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Thursday
Just a week before the Supreme Court ruled that it’s okay for Christians to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people, news broke that a fifth grade Georgia teacher is being fired for reading to her class Stuart Scott’s My Shadow Is Purple. Her infraction is teaching “divisive concepts.” The book is about a boy who likes both traditionally boy things (trains) and girl things (glitter).
As Washington Post commentators Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman observe, the book’s conclusion is that “sometimes blue and pink don’t really capture kids’ full interests and personalities — and that everyone is unique and should just be themselves.” The offended parent complained, ““I would consider anything in the genre of ‘LGBT’ and ‘Queer’ divisive.”
The “divisive” in Georgia’s law is apparently whatever an affronted parent considers to be divisive. Sargent and Waldman point out that the vagueness of the law is part of the point, allowing rightwing parents to object to—well—pretty much anything. Don’t look to the law itself for examples since those it provides all have to do with race, not gender.
“Divisive,” according to these examples, includes “the idea that the United States is ‘fundamentally racist and that people should feel ‘guilt’ or bear ‘responsibility’ for past actions on account of their race.” But despite the failure in the law to mention anything regarding gender, the school decided to adopt that parent’s complaint as policy and to sacrifice Katherine Rinderle.
Also sacrificed are those students who would benefit from the book’s message. Speaking for myself, I desperately needed this assurance when I was that age. As a bookish child who didn’t like fighting or football (a religion in Tennessee), I remember thinking that a mistake had been made somewhere. Maybe I was a girl in a boy’s body.
I’ve written in the past how I was drawn to books in which there are versions of the purple shadow drama. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy was particularly important to me, featuring as it did a boy with long hair (crewcuts were the fashion in the 1950s) whose mother dressed him in velvet and lace collars—and yet who was (as I was) a very fast runner. I thus related to the following scene:
Mr. Havisham found himself leaning out of the window of his coupe with a curious feeling of interest. He really never remembered having seen anything quite like the way in which his lordship’s lordly little red legs flew up behind his knickerbockers and tore over the ground as he shot out in the race at the signal word. He shut his small hands and set his face against the wind; his bright hair streamed out behind.
“Hooray, Ced Errol!” all the boys shouted, dancing and shrieking with excitement. “Hooray, Billy Williams! Hooray, Ceddie! Hooray, Billy! Hooray! ‘Ray! ‘Ray!”
“I really believe he is going to win,” said Mr. Havisham. The way in which the red legs flew and flashed up and down, the shrieks of the boys, the wild efforts of Billy Williams, whose brown legs were not to be despised, as they followed closely in the rear of the red legs, made him feel some excitement. “I really—I really can’t help hoping he will win!” he said, with an apologetic sort of cough. At that moment, the wildest yell of all went up from the dancing, hopping boys. With one last frantic leap the future Earl of Dorincourt had reached the lamppost at the end of the block and touched it, just two seconds before Billy Williams flung himself at it, panting.
I also was riveted by the figure of Tip in The Land of Oz (the second of the Oz books), who is in actuality Ozma of Oz, having been transformed into a boy by a wicked witch. And then there was the episode in one of the Superboy comic books where Kent finds himself transformed into a girl. It turns out to have been a dream, but in that dream his mother renames him Clare Kent and he adds “female intuition” to his superpowers.
The work that had the most profound impact on me was Twelfth Night. When I was in 7th grade, I developed a case of mono, probably caused by stress over the civil rights battles our town was undergoing at the time. My father brought home Shakespeare on records from the English Department’s collection, and I listened to Viola’s gender crossing adventures over and over. I most related to the scene where Viola is confronted by an amusement-seeking Sir Toby Belch, who wants her to duel the cowardly Sir Andrew Aguecheek.
I knew exactly how Viola—female inside, male outside—felt when pressured to fight. This particular scene captured my painful reality while a follow-up scene provided me with a fantasy wish fulfillment: although the first fight is interrupted, in the follow-up challenge Sir Toby mistakenly targets Viola’s twin brother, who proceeds to beat the crap out of both him and Sir Andrew. This unexpected reversal is a version of the fantasy that appeared in the ads at the end of our comic books, where a wimp lifts barbells (which you could order) and thrashes the bully who has kicked sand in his face.
Now, I was drawn to all these stories, not because I wanted to be a girl, but because the 1950s stereotype of boys didn’t match up with my internal reality. What I needed were narratives that honored gender complexity. Shakespeare, who understood human beings as well as anyone ever has, provided me with one.
So will Georgia now fire teachers for teaching 12th Night? All it takes, apparently, is for one parent to call it divisive.
Georgia teachers would definitely face trouble for recommending a book that my wife found in England and gave to our 11-year-old grandson. David Williams’s The Boy in a Dress is about a 12-year-old boy who, missing a mother who has left, tries out her dresses and reads copies of her Vogue magazines. As one thing leads to another, Dennis befriends a sympathetic girl, who helps him in his attempt to pass himself off as a girl at school.
He is caught and expelled but, because he is the soccer team’s star player, his teammates don dresses in a show of solidarity and with his help come back from six goals down to beat their rival. That this other team is notorious for playing rough and dirty—in other words, they’re driven by toxic masculinity—helps make the book’s point that children need to explore alternative narratives.
It so happens that my grandson, who loves to dress up, has sometimes experimented with wearing a skirt to school. He assures me that his pronouns are still he/his and I assure him that I will love him regardless of pronoun. But he may well be, as he currently thinks, cisgender. After all, he’s like his father, who as a boy wore his hair long and who once, for Halloween, passed himself off as a creditable girl in one of Julia’s dresses. He also played Bianca in a cross-dressing version of Taming of the Shrew while studying theatre in London.
Years ago, a University of Hawaii biologist left our college Gender Studies colloquium with a quote I have never forgotten. Milt Diamond noted that not everyone is limited to either the XX or the XY chromosome combination: apparently there are some trisomies (XXX, XXY, XYY), even some tetrasomies (XXXY, XXXX), and yet still other possibilities. And if one adds to the mix those XXes who loves other XXes and those XYs who love other XYs (and I’m only getting started), one can nod vigorously to the observation Diamond shared with us: Nature loves variety, human society hates it.
