The Left Wants to Cancel Orwell? Nope

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2023

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Wednesday

A couple of weeks ago I posted about how people like Donald Trump, Jr., Elon Musk, and other neo-fascists are attempting to appropriate George Orwell’s 1984 for their purposes. In furtherance of this goal they are now, according to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, attacking the left for attempting to cancel Orwell. More on that in a moment.

In my post I quoted FrameLab’s Gil Duran on the absurd way they are using Orwell:

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

Since Duran’s article appeared, we have seen Trump acknowledging that he would be dictator “on day one” if he is elected and his aides promising to go after the press. In the words of Kash Patel, a chief of staff in the Defense Department and member of the National Security Council under Trump, “We will go out and find the conspirators not just in government, but in the media” (this over the “stolen” 2020 election).

Meanwhile Ohio senator J.D. Vance wants the Department of Justice to investigate Washington Post contributing editor Robert Kagan for his opinion column warning readers that “a Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable.” Vance said that Kagan’s article falls under the DOJ’s jurisdiction to intervene in cases of invitation to insurrection, manifestation of criminal conspiracy, and an attempt to bring about civil war.

Basically, the MAGA right is saying that free speech has no limits for me and my friends but you are criminally liable when you use it. Or more succinctly, “liberty for me but not for thee.”

Author Sandra Newman’s article in the Post notes that the MAGA right is using a new biography of Orwell’s first wife as proof that liberals are trying to cancel Orwell, making them the authoritarians, not MAGA. They point to how biographer Anna Funder has described Orwell as “sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic, sometimes violent.” Nor is Funder the only one who has noticed Orwell’s dark side, which includes “his shabby treatment of his wife, his alleged attempt to rape a childhood friend, his homophobic remarks and his colonial service.”

MAGA critics have accused Newman herself of canceling Orwell through her feminist novel Julia: A Retelling of George Orwell’s 1984. And it’s true that she acknowledges the book to have blind spots that can be linked to Orwell’s life:

The evil Party in the book imposes a cartoonish version of feminism on its members, forbidding perfume and makeup, and forcing women to wear gender-neutral overalls and short hair. When Julia and Winston find a hideaway where they can safely express themselves, for him it means voicing his political opinions; for her it means putting on pretty dresses and making cups of tea for him.

More startling, Winston imagines murdering women on several occasions. Before he ever speaks to Julia, he has fantasized about raping and killing her. Julia says of the women’s hostel where she lives, “Always in the stink of women! How I hate women!” and chides Winston for not following through on his idea of killing his wife.

But—and this is a very big “but”—one doesn’t cancel a book because it’s got some bad in it. She herself wants us to continue reading 1984 because its virtues outweigh its flaws:

However bad Orwell’s attitudes toward women were, the warning he gave us in 1984 was not that society might someday become so twisted that women would criticize him. His novel was a warning against the kind of leaders who call their opponents “vermin,” leaders who want to punish people for having the “wrong” opinions or being of the “wrong” ethnicity. It was written about leaders who become cult figures, whose idealized image is plastered everywhere as a symbol of belonging, who hold rallies at which their followers join to scream in ecstatic hatred. It was written about a world in which such leaders could avail themselves of advanced technology, in which propaganda and surveillance were unavoidable and ubiquitous.

In other words, those on the right are engaging in doublethink when they accuse the non-authoritarian left of an Orwellian cancellation of Orwell. “What’s Orwellian,” Newman says, “is using his work to defend the people who are moving us toward the political horror he most feared.”

Literary scholar Wayne Booth, in his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction,” is smart in his handling of flawed masterpieces. Contending that we should regard books as friends, he says that just as our friends aren’t perfect, so are many beloved works. And as with friends, we factor the imperfections into the way we deal with them.

To be sure, if it turns out that the friendship is truly noxious, we should end it—there are books that are out-and-out bad for us—but in the case of 1984, the warning against dictatorship is so powerfully presented that we can separate it out from the novel’s limitations.

People do the same with other works all the time, with Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Taming of the Shrew coming immediately to mind. We don’t wholesale reject Shakespeare, or even the plays themselves, because of their problematic images of Jews and women. Instead, we enter into nuanced discussions, seeking to separate out the good from the not-so-good.

