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Monday
To ward off fascism, the number one rule of Yale historian and authoritarianism expert Tim Snyder is “Do not obey in advance.” Snyder points out that, when Hitler came to power, most Germans voluntarily surrendered their allegiance to him. He observes that
doing what Trump wants in advance only makes it more likely that Trump will have power, and only teaches him that you are easy to intimidate. You are giving the authoritarian power he would not otherwise have.
Unfortunately, the owners of the Washington Post and the L.A. Times are already doing just that, breaking with custom by refusing to endorse a presidential candidate in this most consequential of elections. In the process they are trashing the reputations of two of journalism’s crown jewels. The Post, which once exposed corruption at the highest levels, has suddenly capitulated to a dictator wannabe, perhaps because owner Jeff Bezos is worried that Trump’s plan to levy tariffs will devastate Amazon. Maybe he thinks that if he plays nice with Trump now, Trump will back off if he regains office.
The Post’s best columnists are in full revolt—apparently the editorial endorsing Kamala Harris was being penned when Bezos pulled it—and the editorial page editor of the L.A. Times resigned as well after its owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, pulled the same stunt.
When push comes to shove, in other words, billionaire newspaper owners will abandon their sacred trust and put their commercial interests first. So much for the Times’s declaration that “our mission is to inform, engage and empower.” Or the Post’s that “democracy dies in darkness.”
People have been pointing out that the corporate media has been sane-washing Trump for a while now, and these editorial decisions make clear the reason why. Editorial boards, even when faced with a fascist who attempted a coup, have been trying to hold off their owners.
In the end, sadly, all that placating has come to naught.
I think of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s rage when he heard (erroneously, as it turned out) that another fabled institution was about to be desecrated. In 1830 the Boston Globe mistakenly reported that the U.S.S. Constitution—a.k.a. Old Ironsides—was going to be scrapped. Holmes’s poem helped make sure that the fabled warship would be saved from the scrap heap, and it is now the oldest commissioned naval warship still afloat.
We need such poems today to save our newspapers. Here’s the poem:
Old Ironsides By Oliver Wendell Holmes
Ay, tear her tattered ensign down! Long has it waved on high, And many an eye has danced to see That banner in the sky; Beneath it rung the battle shout, And burst the cannon’s roar;— The meteor of the ocean air Shall sweep the clouds no more!
Her deck, once red with heroes’ blood Where knelt the vanquished foe, When winds were hurrying o’er the flood And waves were white below, No more shall feel the victor’s tread, Or know the conquered knee;— The harpies of the shore shall pluck The eagle of the sea!
O, better that her shattered hulk Should sink beneath the wave; Her thunders shook the mighty deep, And there should be her grave; Nail to the mast her holy flag, Set every thread-bare sail, And give her to the god of storms,— The lightning and the gale!
The Washington Post was a meteor of the ocean air when it took on Richard Nixon, and it has done notable service since. This time, however, harpies of the shore have gotten to it. Plucking eagles is a specialty of Trump-enabling billionaires.
Update: Jonathan Last of the Bulwark informs us that it’s not tariffs but a rocket company that Bezos is worried about–and that he knows that “bending the kneed to Trump” is a smart play with no downside:
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
And Last adds,
The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
Bezos has therefore “sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.”
Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Healing of the Blind Man
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Sunday
Each time the Gospel reading in our church features an account of Jesus curing someone, I turn to Lory Hess’s essential book When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey through Healing Stories in the Bible. Hess responds to each of these stories with a poem, a spiritual interpretation, and an account of how the story has addressed her own version of the illness. With the story of blind Bartimaeus, Hess shows how we don’t have to be blind for Jesus’s healing miracle to be applicable.
The story occurs in Mark 10:46-52:
Jesus and his disciples came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
Hess notes that blindness can be spiritual as well as physical:
The greatest danger for the human today…is that we will lose our sense of life, that we will no longer be able to choose life over death because we cannot tell the difference between them, or we actually prefer the state of death to life. It is a crisis of perception and discernment that requires us to assess the way in which we see.
Hess goes on to say that there are two kinds of seeing,
one that is suited to the sense world and one to the spiritual world, and neither is better than the other. The sickness, or the ‘guilt’, comes in when we confuse the two, when we cannot pass from one to the other when necessary or apply them in appropriate ways. True sickness lies in not knowing one is sick, and true blindness in not knowing one is blind.
Through healing Bartimaeus, Hess contends, Jesus was also conveying a lesson to his disciples. When Jesus’s death robs them of his “sense-perceptible presence,” she says, it is uncertain whether they will be able to manage their vision of Christ. Healing Bartimaeus, then, is “a final instruction for them to look upward.”
She then turns to her own sickness, which involved migraine headaches and a serious gallbladder problem. Blind to the messages her body was sending her, she says, it took her a long while to muster up the courage to listen to the “hidden wisdom deep inside me.” Only these was she able to “navigate the next steps toward finding out what it was that my true self really wanted.”
Hess’s poem, told from the perspective of Bartimaeus, is about opening ourselves to this inner light:
Blind Bartimaeus By Lory Hess
It’s a heavy fate, a child born blind. Everyone wonders what sin runs so deep it even tainted the seed in the womb. Everyone turns their eyes away, not wanting to look on the luckless one and maybe be marked by his sightlessness.
As a child, I didn’t know what I lacked. I felt the closed-in, lowering gloom that you call ‘dark’, and the lifting, expanding, opening up, the radiance of ‘light’. I felt the sun rise, when the world sang for joy, and the chill as a shadow crossed its face.
Light streamed to me from my mother’s face, her smile, her laugh, her gentle kiss. Darkness fell when she turned from me with silent tears, my future her grief.
My father illumined my mind with words, opening to me the book of our people, the story of how God called all things to be and become, beginning with light. He told how that light was so often lost – obscured in the foolish hearts of men, exiled from Eden for doubting God’s love, losing faith in the wilderness, blindly stumbling after false gods.
