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Wednesday
I found myself thinking of the bloody battle of Bakhmut as my faculty study group continued its examination of The Iliad this week. Homer captures the horror of war like nobody else, which brought home to me the horror of what is happening in Ukraine.
Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of America’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, has described Bakhmut as “a slaughter-fest for the Russians,” and in that way it is proving a boon to the Ukrainians, who are “attriting” the invading forces in ways that will pay off later. As they have throughout the war, Ukraine has been making full use of NATO intelligence to pinpoint and destroy Russian attackers, which brings me to The Iliad.
In the sections my group is currently discussing, the Greeks—like the Ukrainians—are hunkered down behind barricades as the Trojans attack. But the Greeks, like the Ukrainians, have superior intelligence, although in their case the intelligence comes through satellite technology and reckless Russian cell phone use but Athena.
The situation is as follows. Facing a dire situation, wise counselor Nestor figures that the Greeks must know more about Trojan intentions. He expresses the need as follows:
O my friends, is there no man who, trusting in the daring of his own heart, would go among the high-hearted Trojans? So he might catch some enemy, who straggled behind them, or he might overhear some thing that the Trojans are saying, what they deliberate among themselves…
Diomedes (the muscle) and Odysseus (the brains) volunteer and use night as cover to scout behind Trojan lines. In an unnerving scene, we see the two of them picking their way “through the carnage and through the corpses.” It’s a scenario that those fighting over Bakhmut know only too well.
Now, it so happens that the Trojans are doing the same but, like the Russians, their intelligence-gathering is inferior. It takes the form of one Dolan who, failing to take the same precautions and carrying weapons that are useless for close hand-to-hand combat (a bow and a throwing spear), is detected by the Greeks and easily captured. Odysseus proves a skilled interrogator and extracts valuable information about enemy locations, which in turn leads to the Greeks’ own slaughter-fest:
Grim sounds rose from there as they [the Trojan allies] were stricken with the sword, and the ground reddened with blood. As a lion advancing on the helpless herds unshepherded of sheep or goats pounces upon them with wicked intention so the son of Tydeus attacked the Thracian people until he had killed twelve.
Also like the resourceful Ukrainians, the Greek warriors know when to fall back after an incursion. This knowledge comes from Athena, who advises Diomedes,
Think now, son of the great-hearted Tydeus, of getting back to the hollow ships; else you might go back with men pursuing if there should be some other god to waken the Trojans.
Of course, the Greeks will ultimately use wily tactics—the Trojan horse—to win the war. We will see if Ukrainian tactics can bring about the same end.
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Tuesday
A fascinating New Yorker article about “The Unexpected Grief of a Hysterectomy” has brought to mind a couple of Lucille Clifton poems that express similar sentiments. Clifton expresses poetically what Anna Holmes, writer and founder of the feminist website Jezebel, articulates discursively.
Holmes tells the story of how, although facing a serious problem with fibroids, she resisted a hysterectomy, even though that operation made the most sense. Instead, Holmes chose to have the fibroids surgically removed, only to see them return. At that point, a hysterectomy was her only option.
What puzzles Holmes is why she was so attached to her uterus. She has never had children, nor did she have plans to have any. Nevertheless, she concluded that her uterus “felt important to my identity as a woman.”
Logically, this did not make sense to her. “As a feminist,” she writes, “I’m not supposed to attach so much meaning to my reproductive organs—I am more than my uterus, I would probably argue. For another, did this mean I believe that having a uterus makes me a woman? No, I would certainly say. I don’t.”
And yet, there she was, feeling that losing her uterus was a blow to her female identity. In the article she quotes a wise friend who tells her, “Isn’t it often the case that we can’t believe about ourselves what we can believe about others?”
Holmes mentions various ways people have used to say goodbye to their uteruses (uteri?). There was, for instance, advice from a friend:
“Your uterus has been kind of a dick,” she said. “I want you to write a breakup letter to it and then take a bat to the piñata I’m going to buy and say goodbye to it forever.”
