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Wednesday
My faculty reading group, especially our current moderator John Reishman, has given me a new take on Homer’s Iliad: Priam, I now realize, is largely responsible for the ruinous war his city faces because he can’t or won’t deny his self-indulgent and narcissistic son Paris. As we discussed Troy’s king, I couldn’t help but think of how the Republican Party has gone off the rails because it similarly can’t stand up to Donald Trump.
And like Trump, Paris seems to pay no price for his self-absorption. Though he violates the fundamental law of hospitality—we could say that he grabs his host’s wife by the p****y—he finds ways to shrug off any responsibility for the disaster he has brought about. When his brother Hektor chastises him for his behavior, notice how easily he deflects the blow.
First, here’s Hektor expressing a wish that multiple Republicans have had regarding their party’s de facto leader:
Evil Paris, beautiful, woman-crazy, cajoling better had you never been born, or killed unwedded. Truly I could have wished it so; it would be far better than to have you with us to our shame, for others to sneer at…. Were you like this that time when in sea-wandering vessels assembling oarsmen to help you you sailed over the water, and mixed with the outlanders, and carried away a fair woman from a remote land, whose lord’s kin were spearmen and fighters, to your father a big sorrow, and your city, and all your people, to yourself a thing shameful but bringing joy to the enemy?
To be sure, Paris is unlike Trump in that he acknowledges some wrongdoing, but he has Trump’s knack for wriggling out of any responsibility. Professor Reishman said that Paris’s response reminds him of those students who, oh so easily, assure him that will submit their essays on time, even though they haven’t started them:
Hektor, seeing you have scolded me rightly, not beyond measure– still, your heart forever is weariless, like an axe-blade driven by a man’s strength through the timber, one who, well skilled, hews a piece for a ship, driven on by the force of a man’s strength: such is the heart in your breast, unshakable: yet do not bring up against me the sweet favors of golden Aphrodite. Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent, which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.
Paris here frames his brother here as an unimaginative drudge. Why be a boring hewer of wood—why be a responsible citizen—when the gods throw a beautiful woman in your path? Paris would have thrived in our own celebrity culture.
To his credit, Paris actually shows up to fight Menelaus in hand-to-hand combat to end the war. He’s not like Trump promising an alternative to Obamacare or promising to share his taxes with the public or promising to get Mexico to pay for his wall or, or, or… But like Trump, Paris manages to wriggle out of situations where his opponents have him dead to rights: when Menelaus is about to slay him, Aphrodite swoops in and carries him off. And to be honest, divine assistance sometimes seems the best explanation for how Trump, time and again, escapes paying for his misdeeds.
But Paris wouldn’t be able to get away with his shenanigans without his paternal enabler, just as Trump would not be running for reelection if Republican senators had found him guilty of extorting Ukraine’s president to smear his likely political opponent or of inciting the January 6 insurrection. Instead, they let him off the hook, which means that he continues to be a thorn in their side.
In Book VII we hear “Antenor the thoughtful” voicing sentiments previously expressed by Hektor. Think of him as another responsible Republican standing up to Trump:
Trojans and Dardanians and companions in arms: hear me while I speak forth what the heart within my breast urges. Come then: let us give back Helen of Argos and all her possessions to the sons of Atreus to take away, seeing now we fight with our true pledges made into lies; and I see no good thing’s accomplishment for us in the end, unless we do this.”
Paris doesn’t bother to counter-argue, essentially telling the assembled Trojans that he’ll do what he wants, Troy be damned. His speech is all about “me” and “I”:
Antenor, these things that you argue please me no longer. Your mind knows how to contrive a saying better than this one. But if in all seriousness this is your true argument; then it is the very gods who ruined the brain within you. I will speak out before the Trojans, breakers of horses. I refuse, straight out. I will not give back the woman.
Then, to soften his refusal, he promises to return the gifts he got from Menelaus and to add some extra:
But of the possessions I carried away to our house from Argos I am willing to give all back, and to add to these from my own goods.
One would hope that Paris’s promises are more reliable than Trump’s promises to pay his lawyers. Paris doesn’t even have to sacrifice this much, however, because Priam acts as though he hasn’t heard Antenor’s proposal. The most blame he ascribes to Paris is to refer to him as he “for whose sake this strife has arisen.” (There’s none of Hektor’s “better had you never been born” here.) He tells his messenger to go to the Greeks with Paris’s word (the part about the possessions, not about never giving back Helen) and–implicitly acknowledging that such an unserious proposal will go nowhere—adds the “solid message” that a momentary truce should be called so that both sides “can burn the bodies of our dead.”
When one is surrounded by enablers who don’t firmly insist upon the sacred laws of hospitality or the peaceful transition of power, then all hell breaks loose. Many people suffer.
Further thought: As I have been accused, by one conservative acquaintance, of Trump Derangement Syndrome, let me expand my scope here: I think the GOP began its downward slide with Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. His irresponsible flouting of Congressional norms transformed Congress from a collegial body where members found ways to work together to a perpetual food fight. Trump just took Gingrich’s tactics to a new level, and he has spawned imitators (Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Loui Gohmert, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis), who similarly eschew governing for performance art.