If you want to see real perversity, look at those people quashing—sometimes through shame, sometimes through worse—their children’s identity explorations. Some of the actual groomers we hear about, including some GOP politicians, were denied healthy avenues of expression as children. What they repressed returned as something monstrous.
If we want our children to grow into mature, well-balanced adults, we need teachers like Katherine Rinderle.
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Wednesday
I flashed on a passage from Death of a Salesman recently after encountering an account of South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham getting booed at a Donald Trump rally. Now, I sympathize with Willy Loman and not at all with Graham so the parallel doesn’t go very far. Still, it provides some insight into those politicians who have sold their souls to ride on the Trump train.
Graham was once regarded as a relatively principled senator who would work across the aisle on Supreme Court nominations and who would speak his mind in memorable ways. I enjoyed his remark about the execrable Ted Cruz, that if you killed him “on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.” In 2015 he once described Trump as “a race baiting, xenophobic religious bigot” while at the same time calling Biden “as good a man as God ever created.”
Then he became a Trump groveller. To be sure, he briefly reclaimed his previous principles after the January 6 insurrection, announcing to his fellow senators, “Trump and I, we had a hell of a journey. I hate it being this way. I hate it being this way. All I can say is count me out.” Since then, however, he has returned to his previous sycophancy.
Authoritarianism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat observed recently, however, that there is no room for waffling in a fascist movement. One response and one response only is allowed: “You say whatever benefits the leader and increases his glory.”
And that’s why Graham faced hostility in Trump’s recent rally. Those present knew their senator’s uneven history. According to commentator Dean Obeidallah, “Lindsey Graham getting booed, called a “traitor”—and worse–for six minutes while trying to speak at Donald Trump’s rally Saturday is the worst reaction I’ve ever seen from an audience.”
It’s how Graham responded to that booing that makes me think of Willy Loman. Here’s Willy’s longtime friend Charley reflecting on his life at the funeral:
BIFF: He had the wrong dreams. All, all, wrong…
CHARLEY: Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
What Obeidallah witnessed was a politician, who is a kind of salesman, panicking when the audience stopped smiling back. Here’s his account:
The booing and jeering began as soon as Graham was introduced to the Trump faithful. At first, Graham appeared amused by the crowd’s boos—even laughing about it. However, Graham soon began to grasp that a large segment of this Trump crowd was not kidding around. That is when Graham went into grovel mode as he tried to win over the audience with lines like, “Just calm down for a second. I think you’ll like this.” Graham then told the audience, “I was born in this county,” adding, “I live 15 miles down the road. This is a place where people pay the taxes, fight the wars, and tell you what they believe.”
Graham even tried a joke to get the crowd on his side, stating “I found common ground with President Trump…it took a while to get there, folks.” He then quipped, “I come to like President Trump and he likes himself…and we go that in common.” (Pro tip: If you are bombing with an audience don’t mock the person the crowd loves!) After six minutes of boos that effectively drowned Graham out, he slinked off the stage.
I learned something important about Trump politicians from applying the Miller passage. They are so hungry for the adulation that comes from high office that they will do anything to get it, including attaching themselves to someone as corrupt as the former president. It doesn’t matter if they must compromise their integrity to get it. Like an addict, they’ll do anything to achieve that high. Correspondingly, they feel as if they are nobody if the electorate rejects them.
Not all politicians are like this. I remember some Democrats who voted through Obamacare, even though it cost them their seats in Congress, figuring that they had done something so important that it was worth the cost to themselves. And there are those principled Republicans who lost elections because they refused to join the Trump cult. What they saved was their dignity.
One of George Orwell’s most important insights in 1984 is that authoritarian leaders lie, not because they expect to be believed, but because they are testing the loyalty of their followers. The more outrageous the lie, the greater the test and the more opportunity their followers have for demonstrating their loyalty. Republicans these days must either demonstrate blind loyalty or they will get the Graham treatment. They’re riding on a smile and a shoeshine, with the constant fear that an earthquake will rock their world and the bottom will drop out.
Dast we blame them? Given that they are supposed to be public servants rather than fascist enablers, hell yes!
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Tuesday – July 4
After the Supreme Court’s latest attacks on African Americans, the LGBTQ+ community, impoverished college students, and clean water—not to mention its reassertion of control over women’s bodies a year ago— Langston Hughes’s “Let America be America Again” seems the best July 4th poem for 2023. Much of what he says about America’s failure to live up to its original promise is only too timely.
By stacking the court with radical Catholics and by having billionaires shower them with gifts so that they remain in the far right bubble, the right has found a way to roll back the progress we were making towards all having equal access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nor is it only the Supreme Court that is acting up. As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, one of the foremost authorities on authoritarianism points out, the GOP generally has been transformed by “cult dynamics” that
dictate how party elites behave and what kinds of individuals find a foothold there. Day after day, we witness one of the largest political parties in the world remake itself as an autocratic entity, discarding the values, norms, and rituals of democracy.
Analyzing Donald Trump’s continuing hold on the party, Ben-Ghiat observes,
Authoritarians don’t just hollow out democratic institutions, but also debase the meaning and the practice of politics, reducing it to lies, leader worship, and violence against enemies. That’s why authoritarian parties become havens for a toxic mix of craven opportunists, racist bullies, and amoral individuals who are attracted by partnering with a leader who has no limits or restraints.
Hughes points out what should be obvious–that we were never supposed to be a country where “kings connive [or] tyrants scheme/ That any man be crushed by one above.” The goal, rather, has been to be a nation where “opportunity is real, and life is free,/ Equality is in the air we breathe.” The question he asks could be easily be directed at our rightwing justices:
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
To be sure, Hughes would not be surprised at the justices’ behavior. As a Black man in America, he had few illusions about the country he was living in. “There’s never been equality for me,” he laments, “Nor freedom in this ‘homeland of the free.’”
But because of that, his call to action resonates all the more:
O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME— Who made America…
In 1787 Benjamin Franklin, asked whether America had just set itself up for a monarchy or a republic, famously replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Hughes’s dream is our republic living up to the vision expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Few poets have understood the urgency of such dreaming better than Hughes.
