Better Living through Beowulf

On Lent, Dust, and His Dark Materials

By Robin Bates | Published: March 4, 2023

Lyra (Dafne Keen) and Will (Amir Wilson) in *His Dark Materials*

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Spiritual Sunday

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” T. S. Eliot memorably wrote in his masterpiece about spiritual desolation, and dust so far has been the theme of my Lent. Our rector Rob Lamborn preached about dust in his Ash Wednesday service before marking us with the ashes of last year’s Palm Sunday fronds, and in our Lenten reading. I was delighted to see author Jane Shaw, in A Practical Christianity: Meditations for the Season of Lent, leans heavily on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy in addressing “The Problem of Dust.”

The biblical metaphor of dust, Shaw writes,

helpfully speaks to our beginnings and our endings, to our place in the world, to the life in Christ that Christians share, and to the practical means by which we may live our lives. In the second of the creation stories in which God makes humankind, it is said: “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7). Later in Genesis, God reminds human beings of their mortality in the words, “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19).

Shaw then quotes philosopher Alain de Botton that, as the stuff from which we are all created, “Dust is that most democratic of substances.” Christianity, Shaw notes,

forces us to realize, finally realize, that for all our achievements and riches, human beings are created equal, from the same substance, and, more than that, in the image and likeness of God.

Shaw also quotes the passage from Ezekiel about the valley of dry bones, which is often read at Easter. Then she applies Pullman’s novel, in which “dust drives the narrative and governs everything.” Pullman’s dust, she says

consists of particles from another world that cause knowledge—or, in theological language, original sin. The overriding intellectual quest, and the central battles in the book, are about discovering the origin and meaning of dust.

Lyra and Will, the two protagonists of the series, are two teenagers grappling with the challenges of life, including sexuality. There’s a battle in the book about how to interpret the forbidden fruit in the Genesis story. As Lyra and Will see it, they must taste of that fruit if they are to grow into their full humanity. In Shaw’s framing, they “learn that the moral life, the good life, is not lived in a dust-free vacuum but is rather lived out in the quest, in the journey and in the choices that one makes in a complex world filled with pain and suffering as well as joy and hope.”

This goes against the teaching of those in the novel who believe that “the fall” was a tragedy rather than a necessary stage of growth. Pullman is contending that it was good that Eva ate the fruit (in the third book we see Lyra and Will eating such fruit) and that it is good that people have sex (as Lyra and Will do). If the church disagrees, then the church is a block to humans achieving their potential.

In fact, Lyra’s mother, representing one wing of the church, wants to keep children innocent—which is to say, prevent them from growing up. She has a particularly fiendish way of doing so (you can check out a previous post on the book to see how). The trilogy is a coming-of-age drama which functions, at the same time, as a rejection of sex-obsessed and guilt-obsessed Christianity.

If we cannot eradicate dust and sin, Shaw continues, then we must find “some way to grapple with our faults, shake off the effects and continue on the journey.” The answer is not longing for an impossible innocence—or for an escape from the world—but rather “reckoning with the reality of dust—coming to accept our created nature, including the flaws.” This in turn provides the foundation for moving towards and embracing life in all its fullness. “Our of our dust,” she writes, “through the clouds of dust that we shake off,” comes new life.”

Invoking again Ezekiel’s image of dry bones, she concludes the chapter on dust as follows:

What, then, does Christianity bring to the quest for a moral life, the struggle to live with our dustiness? The promise that we are created of dust and in the image of God, and that we will be accompanied in our journey by the love of God, a love greater than our sin, greater than our limits.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Coming of Age, His Dark Materials, Jane Shaw, Lent, Philip Pullman, Practical Christianity | Comments closed

March Has Come in Like a Liobam

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2023

Friday

While, for much of the country, March is coming in like a lion, here in Appalachian Tennessee we need a hybrid simile since sometimes we are experiencing lion weather (it’s going down to the twenties next week), sometimes lamb weather (it went up to 72 two days ago). So how should we describe what’s happening?

Thanks to Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake trilogy, there’s an answer. We can say that “March has come in like a liobam.”