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Tuesday
As I noted last week, rereading Philip Pullman’s Book of Dust series has been an unnerving experience. Pullman is targeting Christian fascism, and while the rise of the religious right has not taken America into fascism yet, there are plenty of people who want to go there. Chief amongst these appears to be Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who Fox and others are declaring to be Trump’s heir apparent and who is burnishing his Trumpist credentials by going after women who want abortions, voters of color, the LGBTQ community, state colleges and universities, reporters, and social media users who criticize him. Also, of particular interest to this blog, he has declared war on books his supporters don’t like, along with the teachers and librarians who share them with students.
Headlines from the past two months capture what’s going on in this last area: “Florida’s School Book Bans Have Teachers “Walking On Eggshells” (Buzzfeed); “New Training Tells Florida School Librarians Which Books Are Off-Limits” (Treasure Coast Palm); and “Hide your books to avoid felony charges, Fla. schools tell teachers” (Washington Post). As Buzzfeed reported,
Though the law, HB 1467, went into effect in July 2022, it wasn’t until January that the Florida Department of Education published training on the new law, leaving many schools in limbo for months, uncertain how to proceed. HB 1467 allows parents, or even any resident of the county, to lodge objections to course material, and right-wing organizations are already taking advantage: One group, Moms For Liberty, has lobbied for more than 150 books to be removed from Florida school libraries, including The Color Purple, The Handmaid’s Tale, and many others that deal with race and LGBTQ issues.
The Washington Post, meanwhile, explained how the books are to be vetted. If you see echoes of 1984 in Florida’s plans to have people specially retrained to “properly” determine which books are desirable, you’re not alone:
House Bill 1467, which took effect as law in July, mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and “suited to student needs.” Books must be approved by a qualified school media specialist, who must undergo a state retraining on book collection. The Education Department did not publish that training until January, leaving school librarians across Florida unable to order books for more than a year.
And then there’s an older law that puts teeth into the new one:
The new law comes atop an older one that makes distributing “harmful materials” to minors, including obscene and pornographic materials, a third-degree felony — meaning that a teacher could face up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine, a spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Education said Tuesday. She suggested violating House Bill 1467 might yield “penalties against” an educator’s teaching certificate.
And:
[B]ecause of uncertainties around enforcement and around what titles might become outlawed, school officials have warned teachers that their classroom libraries may expose them to the stiffest punishments.
DeSantis, meanwhile, is doing the classic authoritarian two-step, claiming he wants no more than to keep students safe, even while being so vague about what “safe” means as to leave plenty of room for interpretation amongst rightwing groups. Check out these remarks from a recent press conference:
Earlier Monday, Gov. Ron DeSantis weighed in on the issue during a news conference in Vero Beach. He said he was unfamiliar with the local book challenges, but said it’s important to have age-appropriate restrictions in school libraries.
“No one’s saying ban anything,” DeSantis said.
Books dealing with critical race theory — an academic curriculum that examines the intersection of race, law and equity — also should be reviewed because of the way some content is presented, DeSantis said.
“We want robust education,” he said. “We’re not going to spend tax dollars to have kids hate our country. Not on our watch.”
In Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, the first work in the Book of Dust trilogy, there’s an organization that sounds like a cross between 1984 and Moms for Liberty, the citizens group that is targeting books, teachers, and librarians. Called the League of St. Alexander after a child convert who ratted out his pagan parents, the organization goes into schools, provides badges to those kids who join, and then encourages them to inform on their teachers. Like Moms for Liberty, every success they register fuels their bloodlust. Here’s the consequence in one school, which has just seen the headmaster sacked and imprisoned for standing up to the League:
Malcolm’s headmaster, Mr. Willis, was still away on Monday, and on Tuesday Mr. Hawkins, the deputy head, announced that Mr. Willis wouldn’t be coming back, and that he would be in charge himself from then on. There was an intake of breath from the pupils. They all knew the reason: Mr. Willis had defied the League of St. Alexander, and now he was being punished. It gave the badge wearers a giddy sense of power. By themselves they had unseated the authority of a headmaster. No teacher was safe now.
And:
[T]here was a sort of swagger among the badge wearers. It was rumored that in one of the older classes, the Scripture teacher had been telling them about the miracles in the Bible and explaining how some of them could be interpreted realistically…One of the boys had challenged him and warned him to be careful and held up his badge, and the teacher had backed down and said that he was only telling them that as an example of a wicked lie, and the Bible was right…
One effect of Florida’s laws is that some teachers have begun to self-censor. The same is happening in Pullman’s novel:
Other teachers fell into line as well. They taught less vigorously and told fewer stories, lessons became duller and more careful, and yet this seemed to be what the badge wearers wanted. The effect was as if each teacher was being examined by a fierce inspector, and each lesson became an ordeal in which not the pupils but the teachers were being tested.
It remains to see how many Florida teachers will be actually fired. There have only been a handful so far. But if the law intimidates, it will work as intended. As teachers empty their classrooms of books (or, in some cases, cover them over), definite messages are being sent: authoritarian forces, not the teachers and librarians, are dictating what is best for Florida’s students.