I sometimes wonder, while watching how Trumpist authoritarians use 1984 to accuse their enemies of authoritarianism, whether there’s a silver lining here. The French 17th century moralist François de La Rochefoucauld once wrote that “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue,” the point being that when vice clothes itself in the vestments of virtue, virtue still has the upperhand. If Trumpists claim that freedom is a good thing, even though they then interpret that to mean freedom to oppress other people, freedom itself is celebrated. And once it is, then it’s harder to argue against freedom to love who you want, freedom to make your own decisions about your body, freedom to speak out against injustice—or even freedom just to assert that 2+2=4.

The MAGA right hasn’t yet gotten to the 1984 stage of arguing that “freedom is slavery” and that only mindless obedience to a dictator is true freedom. And while they may get there, so far most Americans still embrace the “self-evident truth” that they have a right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Most Americans still push back against abortion bans and contraception bans and book bans and LGBTQ+ bans.

In other words, most of us are not yet contending that 2+2=5.

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Trump as Dracula and Ancient Mariner

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2023

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Tuesday

Because I switched from The New York Times to the Washington Post after their hatchet job on Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election, I no longer have access to the columns of Maureen Dowd. Which is a pity because, even when I disagreed with her, I always appreciated her literary references. Recently I came across someone quoting a passage from a Dowd column where she piled one allusion on top of another:

No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever.

The image of Trump as a blood-sucking vampire lurking in his castle works for me. And the idea of his coming back from the dead seems fitting as well given that Trump was seen as down-and-out after his January 6 coup attempt. Would Mitch McConnell have persuaded colleagues to find him guilty in the impeachment hearings if he could have foreseen that Trump would be the 2024 GOP nominee for president?

It’s worth noting that Dracula is as much of a narcissist as Trump. Here he is telling Jonathan Harker about his dictatorial ancestor:

They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! What good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys, and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords, can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach.

A dictator from day one, in other words. 

Dracula has the same effect upon Harper that Trump has upon many of his critics:

As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

Dracula, like Trump, has his fanatical supporters: the Romani, who attempt to protect him when Van Helsing and company track him down. The good news is that, in the end, he is decapitated and stabbed in the heart, at which point he crumbles to dust. Will Trump crumble away with these court hearings. We should be so lucky.

The albatross, of course, comes from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. For having shot the albatross, a benign and friendly bird that is doing harm to no one, the mariner has the bird hung around his neck (no small burden given that albatrosses are huge birds). Think of the albatross as America’s multicultural democracy. Killing the bird leads to a crisis aboard the ship, which happens to be our case as well. Pray that Trump doesn’t get a second shot at the albatross.

The mariner is able to find redemption through repentance. No one thinks there is any chance that Trump will do the same.  

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Soliloquies Changed Us Fundamentally

By Robin Bates | Published: December 10, 2023
Branagh as Hamlet, “To be or not to be…”

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Monday

In my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of the World,  I look today at the importance he attaches to Hamlet’s great soliloquy over whether or not to end his life. Such soliloquies help us see (in the words of transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson) “the infinitude of the private man.” Through their identification with Hamlet and his heirs, Fletcher writes, audiences and readers were able to feel connected to “every person on earth.” And from there (so goes the transcendentalist credo) the soul stretched “to include every tree, every star, everything in the galaxy.”

As Emerson puts it in his poem “Each and All,”

Beauty through my senses stole;
I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

How is the “to be or not to be” soliloquy a breakthrough? Fletcher says that engaging in a back-and-forth interior dialogue has “an extraordinary neural effect.” It makes our brain feel “I am the character asking the questions. I am Hamlet.” Here’s the opening of the speech if you need reminding:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. 

The brain goes on alert when we have such internal conflict, Fletcher says, shouting out to us, “Hey! You’re fighting with yourself! You need to sort out which part of you is right!” This warning in turn

rouses our self-awareness, reminding us that we’re not part of the undivided flow of life. We’re a distinct entity with our own individual drives and needs and those drives and needs could be compromised if we don’t resolve our inner conflict…Biologically speaking, self-awareness is thus a tool of self-preservation It makes us aware that we have a self so that we can protect that self by stepping back from life’s flow to act more coherently.

“The sheer experience of being mentally torn between ‘To be or not to be,’” Fletcher continues, “will make our brain feel that part of us is Shakespeare’s prince.”

While Fletcher acknowledges that people felt for characters prior to Hamlet—say, for Achilles and Antigone—he says that Shakespeare’s prince took us “beyond caring about characters.” From henceforth that possibility existed that “we would become them.”

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Harold Bloom’s idea that Shakespeare invented the human. As he writes in his book on the subject,

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

Fletcher gives us another way of understanding how this invention happened, at least with Hamlet.