Let America Be America Again By Langston Hughes
Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed— Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek— And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one’s own greed!
I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean— Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.
Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That’s made America the land it has become. O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home— For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore, And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came To build a “homeland of the free.”
The free?
Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we’ve dreamed And all the songs we’ve sung And all the hopes we’ve held And all the flags we’ve hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay— Except the dream that’s almost dead today.
O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME— Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.
Sure, call me any ugly name you choose— The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives, We must take back our land again, America!
O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath— America will be!
Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain— All, all the stretch of these great green states— And make America again!
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Monday
Julia and I recently read and thoroughly enjoyed Bonnie Garmus’s bestselling Lessons in Chemistry, with its indefatigable heroine Elizabeth Zott. The novel took on an added significance this past Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court’s struck down down affirmative action. Although the novel is about white women, not African Americans, it makes clear how universities and research institutes must make a special outreach to groups that they have historically excluded. As Zott, who wants to be a scientist in 1950s America, puts it,
Too many brilliant minds are kept from scientific research thanks to ignorant biases like gender and race. It infuriates me and it should infuriate you. Science has big problems to solve: famine, disease, extinction. And those who purposefully close the door to others using self-serving, outdated cultural notions are not only dishonest, they’re knowingly lazy.
Zott is a feisty, can-do woman who refuses to be kept down. Unfortunately for her, she regularly experiences discrimination and worse. In graduate school, her advisor tries to rape her, and she is then kicked out of the program for defending herself (she perforates his intestine with a #2 pencil). Another employer, attempting the same, has a heart attack when she pulls a knife out of her purse. “When it came to equality,” the book tells us, “1952 was a real disappointment.”
Zott is clear about the problem. But (and this is where affirmative action and Title IX are particularly relevant), Zott is under the impression that she can make it on her own, without help from anyone. It’s a particularly American illusion, and one can’t help but admire how Zott uses the belief to prod herself into action. She won’t get married to her partner, a famous scientist that she loves and who adores her, because she doesn’t want special favors. When she lands a cooking show, she inspires women across the nation with her can-do spirit. At one point she tells her audience,
Whenever you feel afraid, just remember. Courage is the root of change – and change is what we’re chemically designed to do. So when you wake up tomorrow, make this pledge. No more holding yourself back. No more subscribing to others’ opinions of what you can and cannot achieve. And no more allowing anyone to pigeonhole you into useless categories of sex, race, economic status, and religion. Do not allow your talents to lie dormant, ladies. Design your own future. When you go home today, ask yourself what YOU will change. And then get started.”
This is all very well. But how can you make progress when the deck is stacked against you? Her partner is worried about her:
It was a form of naïveté, he thought, the way she continued to believe that all it took to get through life was grit. Sure, grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help. But maybe because she’d never been offered any, she refused to believe in it.
He tries to lay this out for her, at one point observing that “life has never been fair, and yet you continue to operate as if it is—as if once you get a few wrongs straightened out, everything else will fall into place. They won’t.”
It’s not that Zott is unaware of the depth of the problem. At one point she acknowledges that the problems run deep, telling her television audience that
the reduction of women to something less than men, and the elevation of men to something more than women, is not biological: it’s cultural. And it starts with two words: pink and blue. Everything skyrockets out of control from there.
She also observes that if “a man were to spend a day being a woman in America, he wouldn’t make it past noon”—an observation that could be extended to a White Person being Black for a day.
This is what systemic sexism and racism looks like. But though Zott recognizes the problem, she thinks her own determination and smarts will help her triumph. That proves not to be the case. While her drive gets her a certain distance, time and again she succeeds only because others support her. Her partner secretly makes sure that their institute gives her the resources she needs, a neighbor comes to her rescue when she needs childcare, and a secret benefactor makes sure she can return to science after she leaves her television show.
Which is the whole point of affirmative action. Rather than propping up mediocrity, as its critics accuse, it makes sure that those who have been systematically deprived of support get the education they need to succeed. Clarence Thomas would not be a supreme court justice today if programs had not reached out to him, thereby ensuring that someone with his talents would be recognized. Thomas Gray lays out what could have happened without such programs in “Elegy on a Country Churchyard”:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear: Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Watching Zott, one can see why Thomas is dismissive of affirmative action. After all, if much of your drive comes from feeling that you need to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps—that you must help yourself because there’s no one else to help you—then to be told that you succeeded only because others helped you feels like a slap in the face. Joy Reid, the brilliant MSNBC host who was interviewed the other night by MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, said that when she got to Harvard thanks to affirmative action, she was told by other students that she wasn’t there on her merits.
But Reid, despite such putdowns, is not afraid to acknowledge that affirmative action was critical in her success, despite such putdowns. Thomas’s crime, as Hayes observed the other night, has been to pull up the affirmative action ladder after he himself made use of it.
Zott, one feels sure, will not do the same. Supportive of others, she reflects at one point,
Humans need reassurance, they need to know others survived in hard times. And unlike other species which do a better job of learning from their mistakes, humans require constant threats and reminders to be nice.
And allow me to expand this discussion from affirmative action and Title IX to cancel culture. The Washington Post recently had an article about three professors who lost their jobs because of remarks they made. The faculty argued that their free speech rights were violated and two got their jobs back (the third retired), but what struck me was how their biases could easily undermine their teaching effectiveness. If they see only a stereotype rather than a person in front of them, they cannot detect hidden strengths and abilities. I quote from the article to show how each is blinded by prejudice:
–Past controversies — such as one in which [Indiana University at Bloomington economist Eric] Rasmusen argued on a blog that gay men shouldn’t be hired as school teachers because they could prey on children — had faded from attention.
A tipping point came in 2019, when Rasmusen tweeted a link to an article titled “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably.” He highlighted a quote from the article, which claimed “geniuses are overwhelmingly male.”
–[S]he [a Black student of University of Central Florida psychology teacher Charles Negy] was disturbed by his suggestion that, “statistically speaking, minorities are just not as smart as other people.”