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Monday
Someone—sadly I can’t remember who—gave me a copy of Daniel Genis’s Sentence: Ten Years and a Thousand Books in Prison, about a man who used books to cope with a ten-year prison sentence. The son of a Soviet émigré and an NYU graduate, Genis was an unlikely felon, but a ferocious drug habit turned him into an armed robber. And although he was never truly dangerous—he used to apologize to his victims—he was arrested outside of a Barnes and Noble, where he had just stolen a book, and sentenced to 12 years (two years off if he behaved). The judge, in giving out the harsh sentence, said he was someone who should have known better.
While Genis’s observations of prison life are themselves compelling and enlightening, I of course am particularly interested in his use of literature. I’m only a fourth of my way through the book—I’ll report on the whole when I finish—so today I’m going to quote a few passages to give you a sense of the role that books played. Sometimes they provided an important perspective, sometimes they gave him special insight, sometimes they provided important identity narratives, and sometimes they were used to avoid facing up to reality.
Certain books appear to have had the power to lead Genis astray:
[Luc Santé’s 1917] Low Life was exactly the type of book that had led me to this juncture. My love of obscure tales, printed artifacts from a city devoted to words, and the seamier side of the past primed me to become a bookish New York junkie with my head in the opium clouds of the 19th century….Villainy in sepia attracted me. I relished the idea that I was copping dope on the same blocks that William Burroughs had when he lived in his Bowery bunker; I had read Junkie several times by then, more as a users’ manual than a work of art. Delving deeper, I read the only published collection of Herbert Huncke’s mediocre work when the ancient dope fiend was still alive, and I lived for the streetscapes described in biographies of Beat Generation figures because they were my streets, too.
Some books were used to escape reality:
Of course, when things got a little too real and I found myself on Rikers Island, I lost my taste for the gritty and retreated into science fiction. On the day of my sentencing, I read William Gibson’s Neuromancer twice in a row to avoid contemplating what awaited me.
Some books, these ones creative non-fiction, helped Genis frame the experience:
When I look back, my extensive reading of the travelogues of nineteenth-century explorers was how I sought succor on my own trip through the Incarcerated Nation. I read James Boswell’s Journey to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson and Evelryn Waugh’s collected travel writing, as well as Paul Theroux, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and other genteel travelers, but it was Richard Burton’s Pilgrimage to Mecca and Henry Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent with which I most identified….[A]s I moved through the treacherous terrain of the state’s penal system, I took my own versions of notes on the varieties of human experience little known in the outside world.
Some fictions played a key role in holding onto a sense of self:
I made sure not to forget who I was before I became prisoner 04A3328. This was a common theme in the literature of prison. Henry Charrière relied on his butterfly tattoo to survive the challenge in Papillon. Jean Valjean’s torment over becoming #24601 in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables was clarified for me by my struggle to remain Daniel Genis and not the 3,328th prisoner to be processed into New York State prison in the year 2004. I had read Les Mis years before but returned to it for the description of its hero’s decades of confinement and escape.
Sometimes lit helped him process what he was experiencing:
The fact that much worse than I experienced was suffered by innocent people in The Drowned and the Saved [Primo Levi’s account of being processed into a death camp of Jews by Nazis] made my flicker of self-pity laughable, but much of what I read in the books of the German and Russian camp life was familiar. Downstate Correctional Facility was an hour north of New York. It was like the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter books, though I guess we all went to Slytherin. Being the first prison that a convict sees, it had a processing procedure that was conducted with barked orders, insults, and even occasional violence; Elie Wiesel described something like it in Night, so I knew that such abuse was deliberate…. We were being checked for defiance.
Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” operates in prison but more, Genis explains, as a clenched fist:
Inside, the invisible hand of the market was naked and visible. In the Malthusian competition of all against everyone, the allegorical hand often functioned a clenched fist. Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead describes nineteenth-century czarist prisons in a similar way. One can purchase so much in a prison yard.
Some of the books that Genis describes as escapist are existential nightmares in the form of spy novels and noir science fiction, works that speak to his prison conditions:
Much of my reading during my time on Rikers was meant to distance myself from my present reality. Life felt so hopeless, and the light at the end of the tunnel was impossibly far away, so I really preferred reading of the escapist variety rather than literary challenges. After all, literature inevitably reveals truths about our sordid lives, like the famous “naked lunch”—when you can finally see what’s on your fork. That was pretty much the last thing anyone facing a chunk of hard time would want, so I reread all of William Gibson and lots of Philip K. Dick and John le Carré.
And then some works described the reality he was witnessing:
Prison was populated mostly by drug addicts, with the mentally ill thrown in (Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was as helpful to me as the cavalcade of prison memoirs I plowed through), as well as a number of guys too violent to adhere to the social contract.
When guards became suspicious because of his speaking Russian with his mother over the phone, he found himself thrilling to Cold War spy novels:
Being apprehended and revealed as a bilingual was the closest I ever felt to the KGB sleeper agents I read about in John le Carré novels.