And then there are “celebratory and humorous” approaches:
A few weeks ago, I took a brief glance at Amazon’s Web site. In addition to books about hysterectomies, there are at least half a dozen coloring and activity books (“Don’t Ovary-Act” and “See You Later Ovulator”) and journals (“All My Hysterectomy Shit” and “I’m Sorry Your Uterus Tried to Kill You”). There are T-shirts that say, “Peace Out, Cunt” and “Adioso Uteroso.”
It so happens that none of these worked for her. I’m thinking, however, that the poetry of Lucille Clifton, a fellow African American, might prove effective. Here, for instance, is Clifton’s poem about her own hysterectomy:
poem to my uterus
you uterus you have been patient as a sock while i have slippered into you my dead and living children now they want to cut you out stocking i will not need where i am going where am i going old girl without you uterus my bloody print my estrogen kitchen my black bag of desire where can i go barefoot without you where can you go without me
This poem may or may not resonate with Holmes since, unlike Clifton, she has not used her uterus to have children. “Barefoot” may allude to the phrase “barefoot and pregnant,” which expresses the belief that childbearing is a woman’s chief role—which Clifton, who saw being a professional poet as no less central to her identity as being a mother, would disagree with. Still, childbearing plays a major role in this poem.
But why I think Holmes would find solace in Clifton is that, motherhood aside, Clifton takes seriously the idea that female biology is important to female identity. Clifton, in fact, broke important ground by making female biology a fit subject for poetry, starting with “homage to my hips” and “what the mirror said” (“somebody need a map to understand you,” the speaker tells herself). She continued on with a number of poems about kidneys, breasts, and menstruation. A poem that might speak particularly powerfully to Holmes is one about menopause.
That’s because Clifton articulates a drama not unlike Holmes’s. For all the problems that Clifton’s unusually heavy periods have caused her, she’s sorry to see them go, just as Holmes is sorry to see her fibroid-infested uterus go. Clifton imagines herself as a grandmother looking back and—well, read the poem for yourself:
to my last period
well, girl, goodbye, after thirty-eight years. thirty-eight years and you never arrived splendid in your red dress without trouble for me somewhere, somehow.
now it is done, and i feel just like the grandmothers who, after the hussy has gone, sit holding her photograph and sighing, wasn’t she beautiful? wasn’t she beautiful?
Holmes, who turned the Biblical hussy Jezebel (so the Bible depicts her) into an in-your-face feminist icon, would probably appreciate the analogy. Shaking your head in fond remembrance without denying all the trouble she brought you is a powerful way to move on to your next stage of life.
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Monday
It appears that Rupert Murdoch, upset with the way Trump and Trump-endorsed politicians keep losing elections, wants to move on to another candidate, specifically Florida governor and Trump wannabe Ron DeSantis. People like me worry that DeSantis is just as authoritarian as Trump and could do even more damage since, unlike Trump, he appears disciplined. A Florida judge shares my fears of his authoritarian bent, recently equating with DeSantis with George Orwell’s Big Brother.
The ruling came in response to one of DeSantis’s many attempts to bend Florida education to his will. At issue was a bill that, in the words of NPR, wants to prohibit
schools and workplaces from any instruction that suggests that any individual, by virtue of their race, color, sex or national origin, “bear responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress” on account of historical acts of racism. The bill also forbids education or training that says individuals are “privileged or oppressed” due to their race or sex.
In response to the bill, a group of eight Florida professors “sued representatives of the state higher education system over the bill, calling the legislation ‘racially motivated censorship’ aimed at stifling ‘widespread demands to discuss, study and address systemic inequalities.’”
It was in agreeing with them that the judge cited 1984. Echoing Orwell’s opening line—“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”—Tallahassee U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote,
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,” and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of “freedom.” This is positively dystopian.
The reference to “freedom” is to the bill’s title. While the bill used to be called the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” (the acronym stood for “Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees”), it is now known as Individual Freedom Act. The bill became effective in July.
Some freedom! But of course, the word is also perverted by “the Ministry of Truth” in Big Brother’s society. Winston Smith notices the Ministry’s building, which features, “in elegant lettering,” the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Today we would call Big Brother a rightwing troll or gaslighter. Orwell’s great observation—gleaned from having observed Hitler and Stalin—is that authoritarians pervert language as a way to test loyalty. If you don’t agree with their version of freedom, no matter how absurd, then you are with the enemy. In their world, you either accept that clocks strike thirteen or you are a traitor.