–In December 2020, the Jewish News of Northern California reported that the Twitter account of Abbas Ghassemi, a teaching professor in the engineering school at the University of California at Merced, was awash with antisemitic tropes. A cartoon diagram of the “Zionist brain” there depicted a “frontal money lobe,” a “Holocaust memory centre” and a “world domination lobe.” Another post said the interests of “Zionists and IsraHell” had “embedded themselves in every component of the American system,” including banking and media.
I doubt that these men offer much reassurance to students from the vulnerable populations they denigrate. And while the Clarence Thomases and Joy Reids, like Elizabeth Zott, succeed in spite of them, not all students are as strong. For some, feelings of inferiority become confirmed by such teachers and they become discouraged and underperform.
I can testify that I’ve seen many, many African American students from impoverished backgrounds succeed at my college and go on to live productive and prosperous lives. Affirmative action and supportive teaching were critical.
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Sunday
Julia and I have joined a weekly group that engages in the practice of Lectio Divina, a “traditional monastic practice of scriptural reading, meditation and prayer intended to promote communion with God and to increase the knowledge of God’s word” (Wikipedia). Each week we discuss a Biblical passage and musical selection chosen by the organizer of the group, which includes some very insightful people with extraordinary backgrounds. The sessions so far have been rich and rewarding.
Our first reading three weeks ago provided a perfect introduction. It included the parable of the mustard seed, itself one of Jesus’s most mind-bending stories, but what most caught my eye was a meta moment where Matthew reflects on the practice of using parables itself:
He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’ He told them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.’ Jesus told the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfil what had been spoken through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth to speak in parables’. (Matthew 13:31-35)
The prophet Matthew has in mind is the psalmist:
I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old…(Psalms 78:2).
It’s as though, by watching Jesus pile parable upon parable, Matthew feels the need to comment on the process. Why employ this method rather than express his point straightforwardly?
You know, of course, where I stand on this issue: literature (including stories) gets at truths that escape straight exposition. In fact, I read the whole Bible this way: Genesis does not provide us with a literal account of creation but rather provides us with a story that articulates the wonder of our origins. It also, as great stories do, raises issues that we wrestle with to this day. Religion is better served by leaving Big Bang and DNA theories to scientists and focusing rather on what our existence means.
I think also of Emily Dickinson’s admonition to “tell the truth, but tell it slant.” In her account, desiring to get the truth straight would be like Semele in Greek mythology getting obliterated after seeing Zeus in all his glory:
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind —
Jesus, good teacher that he is, knows that his audiences can’t see everything that he sees and so finds a way to lead them in the right direction. Like any creative storyteller, he uses stories to involve them in the exploratory process. As reader response theorist Wolfgang Iser points out, literature is filled with gaps or indeterminate elements that readers must fill by active participation. Jesus’s auditors would have internalized the parables in a deep way by applying their own experiences to them.
Mark’s reflections remind me of an important lecture that Rob MacSwain, a C.S. Lewis scholar who teaches at Sewanee’s Theological Seminar, gave to our Adult Sunday School. You can read my full account of it here but, to sum up the highlights, it discussed Lewis’s contributions to Anglican theology.
Which at first didn’t seem like much. For one thing, as MacSwain noted in starting out, Anglicans/ Episcopalians don’t do theology.
This would distinguish them from Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Mormons, Moravians, and various other denominations, and looking at Anglicanism’s history one can see why. Fighting over matters of doctrine was a recipe for civil war in Tudor England, which Queen Elizabeth wanted to avoid at all costs. How did one keep Catholics and radical Protestants from cutting each other’s throats? One sidestepped theological battles. As Elizabeth said at one point, “There is only one Christ, Jesus, one faith. All else is a dispute over trifles.”
Theology, which is intent on bringing everything into logical order, often concerns itself with these trifles. MacSwain said that Anglicans are particularly uninterested in systematic theology and in the currently fashionable analytic theology, which is suspicious of metaphor and ambiguity as it strives for the clearest account possible of God and religion.
After having contended that Anglicans don’t “do” theology, however, MacSwain then reversed course and said they in fact engage in it at a very deep level. They just do it through literature. He mentioned figures like John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Alfred Lord Tennyson, T.S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden before turning to his own focus on C.S. Lewis.
To this list, by the way, I would add Edmund Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte and Emily Bronte, John Keble, Gerard Manley Hopkins (who became Catholic but started off Anglican), Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Charles Williams, R.S. Thomas, John Betjeman, Malcolm Guite, Madeleine L’Engle, Richard Wilbur, and Mary Oliver. Some lean more to low church or evangelical Anglicanism, some to high church Anglicanism or even Anglo-Catholicism, but all grapple with spiritual issues in one way or other.
For his part, Lewis sometimes used poetry, sometimes fantasy (the Narnia books), sometimes science fiction (his space trilogy), sometimes other fictional forms (e.g., The Screwtape Letters) to explore issues of faith. Through literature, he and these other authors capture the emotional as well as the intellectual dimensions of spirit. What they lose in philosophical rigor (although literature has its own form of rigor), they gain through fictional immersion.
To sum up, Jesus used parables because stories engage audiences and provide truths in a way that more literal approaches cannot. Touching on buried meanings as they tap into the unconscious, they tell the truth slant. In so doing, they get us closer to God.
Thomas Eakins, The Thinker: Portrait of Louis N. Kenton
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Friday
In his frequently quoted but often misunderstood “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost predicts that one day in the future he will look back at his life and regret a choice he made. (“I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence…”) While the poem is often read as a triumphant assertion of a choice made—I have heard it quoted in this vein at a couple of valedictory addresses—I read it rather as someone who foresees that he will be so upset at having made that choice that he predicts he will try to rationalize it away: he will convince himself that he took the daring and unconventional path, not the path that most people walk. The fact was, he acknowledges, that there wasn’t that much difference between the two paths, that they were worn more or less the same. (But maybe he’s rationalizing here as well.)
In other words, where he would like to think he will look back with a contented sigh, he fears he will look back with a regretful sigh. The poem, after all, is entitled “The Road Not Taken,” not “The Road Less Traveled.”