The fantasy of Cold War operatives seeded in the suburbs speaking KGB-taught English, was exciting for me. I read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and others in the genre. I looked for more of the same in Tom Clancy books but didn’t find it. Instead Len Deighton’s Ipcress File and Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana and The Comedians filled my need to read about being out of place with a purpose. I loved The Day of the Jackal and Six Days of the Condor and put them on the list of movies I wanted to watch when I got out.
One often doesn’t know, ahead of time, which books one needs for a situation. That is how literature differs from the how-to genre. But read enough fiction and you’ll find the books that speak to your condition. And that will help you find a way through it.
Paolo Veronese, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane
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Spiritual Sunday
I’ve just finished rereading Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, in which the author targets (among other things) religious believers in love with their own righteousness. We’re seeing a lot of that in America these days, including state legislators like my own (Tennessee’s), who are tumbling all over themselves to pass laws against abortion, the LGBTQ community, and books they contend are leading their children astray, along with the teachers who teach them. As the Gyptian sage Fardar Coram says in Pullman’s book,
The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right.
The passage reminds me of an Anne Lamott observation: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Lamott has also noted that the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty. With all the judgmental certainty going on these days, I share a poem which I discovered through reading Dan Clendenin’s indispensable website, Journey to Jesus. It was written by the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.
The Place Where We Are Right By Yehuda Amichai
From the place where we are right Flowers will never grow In the spring.
The place where we are right Is hard and trampled Like a yard.
But doubts and loves Dig up the world Like a mole, a plow. And a whisper will be heard in the place Where the ruined House once stood.
The house could be any number of the world’s established religions. The whisperers are the doubters and the lovers who can help us reconnect with God. Religion is supposed to help us with this but, when it falls down on the job, then we need these doubters and lovers.
Jesus was one of them. Think of him as a mole, a plow.
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Friday
Twelve years ago I lost a colleague and a dear friend, philosophy professor Alan Paskow, who in his final months decided that he should read Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I’ve often thought about his choice of reading, which helped me decide to choose it this year as my Lenten project. As I read it, I’m beginning to understand why it meant so much to someone who knew his end was coming.
Alan was a phenomenologist, which is to say (I turn to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here) one who studies “structures of experience, or consciousness.” To do so, phenomenologists examine how we experience things, which is to say, “the meanings things have in our experience.” Put yet another way, phenomenology “studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first-person point of view.”
From what I’ve read so far, In Search of Lost Time is a phenomenologist’s dream work. Proust is committed to examining how we process experience. His most famous example, of course, is how the taste of a madeleine cookie brings back to him his childhood experiences in the village of Combray, which he has forgotten about.
Here’s the experience that sets off his search for lost time:
And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and the crumbs with it, touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was myself. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.
Proust traces the experience back to his aunt serving him madeleines when, as a child, he and his family would visit the village of Combray for Holy Week. Once he makes the connection, the many Combray memories come rushing back. Even though we forget people and things, Proust says, “the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment.” And because they remain, once activated they bear “the vast structure of recollection.”
Recollection fills in what before had felt like a blank canvas:
[I]mmediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.
Proust provides an enchanting analogy to capture what happens:
And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on color and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognizable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.
What drew Alan to Proust was how he combines phenomenological reflections with vivid descriptions. Because Alan was dying, both the past and the present rose up in his mind. He wanted to immerse himself in both memory and present-day nature.
Sometimes we would sit on his pier and watch the sun set over the tidewater inlet by his house. I’m sure he recognized his own intense engagement with nature in Proust. Note, for instance, how the author describes hawthorn blossoms upon exiting the Easter service. One particular hawthorn tree, he observes,
was attired even more richly than the rest, for the flowers which clung to its branches, one above another, so thickly as to leave no part of the tree undecorated, like the tassels wreathed about the crook of a rococo shepherdess, were every one of them ‘in color’… And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before the white blossom, but now still more marveling, that it was in no artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from a village shop, laboring at the decoration of a street altar for some procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in color, this rustic ‘pompadour.’ High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in color, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone.
As Alan and I talked, I would sometimes share my own stories of how literature had enhanced my engagement with nature. I remember telling him about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is about a man who thinks he only has a year left to live. As a result, the world becomes more vivid than it ever has before, with the poet providing us with a gorgeous description of nature’s life and death cycle. And I talked about how, after my oldest son died, I would look out at the green forest by our house and marvel at the relentless intensity of trees, bushes and grasses. It was a prodigal summer, as Barbara Kingsolver puts it, informing me, as the Green Knight tries to inform Camelot, that nature insists upon itself. Attention must be paid.
As I read In Search of Lost Time, I think of how Alan was determined to lose no more time. One way he made time count was by reading a book that was worth reading.
Deckler, Hector’s Farewell to Andromache and Astyanax
Thursday
As my faculty reading group was discussing Book V of The Iliad yesterday, I suddenly gained a clarifying insight into my father that I wish I could have shared with him (he died 10 years ago). It involves Hector’s scene with his wife Andromache on the battlements of Troy.