But the light will come to us again. He will always be there, beyond the clouds, creating, illumining, turning his face to shine upon us, calling us to remember our name, to lift up our hearts, to ourselves become light.
My father taught me to stand upright in spite of the weight of my destiny, accepting my fate as a sign of trust. So what if I couldn’t live on my own, and had to beg for my daily bread? No man survives alone. We are all, every one, beggars before the mercy of God, dependent on grace, and may God help the one who is blind to that truth.
That’s what I tried to show my people as I sat each day by the side of the road, my bowl held open to heaven’s gifts.
But their eyes were closed. They didn’t see the sun that had risen in their midst, the light of the world, the face of God.
I wouldn’t have asked him for sight for myself. I was used to the dark, and it suited me. I could wait for the day when all things would cast off their earthly garments, and stand in his light.
But I could see he wanted to show them – the ones whose hearts were not all stone, the ones who might yet be brought to the light by seeing a blind man seeing again.
So I called to him, as he called me. I threw off my covering and leapt into light, following him on his way into shadow.
Let the blind man die. Let him be reborn, made new in a new world, called by the Word that created light:
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Friday
A recent NPR article by Lesley McClurg about how Medicaid will start covering traditional Native American healing practices in four western states coincides nicely with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, which I’m currently teaching in my “Post-colonial Anglophone Literature” class. The news item backs up Silko’s major contention that Western medicine by itself is not enough to provide Indians with the therapy they need. Indeed, Whites may need these medical breakthroughs as much as Indians do.
The article begins with the story of a young Navajo man—Emery Tahy—who was entangled in depression, alcoholism, and drug-related seizures. As he was contemplating suicide, his family intervened and a court sent him to a psychiatric ward. While there, he learned of a Native-led recovery program in San Francisco, which he attended upon release. The new therapy was life-changing:
A traditional practitioner did prayers for me. They shared some songs with me. They put me in the sweat lodge and I could identify with those ceremonies. And from that day moving forward, I was able to reconnect to my spiritual and cultural upbringing.
McClurg writes that the program, which is currently in a two-year pilot phase, is desperately needed as Native American communities suffer from some of the highest rates of addiction and overdose deaths in the country. Health experts observe that Western medicine cannot handle all the problems.
I have included Ceremony in my course because I want the students to see the process of literary hybridization at work. As in agriculture, hybridization occurs when two different entities join to form a third. Silko has merged Laguna Pueblo folk tales, myths, and accounts of tribal ceremonial practices—all of which have been part of an oral culture—with the novel form and with lyric poetry. The result is something altogether new.
Hybridizing provides Ceremony not only with its form but also with its content, which has mixing as a major theme. Instances include the mixed bloodline of the protagonist (Tayo is half Indian, half White); crossbreeding in cattle (Tayo’s uncle crossbreeds Mexican cattle, which can live in desert conditions, with American cattle, which produce more meat); and intersections between Indian and White culture. This hybridization preserves Indian culture from the assault of White culture, which threatens erasure through assimilation.
Returning to the question of mental health, Silko’s novel indicates that a hybrid approach to psychological issues may be more effective than either Western or Indian medicine alone. In the novel we see Tayo undergo treatment from three medical professionals: a doctor at a military hospital, the local Laguna medicine man, and a Navajo medicine man who lives on the border between the Indian reservation and the city of Gallup, New Mexico. Only the third treatment provides a lasting cure.
To dramatize what Tayo is up against, I listed for the class everything that is messing with his head. These include:
–trauma from having been abandoned by his mother, who leaves him with her siblings on the reservation; –shaming from his aunt for what her sister has done; –bullying from his Indian classmates for being mixed blood –PTSD from having been captured by the Japanese in World War II and seeing them kill his cousin and best friend; –survivor guilt from having returned when his cousin didn’t (both he and his Aunt believe that he is the one who should have died); –guilt over having (as he sees it) abandoned his uncle, the man who raised him, to go off to war; Josiah is dead by the time Tayo returns home; –guilt for having cursed the rain while in the Philippine jungles, thereby (so he believes) causing the region’s six-year drought; –low self-esteem caused by White racism and White superiority, which has led him to look down upon himself and his people; –trauma caused by the destruction that White culture is visiting upon the earth, which includes bother environmental destruction and the threat of nuclear war,.
The question that Silko puts to herself, I told the students, is whether a healing ceremony can address all of this.
The White doctor can’t do much with a practically comatose Tayo, but he does get him talking and he takes him off the drugs that have plunged him into a white fog.
The second doctor is the local medicine man, Ku’oosh, who gets him on his feet again using age-old methods. But Ku’oosh admits that there are parts of Tayo and the other Indian veterans that he can’t reach. The old scalp ceremonies no longer work given the new forms that warfare has taken. Launching mortar shells and dropping bombs has made death anonymous in ways that Ku’oosh can’t understand.
The final medicine man, Betonie, lives between the two worlds and so understands both. After using a version of Freud’s talking cure, which he combines with traditional ceremonies such as sand painting, chanting, dancing, and dream vision, he sends Tayo on a grail quest. Tayo is to follow the stars, search for a mountain and a woman, and retrieve Josiah’s cattle.
In the process, like the man featured in the NPR article, Tayo reconnects with his spiritual and cultural upbringing. He is also able to bring that reconnection back to the elders, who themselves are renewed as they see the next generation carrying on the tribe’s identity.
To be sure, the process is not exactly like it was in the old days, which some see as a problem:
“There are some things I have to tell you,” Betonie began softly. “The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done, maybe because one slip-up or mistake and the whole ceremony must be stopped and the sand painting destroyed. That much is true. They think that if a singer tampers with any part of the ritual, great harm can be done, great power unleashed.”
Betonie explains, however, that a changing world requires changed ceremonies:
At one time, the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough for the way the world was then. But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.
The medicine man concludes that “things which don’t shift and grow are dead things.”