In American politics, Trump perfected this but DeSantis appears to be taking lessons. Fortunately, in this case a judge called him out.
James Tissot, Procession in the Streets of Jerusalem
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Palm Sunday
Yesterday, as a member of our church’s Altar Guild, I spent the morning folding palm crosses in anticipation of today’s services. To further honor the day, I share Mary Oliver’s “The Poet Thinks about a Donkey.”
The donkey Oliver has in mind is the one mentioned in the account of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem in anticipation of the Passover celebrations. Here is Matthew’s account (21:1-11):
When Jesus and his disciples had come near Jerusalem and had reached Bethphage, at the Mount of Olives, Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village ahead of you, and immediately you will find a donkey tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If anyone says anything to you, just say this, `The Lord needs them.’ And he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet, saying,
“Tell the daughter of Zion, Look, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the donkey and the colt, and put their cloaks on them, and he sat on them. A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road, and others cut branches from the trees and spread them on the road. The crowds that went ahead of him and that followed were shouting,
“Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!
Oliver doesn’t normally allude to the Bible in such a specific way—generally her spiritual imagery is more generalized—so this poem stands out. Note how the introverted poet identifies more with the donkey than with the celebrating crowds:
The Poet Thinks about the Donkey
On the outskirts of Jerusalem the donkey waited. Not especially brave, or filled with understanding, he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out into the meadows, leap with delight! How doves, released from their cages, clatter away, splashed with sunlight!
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited. Then he let himself be led away. Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds! And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen. Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark, obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave. I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him, as he lifted one dusty hoof and stepped, as he had to, forward.
The stanza in italics, the second one about horses and doves, captures Oliver’s inner feelings. Her poetry is filled with moments of such spiritual ecstasy, which invariably accompany nature sightings, whether of breaching whales, egrets at dawn, or small wild plums. But as far as her outer action goes, she feels she has far more in common with the “small, dark, obedient” donkey.
Notice that the donkey finds Jesus’s touch to be light and loving. To celebrate the entry of love into one’s soul, dancing isn’t essential. One has but to open one’s heart.
I’m pretty sure that the poem was inspired by one of the great Palm Sunday poems, G.K. Chesterton’s “The Donkey.” The similarities make the contrasts particularly interesting. Here’s Chesterton:
When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born.
With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil’s walking parody On all four-footed things.
The tattered outlaw of the earth, Of ancient crooked will; Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, I keep my secret still.
Fools! For I also had my hour; One far fierce hour and sweet: There was a shout about my ears, And palms before my feet.
Chesterton’s donkey expresses the repressed resentment of one who has been abused whereas Oliver’s articulates the quiet humility of one who doesn’t particularly mind that it’s been overlooked–but who, nevertheless, is grateful to have this chance to serve.
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Friday
A week ago Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker observed that we seem to be stuck in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot as we await a Trump indictment. For years, we have been wondering whether the former president would ever be held accountable for his dodgy behavior as for years he has gotten away with everything from fraud to sexual assault to corruption to an attempted coup d’etat. In the play, Godot—perhaps an allusion to God—never shows up, and we’ve been wondering if, in our case, it will be the same with justice.
As Parker puts it,
His arrest could happen any day now. . . . Or, like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, we could wait forever for Trump to have his day in court.
In the play, the closest we get to hearing from Godot is from a messenger boy who, towards the end, conveys a message:
BOY: (in a rush). Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.
This is like all the hints of possible or pending indictments that we’ve been hearing about for years.
Only, as of yesterday, Godot really has shown up. In the words of The Washington Post account,
A Manhattan grand jury has voted to indict former president Donald Trump, making him the first person in U.S. history to serve as commander in chief and then be charged with a crime, and setting the stage for a 2024 presidential contest unlike any other.
In Beckett’s absurdist vision, the non-appearance of Godot is a comment on the human search for meaning. We look and we look for some deeper significance to our lives, only to come up with nothing. By invoking the play, Parker foregrounds the issue of whether our society and our system of government has any higher meaning. If those with wealth and power are unaccountable, then our ideals ring hollow.