Hector has taken momentary respite from the battle to instruct the women of the city to offer sacrifices to the goddess Athena, whose anger is one of the reasons why Troy is under siege. In talking with Andromache, Homer appears to depict an inconsistency so pronounced as to induce whiplash in the reader. At one moment, Hector is fatalistically predicting a tragic end for himself, his wife and all of Troy. At the next, he is dreaming of a heroic future for his son.
Here he is foreseeing how he, his father, and his brothers will all be killed and how Andromache will be enslaved:
For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it: there will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish, and Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear. But it is not so much the pain to come of the Trojans that troubles me, not even of Priam the king nor Hekabe [his wife], not the thought of my brothers who in their numbers and valor shall drop in the dust under the hands of men who hate them, as troubles me the thought of you, when some bronze-armored Achaian leads you off, taking away your day of liberty, in tears; and in Argos you must work at the loom of another, and carry water from the spring Messeis or Hypereia, all unwilling, but strong will be the necessity upon you… [M]ay I be dead and the piled earth hide me under before i hear you crying and know by this that they drag you captive.
This grim prediction, however, then gives way to one more benign once the helmeted Hector takes his baby son in his arms. The child is child frightened by “the bronze and and the crest with its horse-hair, nodding dreadfully” so Hector “lifted from his head the helmet and laid it in all its shining upon the ground.” After tossing the boy about in his arms and kissing him, Hector then prays to the gods:
Zeus, and you other immortals, grant that this boy, who is my son, may be as I am, pre-eminent among the Trojans, great in strength, as am I, and rule strongly over Ilion; and some day let them say of him: “He is better by far than his father,” as he comes in from the fighting; and let him kill his enemy and bring home the blooded spoils, and delight the heart of his mother.
If Hector’s family and all of Troy are to perish, the Asyanax will not live to become greater by far than his father. But, at least for a moment, Hector has banished that thought from his mind.
My professor father was a self-described determinist who said he didn’t believe in free will. And he was a pessimistic determinist at that, believing that the world was inexorably moving toward a climate and overconsumption apocalypse, regardless of what individuals did in trying to prevent it.
Yet, at the same time, he behaved as though he could have some impact on the future. He was a passionate advocate for social justice and worked closely with the local NAACP and with Highland Folk School to desegregate Franklin County schools. Early on he angered various Sewanee administrators as he fought to desegregate the University of the South. He advocated hard for enrolling women students (Sewanee used to be a men’s college) and for protecting LGBTQ rights. An ardent environmentalist, he also made sure that the college would be a wise steward of the 10,000 acres that comprise its domain. His advocacy in these areas sometimes took the form of committee work, sometimes of marching, sometimes of writing advocacy poetry.
I used to point out the contradiction while, at the same time, noting that it was impossible to argue with a determinist. After all, every bad thing that happens confirms that view of the world. Riffing off a Borges line, I said that the philosophy of determinism is irrefutable and therefore unconvincing. How, I would ask my father, can you believe one way and act another?
One could ask the same thing of Hector, who drops his rational assessment of the situation when he is holding his son in his arms. At that point, he has to believe in a future. The heart wars with the brain and, for a moment, the heart wins.
Rather than critiquing my father for his inconsistency, I wish I had instead examined the reasons for it. As I think about it, my father’s fatalistic determinism probably arose out of his experiences in World War II. A graduate professor once told me that, if you want to understand an author—or anyone, for that matter—look at what was going on in the world when he/she was 21, and at 21 and 22 my father was witnessing some of the horrors of World War II. For instance, he arrived in Munich shortly after the Allies freed the Dachau concentration camp, and one of his jobs would be taking Germans on tours of the camp to show them what their country had done (and to prove to them that it wasn’t American propaganda).
He received another shock when America dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My father’s idealism took a hit along with Japan as the Germans in his tours began telling him, “So you’re as bad as we are.” He took the criticism to heart.
So you can see where my father got his fatalism. Having been a close-up witness to some of the world’s great horrors, he must have believed the world is in the grip of an implacable disaster machine.
But if we’re going to hell in a handbasket, then that also gives us a certain amount of freedom. If, in the long run, it doesn’t matter what you do, then you might as well do things you believe in. Why not fight for peace and justice? At least you’ll be able to live with yourself. I think my father used his fatalism to hold the horrors at a distance–it was a version of Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse Five–while doing what he could in his own small way
Likewise, I believe Hector could not go on if he succumbed to fatalism. He is ready to fight for his son’s future, even if it’s not clear his son has one. My father, despite being a fatalist, was certainly fighting for ours.
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Wednesday
In anticipation of Philip Pullman’s final installment of his Book of Dust trilogy, scheduled to come out in September (if he can pull it off), I’ve been rereading The Secret Commonwealth. Because of all that has happened politically since I first read it three years ago, I’m even more chilled by his description of the church organization that runs things.