Silko is like Betonie in that she lived on the edge of a reservation when she was young and is of White American, Native American, and Mexican descent. According to her Wikipedia entry, her one eighth Laguna blood prevented her from participating in various Laguna rituals. Yet she has used this mixed identity to her advantage, creating a hybridized Ceremony that speaks to White readers as well as Indian readers. Western culture, which has become alienated from the land and obsessed with dead things, stands to gain much from Indian healing ceremonies.
And as for Emery Tahy, he appears to be doing well. The NPR article reports that
he hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since starting therapy at Friendship House. He now holds a full-time job as an evaluator for the native American Health Center in San Francisco. Soon he will complete a master’s degree in American Indian studies. And, a few months ago, he completed the San Francisco marathon.
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Thursday
Last month blogger Thom Hartmann of Substack’s Hartmann Report wrote two illuminating essays (here and here) on the libertarianism of some of our Trump-supporting billionaires. Why would figures such as Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk be signing on to a philosophy that wants to strip Americans of basic social safety net protections and regulations? Their views, Hartmann contends, can be traced back in part to two highly influential novels, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.
As an added bonus, Hartmann also alerts us to Trump’s enthusiasm for The Fountainhead.
Given that these billionaires are very close to achieving their dream—their acolyte J.D. Vance in the White House with a declining Donald Trump—it’s important to look closely at what the novels say and how they came to be written. But first let’s remind ourselves of the GOP’s 40-year love affair with libertarianism.
That’s how long it’s been, Hartmann points out in the first of his two essays, since rightwing billionaires began
pouring money into libertarian ideas, setting up think tanks and funding hundreds of college professors nationwide to preach their libertarian ideology. They have also “set up organizations nationwide and in every state to bring Republican legislators together with lobbyists to craft libertarian ‘corporate friendly’ legislation that consistently enriches the top 1% and screws average Americans.”
Billionaire David Koch, who ran for vice-president on the Libertarian ticket in 1980, advocated privatizing the post office, ending all public schools, giving Medicare and Medicaid to big insurance companies, ending all taxation on the wealthy, terminating all forms of welfare, regulating all corporate oversight, and selling off much of government land to billionaires and large corporations.
While Koch never won public office, he found a sympathetic ear in Ronald Reagan, who did win in 1980. While railing against government programs, Regan began the massive shift of wealth from the American middle class to the wealthiest Americans, which accounts for the Gilded Age kind of imbalances we see today.
Trump continued this trend. Hartmann notes that libertarians got a taste of what was possible in 2017, with Trump
installing a billionaire advocate of destroying public schools in charge of public schools, a coal lobbyist representing billionaires in charge of the EPA, a billionaire-funded oil lobbyist in charge of our public lands, and a billionaire described by Forbes as a “grifter” in charge of the Commerce Department.
And then there was Trump’s chief of staff, who (Hartmann points out) “said that putting children in cages and billionaire-owned privatized concentration camps (where seven died) would actually be a public good.”
In addition to making the rich richer and everyone else poorer, however, there is also a mean streak to libertarianism. Hartmann lays out some of the results in the form of a series of questions:
How is it that Republicans so often embrace casual cruelty like tearing mothers from their children or throwing pregnant women in poverty off public assistance? Why have 11 GOP-controlled states refused to this day to expand Medicaid for their 30 million minimum-wage working people when the federal government covers 90 percent of the cost? Why are Republicans so committed to destroying Medicare and Social Security?
I’ve long known that the Reaganite maxim that “greed is good” has its roots in Ayn Rand’s novels, but until I read Hartmann’s essay I didn’t know that she based Howard Roark, the protagonist of Fountainhead, on the most notorious psycho killer of the 1920s.
I also didn’t know that Trump himself was a fan of The Fountainhead although, if there’s any book I could imagine him reading (besides the speeches of Adolph Hitler, which first wife Ivana reports he kept by his bedside), it would be this one. After all, it’s about a maverick architect who is enthusiastic about skyscrapers and who has contempt for “the collective” that pressure him to conform to their vision. Roark also gains the adoration of a woman after raping her. Here’s a section from that scene:
[S]he felt the blood beating in her throat, in her eyes, the hatred, the helpless terror in her blood. She felt the hatred… She fought in a last convulsion. Then the sudden pain shot up… …and she screamed. Then she lay still.
It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him–and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.
In a poster of the 1949 King Vidor film, incidentally, we see Gary Cooper holding a struggling but yielding Pat Neil in his arms with the tagline, “No man takes what’s mine!” Toxic masculinity on steroids, one might say.
In an interview with USA Today’s Kirsten Powers, Trump said of Fountainhead, “It relates to business, beauty, life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.” He told Powers that he also likes how Roark “rages against the establishment.”
In the book, Roark is kicked out of his architecture school because he refuses to do what everyone else is doing and then proceeds to have a rocky career because he insists on his own vision. When someone makes changes to one of his designs, he blows the building up. In the end, however, he gains adherents and builds a skyscraper that serves as a monument to human achievement. He and his former rape victim (now his wife) meet atop the building at the book’s close.
What Rand wrote about Roark at the time also applies to Trump:
He has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.
Now, for the psycho killer. In 1927 a man named Edward Hickman kidnapped a girl, demanded a ransom from her father, killed her,, and then staged her to look like she was still alive when the father showed up with the ransom money. But while the Los Angeles Times called it “the most horrible crime of the 1920s,” Rand was entranced. As she saw it, Hickman’s greatest quality was “his unfeeling, pitiless selfishness.” This was why the public demonized him, she said, noting in her diary,
It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred. It is the case of a daring challenge to society. … It is the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.”
Perhaps Rand saw, in Hickman, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov aspires to be a Nietzschean Übermensch and seeks to prove to himself that he is superior to others by his ability to kill—in his case, an old lady pawnbroker. But unlike Rand’s flat characters, Raskolnikov has a complex inner life, which includes self-doubt and guilt. It’s as though Rand saw in Hickman a successful Raskolnikov, one who could confidently and coldly say at his trial (as she observed in her notes), “I am like the state: what is good for me is right.”