Having reached an age (72) where one looks back, especially after having just attended one’s 50th college reunion, I use today’s post to sort through one of my own career regrets. You’ll have to excuse me if I descend into the weeds of my profession—what has bothered me may seem trivial to those in other walks of life. And it may in fact be trivial. Nevertheless, I still need to work through it.
I begin my ruminations with a professor that I mentioned in a PechaKucha talk I gave at the reunion. PechaKucha, of Japanese origin, allows the speaker 20 slides in just under seven minutes to make the presentation (20 seconds per slide, which change automatically so that the speaker can’t drone on). Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my subject, which was how Beowulf helps us negotiate our gun-happy society. If we are to stand up to resentment crazed trolls and to counteract dragon depression, I argued, we need to “be like Beowulf.” The talk outlined the ways how.
The first slide mentioned Phil Niles’s Medieval History I class, which introduced me to the idea that the monsters in Beowulf represented the forces that threatened the stability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society. In the social contract between warrior and king, warriors were to be loyal, giving all their winnings to their king, and kings were to be fair and generous, redistributing those winnings to the warriors. If either side broke that contract—if warriors behaved like resentful trolls or if kings became greedy dragons—society could disintegrate, with death or slavery the end result for all its members.
I vividly remember my essay for the course, which I entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” Understanding came to me at around two or three in the morning in one of Carleton’s all-night study rooms. At that moment I grasped, in a deep way, that literature, including the literary fantasy that I loved, was not just for fun but articulated life and death issues. While I already knew the books I read were of immense importance to me, I now realized they were of immense importance to society as a whole. After all, Beowulf had served as a blueprint to Anglo-Saxon warriors in how to literally survive.
Socially conscious as we all were in those days, what with the Black, Chicano and Indian liberation movements, the anti-war protests, and the feminist revolution all in full sway, this view that my private passion could help change the world hit me with seismic force. I determined that I would become a literature teacher.
Majoring in history rather than in English was not the way to go about this, however. By my junior year, however, I feared that I was too far along in history to make the transition. Furthermore, none of the English courses I was taking spoke to this new-found revelation. Whereas my English professors seemed more interested in confining themselves to the works rather than linking them to anything going on in the world, my history teachers were introducing me to thinkers who argued that ideas could have a transformational impact on the world.
These thinkers included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukacs. In my French courses, meanwhile, I was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who thought the same. I wrote my thesis on the absurdly broad topic (but undergraduates are allowed to go big) of whether the French Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. I concluded that works like Rousseau’s On Inequality and Diderot’s Letter on the Blind had changed the framework in which reality itself is seen. This new reality, I argued, undermined traditional monarchical beliefs.
It helped that, as I was writing my thesis, I was also taking Barry Casper’s “Revolutions in Physics” class (I had put off this science requirement to the very last moment). Casper introduced us to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and I realized later that my thesis was essentially contending that the French Enlightenment had ushered in a significant paradigm shift.
But while my history major was speaking to issues that concerned me deeply, it wasn’t preparing me for graduate English programs. I was turned down by seven of the nine schools I applied to, and I could understand why when I entered Emory University’s English program. After all, my fellow grad students could detect image patterns in the works we studied, which appeared to me as though they were performing magic. How could they see all these things at work beneath the surface?
So did I choose the wrong path by majoring in history rather than English? Actually, fearing that this was indeed a mistake, at the beginning of my junior year I planned to tell my history advisor Carl Weiner—a brilliant if somewhat obstreperous intellectual—that I wanted to change majors. At the last moment, however, I lost my nerve. So some cowardice entered into my decision making.
Then again, I would not have taken Phil Niles’s Medieval History class if I had changed majors, nor all those intellectual history classes. And I would probably have experienced, in further English classes, the same frustrations that had sent me to the history major in the first place.
And despite having taken only six English courses, I was accepted into a good graduate program. It so happens that my Emory mentor had taken me in part because of my history background. J. Paul Hunter, a giant in the field of 18th century British Literature, liked my interdisciplinary interests, and he and I saw eye to eye about the importance of history.
I was also fortunate that Emory’s Victorianist, Jerome Beaty, was interested in the emerging field of reader response theory. When, my first semester, I heard Beaty talk about how readers in 1847 would have responded to Jane Eyre, I felt a shock of recognition. I tracked him down after the talk and got the names of the theorists he was referencing, including the German theorist Hans Robert Jauss.
Jauss argues that great works of literature expand readers’ “horizon of expectations”—a paradigm shift, if you will—which was exactly what I wanted to believe. I wrote an essay that semester in Beaty’s “Dickens’s Early Novels” class about how Dickens challenged and expanded traditional notions of the family in Martin Chuzzlewit—with the effect that the novel was a flop when it came out (it was ahead of its time) but one of Dickens’s most popular novels by the end of his life (third after David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers). Dickens had expanded his readers’ horizons so that they saw his novel with new eyes.
So if you’re keeping track, my decision to major in history turns out not to have been a mistake after all. It got me into a graduate school where people considered history an important part of literary study—this was before New Historicism and so still unusual—and my Emory PhD helped me find what was for me the perfect job: a state school with a mission to introduce a liberal arts education to (among others) first generation college students.
But wait, I’m not done yet with regrets. When, still in grad school, I was discussing a possible dissertation topic with Hunter, I said something to the effect of wanting to study how novels could change lives. But I narrowed my articulation too much. I thought that I needed to study satire, having the impression that satire was more effective at changing lives than other genres. He, hearing this, suggested that I take on the work of an under-appreciated satiric novelist (and former ship surgeon) Tobias Smollett and I dutifully did so.
This in spite of the fact that I can’t stand Smollett, largely because he is such a cranky writer. In fact, fellow novelist Laurence Sterne referred to him as “Smelfungus” for the way he complains all the time. While I dutifully wrote on Smollett, producing an acceptable dissertation (“Smollett’s Struggle for a New Mode of Expression”), I could never return to him later. And as one’s dissertation often serves as the source of one’s early scholarly articles, I cut myself off from that opportunity.