What has changed has partly been the takeover of the Supreme Court by Catholic extremists, although that shift has also been accompanied by the increasingly strident language of Christian White nationalists. And then there have been the book bans, the virulent attacks on transexuals, the rise of antisemitism, and mass shootings by White terrorists. White nationalists like Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan are also calling the shots in the House of Representatives. All of this was playing in the back of my mind as I read a speech given before the Magisterium, an organization consisting of the different entities in charge of the church.
Like our own Christian nationalists, the Prefect believes people of faith are under attack. A sense of grievance and resentment pervades his remarks.
“Brothers and Sisters,” the Prefect began, “in the name and the authority of the Most High, we are summoned here today to discuss a matter of burning importance. Our faith has in recent years been challenged and threatened as never before. Heresy is flourishing, blasphemy goes unpunished, the very doctrines that have led us through two thousand years are being openly mocked in every land. This is a time for people of faith to draw together and make our voices heard with unmistakable force.
This initial defensiveness, however, then gives way to a sense of opportunity. Now is the time to start imposing our will on others:
“And at the same time, there is opening to us in the east an opportunity so rich and promising as to raise the heart of the most despondent. We have a chance to increase our influence and bring our power to bear on all those who have resisted and are still resisting the good influence of the Holy Magisterium.”
Having moved from victimhood to power fantasies, the Prefect then—and oh so logically— delivers the solution. Democracy, he declares, must give way to what the communists used to call the vanguard, which supposedly will speak for the whole:
“In bringing you this news—and you shall hear much more later—I must also urge you all to pray most earnestly for the wisdom we shall need in order to deal with the new situation. And the first question I must put before you is this: Our ancient body, here represented by fifty-three men and women of the utmost faith and probity—is it too large? Are there simply too many of us to make rapid decisions and act with force and effect? Should we not consider the benefits that would flow from delegating matters of great policy to a smaller, a more swift-moving and decisive council, which could provide the leadership that is so necessary in these distracted times.”
The Prefect, it so happens, is delivering someone else’s script, just as Russian president Dimitri Medvedev used to do for Vladimir Putin. The puppet master in this case is Marcel Delamare, who heads the nefarious League for the Instauration of the Holy Purpose, which sounds a bit like the Catholic Opus Dei:
No one would ever know, but he himself had written the speech for the Prefect to deliver; and he had made sure, by private inquiry, by blackmail, by bribery, by flattery, by threat, that the motion to elect a smaller council would be passed, and he had already decided who should be elected to it, and who should chair it.
Later, moving from the bad guys to the good, we get an explanation about why it’s so hard to fight against fanatics. Fardar Corman is a wise elder of the wandering gyptians:
The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous and good can’t. Evil has nothing to top it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’s have to become evil to do ’em.
This is always the struggle between democracy and autocracy. As we’ve learned over the past seven years, we can never take the Constitution for granted.
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Tuesday
Last week, when writing about William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, I mentioned feeling pounded by the n-word. I found the work brilliant nevertheless, a brilliant expose of how White America’s obsession with race is both nonsensical and deeply corrupting. Since I think it vital that American students become familiar with such a vision, I share today some thoughts about how teachers can handle works that make prominent use of the epithet. After all, the first impulse of many upon encountering it is to reject the work altogether, thereby missing out on the important wisdom to be gained.
Let me start with my own history with the word. I was born in 1951 and my family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee in 1954, when I was three. My first awareness that something was wrong occurred when I was eight and was chanting to someone younger than I (John Mayfield) a rhyme I had picked up in school:
Teacher, teacher, don’t hit me, Hit that [n-word] behind that tree.
John started complaining vociferously but that just meant that I, amazed that my words had special power, kept repeating it to plague him. Finally he told his parents, which led to a discussion. While I wasn’t chastised, I learned something was amiss and we arrived at a compromise, replacing the n-word with “tiger.”
Being a dutiful child, I stopped using the n-word from that day forward, but I continued to hear it constantly from my peers. I remember someone, for instance, referring to the Black section of Sewanee as [n-word]town. When we had our first Black student at Sewanee Public School, I remember one of my classmates calling him the n-word to his face and of him deflating the bully with a smile, a response (as I learned years later) his mother had coached all her children to use.
While Sewanee faculty—the adults I saw most often—were liberals who considered the n-word abhorrent, I would hear it from adults down in the valley. Or rather, I would hear “nigra,” which was a compromise between “Negro”—which granted too much respect—and the n-word, which by then was being associated with the people referred to as “white trash” (itself an objectionable slur).
Because of the racism, I fled as far from the south as I could for college, attending Carleton in Northfield, Minnesota. While I encountered racism in rural Minnesota as well, it wasn’t as blatant. Therefore, returning to Sewanee for the year before graduate school felt like a return to my childhood. Working for the Winchester Herald-Chronicle, I heard the n-word daily, especially from the paper’s publisher.