But if Roark is a successful Raskolnikov, Rand is a failed Dostoevsky. Both had traumatic early experiences: while he was almost executed as a nihilist, spared only at the last moment, she saw her father’s pharmacy looted by the Bolsheviks. But whereas he developed a depth of soul following the incident, she was left only with implacable resentment and a desire to make others pay.
Could it be that Thiel, Zuckerberg, and Musk see themselves as supermen themselves, superior to democracy and the mob and entitled to treat the country as their plaything. Certainly reading The Fountainhead could bolster them in that belief. Whether or not they, like Trump, are Rand fans, they have signed on to a movement that she helped set in motion and that her novels, never out of print, continue to promote.
My favorite response to Rand is by blogger John Rogers, who accounts for the success of Rand’s other novel (Atlas Shrugged) as follows:
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
In Trump, we certainly have all the qualities of someone unable to grow up. If he and these billionaire supporters succeed in imposing their will on the United States, God help us all.
One other thought: In a thoughtful but depressing Atlantic essay yesterday, former Republican Tom Nichols attributes Trump’s enduring popularity to a Rand-type resentment and believes that nothing Kamala Harris does will be able to penetrate it. As he puts it,
For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting….
Some Trump voters may believe his lies. But plenty more want Trump to be terrifying and stomach-turning so that reelecting him will be a fully realized act of social revenge. Harris cannot propose any policy, offer any benefit, or adopt any position that competes with that feeling.
“The hard choice of civic virtue,” Nichols concludes, “will never match the rush of racism, hatred, and revenge that Trump offers in its place.”
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Wednesday
I’m slowly but surely getting a sense of the “Post-colonial Anglophone Literature” class I’m currently teaching at the University of Ljubljana. It’s a wonderfully international class, with students from Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Macedonia and Turkey joining the Slovenian students. I’m also finding that my (admittedly limited) acquaintance with Slovenian literature is coming in handy because I’m able to note how Slovenia too once used literature to find an identity separate from the Austro-Hungarian empire that once controlled it.
Last week we looked at two Nigerian novelists, Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in the light of the post-colonialist theories of Edward Said and Frantz Fanon. Said describes how the West has Orientalized other parts of the world, imagining cultural features that confirm in it its own superiority. In my first week with the class, we talked about how H. Rider Haggard in She and Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness depicted Africa as both repulsively barbaric and strangely alluring, with beautiful women in the heart of the dark continent casting their spell over white explorers.
We also talked about Fanon’s insight that colonized people are brainwashed into seeing themselves through Western eyes. It’s bad enough for others to see you as barbaric and inferior, but the problem is compounded when you see yourself that way. I talked about how colonialist indoctrination was a form of soft power, which supplemented the hard power of armies with rifles. William Blake’s compelling image for such soft power is “mind-forged manacles” (from his poem “London”).
To counteract such brainwashing, Fanon called for a “literature of combat,” writers who would help create a new national consciousness. One of the writers he had in mind was Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart gave names and stories to African characters. In this novel about the tribal Igbo at the time of the British incursion, we get a very different picture of native villagers than we do from Heart of Darkness. Indeed, in an important post-colonial essay entitled “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Achebe calls out Conrad for his two-dimensional depictions of Africans and for his shuddering horror that he shares something in common with them. Achebe finds objectionable what for Conrad is a great revelation: that the heart of darkness lies not only in Africa but in civilized England as well.
My own view is that Conrad has much to teach us about Europe’s existential crisis at the time—how its view of itself as Christian and enlightened clashed with its brutal grab for Africa’s natural resources. But I agree with Achebe that, in using Africans as no more than props in this internal drama, Conrad dehumanizes them. In class I contrasted Conrad with Shakespeare, who always grants characters their full humanity.
In any event, Fanon, had he lived to see Achebe’s essay, would have applauded. And he probably did read Things Fall Apart, which would qualify in Fanon’s eyes as “literature of combat.” Fanon complains about those native writers who write for the colonizers rather than for the colonized, but this cannot be said for Things Fall Apart, which played a role in Nigeria’s liberation two years later.
For proof of the book’s impact on a native Nigerian, we have the example of a next-generation Nigerian author. When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was a girl, she read only English-language stories, especially (so her Wikipedia entry tells us) the racist and sexist stories of British author Enid Blyton. Many of Blyton’s stories were typical of British attitudes in the 1920s to 1950s, including (to cite one particularly obnoxious story) The Little Black Doll. In it, a dark colored doll is considered ugly and is mocked by the other dolls until a shower of “magic rain” washes his face clean—at which point he is welcomed back into the fold. When Fanon talks about colonial culture teaching Africans to hate their bodies, these are the kinds of stories he has in mind.
Having been raised on such fare, Adichie experienced Things Fall Apart as a revelation when she read it at 10. Indeed, Achebe’s novel worked just as Fanon said combative literature should work, instilling in Adichie a liberating sense of national pride. (Other works that aided in her awakening were Camara Laye’s The African Child, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Weep Not, Child and Buchi Emecheta’s Joys of Motherhood.) Adichie’s first novel Purple Hibiscus, in a nod to Achebe, opens with the line, “Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja did not go to communion…” Her new sense of national pride also led Adichie to continue learning Igbo along with English, even though she could have dropped it. And indeed, Purple Hibiscus is scattered throughout with Igbo phrases.
We talked about this feature of her novel. If, as Fanon announced, authors should write to the colonized rather than to the colonizers, shouldn’t they use tribal languages instead of English? It’s an issue that many African authors have wrestled with. Achebe said he chose English because he found Igbo to be too wooden and perhaps too because he wanted to reach beyond the Igbo—not only to the rest of Nigeria but to all of Africa and to all of the world. Indeed, many readers in other African countries consider Achebe to be their Shakespeare.
Salman Rushdie addresses the issue of writing in the language of the conqueror. In India’s case, English is much of what gives the country, which features 122 major languages, any sense of unity. (Nigeria for its part has 525 different languages.) If one must use the language of the colonizer, then the question becomes how to make it your own, what cultural historians call hybridization. This week I will be looking at how the Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko creates hybrid forms with the aim of simultaneously honoring tribal history while dealing with a changing world.
