devorah (the honey bee, her sting intact) judged the acts of the Israelites
the people came with gifts of oil and flour and yearling lambs and she answered them with justice
she sent for Barak in his leathers words fell from her mouth like honey and he yearned to taste her sweetness
come with me, he pleaded I will relinquish my own glory if I can have you by my side
nine hundred iron chariots thundered the Infinite cast panic like a spell and all Sisera’s army was slain
and Devorah slept, and dreamed Sisera stumbles into a woman’s tent Jael’s doors open wide to let him in
he drinks milk fermented in goatskin he slides into sleep: her tent pin rests at his sweaty temple: she drives it home
2. Jael
My husband is a Kenite Kenites don’t take sides so when God told me what to do I kept it to myself
someday the sages will credit me with pluck and righteousness, even if my methods were obscure
but Sisera’s mother wrapped in happy fantasies of her precious son’s return will never be the same
the rabbis say Sisera demanded my body the rabbis say we slept together seven times
but you don’t get to know you can claim me as a righteous convert but my story is my own
3. Yiftach’s Daughter
Israel whored with foreign gods until Yiftach, prostitute’s son, rose up wearing holy spirit like a cloak, saying
deliver the Ammonites into my hands and whatever exits my house to meet me will be sacrificed to You in holy fire
and out came his only daughter bare feet flying to greet him, Daddy! with her tambourine beneath her arm
he rent his garments in grief she bent her head in submission to her father and his God’s demands
two months with her friends in the hills (curve of soft hips beneath her hands, stretch of skin salted with hot tears)
and she returned home, pale but resolute, and bared her neck her father steeled himself to raise his knife
the sun went down early, turning away from the war hero with bloodied hands the mothers wept like the opened skies
when he burned her bones no prophet spoke God’s anger and the maidens mourned alone
Bonus poem
I came across this Nancy Hightower poem about Jael that strikes me as very Margaret Atwoodian. By this I mean that it pushes against sentimental vision of women as caring madonnas or angels in the home. Atwood, as we see in Cat’s Eye (Cordelia) and Alias Grace (Grace Marks), often shows them to have a dark side. Men may think they are dealing with a dove, only to encounter “an eagle, feathers spread,/talons reaching.” They think they see familiar household chores, followed by “quilted comfort,” before experiencing the kiss of a tent pin to the skull. Barenblat too hints at this dichotomy with Devorah, she of honeyed sweetness with “sting intact.”
I’m sharing the poem not so much for this insight but for the unexpected tenderness of the ending. Like Barenblat’s Jael, this one thinks of Sisera’s mother. Like many in Israel and Gaza at the moment, she looks out for her son returning, only to see “nothing/ but red leaves falling/ in the morning wind.
Jael By Nancy Hightower
Then Jael, Heber’s wife, took a nail of the tent, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it to the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died. —Judges 4:21
such a muted sound at first as spike hits skin, then, the skull’s soft crunch. one would think murder made more noise— like a battering ram against the temple, but no, just a simple tent nail and a cup of milk; we women have our ways. had i more time, i would have cooked, made the bed, washed the dishes— scheduled in the killing. but he had come quickly, galloped himself into my sanctuary, heaving breath in muffled gasps and war-weary, as men often are. i became an eagle, feathers spread, talons reaching as i flew out to meet him, and he, thinking i was his dove, his mother hen, came under my wings, shadow-filled. i wrapped their warmth around him with my voice spinning lies, quilted comfort, my hands tucking in the folds of the blanket as he slipped into that dream-quenching slumber. i almost kissed his brow to drive the pin through. his mother, far away, felt the breeze of my hand as it came down, gentle, a loving breath upon her cheek, thought her son had come back early in victory, and opened her arms wide in ready embrace. when she turned, her eyes beheld nothing but red leaves falling in the morning wind.
Cassius (Gielgud) and Brutus (Mason) plot Caesar’s assassination
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Friday
I see that my labeling Donald Trump a fascist this past week tracks fairly closely with yesterday’s Atlantic daily essay, written by political science professor and NeverTrumper Tom Nichols. Like me, Nichols was reluctant to apply the term until this past weekend. Then, in a Veterans Day speech, Trump “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism” with the following threat:
We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.
Rather than a red line, I see Trump crossing the Rubicon, so get ready for a discussion of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
First, here’s some more from Nichols. In the past, he says, he warned his classes against the indiscriminate use of fascism. That’s because, he explains,
I suspected that the day might come when it would be an accurate term to describe him, and I wanted to preserve its power to shock and to alarm us. I acknowledged in August 2022 that Trump’s cult “stinks of fascism,” but I counseled “against rushing toward the F-word: Things are poised to get worse, and we need to know what to watch for.”