Then he provides instances of subsequent literary inventors building on Shakespeare’s soliloquy. For instance, 21 years after Shakespeare’s death, there was Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, in which we see the title character struggling “between the honor demanded by his father and the love demanded by his betrothed”:

My father or my betrothed? Love or honor?
Duty’s harsh bonds or the heart’s sweet tyranny?
Either my happiness dies, or my name is ruined;
One is bitter, the other unthinkable.

The moment is so powerful that theater patrons attended the play night after night. Some, Fletcher reports, stood upon their gallery seats and chanted these lines in unison with the actor. As he explains, “The audience had literally become the character. Their lives had fused with his.”

This evening was so unprecedented, Fletcher says, that the civic authorities became perturbed, unsettled by this new force that had been released into the world. “Fearing that Le Cid might herald a social revolution,” he writes, “the king’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, censored the play for being a dangerous novelty.”

The next step in the innovation was the novel, and Fletcher mentions Robinson Crusoe, Sorrows of Young Werther, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In each work, we see characters wrestling with themselves—Crusoe between duty to his father and his hunger for adventure; Werther between his love for Charlotte and his admiration for Charlotte’s betrothed; and Huck on his duty to report Jim to the authorities and his urge to free him (even if it means going to hell).

In fact, first-person novels specialize in the drama of the soliloquy. One of my favorite examples occurs at that key moment when Jane Eyre wrestles with whether or not to become Rochester’s mistress:

While [Rochester] spoke my very conscience and reason turned traitors against me, and charged me with crime in resisting him. They spoke almost as loud as Feeling: and that clamored wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”

Still indomitable was the reply—“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

Novels, Fletcher says, “upgraded the soliloquy by accident. Their authors didn’t craft a new literary mechanism to insert into Hamlet; they simply deleted the stage and the persons upon it…By eliminating the physical element that disrupted the soliloquy’s identification effect, the novel added via subtraction.”

Fletcher adds one more novel to his discussion. What stands out about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is that the soliloquies multiply. Not only does Scout soliloquize but she observes “other characters as they soliloquize.” At which point, Scout identifies with those characters, prompting our brain, through Scout, to identify with them too. Scout finds herself identifying with two people who are also torn, Atticus (who talks about his inner conflicts) and Boo Radley (who’s conflicted state we see in his advance/retreat behavior). At the end of the novel, Scout comes to understand Boo:

Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.

In this remarkable moment, Fletcher writes,

Scout realizes that she’s come to identify with two other people. She sees through her father’s eyes—Atticus was right—as she stands in Boo’s shoes. And while she is perceiving two minds in one, we the reader are experiencing three minds in one. “This is multiple times the identification provided by Hamlet,” Fletcher writes. “It’s Emerson’s greater soul, expanded, giving us an intuition of the humanity beyond…and beyond…and beyond.”

What we see, in this process, is “not our fleshly desires, but the more rarefied elements of our consciousness: higher meaning, eternal truth, universal justice.” And the intuition of these cosmic values “can give our brain purpose in times of peace and strength in times of disaster.” It becomes possible to follow Martin Luther King’s injunction to “respond to hate with love.”

Fletcher adds that, when we extend that love, “one last wonder occurs”:

As modern psychologists have learned, nothing boosts our neural happiness more reliably, more deeply, or more enduringly than acts of generosity. So by giving our love to others, we really do receive ourselves. Like…the transcendentalists, we find connection to a greater human soul.

So if you find yourself losing faith in that soul, Fletcher has a ready solution: go read a novel. “Anytime that you notice yourself identifying with a character who seems nothing like you,” he says, you will probably be responding to some version of a soliloquy. 

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Light in a Time of Darkness

By Robin Bates | Published: December 9, 2023
Gerritt van Honthorst, Adoration of the Shepherds (1622)

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Spiritual Sunday

Here’s an Advent poem that we need pretty much every year at this time (not to mention the rest of the year as well). Author Allan Boesak is a South African pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church who worked to end apartheid. I like how, by folding passages from scripture into the poem, Boesak highlights the poetry of the gospel writers.

Advent Credo
By Allan Boesak

It is not true that creation and the human family are doomed to destruction and loss—
This is true: For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life;

It is not true that we must accept inhumanity and discrimination, hunger and poverty, death and destruction—
This is true: I have come that they may have life, and that abundantly.

It is not true that violence and hatred should have the last word, and that war and destruction rule forever—
This is true: Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and the government shall be upon his shoulder, his name shall be called wonderful councilor, mighty God, the Everlasting, the Prince of peace.