The path I wish I had taken was choosing a topic specifically focusing on reader response issues. All I needed to have done is follow more closely the kind of research Hunter himself was doing. For instance, he had recently written an article I found brilliant entitled “The Loneliness of the Long Distant Reader,” in which he talked about how novels were disrupting social society by introducing a new kind of solitude. Wives, for instance, would sometimes distress their husbands by disappearing for days into Samuel Richardson’s million-word novel Clarissa.
Had I said, “I want to do the kind of research that you did in that article,” I would have written a very different dissertation. I would have dived into 18th century reading journals, letters in which books are mentioned, and other documents and other forms of evidence as to the impact of works. I would have built a career in reader response theory, then in its infancy, instead of jumping between multiple fields.
I also would have become the kind of scholar my father was. More on this in a moment.
Instead, having written a dissertation more from the intellect than from the heart, I turned away from writing literary scholarship altogether (at least for a while) and instead started analyzing films. After all, I could see vividly the impact that cinema had on audiences—why, for instance (to cite my most widely cited article) Citizen Kane shook 1941 viewers to the core. But I could have been doing the same with literature.
In short, I had committed a scholarly no-no: I left a field where I had considerable expertise to branch into something new.
Mentioning my father points to an Oedipal drama at work. Scott Bates, a French professor at the University of the South, was a world authority on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. During a Fulbright year when I was a year old, he had uncovered source material at France’s national library that upended previous interpretations, and he continued to do so for decades afterward. For 15 years, I considered myself somewhat of an impostor because I wasn’t doing something comparable.
I should add that I worshipped my father, seeing in him everything I wanted to be. I was even proud when, in seventh grade, I had to wear glasses because he wore glasses. You see what I mean.
But instead of becoming a recognized scholar, I became what some will regard as a shallow generalist. As a small liberal arts college, St. Mary’s College of Maryland allowed this so that, at any moment, I could be found teaching one of our three survey courses—everything from Beowulf to Margaret Atwood—or one of a bewildering assortment of theme courses. Over the years these included Minority Lit, African American Lit, Post-Colonial Lit, American Fantasy, British Fantasy, Magical Realism, American Film, Film Genre, Great Directors, Theories of the Reader, and The Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami. Although my two favorite courses were in my field (Restoration and 18th Century Couples Comedy and Jane Austen), ranging as widely as I did was not a recipe for scholarly success.
Where I went deep was in responding to student essays. Figuring that everyone had the potential to undercover meaningful literary insights, I spent hours helping students choose their topics, develop their proposals, and draft and polish their essays (at which point I assigned a grade). After that I met individually with them and then graded their revisions (with the new grade replacing the first).
Even after 35 years, this never got old. I reached the point where I could detect—sometimes from no more than a phrase—the topic that would yield an essay where the student had “something at stake” (the phrase I used in my syllabus). I’ve shared a number of these student reading stories on this blog.
But while I flourished as a teacher, my traditional scholarship was mostly missing. Although I published twenty academic articles and delivered a score of scholarly presentations—enough to earn tenure at my college—my one book is self-published, and my current project, caught in limbo between popular and scholarly, is having difficulty finding a publisher. Instead, I have this blog.
As I look back at this career, my version of Frost’s regretful sigh is that I didn’t produce the work that I thought I was supposed to. And saying that brings back another memory.
Having just visited my old professor Carl Weiner at the reunion—sadly, he’s having health issues—I recalled something he said to me after awarding me honors (but not highest honors) for my senior thesis. In addition to my studies, I had thrown myself into the student newspaper, which I was proud of having edited but which he regarded as a distraction. “If it had not been for that paper,” he told me, “you could have gone so much further.” At the time, I was more taken aback than offended. I could see what he meant.
Could I have gone as far as those of my stellar Carleton classmates who have had brilliant scholarly careers. One of them, I discovered, heads the Emory Philosophy Department while another received a rave review in The New York Review of Books. Reunions can get us to notice roads we haven’t taken.
And yet, to reverse course once again, I have had students tell me that my teaching impacted them in ways that were life-changing, and this blog has reached a wider readership than I ever could have hoped for from scholarly work. It’s not what my father did nor what various of my professors hoped from me. But in the end I have fulfilled my professional mission, which was to put people in contact with literature that bettered their lives. When my old regrets flair up, I can remind myself of this.
And actually, to do justice to our 50th class reunion, what I carried away was a sense, not of expectations unfulfilled, but of lives lived fully and meaningfully. Professional goals seemed less important now that many of us were retired.
In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges gives us an alternative to Frost’s yellow wood. Whereas the speaker in “Road Not Taken” agonizes over a single choice, Borges describes a garden where the choices are infinite. As a character tells the narrator,
The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.
And further on:
Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.
What this image shows me is that I have been too one-dimensional in thinking about my life trajectory. Life indeed has “innumerable futures,” which are too complex to chart. I’m especially struck by the thought that sometimes a path that seems to diverge will then later converge, and that a path that bifurcates into two will then see those two intersect. A history class that I wouldn’t have taken had I majored in English gave me the literary insight that has guided my life. The history major that kept me out of a number of graduate schools got me into one that gave me the thinkers that I needed and helped me land my dream job.
Frost’s poem, which jumps back and forth in time, tells me the same as well. Don’t fixate on a single narrative about a wrong or right decision—don’t spend time regretting that you took this path rather than that one—because the very story you tell yourself about that choosing will change over time.
Better for me to focus on the rich interactions with people that teaching literature has made possible, which is a far more interesting story than that of a hypothetical path not taken.
Further thought: I didn’t mention one further life choice I made which, while it ran counter the path of a traditional literary scholar, added immeasurably to my life. In 1987, inspired by recent Hungarian films, I applied for a Fulbright to go study them, even though I didn’t know any Hungarian. Although I had experienced early academic success with an article on the Czech New Wave, jumping to another country made no scholarly sense. In any event, the Hungary slot was not available so I ended up in Yugoslavia instead, in Slovenia. There I learned that, while Yugoslavia itself had a robust film industry, Slovenia did not so my research plans fell through. From outer appearance, it appeared a bust.