By sprinkling Igbo throughout her book, Adichie gestures toward her own country’s indigenous culture. And unlike Achebe, she doesn’t provide a glossary. The phrases can generally be figured out from the context, however. And then there is always google, and the mixture of old with new characterizes modern Nigeria itself.
I find it fascinating to compare and contrast Purple Hibiscus with Things Fall Apart. In both, one finds a toxic masculinity, an autocratic father who beats his family, along with a rigid Christianity that distorts the culture. In Purple Hibiscus, the fanatically Catholic patriarch breaks with his own father, who is a “pagan,” and narrator 15-year-old Kambili finds herself torn between her desire to please her father and her longing for the far richer life of her grandfather. Her wise aunt, a liberal Catholic, observes at one point that
Papa-Nnukwu was not a heathen but a traditionalist, that sometimes what was different was just as good as what was familiar, that when Papa-Nnukwu did his itu-nzu, his declaration of innocence, in the morning, it was the same as our saying the rosary.
The grandfather himself is baffled by the Catholics who have converted his children, reporting at one point,
One day I said to them, Where is the God you worship? They said he was like Chukwu, that he was in the sky. I asked then, Who is the person that was killed, the person that hangs on the wood outside the mission? They said he was the son, but that the son and the father are equal. It was then that I knew that the white man was mad. The father and son are equal? Tufia! Do you not see?
Interestingly, whereas in Things Fall Apart the accepting and ethnographically-open missionary Brown is followed by the rigidly orthodox and destructive Smith, in Purple Hibiscus the priests are reversed. At first there’s the orthodox Father Benedict, who degrees that services must be in Latin rather than in Igbo and who bans clapping in church. His sensibility is that of Kabili’s abusive father, but he is followed by the far more humane Father Amadi, who helps Kabili develop a sense of self and to build her self-confidence.
One striking difference between Achebe and Adichie is in their handling of female characters. Whereas they are two-dimensional in Things Fall Apart, they are richly textured in Hibiscus. The liberation struggle described by Fanon, in other words, doesn’t only involve liberation from the colonizers but continues on in other battles. Adichie is writing her own literature of combat.
One other thought: Because peaceful transfers of power are on my mind these days (as I noted in Monday’s post about Shakespeare’s Richard II ), I note that Nigeria, after five years of democratic rule, experienced a long succession of military coups, along with a bloody civil war. But rather than see this as a vindication of colonialism, Kabili’s professor aunt sees a process at work:
There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once.
In other words, there’s still work for Nigerian literature to do. It doesn’t stop being important once freedom from the colonizers is achieved.
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Tuesday
An article in Literary Hub by literary scholar John MacNeill Miller has introduced me to a fascinating British novelist from the 19th century that I didn’t know about. Harriet Martineau, he contends, “foresaw ecology, environmentalism, and realist fiction.”
Miller notes that we’ve long known that Victorian novelists “pioneered the use of storytelling to reveal interwoven social networks,” a strategy that we see in everything from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth to David Simon’s The Wire. What sets Martineau apart, however, is how she shows people’s lives impacted by changes, not just in other people, but in the environment. He points out that her stories involve “lives upended by unexpected patterns of rainfall, by the felling of trees, by the importing of new crops, and by the movements of fish.”
In short, Martineau’s work is ecological along with being sociological. More than another other novelist he can name, Miller says, she looks into “the entanglements that draw the fates of humans together with those of trees, water, grain, cattle, and fish.”
What is significant about this? Miller says that “it wasn’t until the late twentieth century and the rise of environmentalism that novelists began, slowly, to reconnect their stories of human lives to the material changes in the nonhuman world around them.” He finds Martineau remarkably astute when it comes to recording “the surprising ways interspecies connections affect us all.”
Miller attributes this sensitivity to Martineau’s relationships with political economist Thomas Robert Malthus and biologist Charles Darwin, two men who studied environmental shifts. This focus leads to “intricate interspecies plotting” that “far exceeds the simplistic moral and economic lessons she tags onto the end of each novella.”
Think of it this way: Rather than focus on individuals’ emotional and mental lives, which is what we normally expect from novels, Martineau’s stories instead look at “the extent to which all our lives are shaped by circumstances beyond our control, circumstances that arise from both human and nonhuman events unfolding around us.” They focus more on human exteriority than interiority.
As a result, we begin to notice “all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings.” And when we do so, we elevate the nonhuman world, which is normally consigned to the margins. We stop “treating plants and animals as mere surroundings with little impact on the stories of our lives.”
Miller concludes,
By downplaying all the widely glorified aspects of being human, Martineau refocuses readers’ attentions on all the ways humans are bound into much larger networks of beings. She reminds us that our individual and communal lives are not really so different from the lives of the animals and plants who share our planet. And in this age of extinction, that is a lesson we still desperately need to learn.
Although Martineau’s work has largely been forgotten, it was much admired in its time by writers such as Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Miller recommends novels Illustrations and Deerbrook as must reading in this era of climate change.
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Monday
Tomorrow, for the first time in my life, I will be teaching Shakespeare’s Richard II, which among other things points to what we can expect if Donald Trump is re-elected president. It has also provided me with a great phrase to describe the ex-president and all the grifters who follow in his wake: think of them as “caterpillars of the commonwealth.”
Richard II is a particularly bad king in ways that are reminiscent of Trump. In the course of the play we see him as
—incompetent: he botches a quarrel between two noblemen in ways similar to how Trump botched the Covid pandemic, sometimes lurching one way, sometimes another; —corrupt: he confiscates Henry Bolingbroke’s land to pay for his Irish war, just as Trump unlawfully has been accepting and soliciting bribes from a variety of sources, foreign and domestic; —susceptible to impulsive actions and wild mood swings; —arrogant and deaf to good advice; —enabling of corruption in others: Bushy, Bagot, and Green, the named caterpillars, resemble Jared Kushner, the Trump children, Steve Bannon, various former members of Trump’s cabinet, and a host of others.