We may have become so cynical concerning Trump as to fear that nothing will change. Even with this indictment, we may fear that Godot, in showing up, will fail to infuse our lives with new meaning. Perhaps Godot is nothing more than a two-bit actor, talking a good game but empty of substance.
Given how cavalier Trump has been about the rule of law —including how he used the presidential pardon to ensure the silence of his corrupt friends—our cynicism is understandable. And we could wish that this particular Trump indictment had been more consequential. Why couldn’t we have started off with his attempt to carry out a coup?
Nevertheless, if justice is shown to apply to all, then the ideal of all being equal before the law will have been served. Justice is a transcendent ideal of the kind that Beckett is questioning. If even a former president can be indicted, perhaps we don’t entirely live in an absurd world.
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Thursday
A month ago a friend (Bruce Baird) alerted me to a New Yorker article about “The End of the English Major.” Actually, Nathan Heller’s essay is about the arts and humanities generally, with English serving as a metonym for all those majors that aren’t social science, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), or degrees connected with vocations. According to Heller, collegiate study of English and history has fallen by a third over the past decade while humanities enrollment overall has declined by 17%.
With the ruthless thoroughness of a New Yorker writer, Nathan Heller shares all the explanations for this state of affairs that he has encountered. To share you any suspense, I can tell you he arrives at no clear answer. Among the reasons given are the following, some of them related:
1. Skyrocketing tuition costs
With college growing increasingly expensive, students are more vocationally minded and want degrees that are clearly linked with specific jobs and careers. The article notes that, while English majors on average “carry less debt than students in other fields,” they also take longer to pay off their debt. As a result, even students drawn toward the humanities sometimes choose others majors just to be safe. As one student put it, the humanities are often seen as “hobby-based” for those who can afford it.
2. Relatedly, a precipitous drop in state funding
This means that universities have to choose where to invest their resources. Often, they are more interested in shinier fields of studies than the traditional humanities.
3. The rise of social media
Many are worried that books can’t compete with the texts, videos, and podcasts available on the internet. As one English professor, who himself admits he reads less fiction now than formerly, observed to Heller, “Go to a play now, and watch the flashing screens an hour in, as people who like to think of themselves as cultured cannot! Stop! Themselves!” To which Heller adds, “Assigning Middlemarch in that climate [is] like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip.”
4. The seeming lack of clear performance metrics in the humanities
One student interviewed by Heller put it this way:
“I think the problem for the humanities is you can feel like you’re not really going anywhere, and that’s very scary,” he said. “You write one essay better than the other from one semester to the next. That’s not the same as, you know, being able to solve this economics problem, or code this thing, or do policy analysis.” This has always been true, but students now recognized less of the long-term value of writing better or thinking more deeply than they previously had. Last summer, Haimo worked at the HistoryMakers, an organization building an archive of African American oral history. He said, “When I was applying, I kept thinking, What qualifies me for this job? Sure, I can research, I can write things.” He leaned forward to check for passing traffic. “But those skills are very difficult to demonstrate, and it’s frankly not what the world at large seems in demand of.”
–Failure of English departments to link literature to students’ life experiences
Needless to say, this is a major concern of mine, although it’s probably not the reason for the precipitous drop in humanities enrollments. I’ll have more to say on this in a future post.
–Overspecialization
This has long been a complaint but, again, it wouldn’t account for why other humanities majors are also seeing enrollment declines.
–Too much focus on “disenchantment”
Some are accusing English professors of taking the enchantment out of literature. I suppose the critics here are referring to deconstruction or historical criticism although the idea that scholars are ruining literature by systematically dissecting it goes back at least to the early part of the 20th century, when German philology invaded British literary studies. To quote Terry Eagleton in “The Rise of English,” the discipline was irrevocably changed when it ceased to be regarded as “idle gossip about literary taste.” Eagleton writes that colleges faced the difficulty of knowing “how to make [English] unpleasant enough to qualify as a proper academic pursuit” but adds, “This, it might be said, is one of the few problems associated with the study of English which have since been effectively resolved.”