Except that it wasn’t as I developed deep ties with people in the country that have led to some of the happiest moments of Julia’s and my life. In addition, my teaching and my understanding of literature grew immensely from this immersion in another country. I return regularly to teach there and to refresh our many, many friendships. Would I trade all that for a straight line scholar’s path? On reflection, I don’t think I would.
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Thursday
When we visited Dublin in April, Julia and I decided at one point that we’d like to experience traditional Irish fare and found Flanagan’s Bar and Restaurant on O’Connell Street. There we were served a hefty lamp shank with mashed potatoes, root vegetables, and plenty of gravy. It was a dinner that reminded me of those my mother used to cook in my childhood (I was born in 1951) and that I also encountered when I visited my grandmothers, both of whom were of English extraction (one a Jackson, one a Fulcher). The eating experience, in other words, carried me into my past.
Just one of these heavy meals was more than enough, however. Much as I love lamb, we didn’t repeat the experience.
I encountered the same nostalgia, and the same feeling of heaviness, in John Galsworthy’s description in Man of Property of what the Forsytes eat. The “crowning point of a Forsyte feast,” we are told, is “the saddle of mutton” (the quotation marks, which are the author’s, serve to elevate the dish). Warning: just reading the passage is enough to raise one’s cholesterol level or bring on a case of the gout. Here it is:
No Forsyte has given a dinner without providing a saddle of mutton. There is something in its succulent solidity which makes it suitable to people “of a certain position.” It is nourishing and tasty; the sort of thing a man remembers eating. It has a past and a future, like a deposit paid into a bank; and it is something that can be argued about.
The “saddle of mutton” serves a double purpose, functioning also as something to talk about:
Each branch of the family tenaciously held to a particular locality—old Jolyon swearing by Dartmoor, James by Welsh, Swithin by Southdown, Nicholas maintaining that people might sneer, but there was nothing like New Zealand! As for Roger, the “original” of the brothers, he had been obliged to invent a locality of his own, and with an ingenuity worthy of a man who had devised a new profession for his sons, he had discovered a shop where they sold German; on being remonstrated with, he had proved his point by producing a butcher’s bill, which showed that he paid more than any of the others.
The author reflects on the class significance of the dish:
To anyone interested psychologically in Forsytes, this great saddle-of-mutton trait is of prime importance; not only does it illustrate their tenacity, both collectively and as individuals, but it marks them as belonging in fiber and instincts to that great class which believes in nourishment and flavor, and yields to no sentimental craving for beauty.
Those of us who prefer lighter meals will sympathize with the younger Forsyte members, who the authors tells us
would have done without a joint altogether, preferring guinea-fowl, or lobster salad—something which appealed to the imagination, and had less nourishment—but these were females; or, if not, had been corrupted by their wives, or by mothers, who having been forced to eat saddle of mutton throughout their married lives, had passed a secret hostility towards it into the fiber of their sons.
After the Forsyte elders have finished with the saddle of mutton, they proceed on to a Tewkesbury ham. Add in all the sherry, port, champagne and wine that gets drunk and the cigars and cigarettes that get smoked and you wonder how anyone in that class and era survived past middle age.
Not that we had any alcohol or smoking in my grandmother Bates’s house, her family having moved to Evanston because it housed the headquarters of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. But heavy, well-done meat dishes with lots of gravy, potatoes, and mushy peas—yes, I remember those dinners well.
Detail from Camuccini, Death of Julius Caesar (1806)
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Wednesday
While there’s much we don’t know about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s coup attempt (or accidental coup or mutiny or armed insurrection or bargaining strategy—there’s no consensus on exactly what the head of the Wagner mercenaries was up to this past weekend), references to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon have been frequent. This gives us an excuse to apply Shakespeare’s play to the events.
Not that Prigozhin has anything in common with Brutus, the “noblest Roman of them all.” That’s because the man is just another corrupt and brutal Russian thug, made rich by Putin before parting ways with his patron. He is more like self-interested Cassius, described by Caesar as having “a lean and hungry look.” (Prigozhin has more of a pudgy and hungry look but you get the point.) Maybe the experience of seeing his troops wiped out galvanized him into action, prompting him into an uncharacteristic bout of truth-telling. Or maybe he was just upset at seeing Putin preparing to take his men and incorporate them into the Russian military.
That being said, if Putin ultimately annihilates him, he may be sorry that he didn’t follow the advice of Shakespeare’s conspirators. While, in his public pronouncements, Prigozhin went out of his way not to name Putin, Cassius is not so delicate. As the Roman senator points out, Caesar may seem to “stride the world like a colossus,” making others seem like “petty men”—but if he is seen as a man like other men, then what is to keep a Cassius or a Brutus from taking his place? Prigozhin, by contrast, never attempted to demythologize Putin.
Cassius also tells Brutus that, if they remain underlings, the fault “is not in our stars but in ourselves.” In other words, we chart our own destinies.
Brutus, meanwhile, talks about making the most of an opportune moment:
If Prigozhin really could have attacked Moscow after having captured Rostov-on-Don, headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, then he would have taken advantage of the high tide. By instead accepting Putin’s deal and retreating to Belarus, he may discover the rest of his life to be bound in shallows and in miseries. More than one commentator has observed that he is now a “dead man walking.”
It’s worth noting that Brutus, to his sorrow, doesn’t fully take his own advice, allowing Marc Antony to go free rather than disposing of him when he has a chance. In a sense, after having crossed their own Rubicon by assassinating Caesar, he and Cassius then retreat back across the river. As a result, they suffer the fate that Putin may be planning for Prigozhin.
Perhaps I do the Wagner leader an injustice—maybe the tide was never as full as it appeared and, rather than losing an advantage, he never had one. But to have had any chance at all, it appeared that he needed to go all in. That he failed to do.
Washington Post’s David Ignatius, in assessing Putin’s survival skills, has invoked a well-known truism: Prigozhin made the mistake of shooting at the king and missing. Ignatius goes on to invoke two other two other Shakespeare figures:
Putin’s vulnerabilities were vividly on display last weekend, but so were his uncanny survival skills. He got inside Prigozhin’s conspiratorial plot and stopped it. The Russian leader is a mysterious figure, far more so than the cartoon versions sketched by his enemies. He is Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a villain whose hands drip with the blood of his victims. But he’s also Hamlet, the vain, self-absorbed prince who delayed taking action against his enemies until it was nearly too late.