Rather than building up an immunity to the word, I experienced the opposite, feeling increasingly ill each time I encountered it. A rightwing Slovenian professor once tried the word out on me just to gauge its effect and got what he was looking for as he saw me wince in pain. When listening to Absalom, Absalom!, therefore, I felt like I was being stabbed over and over. And if that’s how I felt, imagine the response of a person of color upon encountering a passage like the following, where Quentin imagines young Sutpen, dirt poor, encountering two slaves (a coachman and a butler) of the local plantation owner. It begins when he and his sister are passed by the man’s coach:
[H]e saw two parasols m the carriage and the nigger coachman in a plug hat shouting: ‘Hoo dar, gal! Git outen de way dar!’ and then it was over, gone; the carriage and the dust, the two faces beneath the parasols glaring down at his sister; then he was throwing vain clods of dirt after the dust as it spun on. He knew now, while the monkey-dressed nigger butler kept the door barred with his body while he spoke, that it had not been the nigger coachman that he threw at at all, that it was the actual dust raised by the proud delicate wheels, and just that vain. He thought of one night late when his father came home, blundered into the cabin; he could smell the whiskey even while still dulled with broken sleep, hearing that same fierce exultation, vindication, in his father’s voice; ‘We whupped one of Pettibone’s niggers tonight’ and he roused at that, waked at that, asking which one of Pettibone’s niggers and his father said he did not know, had never seen the nigger before: and he asked what die nigger had done and his father said, ‘Hell fire, that goddam son of a bitch Pettibone’s nigger.’
Quentin has no problem, in his narration, with using the n-word, nor does his Canadian roommate. And in having them discourse this way, Faulkner certainly captures the prevailing mentality, one which persists today. In his recent book The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, English professor Michael Gora explains what Faulkner still gets right. The saddest words are “was” and “again,” and Gorra writes,
What was is never over. There have been moments in our history, brief ones, when the meaning of the Civil War has seemed settled. This isn’t one of them, not when the illusion that this country might become a postracial society lies in tatters. Again. That’s precisely why Faulkner remains so valuable—that very recurrence makes him necessary.
Necessary though Faulkner is, however, there’s a problem with reading works that only feature the inner turmoil of White characters. That’s why, in literature courses, we must pair figures like Faulkner with authors like Richard Wright, James Baldwin or (my preference) Toni Morrison. If Faulkner explores the continuing impact of our slave past on Whites, Morrison does the same with its impact on Blacks, especially in novels like Beloved and Paradise. Indeed Morrison, who wrote her Master’s thesis in part on Faulkner, can be seen as rounding out his vision.
And how about Huckleberry Finn? Back in the 1990s I had a former student who, grasping the need for such balance, paired Twain’s novel with Morrison’s Song of Solomon in a high school AP class. It was a brilliant coupling since both novels involve young men engaged in journeys of self-discovery. Unfortunately, a White student complained about a couple of pages of Black trash talk in the middle of the novel, prompting the superintendent of schools to ban it. Morrison was dropped from the curriculum while the novel that makes liberal use of the n-word was allowed to stay.
To be clear, I don’t think Huckleberry Finn should be banned for its use of the n-word. It is a brilliant response to the attack on Black rights that a discouraged Twain witnessed when he took a trip down the Mississippi. But it is a White drama, not a Black one. We aren’t able to see in Jim, as we see in Milkman, a Black man negotiating the twin poles of Black surrender to White society and Black violence against it. (Morrison’s protagonist finds a balance.) By banning Morrison, the superintendent made it difficult to do justice to Twain since, without a Black counterbalance, the class itself becomes lopsided.
Black students recognize this to be very much the case when they are only taught To Kill a Mockingbird, which itself features a number of instances of the n-word. While it’s laudable that Atticus schools Scout on its inappropriateness—just as I was schooled those many years ago—the Black characters don’t get the same three-dimensional treatment as the Finch family. As a result, Black students don’t see themselves in the book.
Teachers shouldn’t avoid discussion of the n-word but, as the saying goes, should make the problem the subject. After all, both the word and the attached sentiments are alive and well in present day America. Literature, which immerses us in its world, provides an ideal venue for talking about our racial challenges. But the literature has to be chosen so that multiple parties are heard, not just White ones. It is this multiplicity that is currently under attack in Texas, Florida, and other reactionary states.
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Monday
I have just been emotionally blindsided by a powerful Maggie O’Farrell novel about Shakespeare’s wife and children. Hamnet (2020) is a fictional account of the bard’s marriage to Anne (Agnes) Hathaway and how the two processed the death of Hamnet, their one son. (According to Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt, “Hamnet” and “Hamlet” are in fact the same name.)
While some speculate that the marriage was troubled, that is not how O’Farrell sees it. Or at least, it is not troubled until Hamnet dies, at which point Shakespeare starts avoiding the family and burying himself in the theater. Feeling abandoned, Anne journeys to London when she hears (not from her husband) that he has written a play bearing their son’s name.
It is when she is responding to the play that Hamnet hit me with its hammer blow. Of course, the novel had to set me up for the final scene. As I read about Hamnet’s death and the family’s mourning, I thought of my own Justin, who drowned 23 years ago and who would have turned 44 this coming Sunday. Justin wasn’t uppermost in my mind as I was reading, but when I reached the end of the novel—where we see Anne/Agnes at the lip of the stage reaching out to the figures of Hamlet and the ghost of his father (played by Shakespeare)—something in me broke. I, who haven’t cried for Justin in over 20 years, was wracked by loud sobs that I couldn’t stop. Here’s the passage—the novel’s final paragraphs—that unleashed pent-up emotions I didn’t know were there:
For now, she is right at the front of the crowd, at the edge of the stage; she is gripping its wooden lip in both hands. An arm’s length away, perhaps two, is Hamlet, her Hamlet, as he might have been, had he lived, and the ghost, who has her husband’s hands, her husband’s beard, who speaks in her husband’s voice.