Liobams are the product of a laissez-faire dystopian future in which crazy, gene-splicing Dr. Frankensteins do whatever they want with animal and human DNA. There are pigoons (pigs that can be harvested for human organs), rakunks (rats and skunks) and fluorescent rabbits that glow in the dark. There are also edible hybrids, like soydines, chickeanpeas and beananas. And then there are liobams.

Here is Toby’s first encounter with a flock of them. Or should I say pride of them? Flide? Prock? Anyway, Toby is one of the environmentally oriented survivalists who manages to survive the human-manufactured plague:

Toby stares at them, fascinated: she’s never seen a liobam in the flesh, only pictures. Am I imagining things? she wonders. No, the liobams are actual. They must be zoo animals freed by one of the more fanatical sects in those last desperate days.
They don’t look dangerous, although they are. The lion-sheep splice was commissioned by the Lion Isaiahists in order to force the advent of the Peaceable Kingdom. They’d reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together. But the result hadn’t been strictly vegetarian.
Still, the liobams seem gentle enough, with their curly golden hair and twirling tails. They’re nibbling flower heads, they don’t look up; yet she has the sense that they’re perfectly aware of her. Then the male opens its mouth, displaying its long, sharp canines, and calls. It’s an odd combination of baa and roar: a bloar, thinks Toby.

We heard bloaring the other night when we were under a tornado watch. That was March coming in.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged gene splicing, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, Seasons, Spring, Year of the Flood | Comments closed

Faulkner on Racism: Sadly, Still Relevant

By Robin Bates | Published: March 1, 2023

Thursday

Last week I finished listening to Absalom, Absalom!, a Faulkner novel I hadn’t read since Erling Larsen’s contemporary novels class at Carleton College (spring of 1973). All I could remember of that earlier encounter is that it felt like a nightmarish hallucination, which itself was intensified by the end-of-semester madness going on at the time. Listening to it this time was difficult in part because of how Faulkner hammers the reader with the n-word on page after page. Still, I came away feeling that Absalom! provides vital insights into the America’s continuing problems with race.

I felt this way even more after reading a recent Washington Post article on White racial anxieties. Columnist Theodore Johnson poses the question, “[H]ow comfortable are White Americans in a democracy where people of color increasingly hold political power?” He believes this to be “the most important question in the nation today.”

Johnson explains that some form of resistance is guaranteed “when the thinning majority suddenly find themselves governed by racial minorities long stereotyped as less intelligent, culturally inferior, prone to criminality and unsuited for leadership.” We can see this resistance in voter suppression, racial gerrymandering, the infusion of dark money into campaigns and, most dramatically, attempts to overturn legitimate elections. “The Democratic Party,” Johnson points out, “has ushered in a new era of racial diversity in the nation’s most powerful public institutions—and folks are mad about it.”

Insecure White Americans have not been shy, especially since Donald Trump, about openly expressing their fears. As Johnson observes,

A swath of the right has put its cards on the table. Its comments about immigrants, majority Black cities and Black and Hispanic Democratic officials — coupled with conspiracy theories and disinformation — make plain the fears it harbors about living in a nation where people of color genuinely participate in power.

I cannot sort through all the racial intricacies of Absalom, Absalom! in a single post but here are a few observations. First, the incessant use of the n-word is not only a way of degrading another race, although that’s certainly part of it. The epithet also grows out of panic that the hard lines of demarcation cited by White supremacists are actually porous. The characters use the n-word to reassure themselves that the boundaries are more fixed than they actually are.

The novel makes clear the instability of race identity. Thomas Sutpen, who has moved to Haiti to learn how to be a slave master, finds himself tricked into marrying a woman of color who is passing as white. He tries to buy off her and her son (Charles Bon) and marries a second time, becoming a secret bigamist. He and his wife have Henry and Judith.

In what may be an elaborate revenge plot concocted by Sutpen’s rejected first wife, Bon ends up at the same college as Henry and proceeds to corrupt him. As though the relationship between these two half-brothers is not already complicated enough, Charles also becomes betrothed to his half-sister Judith. In doing so, furthermore, he is on his way to becoming a bigamist himself, having married an octoroon woman in New Orleans and having had a son by her. Oh, and Henry, Judith, and Charles have one other half-sister, Clytemnestra, whose mother is one of Sutpen’s slaves. In short, what with bigamy, miscegenation, slave rape, and potential incest, the two races are thoroughly intermingled. White insistence that there’s an absolute distinction is belied by the facts on the ground.