It is not true that we are simply victims of the powers of evil who seek to rule the world—
This is true: To me is given authority in heaven and on earth, and lo I am with you, even until the end of the world.

It is not true that we have to wait for those who are specially gifted, who are the prophets of the Church before we can be peacemakers—
This is true: I will pour out my spirit on all flesh and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions and your old men shall have dreams.

It is not true that our hopes for liberation of humankind, of justice, of human dignity of peace are not meant for this earth and for this history—
This is true: The hour comes, and it is now, that the true worshipers shall worship God in spirit and in truth.

So let us enter Advent in hope, even hope against hope. Let us see visions of love and peace and justice. Let us affirm with humility, with joy, with faith, with courage: Jesus Christ—the life of the world.

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Beowulf’s Lessons in How to Grieve

By Robin Bates | Published: December 7, 2023
Henryk Siemiradzki, Funeral of a Rus Noble (1883)

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Friday

Last week, I wrote about Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature opening my eyes on how Hamlet provides us with a powerful means to grieve. It also has helped me understand how I myself used Beowulf to grieve following the death of my oldest son.

Beowulf is as much a poem about grieving as it is about fighting, which makes sense when you think about violence in the culture. Grendel’s Mother grieves over the death of her son (she’s the archetype of vengeful grief), and after she gets her revenge, we see Hrothgar grieving for the man she kills. (“Rest, what is rest, sorrow has returned,” he tells Beowulf.) In the tale of Finn, Hengest grieves the death of his fallen lord Hnaef. Hrethel, who loses his son in a hunting accident, climbs into bed and never gets out again. The “last veteran” retreats into his treasure hoard after everyone around him has died, becoming (as I read the scene) a human dragon. And my reading of the poem’s ending is that Beowulf, upon looking back over his life and seeing a long string of deaths, is himself in danger of scaly and hard.

In this reading of the poem, two of the three monsters are connected with grieving, with Grendel’s Mother being a hot anger response and the Dragon being a sullen withdrawal response. But as I have noted, Grendel’s Mother and the Dragon are coin sides of the same emotion: after killing Hrothgar’s companion, she becomes a dragon, retreating to her underwater lair, and the dragon, when triggered, comes charging out his cave to burn down everything around him.

When Hrothgar sinks into grief, Beowulf’s first recommendation is revenge therapy. “”Wise sir, do not grieve. It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” he says before concluding his speech by describing such mourning as unmanly: “Endure your troubles today. Bear up and be the man I expect you to be” (trans. Seamus Heaney).

But as Fletcher points out in Wonderworks, Hamlet reveals the emptiness of revenge therapy. The problem with typical revenge stories, he points out, is that they suggest that the solution to grief is doing something. In Beowulf, he might point out, Beowulf is telling Hrothgar that the revenge plot just needs more plot.

Shakespeare, however, understands this is not enough and gives us a play where, for large stretches, there doesn’t seem to be any plot. Discussing the “strange plotlessness” of the play, Fletcher points out that Hamlet doesn’t behave like a character in a traditional revenge tragedy. Instead, he wanders around the castle with a book while delivering long soliloquies, raving about his inner doubts, and venting his disgust at life. In fact, he wanders so far from the typical revenge plot that the ghost of his father returns to get him back on track. “This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose,” he tells his son.

Grieving, in other words, requires more than revenge—or, from another perspective, it requires less.

As I look back at the weeks following Justin’s death, I realize I picked up this lesson from Beowulf. For all of Beowulf’s can-do spirit, when he leaps into the mere (lake) to confront Grendel’s mother, for the first time we see him passive. Because the monster has him in her grip, he can do nothing. Sea monsters strike against his chest armor and he is helpless against them. The lesson I took from this when I reread the poem two weeks after the drowning—I had returned to a book I was writing on various classics as my therapy—was that I just needed to let the monster take me wherever she would and not fight back. As I write in that book (which will come out in the fall),

“I don’t know where this grieving is going to take me,” I remember saying to myself, “but I will follow her wherever she leads me…” Following grief’s lead, I was to discover, meant accepting whatever she dished out to me each day. Sometimes I was furious, sometimes I was sad, and often I was unimaginably tired, experiencing a bone fatigue that nothing could assuage. In each case I didn’t fight it. I just figured that anger or depression or fatigue were on the menu for that day.