–The Obamas
By focusing so much on STEM and the arts with nothing in-between, Barack and Michelle (so the complaint goes) weighted the scales against the humanities. This criticism isn’t really fair, however, since the former president constantly sang the praises of Toni Morrison. And in any event, the arts are suffering from the general decline along with literature.
–The humanities actually aren’t doing that poorly, only their successes are hidden
As Heller explains,
One idea about the national enrollment problem is that it’s actually a counting problem: students haven’t so much left the building as come in through another door. Adjacent fields aren’t included in humanities tallies, and some of them are booming. Harvard’s history-of-science department has seen a fifty-per-cent increase in its majors in the past five years. The humanities creature who recites Cavafy at parties might fade away, but students are still getting their vitamins. There’s a lot of ethics in bioethics, after all.
–Traditional literary study has become stale
Heller:
Some have resigned themselves. “The age of Anglophilia is over,” one late-career English professor told me. “It’s like thinking back to when Latin was the center of the world—the memorization of lines and competing with your friends at Oxford and Eton in quips.” The great age of the novel had served a cloistered, highly regionalized readership, but that, too, had changed. “I don’t think reading novels is now the only way to have a broad experience of the varieties of human nature or the ethical problems that people face,” he said.
There has been some imaginative rethinking here, however. Heller reports that some in the humanities are recommending that their departments
match majors to topics that resonate in the current moment, like climate change and racial justice[.] I wondered aloud whether that was a moving target—the concerns in our headlines today are different from those fifteen years ago—but Kelsey insisted that some causes were here to stay. “I would like to see us come out with better platforms for studying the environmental humanities, migration and ethnicity, and the medical humanities,” he said.
–Changing student demographics, with more students from working class backgrounds
Such students understandably want clear paths to jobs. And in fact, my English Department at a state college (St. Mary’s College of Maryland), with its high percentage of first-generation college students, addresses this issues by emphasizing internships, externships (where students shadow former majors in their jobs), and colloquia where alumni visit campus to tell their experiences in the job world. Nevertheless, as Heller notes,
It is only slightly awkward, then, that this opening of the field has nudged educational incentives away from humanities study. The students whom universities most seek are the ones likeliest to require immediate conversion of their degrees into life change. They need the socioeconomic elevator that college promised them. And they need it the instant they lose institutional support.
–Advanced Placement courses
As Heller explains,
Smart humanities-oriented kids are taking the A.P.s, or studying English or history at community college, so, by the time they make it to four-year colleges, they’ve placed out of humanities requirements: classes in which students often fall in love with the field. In that way, too, students whom the universities are keenest to recruit are pre-sorted away from the humanities.
Fortunately, Heller notes, there is some good news for the humanities. “Career studies,” he points out,
have shown that humanities majors, with their communication and analytical skills, often end up in leadership jobs. To that extent, the value of the educated human touch is likely to hold in a storm of technological and cultural change.
He also notes that those with humanities backgrounds are less likely to be replaced by Artificial Intelligence:
There has been much hand-wringing about ChatGPT and its ability to replicate some composition tasks. But ChatGPT can no more conceive Mrs. Dalloway than it can guide and people-manage an organization. Instead, A.I. can gather and order information, design experiments and processes, produce descriptive writing and mediocre craftwork, and compose basic code, and those are the careers likeliest to go into slow eclipse.
Because I taught at Maryland’s liberal arts college, I have long been aware of the difficulties of convincing students to major in literature. My own efforts to relate literature to my students’ lives led to this blog, where I now try to spread the word more generally. As I see it, this will always be an uphill battle.
But since, as Heller too believes, it is imperative that students have some acquaintance with the humanities, I agree with those who believe we need to reimagine the discipline and to join with other disciplines to get the word out. Rather than despair, humanities teachers just need to be creative.
Tennessee GOP Congressman Andy Ogles, Christmas 2022, whose district recently suffered a mass shooting with assault rifles
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Wednesday
If I write fewer posts about mass shootings in America these days, it’s partly because I’ve become so discouraged, partly because I have no new literary works–or new insights–to apply to the incidents. With the country having averaged a mass shooting a day since the beginning of the year, I feel like Hogarth sitting in his hall after multiple Grendel attacks and crying out, “Rest? What is rest? Sorrow has returned.”