This is what he was watching out for. Nor is it only the word “vermin” or Trump’s description of immigrants as “disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country'” that has Nichols concerned. It’s also “the programmatic changes Trump and his allies have threatened to enact once he’s back in office.” These changes include
establishing massive detention camps for undocumented people, using the Justice Department against anyone who dares to run against him, purging governmentinstitutions, singling out Christianity as the state’s preferred religion, and many other actions—and it’s hard to describe it all as generic “authoritarianism.” Trump no longer aims to be some garden-variety supremo; he is now promising to be a threat to every American he identifies as an enemy—and that’s a lot of Americans.
Now, Nichols is also urging us not to panic. Careful political scientist that he is, he points out that we’re in a better place than were Germany and Italy when fascists there came to power:
[A]lthough he leads the angry and resentful GOP, he has not created a coherent, disciplined, and effective movement. (Consider his party’s entropic behavior in Congress.) He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse. Although some of Trump’s most ardent voters support his blood-and-soil rhetoric, millions of others have no connection to that agenda.
Still, we can’t be complacent, as Shakespeare’s play teaches us. I’m particularly concerned when I revisit Brutus’s famous speech green-lighting the assassination of Caesar:
[W]e have tried the utmost of our friends, Our legions are brim full, our cause is ripe. The enemy increaseth every day; We, at the height, are ready to decline. There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures.
Nichols doesn’t mention that there are Brutuses out there who think this is their last shot at taking over America. People like Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Stephen Miller see themselves “at the height” and “ready to decline.” They are at the height in that Trump (according to polling) leads Biden in a number of the critical swing states, but they also see themselves “ready to decline.” Trump, after all, is getting old, may be facing jail time, and shows signs of mental stress. He certainly won’t make it to 2028.
In other words, they see themselves on “a full sea.” Either they take “the current when it serves” or they forever lose their ventures.
Brutus and Cassius, to save the Roman republic, choose the assassination route. Bannon et. al. are planning modern day equivalents. After all, look at everything they attempted their first coup attempt: going to court over fraudulent claims of voter fraud, pressuring electors, stealing voter data, pressuring Mike Pence, and finally unleashing shock troops on the U.S. Capitol. And while they didn’t achieve their end that day, they scared a number of senators that would otherwise have voted to convict Trump of insurrection. In Mitt Romney’s biography we hear of legislators who didn’t vote against the former president because they were afraid his supporters would come after them and their families.
Many commentators have warned that the failed January 6 coup was a rehearsal, just as the beer hall putsch was for Hitler, and that the Trump plotters will hold nothing back this second time. In next year’s election, I expect we will see things we’ve never seen before in American elections—shock troops sent to intimidate voters from going to the polls in every heavily populated Democratic districts; election officials in those same districts threatened if they don’t produce pro-Trump results; GOP legislators, attorneys general, and local authorities brought into the process to disenfranchise voters (we already saw that happen on a small scale in Virginia’s 2023 election); X, Fox, and other rightwing media and social media outlets unleashed on the country in ways never before seen; Russian and rightwing billionaire money overwhelming the system; and so on.
If Biden were to be returned to office, these Trumpists already think that “the voyage of their life” will be “bound in shallows and in miseries.” As they see it, they have nothing to lose from extreme tactics.
Of course, our situation is the reverse of what occurs in the play. Rather than safeguard our republic from one-man rule, our conspirators want to establish Trump as Caesar. It is multicultural democracy that they want to stab.
Although Democrats and the FBI were caught off guard by January 6, they now have a clear view of the lengths to which Trump and his followers will go to seize power. Will they heed those warnings as Caesar in Shakespeare’s play does not? Julius may have an inkling of what Cassius is willing to do—”Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look”—but he is unwilling to appear a coward. As he memorably observes,
Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.
Unfortunately for him, his death comes far earlier than it should. Pray that does not happen in our case.
Lila (Nasti) and Elena (Del Genio) in My Brilliant Friend
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Thursday
Here’s my weekly update on my incursions into Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. The book, which looks at different literary techniques as inventions created by authors to address major life issues, often surprises, which is one of its virtues. I was, for instance, surprised that a work I recently read and enjoyed—Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend—invented a remedy for loneliness. Or so Fletcher claims.