I picked up the same lesson from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I was also writing about in the summer following Justin’s death. Early in the poem, in what I tell my students is comparable to a diagnosis of terminal cancer, Gawain knows he only has a year left to live. After all, he can’t survive the return axe blow from the Green Knight, with whom he is having a beheading contest. At first Gawain tries to fill up the intervening time with action—which is to say, with plot. And while it first appears that (unlike in Hamlet), we get lots of plot, that plot is presented in such a way as to be virtually meaningless. Basically Gawain is presented with one damn adventure after another as he rides to keep his rendezvous with death:

Many a cliff must he climb in country wild;
Far off from all his friends, forlorn must he ride;
At each strand or stream where the stalwart passed
T’were a marvel if he met not some monstrous foe,
And that so fierce and forbidding that fight he must.
So many were the wonders he wandered among
That to tell but the tenth part would tax my wits.
Now with serpents he wars, now with savage wolves,
Now with wild men of the woods, that watched from the rocks,
Both with bulls and with bears, and with boars besides,
And giants that came gibbering from the jagged steeps.
Had he not borne himself bravely, and been on God’s side,
He had met with many mishaps and mortal harms.
(trans. Marie Borroff)

The actions that make a knight a knight no longer have significance in the face of death. It’s like someone continuing to do his or her job—let’s say, writing up reports—after the cancer diagnosis. The poet says that his wits are being taxed but it’s more like he has lost all interest. After all, other things are more important.

Beowulf’s descent into the depths of the mere has its equivalent in Gawain being lost in a dark wood (to use Dante’s phrasing):

…By a mountain next morning he makes his way
Into a forest fastness, fearsome and wild;
High hills on either hand, with hoar woods below,
Oaks old and huge by the hundred together.
The hazel and the hawthorn were all intertwined
With rough raveled moss, that raggedly hung,
With many birds unblithe upon bare twigs
That peeped most piteously for pain of the cold.
The good knight on Gringolet glides thereunder
Through many a marsh and mire, a man all alone…

Think of Gawain–or anyone grieving for either a loved one or for him/herself–as those unblithe (sorrowful) birds peeping most piteously.

My next project, The Green Knight’s Guide to Grieving, will take up this work so I’ll put it aside for now. Returning to Beowulf, I get a better sense from Fletcher’s Hamlet discussion how Beowulf helped me grieve. In addition to guiding me into a plotless space, it also let me know that there’s no magic bullet to ending grieving.

I thought at one point that the manner in which Beowulf kills Grendel’s Mother might provide an answer. The sword, which was forged by giants in the golden age before the flood, was (as I interpreted it) a cause greater than oneself. For Beowulf, the sword represents the warrior ethos while for me it meant my family, my students, my college, and my community. If I gave myself over to them, I hoped I would find peace.

It took a student undergoing her own grieving to point out what I was getting wrong. I quote from Erica, whose mother was dying and who took up my suggestion that Beowulf might speak to her emotional turbulence. She wrote that the author of Beowulf, having “no real solution for the problem of grief, simply created the sword as a way to escape a real answer, a real struggle.” Because “neither the poet nor the society understood or felt comfortable enough to really feel grief,” she said, “Beowulf hid behind his armor and his weapons, under the pretext that he was on the good side and grief was on the bad side.”

Only at the end of the poem, Erica continued, do we see an end to grieving. From this she took away the lesson that “grief will get you. If not now, it will come later, and denying yourself the emotional freedom to be honest with your own heart will only work against you in the end.” And she added, “Grief is not always a bad thing to feel; it allows you to come to terms with, and reconcile with, things in your life that cause you pain. In this way you grow and mature with greater wisdom, and even [develop] coping skills.”

Thanks to Erica and to Fletcher’s book, I now see that Beowulf is more of a unified whole when it comes to grieving. Fletcher says that Hamlet is finally able to move past grieving when, seeing Laertes mourning Polonius and Ophelia, he “acknowledges that someone can feel like him.” When we see, in this other mourner, that “we’re not alone in our sorrow” and that a wider public “understands what it is to lose someone who can never be replaced,” we experience relief. “With their understanding,” Fletcher writes, the public “helps not only to support us through our bereavement, but also to relieve our anxiety that we haven’t done enough to commemorate our dead.”

Fletcher adds that

the relief deepens when the public then carries our intended meaning beyond us into future days and places. As that shared remembrance spreads forth, the deep centers of our guilt network gently relax. We come to see that we don’t need to devote our every waking hour to mourning remembrance. We can return to the rhythms of our daily lives, secure in the emotional discovery that a memorial exists in a human community far vaster than ourselves.