Beowulf, as my longtime readers know, is my go-to work for mass shootings. I shake off my lethargy today to apply the poem to the recent mass slaying in Nashville, where the shooter killed three nine-year-old kids and three adults. Nashville is less than two hours from where I live, and what has been particularly galling has been the attitude of our anti-gun control Congressional representatives. One shrugged the killing off, noting that he home schools his own kids. Another had sent out a photo this past Christmas of his family cheerfully brandishing assault rifles, which it so happens is the gun the Nashville shooter used to kill his victims. For these Republicans, guns are a game, a form of performance art to win votes and raise money, a way of owning the libs, a tragedy that is acceptable because it happens to other people.
The United States may be the most powerful country on earth, but it is unable to stop the violence within. As I note in the post below, reprinted from three years ago, that’s exactly the situation of the Danes in Beowulf.
Reprinted from August 7, 2019
When I launched this blog over 10 years ago, I called it Better Living through Beowulf because Beowulf is the starting text for those of us specializing in British Literature. I used Beowulf to represent all of literature and felt free to write about any literary work that provides insight into the life we are living. Other bloggers do the same with other works and authors, for instance Lucy with Tolstoy Therapy, Lory with Emerald City, and Rachel Barenblat with The Velveteen Rabbi.
While highlighting Beowulf, I didn’t realize how relevant it would prove to be in a world grappling with an unending series of gun attacks. No literary work understands violent eruptions better than Beowulf, making it an essential resource for our time. At the end of this article you can see how often I have turned to Beowulf when writing about mass killings, and my book How Beowulf Can Save America also explores America’s anger problem. Today I repeat ideas I have shared in the past because sometimes one needs to sound like a broken record.
Beowulf is above all a poem about violence—what causes it, the chaos that ensues, and what can be done to counter it. Given the instability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society, the Beowulf poet was well acquainted with the subject. While some of the violence he mentions comes from without (say, Frank, Frisian, and Swedish invasions), he is most interested in the violence that comes from within. Using modern categories, he focuses on domestic rather than foreign terrorism.
The poem’s three monsters, each of which is the manifestation of a different kind of anger, are all locally generated. This is noteworthy because the poem opens with images of political stability. There has been a successful four-king succession, no small thing, and the fourth king has built a magnificent mead hall that would make any foreign invader think twice. It’s like America flexing its military might. Because Hrothgar’s Denmark and the United States are both the reigning superpowers of their time, neither fears a frontal attack.
Yet violence still occurs and in this very mead hall. Grendel is no more a foreigner than those white supremacists who dwell in the dark reaches of the internet, nursing a “hard grievance” and resenting the sounds of other people having a good time—say, Democrats celebrating American diversity. Our own Grendels attack our shopping malls, schools, churches, synagogues, and other places at the heart of our society.
Grendel is the form grievance takes when it turns to violence. He is society’s malcontent, which in Anglo-Saxon society could take the form of a warrior angry about being bypassed, a nephew who thinks he should be king, or a relative of a diplomatic marriage who can’t get over the quarrel the marriage was supposed to solve. All three figures show up in the non-monster parts of the poem, but their fury receives full emotional articulation in the archetype of the monster.
Grendel’s mode of attack resembles any number of the shooters we have seen—they storm into a space and begin shooting (in Grendel’s case, slashing) left and right. The fury of slaughter overtakes them until some strong arm takes them down. Here’s Grendel anticipating the carnage to come:
Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open the mouth of the building, maddening for blood, pacing the length of the patterned floor with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light, flame more than light, flared from his eyes. He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping, a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors quartered together. And his glee was demonic, picturing the mayhem: before morning he would rip life from limb and devour them, feed on their flesh…
The strong arm, by the way, is not “a good guy with a gun.” The NRA’s macho stance—which is actually a sales pitch for buying more guns and is more accurately translated as “a white guy with a gun”—grows out of the very resentment that leads to the violence we are witnessing. When Beowulf enters Hrothgar’s hall, he is affronted by a trash-talking Unferth, who has killed a relative but is still accorded a place of honor. Instead of reaching for his sword, Beowulf makes a strong verbal reply that gets Unferth to back down. It’s a version of how he defeats Grendel: he disarms both figures–literally in Grendel’s case–with a strong grip, which proves more effective than the frantic sword strokes dealt out by his fellow warriors.