Although he frequently wanders in his book, Fletcher takes a particularly roundabout way with this claim. He starts with the story of Orpheus, moves to the operas L’Euridice and Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, shifts to the bestselling penny dreadfuls of the Victorian era (pulp publications that offered up weekly serial installments of “long romantic sagas, supernatural horror tales, and true crime adventures”), and then it’s on to Varney the Vampire and Sweeney Todd (both originally penny dreadfuls), Mario Puzo’s Godfather (the penny dreadful on a grand scale), and finally Brilliant Friend.
I won’t get into what he says about Monteverdi and opera in general—something about presenting us with discord and then winning our deep friendship through harmonic resolutions—but one can certainly see that dynamic at work in the cliffhangers that sold for a penny in the 19th century.
The example Fletcher uses from The Godfather, which occurs early in the novel, is the undertaker whose daughter is savaged and who goes to Don Corleone for justice. The godfather wins our friendship by giving justice where the courts fail.
And yes, that’s the effect I remember the book having on me. Fletcher comments, “[I]n real life, it might be best to avoid the company of gangsters. But not in fiction. In fiction, the don’s friendship is healthy for our brain.”
Then he explains how:
The first healthy thing about befriending The Godfather is that it wards off loneliness.
After going into all the negative physiological consequences of loneliness, Fletcher explains how books can help. As I read Fletcher’s chapter, I thought of Wayne Booth in The Company We Keep, whose central idea is that we should look upon books as friends, with all the benefits and risks that friendship entails. Here’s Fletcher:
When we connect with a book, we can ease that feeling of aloneness. Even though no one is physically with us, our emotional connection to the narrator’s voice or to the lives of the story characters makes our brain feel like we’re in friendly company, easing the psychological gnaw that contributes to abnormal cortisol. And with pulp fiction, gaining this bonding benefit from literature is easy. The libraries of the world are packed with adventure novels, detective fictions, and romance paperbacks that deftly use the Partial Dopamine to connect with our brain, tiding us over until our flesh-and-blood friends come knocking.
So what’s so innovative about Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, a novel about two working class girls growing up in 1950s Naples? If it is “more powerful than even the Godfather himself,” Fletcher writes, it’s because it gives us an opera through the eyes of a child. Noting that our most powerful friendships usually start in childhood, Fletcher says that My Brilliant Friend catches up “our whole psychology,” “from wonder, to curiosity, to jealousy.”
“To capture this all-consuming experience,” Fletcher continues on, “My Brilliant Friend
treats the relationship between Elena and Lila as a kind of pulp fiction serial: “It was time to go home, but we delayed, challenging each other, without ever saying a word, testing our courage.” Like an issue of Spicy Mystery or Terror Tales, Elena and Lila agitate each other’s heart. Immersing themselves in half-released dopamine, they form an ever-hungry bond that connects Elena and Lila for life; even their lovers and their families fall away.”
And:
Roughing up our emotions, like the two girls do to each other, the novel makes us feel part of their childhood gang.
Fletcher sums up Ferrante’s literary invention as follows:
To draw us into the same hungry friendship as Elena and Lila, Ferrante’s novel dishes up a simple recipe: pulp fiction dissonance from the perspective of a child. The pulp fiction dissonance does its usual work of priming our dopamine neurons. Meanwhile, the childhood perspective increases the intensity and emotional range of the dissonance, making our dopamine bond to the novel feel deeper and more psychologically complete.
Fletcher’s book title–Wonderworks–sums up well his feelings about literature. There’s a perpetual “oh, wow!” in his writing. Sometimes his enthusiasm attempts to carry him through reservations we might have. For instance, I can think of other child narrators previous to Ferrante’s that pull us into similarly deep friendships.
Jane Eyre, for instance, and the narrator of John Knowles’s A Separate Peace come to mind. To be sure, their mood swings aren’t as wild as those experienced by Elena and Lila, but maybe that’s as much to do with national temperament as a new literary invention.
Then again, Brits can go through volatile mood swings—witness Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. And for that matter 12-year-old Juliet and 14-year-old Romeo.
But yes, this still feels a little different. So maybe Fletcher is on to something with his “pulp fiction dissonance from the perspective of a child.”
Whether My Brilliant Friend has brought a new literary technique into the world or not, Fletcher alerted me to structural aspects of the novel that I had missed and that I missed in The Godfather as well. It’s always good when an essay gives you a new perspective on a work.
And yes, if I had been lonely as I was reading it, it would have made me feel less lonely.