So sorrowful warriors could have used Beowulf to work through their own grief issues. First they would have seen Beowulf open himself to Wiglaf, accepting his help in fighting the dragon—which is to say bitterness and withdrawal. Then they would have seen a woman keening for the fallen king:

A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
A Geat woman’s with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst fears, a wild litany of nightmare and lament…

Finally, they would have seen the Geats constructing a marker, one that will guide sailors through dark seas:

Then the Geat people began to construct
Beowulf’s barrow a mound on a headland, high and imposing,
a marker that sailors could see from far away…

Before dying, Hamlet asks Horatio for a different kind a monument, a sharing of his story. Fletcher points out that “once again, a public memorial is required”:

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

In Beowulf, we see the hero’s story being told:

Then twelve warriors rode around the tomb,
chieftain’s sons, champions in battle,
all of them distraught, chanting in dirges,
mourning his loss as a man and a king.
They extolled his heroic nature and exploits
and gave thanks for his greatness; which was the proper thing,
for a man should praise a prince whom he holds dear
and cherish his memory when that moment comes
when he has to be convoyed from his bodily home.
So the Geat people, his hearth companions,
sorrowed for the lord who had been laid low.
They said that of all the kings upon the earth
he was the man most gracious and fair-minded,
kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.

There are different kinds of memorials. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, I determined that I would reach out to suffering students since I now knew what it was to have suffered. Indeed, I might not have guided Erica to Beowulf to explore her own grieving had I not gone through my own experience.

But there was another kind of public memorial as well. Julia and I set up an international exchange scholarship in Justin’s name. 23 students from Slovenia, where I had a pair of Fulbright fellowships, have attended St. Mary’s College of Maryland for a semester, living with us as they did so, and a like number of American students have studied in Ljubljana. When we visited Slovenia last year, we joined up with many of these former students and learned about their lives, which have included careers, partners, sometimes children. Many told us that their semester at St. Mary’s was a high point in their lives.

In seeing them, we were able to see the future that we were denied with Justin. And were comforted.

Previous post on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks
Hamlet Taught Us a New Way to Grieve
George Eliot’s Humanism
My Brilliant Friend, a Cure for Loneliness
Stream of Consciousness’ Healing Powers
Self-Satire’s Medicinal Powers
How Lit Inspires Courage and Love
Got a Problem? Call a Poet
Lit’s Neurological Benefits

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Dec. 7 & Watching One’s Son Go to War

By Robin Bates | Published: December 6, 2023
W. H. Johnson, Off to War (ca. 1942-44)

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Thursday

December 7, the day that will live in infamy, was always an important date to my parents. My father was 18 at the time, my mother 16, and they often commemorated Pearl Harbor Day at this time of year through the poem they chose for their weekly poetry column.

My father would be drafted a few months after the Japanese attack and was sent to Europe as an interpreter, serving first in Normandy and later in Munich. My mother, of course, observed the war from stateside but it shaped her view of the world no less than my father’s. It is from a perspective closer to hers that today’s poem comes.

The speaker in Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the sonnet-ballad” is a mother whose son is off fighting. Or as the speaker puts it, “they took my lover’s tallness off to war, / Left me lamenting.” In her view, her son has been lured away by “coquettish death,” and war—with its “possessive arms” (a pun) and beauty—can make a man change. The rhetorical question that the poem asks in the first and last lines presumably invites the answer “nowhere.” After all her son “won’t be coming back here any more” and her heart-cup is empty.

Although some people refer to World War II as “the great war,” I always think of documentarist Ken Burn’s description of it as “the worst war.” My father, when he talked about it, saw nothing glorious about it. For him, it was always an utter waste, even though he was glad to see fascism defeated.

the sonnet-ballad
By Gwendolyn Brooks

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover’s tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won’t be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, “Yes.”
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

One other story given that the soldier here is African American. Sometime during the war–I’m not sure whether in France or in Germany–my father did Military Police patrol with two others, a White southerner and an Black serviceman from Chicago. The White wouldn’t talk to the Black so my father served as a kind of intermediary. The experience was formative: shocked by the man’s racism, my father would become a passionate supporter of the Civil Rights movement.

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Pachinko and the Miracle of Teaching

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2023


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Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Burns on December (and Austen on Burns)

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

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Tuesday

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

Thou Gloomy December
By Robert Burns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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George Eliot’s Humanism

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

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Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of it for you and me.

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

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

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