We cannot rely on a Beowulf to ride in and save us, although Trump could have an impact if fought the NRA on assault rifles and background checks or if he forcefully renounced white supremacy. For that matter, Republicans in Congress could have an impact if they collectively stood up to Trump. It’s called having a spine.
But because they cower before Grendel’s destructive energy, the shooters in our midst are emboldened and unleash mayhem in our great hall. As a result, we find ourselves in the position of Hrothgar: head in his hands following a second monster attack, he moans, “Rest, what is rest? Sorrow has returned.”
Former Republican Congressman David Jolly, now an Independent, says that Republicans will never approve common sense gun reforms and the only solution is to vote them all out. Beowulf, who always prefers a non-violent response, would approve.
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Tuesday
I’m beginning to understand some of the reasons for my current Faulkner fascination: although Faulkner precedes me by two generations (he was born in 1897, two years before my grandfather), he deconstructs the segregated south of my childhood. I was three when my family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee in 1954, and I grew up thinking that segregation was a permanent fact of life. When I started teaching and saw my Black and White students taking integration for granted, I never ceased to be amazed and gratified.
I’m working my way through Faulkner’s novels (Absalom, Absalom!, Intruder in the Dust,Sanctuary, and The Reivers and I’m on the Libby waitlist for Light in August and The Sound and the Fury) and am also reading about Faulkner. I’m riveted by Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War.
In one of the early chapters, Gorra contrasts Faulkner the man with Faulkner the novelist. While Faulkner the man was a racist like those around him—better than some but a racist nonetheless—Faulkner the novelist brilliantly shows how racism has corrupted both the South and America as a whole.
We see this contrast particularly vividly, Gorra notes, in Faulkner’s mixed message about lynching. In the 1931 short story “Dry September,” the author reveals the dynamics of a horrific lynching in which an innocent Black man is killed. A month after the story appeared, however, Faulkner wrote a public letter defending lynching. The difference between artist and man could not be more starkly set forth.
More on artist vs. individual in a moment. First, the details. “Dry September” shows how a mob, hearing that a spinster has been “attacked, insulted, frightened” by a Black man, works itself up into a frenzy and goes after a random individual. When the town barber Hawkshaw mentions that the man can’t have been night watchman Will Mayes, the mob—now having a name—goes and kills Mayes.
Lest the scene appear a relic of America’s past, it is worth pointing out that Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol on evidence just as bogus. In fact, barroom conversations following Trump’s defeat in 2020 were probably not unlike the ones that Faulkner describes leading up to the lynching. In our terms, the barber would be like someone pointing out to the MAGA faithful that there’s no evidence of significant voter fraud:
“Except it wasn’t Will Mayes,” a barber said. He was a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face, who was shaving a client. “I know Will Mayes. He’s a good nigger. And I know Miss Minnie Cooper, too.”
“What do you know about her?” a second barber said.
“Who is she?” the client said. “A young girl?”
“No,” the barber said. “She’s about forty, I reckon. She ain’t married. That’s why I don’t believe…”
“Believe, hell!” a hulking youth in a sweat-stained silk shirt said. “Wont you take a white woman’s word before a nigger’s?”
“I don’t believe Will Mayes did it,” the barber said. “I know Will Mayes.”
“Maybe you know who did it, then. Maybe you already got him out of town, you damn nigger-lover.”
“I don’t believe anybody did anything. I don’t believe anything happened.”…
“Then you are a hell of a white man,” the client said. He moved under the cloth. The youth had sprung to his feet.
“You don’t?” he said. “Do you accuse a white woman of lying?”
And further on:
The barber said in his mild, stubborn tone: “I ain’t accusing nobody of nothing. I just know and you fellows know how a woman that never…”
“You damn nigger-lover!” the youth said.
“Shut up, Butch,” another said. “We’ll get the facts in plenty of time to act.”
“Who is? Who’s getting them?” the youth said. “Facts, hell!”