She stretches out a hand, as if to acknowledge them, as if to feel the air between the three of them, as if wishing to pierce the boundary between audience and players, between real life and play.
The ghost turns his head towards her, as he prepares to exit the scene. He is looking straight at her, meeting her gaze, as he speaks his final words:
“Remember me.”
Up until the moment when the young Hamlet appears on stage, Agnes has been furious with her husband. The rest of the audience may be gripped with the early presence of the ghost on the ramparts, but Agnes cannot understand why Shakespeare would have their son’s name emerge from “the mouths of people she has never known and will never know.” Why pretend, she asks, that their son’s name
means nothing to him, just a collection of letters? How could he thieve this name, then strip and flense it of all it embodies, discarding the very life it once contained? How could he take up his pen and write it on a page, breaking its connection with their son? It makes no sense. It pierces her heart, it eviscerates her, it threatens to sever her from herself, from him, from everything they had, everything they were.
And:
She had thought that coming here, watching this, might give her a glimpse into her husband’s heart. It might have offered her a way back to him. She thought the name on the playbill might have been a means for him to communicate something to her. A sign, of sorts, a signal, an outstretched hand, a summons. As she rode to London, she had thought that perhaps now she might understand his distance, his silence, since their son’s death. She has the sense now that there is nothing in her husband’s heart to understand. It is filled only with this: a wooden stage, declaiming players, memorized speeches, adoring crowds, costumed fools. She has been chasing a phantasm, a will-o’-the-wisp, all this time.
Then, however, the magic of the theatre takes over, which is all the more intense in her case because she recognizes, in the boy playing Hamlet, her own son. Shakespeare has coached the actor to be Hamnet had he grown into a man:
He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him.
As fiction becomes more real than reality itself, Agnes realizes what Shakespeare has done:
Her husband has brought him back to life, in the only way he can. As the ghost talks, she sees that her husband, in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son. He has taken his son’s death and made it his own.; he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place. “O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
The novel affected me not only because, through it, I relived the death of our son. After all, I have encountered other such dramas in the intervening years that, while moving, have not struck this deep. No, I think what O’Farrell has done is shown how, in a great work of art, we are able, momentarily, to penetrate the boundary that separates us from the dead. Agnes sees—imagines she sees— her child on the stage and experiences “an old, familiar urge, like water gushing into a dry streambed. She wants to lay hands on that boy; she wants to fold him in her arms, comfort and console him—and she has to, if it is the last thing she does.”
Of course, art, no matter how great, can’t bring the dead back to life. But think about it this way: those we have lost were never entirely material to begin with. They were the emotions they aroused in us, the anxieties they put us through, the love we felt for them. They are also integrally intertwined with the people we have become. What Hamlet does for Agnes is bring back all of that. She sees, in one of the most three-dimensional characters ever penned, everything but the actual flesh and blood of her beloved son. And that flesh and blood were never the most important part of him anyway.
I realized, in reading Hamnet, that the way I turn to literature to process my life—including the death of my son—is more than a shallow consolation or a wish fulfillment or a cerebral exercise. I already knew, of course—but here was an author confirming it—that literature puts us closer to life’s essence than any other use of language. Watching Agnes watching Hamlet, I saw myself reading the literature I turned to after Justin died: Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Mary Oliver’s “The Lost Children” and Percy Shelley’s Adonais and Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia. These works, I realized, connected me to parts of myself that Justin had touched—which is to say, ways in which Justin was still alive. The sorrow I felt while reading Hamnet, which took me back to my own mourning period, was intermixed with a deep joy and maybe even relief: these fictional re-creations to which I have devoted my life, I was assured, are not in vain.
Julia the other day asked me why I thought she is so drawn to certain fantasy works (especially Robin McKinley’s The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown) that she returns to time and again. I said that the works we love have articulated deep soul longings and that we reread to get back in touch. Sometimes an old work still functions as a conduit and sometimes we discover we have grown past it and need to turn elsewhere. In any event, when she saw me crying and saw the book that was lying by my side (she’s the one who alerted me to it), she knew what had happened and she held me, just as she held me almost 23 years ago when we mourned our son together.
And in that action, I see another passage in Hamnet. Right before the end the author tells us that, after the play, Agnes will find her husband, “his face still streaked with traces of paste,” and they will stand together in “the open circle of the playhouse” until it is “as empty as the sky above it.” Perhaps they will think together, “Good night sweet prince: And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” Because art has opened hearts that were in danger of shriveling, their relationship too will grow, in spite of—or even because of—the stresses that have been put on it. The Globe Theater opens them up to a vision that is as wide as the sky.