This enabling, incidentally, gets some of the best lines in the play. The court gardener turns a pruning lesson into a political allegory on the state of the nation. His servant starts him off by wondering why they should continue upkeep when the nation is falling apart around them:
The gardener is referring to how Henry has, in fact, executed these individuals. He observes that Richard would have preserved his kingship if he himself had “trimm’d and dress’d his land”:
If Trump is re-elected and, following the advice of Project 2025 as well as his own inclination, replaces civil servants with loyalists, we too will find our land swarming with caterpillars.
So what does this drama about overthrowing a divinely anointed monarch have to do with those of us who live in a secular democracy? Well, before Trump, I might have thought, “not much.” But then, I wouldn’t have thought we needed President Biden reminding us that “presidents are not kings.” And I never thought I’d see Supreme Court justices chastising the court’s majority for having created a “law free zone around the President.” In granting Trump immunity for his crimes, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote, the rightwing justices have ignored the Constitution by creating “an atextual, ahistorical, and unjustifiable immunity that puts the President above the law.”
Recall that Trump informed us at one point that God may well have saved him from assassination in order to achieve higher things. “I’d like to think that God thinks that I’m going to straighten out our country,” he told radio host Mark Levin. For his part, Richard periodically reminds himself that he too is God’s instrument—so much so that it doesn’t matter that his troops have fled, his enemy is at the gates, and his advisors have been executed:
But for all Richard’s blinkered arrogance, he says one thing that we do well to heed. If there is no orderly plan of succession, the country will be ripped apart. In 14th century England, the monarch was monarch for life and the throne was passed on to a predetermined line of succession. In our case, the president is succeeded by whoever gets the most electoral votes in the next election. Thus Henry’s attack on Richard has its modern version in Trump and the GOP’s attacks on elections themselves. With bogus charges of massive voter fraud—which have yet to be verified by any objective authority—they undermine constitutional governance itself. Lisa Needham of Public Notice notes what many political observers are pointing out: the goal of the GOP is a swing state like Pennsylvania is “to sew distrust in the election, likely setting up a challenge for Trump to contest the results if Pennsylvania doesn’t go his way.”
Or as the headline of her piece puts it, “If you can’t beat ’em, destroy the system.”
Richard, speaking to Northumberland but seeing his boss in the background, points to what happens if we violate society’s rules for orderly succession:
And so it transpires in Henry IV, Part I, with civil strife breaking out almost immediately after Henry grabs the throne. In the opening scene of the sequel, Henry thinks he has found some breathing space and plans a crusade to wash away the blood from his coup and the assassination of Richard. He quickly discovers, however, that he can’t command the blind obedience due to a divinely ordained king. After all, his fellows have seen him as one of them.
For instance, when Henry orders Northumberland’s son Hotspur to do something he doesn’t want to do, Hotspur doesn’t refer to Henry as king but as “this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke.” He also calls out his father for having assisted in “murderous subornation.” Together they have “put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose.”
Before dying, Richard has predicted to Northumberland that he will one day fall out with Henry. And in fact, Northumberland and Hotspur do rebel. Here’s Richard’s prediction:
That’s the key: once one “know’st the way to plant unrightful kings,” one will know “another way to pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.” And indeed, early into Henry IV Northumberland is contending that Richard had chosen a different successor, not Henry, were he to die. Multiple claimants to the throne, none being able to claim absolute legitimacy, is how you plunge a nation into “civil butchery.”
So for all those Republicans buying into Trump’s Big Lie that he did not lose to Joe Biden, remember this: as soon as candidates start getting seats they did not legitimately win, bloody succession battles become likely. No one’s seat is safe.
Richard may have been a bad king, but Shakespeare indicates that, in overthrowing him, Henry sowed the seeds for the Wars of the Roses.
Biden is fond of saying, “You can’t love your country only when you win.” Are we really going blow up our democracy, along with all the benefits of a stable society, for the sake of Donald Trump?
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Sunday
When I read God’s answer to the long-suffering Job, today’s Old Testament reading and a magnificent poem in its own right, I recognize the God I encountered when I lost my oldest son 24 years ago.
In response to the question “why suffering?”—the toughest of all questions–Job receives what at first appears a non-answer. Rather than speaking to Job as Job’s so-called friends have been doing, God essentially accuses Job of thinking too small. He even throws in a little sarcasm: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?…surely you know!”
What I hear God saying to Job is this: “You are part of a drama that is bigger than you can ever know. You are part of the great dance of creation and destruction, one that involves the foundation of the earth and the creation of the stars and nature’s cycle of life. So gird up your loins and expand your imagination.”
Although I didn’t read the Bible when I lost Justin, turning instead to poems like Shelley’s Adonais and Tennyson’s In Memoriam, I came to an insight similar to what God is telling Job. In losing Justin and in experiencing unbearable mental anguish, I felt connected with the universe in a new way. It’s like what Sartre’s Orestes says to his sister Electra in The Flies when she wants to retreat into a comforting rationalizations. “We were too light,” he tells her. “Now our feet sink into the soil, like chariot-wheels in turf.”
If I had thought that God was singling me out—if I had thought that God was some old man watching me through a telescope– if I had rationalized that God was somehow doing this for reasons that would be revealed later—I would have found such a God to be disappointingly small. And if God was this small, then the pain I was feeling was also a lot smaller than I thought it was, something that could be encapsulated in a maxim or some other kind of explanation. And that, I felt, would have failed to do justice to the loss.
Where I departed from Sartre’s Orestes is that, rather than feel weighed down—even in a good way—I felt expanded. I felt like I was entering unknown territory. I looked up at the summer sky and out over the St. Mary’s River where Justin had drowned and into the woods that border our house and understood now that I was a member, however unwilling, of God’s larger mysteries.
It’s hard to explain exactly what I mean but that’s why we have poems like Book of Job. Here’s God’s full response (Job 38), not just the excerpted passage that will be read in church today:
The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind:
“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?
“Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made the clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’?
“Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? It is changed like clay under the seal, and it is dyedlike a garment. Light is withheld from the wicked, and their uplifted arm is broken.
“Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.
“Where is the way to the dwelling of light, and where is the place of darkness, that you may take it to its territory and that you may discern the paths to its home? Surely you know, for you were born then, and the number of your days is great!
“Have you entered the storehouses of the snow, or have you seen the storehouses of the hail, which I have reserved for the time of trouble, for the day of battle and war? What is the way to the place where the light is distributed or where the east wind is scattered upon the earth?
“Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain and a way for the thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the ground put forth grass?
“Has the rain a father, or who has fathered the drops of dew? From whose womb did the ice come forth, and who has given birth to the hoarfrost of heaven? The waters become hard like stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.
“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?
“Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightnings, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens, when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?
“Can you hunt the prey for the lion, or satisfy the appetite of the young lions, when they crouch in their dens, or lie in wait in their covert? Who provides for the raven its prey, when its young ones cry to God, and wander about for lack of food?”
What I thought about God in those awful days and weeks and months, I also thought of literature. Poets since the dawn of time—including the Job poet—have been grappling with heart-rending tragedy. And although they have always come up short when it comes to putting their grief into words, they also found a measure of meaning and a measure of consolation.
I turned to poetry in a new and intense way to explore this new connection with creation. Just as Justin, in his birth, had opened up new pathways for me, so was he doing so with his death.
Knowing, as God tells Job, that I knew nothing of what provides “wisdom in the inward parts” or that gives “understanding to the mind,” I gave myself over to all that grieving had in store for me.
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Saturday
I’m writing this special Saturday post because I promised the students in my University of Ljubljana class a summation of the major ideas in my first two Shakespeare lectures. Those of you interested in Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet may also enjoy it as it manages to tie them all together.
I began the course with some observations on why Shakespeare is so admired, mentioning his
–virtuosity
Shakespeare wrote 38 or so different plays in three different genres (comedy, tragedy, and history), with unquestioned masterpieces in each. Most playwrights limit themselves to a single genre (Sophocles tragedy, Molière comedy, etc.). He also wrote astounding sonnets, reinventing the form in the process. And then there were three long narrative poems.
–linguistic inventiveness
Shakespeare added above 1000 new words to the language—there’s dispute as to the exact number—along with countless memorable expressions. Among the words are alligator, bedroom, eyeball, gossip, inaudible, lonely, puppy, assassination, gloomy, and pious. Among the expressions: “We have seen better days”; “I have not slept one wink”; “the clothes make the man”; “it’s Greek to me”; “what’s done is done”; “wild goose chase”; “tower of strength”; “the world is my oyster.”
–depth of character
He created characters that feel so real that it’s as though they actually existed. And with this in mind, here’s what I write in my book about how, in Harold Bloom’s opinion, Shakespeare “invented the human”:
Harold Bloom contends that Shakespeare “pragmatically reinvented” us, changing the way we see others and ourselves and even how we experience feelings. Whereas fellow playwrights Marlowe produced “cartoons” and Ben Johnson “ideograms,” Shakespeare created characters like Hamlet and Falstaff, thereby inventing “human inwardness.” Personality as we understand it, Bloom explains, is “a Shakespearean invention…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…”
“Even if we never attend a performance or read a play,” Bloom writes, Shakespeare has “made us theatrical,” changing our ideas “as to what makes the self authentically human.” 17th century British theatergoers loved how Hamlet upended conventional expectations of what to expect from a revenge tragedy. They were so enthralled by the wild ramblings of Hamlet’s mind that the play’s revenge plot seemed almost incidental. They were similarly fascinated by Falstaff, Othello, Rosamond, Macbeth, Lear, Cleopatra, and others. For them, it was if the world had gone from black and white to color.
I concluded this early part of the first lecture with Ben Jonson’s immortal line, “He was not of an age but for all time!” And so it has proved as Shakespeare is read and performed endlessly around the world.
In the first two lectures I looked at Shakespeare’s handling of dangerous desires: gender-bending desire in Twelfth Night, sexual desire in Midsummer and Romeo and Juliet. Of the six plays that feature cross-dressing, Twelfth Night is my favorite. I advised my students to take special note of the play’s subtitle—What You Will—as Shakespeare plays with the notion of “what you will” or “what you desire” throughout.
The play is set in Italian Ilyria—I mentioned that the students wouldn’t necessarily be wrong if they imagined it being set in Slovenia—and Shakespeare plays with the Italian word for “want” (“volere”) in naming his characters. There’s Malvolio (“bad willing”), along with Viola and Oliva (near anagrams of each other). The end result in a plot in which we see
–a man fantasizing about having the qualities he associates with women (Orsino); –a woman passing herself off as a man (Viola as Cesario); –two women fantasizing about being able to behave like men (Viola and Olivia); –a man in love with another man (Antonio); –a woman in love with another woman (Olivia); –an effeminate man who doesn’t want to fight but succumbs to male peer pressure (Sir Andrew and also, in a sense, Cesario); –a sensitive man who, while a good fighter, is not afraid to admit that he can cry like a woman (Sebastian); –a man desiring to rise above his station (Malvolio); –and a wise fool who concludes, from observing all this gender confusion, that once we grow up and are slotted into fixed categories, life starts to suck.
Early in the play, I pointed out, a lightning bolt splits the ship upon which Viola and her twin brother are journeying. I speculated that this is inspired by the allegory that Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium recounts to explain sexual desire: once we were perfect creatures, with two heads and four arms and four legs, but the gods, fearing that we were so self-sufficient that we would ignore them, split us in half. Ever since, rather than contending with Mount Olympus, we have been searching for our missing half: split men are looking for other men, split women are looking for other women, and split androgynes are looking for members of the opposite sex.