The same “facts” that galvanized a mob to lynch Mike Pence send forth the men in Faulkner’s story to lynch Will Mayes. And unlike the January 6 insurrectionists, these men succeed.
Gorra, however, then tells the following story of what happened following the story’s publication. A letter appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal, written by a Black reader
to thank the white women of Mississippi for organizing an anti-lynching society. In reply, Faulkner sent in a rambling, incoherent, and apparently unmotivated screed that effectually contradicted the story he’d just published. “No balanced man can…hold any moral brief for lynching,” he writes, and yet mobs, “like our juries…have a way of being right.” For try as he might he cannot remember any case, outside of fiction, in which “a man of any color and with a record beyond reproach, suffer[ed] violence at the hands of men who knew him.”
Gorra concludes from this dramatic contrast that
Faulkner could not see the racial ideology of his world—could not even really think—except when writing fiction. He could stand outside that ideology only by first assigning it to a character. He inhabited those beliefs by inhabiting another person. Then he saw them clearly, and in that act he became better than he was.
Of the short story “Dry September,” Gorra notes that Faulkner could not “have written so clearly of mob psychology…without knowing it from within, without feeling or recognizing the force of its communal roar.”
The miracle of great fiction is that somehow, in the act of writing, the author becomes a better person than he or she is in real life. And that’s how it is for readers as well. When I’m reading Tolstoy or Hugo or Austen or—yes—Faulkner, I become open to human nobility and human possibility in ways that can evade me in the rough and tumble of everyday life. To borrow a word invented by cartoon character Lisa Simpson, I am “embiggened.”
In my case, however, I then try to live up to this glimpse of a better self, using it to guide my personal growth. That’s why I see reading literature as vital to the human community. Unfortunately, there have been numerous authors who don’t appear to have personally benefited from their miraculous creations.
I’m reading Gorra in part to discover where Faulkner ended up. Perhaps, although James Baldwin wasn’t impressed, Faulkner became less of a racist the more he wrote his books. Certainly, given that there were Mississippians who called him an “n-word lover,” perhaps his sentiments moderated some. In any event, I’ll report back when I get further into the book.
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Monday
Katy Giebenhain, a poet I met when she was the poetry and theology editor for the Seminary Ridge Review, advocates for access to essential medicines. In this role she alerted me to a poem where she channels Shakespeare to chastise the pharmaceutical company Vertex for “leaving cystic fibrosis patients with crushing drug costs.” The behavior is reprehensible because, as Giebenhain points out,
the carcanet of drugs that secured the company’s current profits and reputation exists because of massive early-stage nonprofit funding launched by patient families….The infusion of support to keep talented teams focused on developing these drugs was unlike anything experienced on the planet.
Or course, we’re not surprised at unscrupulous practices from drug companies. Big Pharma is notorious, of course, for hiking the cost of insulin, despite the inventor’s intentions, and Sackler-owned Purdue Pharma got America hooked on oxycontin. (While the Sackler family was fined $6 billion for its irresponsible behavior, it took in $10 billion in profits from the drug.) Most recently, we’ve learned that Moderna, which benefitted from government support during the Covid pandemic, is planning to charge $130 for a COVID vaccine that costs only $3 to make. (Moderna made $19 billion in profits last year.)
It’s enough to make one vent, which is what Giebenhain does in “Shakespeare Addresses Vertex Executives.” While she told me she didn’t have any particular play in mind, the Bard is a master at having characters deliver insults. There’s Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew (“Away thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant”) and Falstaff (“Thou art a very ragged wart”), but my favorite is Kent unloading on the shameless sycophant Oswald:
Kent Fellow, I know thee. Oswald What dost thou know me for? Kent A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.
Now Giebenhain:
Shakespeare Addresses Vertex Executives
Rascals. Wallet-pressing blockheads. Ye did not build this alone. Reconsider. Be your brilliant selves instead – not rascals, not wallet-pressing blockheads. Reconsider! Be your brilliant selves instead of nook-shotten, overblown rascals. Wallet-pressing blockheads, Ye did not build this alone.
In his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, Barack Obama pointed out, “Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Giebenhain makes the same point, only with a bit more spice.