One doesn’t have to confine oneself to America’s past to find Whites insisting on this distinction. Cartoonist Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert cartoon series, recently got into trouble by calling Black Americans a “hate group” and suggesting that White people should “get the hell away” from them. While many White Americans, starting with Trump, think this, Adams suffered consequences because he said the quiet part out loud. Again, Faulkner’s novel shows this distinction between “Black Americans” and “White people” to be a false one, especially when one recalls the “one drop of Black blood” criteria that Whites used to distinguish the races. One has but to watch an episode or two of Henry Louis Gates’s Finding Your Roots to realize how mixed up our bloodlines actually are.

Quentin Compson, the historian who is digging into the Sutpen family history, believes that if old Thomas were to acknowledge, even privately to Charles, that he is his father, then Charles would abandon the revenge plot and leave the Sutpens alone. Instead, the father pretends there is no connection:

Then for the second time [Charles] looked at the expressionless and rocklike face, at the pale boring eyes in which there was no flicker, nothing, the face in which he saw his own features, in which he saw recognition, and that was all…

Sutpen cannot bring himself to acknowledge that he has been married to a Black woman, just as certain White Americans today cannot acknowledge that their lives and their histories are inextricably intertwined with Black Americans. Faulkner makes the point dramatically through the intermixed genealogy, but he also makes through the ways that Black and White lives intersect continually in the novel. In Quentin’s “what could have been” alternate history, Sutpen would not have lost his son Henry if he had opened himself to his mixed-race son. Nor would he have begotten another child through the daughter of his handyman in order to replace Henry. Nor would this handyman then have killed Sutpen, along with this daughter and her baby.

In the novel, the stupendous Sutpen mansion devolves into a gothic haunted house, and it is useful to note that gothic horror relies on repressed truths about ourselves. What we push under, Freud tells us, returns in monstrous guise. When White Americans repress the fact that we are an ethnically diverse and multicultural nation, they project these monstrous images upon people of color. Then unscrupulous politicians and shameless grifters feed upon their projections.

Abraham Lincoln, quoting Jesus, famously said that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and the Sutpen mansion, symbol of a nation that refuses to face up to its diversity, goes down in a fiery blaze at novel’s end. If today we see figures like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene replaying a dark history–she has called for secession and Civil War–it’s because they still cannot accept what we actually are. As Faulkner famously observed, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into what used to be.

Fortunately, not all Whites feel this way. At the end of his Washington Post article, Johnson writes about pushing back against our racially toxic eternal return. “The American experiment only succeeds,” he writes,

when our large diverse nation figures out how to strengthen an egalitarian and participatory democracy. It only fulfills its promise when the republic resembles the people without losing credibility or legitimacy. We are only exceptional if the color of our democracy is not seen as an impediment to the content of the nation’s character.

Faulkner, who knew the South well, shows the depth of the problem. Sadly, the problem extends beyond the south, and it appears that we still have a long way to go.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Absalom Absalom!, Diversity, gothic fiction, miscegenation, racism, William Faulkner | Comments closed

Lady Audley’s Secret: Iron Resolve

By Robin Bates | Published: February 28, 2023

Wednesday

Have you ever found yourself immersed in four novels simultaneously. (It was five but I’ve completed William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!) For the record, the novels are Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Anyway, I came across a wonderful passage in Braddon’s novel that I must share. It reminds me of a well-known Winston Churchill anecdote.

While probably apocryphal, the anecdote gets at the outsized role Clementine Churchill played in her husband’s political success. (A History Channel article summarizes her impact.) The story goes something as follows:

In their nightly walk around their villa, the Churchills come across the caretaker tending the garden. (In some versions of the story, the man they encounter is a street sweeper.) When Winston notes that the man seems interested in Clementine, she notes that they have known each other for a long time.