In other words, Shakespeare is telling us that, at an early age, society splits us off from an integral part of ourselves, decreeing from henceforth we can only behave as a single gender. Understanding humans as well as anyone ever has, the Bard wrote a play that acknowledged that we are more complex than the gender labels and the associated behaviors that society foists on us.
I touched on the issue of homosexuality in Shakespeare’s time, noting the Buggery Act of 1533, which made it a capital offense. To be sure, the laws were not as comprehensive as they would become in Victorian times as there was a lot of gray area. It was okay, for instance, to have “masculine friendship,” which could include embraces, protestations of love, physical closeness in a common bed, and physical intimacy.
Still, there were boundaries for men and even more for women, who could not dress as men (as Viola does) or go running after men (as Olivia does). Nor could a steward marry a lady (as Malvolio desires). In short, Shakespeare is challenging rigid boundaries in his play, and if it is called Twelfth Night, it’s because the end-of-the-year twelfth night festivities were one of the few times of the year when people could pretend to be someone they weren’t.
Even calling the play Twelfth Night didn’t give Shakespeare full license, however, and he had to cast his gender exploration as a comedy, not as a melodrama. Furthermore, he framed it as what film theorist Chris Straayer calls a “temporary transvestite comedy”—which means characters cross-dress only because they are forced to, not because they want to. Famous film examples of the genre are Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Victor/Victoria, and She’s the Man (which is a modern teen version of Twelfth Night).
In a temporary transvestite comedy, characters must return to their “correct” genders by the end, and so it happens in Twelfth Night. But because Shakespeare feels that some precious part of us is denied when this happens—remember the violence of the lightning strike—he adds a sad note at the end, with the fool singing about “the wind and the rain.” Twelfth Night has been called “an autumnal comedy” as a result. After all, Antonio is thwarted in his love for Sebastian, Olivia finds herself married to a stranger, and Orsino—while seemingly happy to be marrying Viola—would like to see her dressed in male clothing for a little longer. Perhaps he is sad at losing this “masculine friendship.”
For that matter, how do we think Viola will take to wearing dresses and conforming to proper female behavior again? As the twelfth night party ends, life is about to feel a lot narrower.
And remember, I told the students—all these issues arise in a play nearly half a millenium ago.
I hadn’t fully realized, when I paired Midsummer and R&J for the second lecture, how much they reflect each other. Of course, I knew that Pyramus and Thisby, the source story for R&J, gets performed in Midsummer. But there’s more, with the same interplay between sexual drive and imagination occurring in both plays. With that in mind, it’s interesting to see what different insights emerge when one approaches the same subject through two different genres.
Comedy, I told the students (calling on theorist Northrup Frye) focuses on society, tragedy on the individual. And where comedy aims to renew and thereby restore a society that has become static and stale, tragedy acknowledges the depth of the individual. To cite a word that could have been coined by Shakespeare but instead is the invention of the immortal Lisa Simpson, one emerges from a tragedy “embiggened.”
For this genre discussion, I also quoted Charlie Chaplin, who once observed, “Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in long-shot.”
There’s plenty of potential for tragedy in Midsummer—Lysander and Demetrius could kill each other, leading to a double suicide on the part of their lady loves–and a slight mix-up in timing is all that keeps R&J from becoming a comedy. (Well, that and the deaths of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris.) And there are other similarities as well.
For instance, while we watch magic fairy juice cause Lysander to rapidly switch his allegiance from Hermia to Helena, we see Romeo too turning on a dime, from Rosaline to Juliet, and there’s no Puck around to explain that. While King Theseus notes that there’s not much difference between lovers and madmen (he also throws in poets), Mercutio says something similar when he describes Queen Mab. In both speeches, our fertile imaginations, spurred by sexual desire, are seen as taking control. Here’s Theseus:
Mercutio says something similar as he watches Romeo lose his head over Rosaline. The difference is that he is just imagining a fairy whereas actual fairies show up in the other play. Romeo reports that he has been dreaming of his love, to which Mercutio responds by describing a malevolent fairy who visits our dreams.
If Shakespeare explored socially-disruptive gender desire in Twelfth Night, he focuses on the chaos that can be caused by sexual desire in Midsummer and R&J. We see this from the very first scene when testosterone-fueled Capulets swagger through the streets looking for violence and sex:
SAMPSON: A dog of that house shall move me to stand: I will take the wall of any man or maid of Montague’s. GREGORY: That shows thee a weak slave; for the weakest goes to the wall. SAMPSON: True; and therefore women, being the weaker vessels, are ever thrust to the wall: therefore I will push Montague’s men from the wall, and thrust his maids to the wall.
Under the influence of sexuality’s force, women too become assertive, even when threatened with explusion (Juliet) or death (Hermia in Midsummer). Juliet knows what to expect from her father when she resists him:
An you be mine, I’ll give you to my friend; And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in the streets, For, by my soul, I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee, Nor what is mine shall never do thee good: Trust to’t, bethink you; I’ll not be forsworn…
Desire is so strong, however, that these formerly docile and obedient daughters go into full rebellion. “I know not by what power I am made bold,” Hermia tells Theseus while Juliet absolutely revels in her newly discovered sexuality. In her longing for Romeo, she speaks with a new boldness, showing herself to be as much in love with her own power as in her lover.
Whereas Midsummer is shot in long shot, however, R&J is shot in close-up. Puck can look down on the lovers as they go careening through the woods and say, “What fools these mortals be.” Likewise he and Oberon can look from afar as Queen of the Fairies Titania, under the influence of the same love potion, falls in love with an ass. Yes, desire makes us do things that, at a distance, appear funny.
But it’s not funny if you’re one of the lovers. We see, in close-up intensity, the joys and agonies of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship. We get to laugh at ourselves with the first play, but with the second–one of the world’s great love stories–we are embiggened. Sexual passion and our seething imaginations can be seen in two different ways.
We don’t know which of these two plays, both written around 1595-96, came first. Did Shakespeare step back from tragic immersion to make fun of himself? Or did he parody love in his first play and then get serious? Whatever the case, his ability to produce two masterpieces in two different genres is what I mean by genius versatility.