I wouldn’t call Hamlet vain and self-absorbed, but perhaps Putin is a Hamlet-like waffler. Although that being said, unlike the Danish prince he would never hesitate killing a man just because he seemed to be praying. In fact, he is more like Claudius, with his elaborate plots involving poisonous potions and poison-tipped swords (or a ricin-tipped umbrella in Putin’s case ). But Claudius’s plotting eventually backfires on him, and it appears that Putin’s encouragement of a mercenary force to do his dirty work has done the same.
Further thought: In another Washington Post column, Harvard government professor Graham Allison gives Ukrainian President Zelensky advice that sounds very much like Brutus’s. In this moment of Russian dissension, Ukraine too has a high tide to its advantage and “must take the current when it serves, or lose [its] ventures.” Or as Allison puts it,
The extraordinary coup attempt by a Russian mercenary leader provides Ukraine with an unexpected opportunity to press whatever advantages it has in its war with Moscow. If it does not seize this chance and break the stasis that governs the battlefield in eastern Ukraine, we will enter a very different chapter in this conflict.
This “different chapter,” as Allison sees it, will be a perpetual stalemate rather than Ukraine gaining back its conquered lands. Now or never, in other words.
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Tuesday
Carleton classmate Mike Hazard shared with me this New York Times article about literature that unsettles us. Written by one who has written a biography about Shirley Jackson, whose short story “The Lottery” has long disturbed audiences, the piece argues that literature that disturbs and disrupts often plays a vital role in our lives. On the other hand, Ruth Franklin states that going out of one’s way not to offend is a recipe for bad writing, and she fears that “readers across the political spectrum seem to be losing their appetite for literary discomfort.”
Franklin reports that “The Lottery” discomfited when it first appeared:
Over 150 letters flooded into The New Yorker’s offices, more mail than the magazine had ever before received for a work of fiction. Readers called the story “outrageous,” “gruesome” and “utterly pointless”; some canceled their subscriptions. I spoke to one of those readers more than a decade ago, and she still remembered, some 60 years later, how deeply the story had upset her.
Over the years, the story has been applied to various political situations, sometimes by the left, sometimes the right:
When “The Lottery” was published, three years after the end of World War II and at the start of the Cold War, many readers speculated that, given its apparent themes of conformity and cruelty, it was an allegory for McCarthyism or the Holocaust. Over the years, it has become a reliable reference when discussing some social development or troubling trend. People have heard its echo recently in the policies of Donald Trump’s MAGA populism or in the perceived excesses of the censorious mob. In Harper’s Magazine, the critic Thomas Chatterton Williams used it as a metaphor for cancel culture, which he suggested was a contemporary analogue to stoning. For the humorist Alexandra Petri, it served as the basis for a parody about the absurdities of the U.S. health care system.
This general applicability, Franklin says, derives from the story’s “unsettling open-endedness”:
Jackson deliberately declined to wrap up the ending neatly for her readers, some of whom (in a foreshadowing of the reaction to the finale of The Sopranos) asked whether The New Yorker had accidentally left out an explanatory final paragraph. That’s why it has retained its relevance across the decades: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its unsettling open-endedness. The story works as a mirror to reflect back to its readers their current preoccupations and concerns…
While critical of the right’s book banning efforts, Franklin doesn’t let liberals off the hook. Too many, she says,
have shown a reluctance to tolerate fiction that ruffles their political sensibilities — especially in the world of young adult fiction, where several high-profile writers have canceled or delayed books dealing with subjects that have generated controversy. A few weeks ago, the best-selling author Elizabeth Gilbert decided to delay the publication of a new novel set in the mid-twentieth-century Soviet Union after online commenters, citing the conflict in Ukraine, protested that the novel sounded like it cast Russia in a romantic light.
It’s worth noting that discriminating readers have long seen applying ideological litmus tests to literature as problematic, with even figures like Marx and Engels weighing in. Engels once critiqued a socialist novel for its political correctness and said that the goal of literature should be “the portrayal of real conditions.” Speaking of Balzac, a brilliant writer with royalist sympathies, Engels said that he and Marx had “learned more from him than from all the professional historians, economists, and statisticians put together.”
This is not to say that that all literature disturbs in healthy ways. There are many works that traffic in racist, sexist, and other stereotypes, with the authors going for cheap emotional effects rather than dealing with human complexity. We need to distinguish between these literary efforts (say, Thomas Dixon’s influential The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, to choose an extreme example) and those that disturb through telling truths we don’t want to hear.
I’ve been writing recently how William Faulkner, as disturbing a novelist as one will find, falls in the latter category. Nabokov’s Lolita, a novel that sometimes elicits trigger warnings in college classes for its depiction of a pedophile, discomfits in ways that I think are positive. So does Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, which upset a number feminists when it followed Handmaid’s Tale by showing that women no less than men have a dark side and are capable of great harm. In other words Atwood, who has always avoided the feminist label, was not about to sentimentalize or glorify women for the sake of a political cause. I suspect she would agree with the conclusion of Franklin’s article:
Great writing can entertain, enlighten and even empower, but one of its greatest gifts to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. “A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us,” Kafka once wrote. Stories like “The Lottery” create waves in that frozen sea. We stifle and censor them at our peril.
While I fully agree, I also realize that this presents English teachers with a particular challenge. It’s not easy to go up against state restrictions and repressive school boards. Far easier to teach To Kill a Mockingbird, with its sentimentalized depiction of heroic White saviors and grateful Black dependents, than Faulkner’s Light in August or Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. But we must always keep in mind that literature is not tame, an adjective I borrow from Mr. Beaver in The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe. Imagine the following description of Aslan applied to literature:
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
And later:
He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.
Our students can handle literature’s wildness. More to the point, they need it. If schools only teach what they deem to be safe and tame and if publishers only publish the same, they deprive readers of the axe that is critical to our growth as human beings.