“Well, if you had married him, you would have been the wife of a caretaker, not the wife of a prime minister,” Churchill says, to which Clementine replies, “Dear, if I had married him he would have been prime minister, not a caretaker.”

Like most stories too good to be true, this one probably is. Still, I thought of it when reading today’s passage in Braddon’s 1862 novel.

Lady Audley’s nephew-in-law is on the verge of solving a mysterious disappearance that will, if the facts prove to be what he fears, break his beloved uncle’s heart. Before he can walk away from the case, however, he encounters a very determined woman who renews his resolve. I imagine that Braddon got great satisfaction out of writing the following passage, which describes the impact an iron-willed woman can have on a man’s life:

I am in it, and I can’t get out of it; so I better submit myself to the brown-eyed girl, and do what she tells me patiently and faithfully. What a wonderful solution to life’s enigma there is in petticoat government! Man might lie in the sunshine, and eat lotuses, and fancy it ‘always afternoon,’ if his wife would let him! But she won’t, bless her impulsive heart and active mind! She knows better than that. Who ever heard of a woman taking life as it ought to be taken? Instead of supporting it as an unavoidable nuisance, only redeemable by its brevity, she goes through it as if it were a pageant or a procession. She dresses for it, and simpers and grins, and gesticulates for it. She pushes her neighbors, and struggles for a good place in the dismal march; she elbows, and writhes, and tramples, and prances to the one end of making the most of the misery. She gets up early and sits up late, and is loud, and restless, and noisy, and unpitying. She drags her husband on to the woolsack, or pushes him into Parliament. She drives him full butt at the dear, lazy machinery of government, and knocks and buffets him about the wheels, and cranks, and screws, and pulleys; until somebody, for quiet’s sake, makes him something that she wanted him to be made. That’s why incompetent men sometimes sit in high places, and interpose their poor, muddled intellects between the things to be done and the people that can do them, making universal confusion in the helpless innocence of well-placed incapacity. The square men in the round holes are pushed into them by their wives. The Eastern potentate who declared that women were at the bottom of all mischief, should have gone a little further and seen why it is so. It is because women are never lazy. They don’t know what it is to be quiet. They are Semiramides, and Cleopatras, and Joans of Arc, Queen Elizabeths, and Catharines the Second, and they riot in battle, and murder, and clamor and desperation. If they can’t agitate the universe and play at ball with hemispheres, they’ll make mountains of warfare and vexation out of domestic molehills, and social storms in household teacups. Forbid them to hold forth upon the freedom of nations and the wrongs of mankind, and they’ll quarrel with Mrs. Jones about the shape of a mantle or the character of a small maidservant. To call them the weaker sex is to utter a hideous mockery. They are the stronger sex, the noisier, the more persevering, the most self-assertive sex. They want freedom of opinion, variety of occupation, do they? Let them have it. Let them be lawyers, doctors, preachers, teachers, soldiers, legislators—anything they like—but let them be quiet—if they can.

Braddon’s novel appeared eight years after Coventry Patmore’s famous (or infamous) poem Angel in the House, which paints a far different picture of the supportive wife—strongly supportive, to be sure, but also sweet, docile, and submissive. I can imagine Braddon thinking, “If you’re not going to grant us full equality, then we’re going to have to use you men as our surrogates. Don’t blame us for what happens.”

It’s enough to turn Robert Audley into a suffragette.

Side note: The lotus reference in the Braddon passage is to Tennyson’s “The Lotus Eaters,” which imagines men lolling around doing nothing all day. The poem ends,

Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore
Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar;
O, rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

No such slumbering for married men, Braddon threatens.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Feminism, Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Winston Churchill | Comments closed

Proust on Why the Poor Support the Rich

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2023

Tuesday

Yesterday I mentioned the GOP’s use of cultural issues to distract their working-class supporters from their real agenda, which is to funnel as much money to wealthy people as they can. In contending this, however, it’s possible that I don’t understand these supporters. Perhaps they don’t need to be distracted but are just fine with the wealthy feathering their own nests. As they see it, Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, along with Trump’s shameless grift—recently he peddled “Trump Water” at the East Palestine toxic disaster site—are just marks in his favor.

Two passages from literary works I’ve read recently alerted me to this possibility. While Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! don’t have much in common, both provide interesting insights into lower class characters on this issue.

In Proust, the family maid is affronted by all charity her wealthy mistress directs to poor people. If the aristocratic Aunt Léonie is going to give money away, Françoise figures, she should only bestow it on other rich people.

“I don’t think she [Eulalie, an impoverished recipient of the aunt’s generosity] has very much to complain of, all the same,” Françoise would sigh grimly, for she had a tendency to regard as petty cash all that my aunt might give her for herself or her children, and as treasure riotously squandered on a pampered and ungrateful darling the little coins slipped, Sunday by Sunday, into Eulalie’s hand, but so discreetly passed that Françoise never managed to see them. It was not that she wanted to have for herself the money my aunt bestowed on Eulalie. She already enjoyed a sufficiency of all that my aunt possessed, in the knowledge that the wealth of the mistress automatically ennobled and glorified the maid in the eyes of the world….[H]ad she had control over my aunt’s fortune (which would have more than satisfied her highest ambition) she would have guarded it from the assaults of strangers with a maternal ferocity. She would, however, have seen no great harm in what my aunt, whom she knew to be incurably generous, allowed herself to give away, had she given only to those who were already rich. Perhaps she felt that such persons, not being actually in need of my aunt’s presents, could not be suspected of simulating affection for her on that account.

As Françoise sees it, giving gifts to “persons of the ‘same class’ as my aunt” seemed to her

to be included among the ornamental customs of that strange and brilliant life led by rich people, who hunted and shot, gave balls and paid visits, a life which she would contemplate with an admiring smile. But it was by no means the same thing if, for this princely exchange of courtesies, my aunt substituted mere charity, if her beneficiaries were of the class which Françoise would label “people like myself,” or “people no better than myself”…

Note that Françoise exempts from the aunt’s charitable giving the money she herself receives, regarding it as so much “petty cash.” Here she is like those White working-class Americans that consider Black working-class Americans unworthy of receiving governmental assistance that they themselves receive. If she were a member of our own society, Françoise would be amongst those convinced that the poor spend their money on sirloin steaks. With no proof, Proust’s maid is sure that the Eulalies of the world (a.k.a. “undeserving objects”) receive far more than she does from her employer:

And when she saw that, despite all her warnings, my aunt continued to do exactly as she pleased, and to fling money away with both hands (or so, at least, Françoise believed) on undeserving objects, she began to find that the presents she herself received from my aunt were very tiny compared to the imaginary riches squandered upon Eulalie. There was not, in the neighborhood of Combray, a farm of such prosperity and importance that Françoise doubted Eulalie’s ability to buy it, without thinking twice, out of the capital which her visits to my aunt had ‘brought in’…

In her anger, Françoise starts sounding like certain of our rightwing evangelicals, convinced that Eulalie will ultimately experience the full force of God’s wrath:

“Flatterers know how to make themselves welcome, and to gather up the crumbs; but have patience, have patience; our God is a jealous God, and one fine day He will be avenged upon them!” she would declaim, with the sidelong, insinuating glance of Joash, thinking of Athaliah alone when he says that the
…prosperity
Of wicked men runs like a torrent past,
And soon is spent.

I now shift gears to Thomas Sutpen, the central figure in Absalom, Absalom! Although he is regarded as “white trash” by privileged Whites, as a young boy he doesn’t begrudge them their wealth:

He had learned the difference not only between white men and blade ones, but he was learning that there was a difference between white men and white men….He still thought that that was just a matter of where you were spawned and how; whether you were lucky or not lucky; and that the lucky ones would be even slower and loather than the unlucky to take any advantage of it or credit for it, or to feel that it gave them anything more than the luck; and he still thought that they would feel if anything more tender toward the unlucky than the unlucky would ever need to feel toward them.

And:

He no more envied the [rich] man than he would have envied a mountainman who happened to own a fine rifle. He would have coveted the rifle, but he would himself have supported and confirmed the owner’s pride and pleasure in its ownership because he could not have conceived of the owner taking crass advantage of the luck which gave the rifle to him…

Faulkner attributes the views to Sutpen’s youthful innocence, but I wonder if Trump’s working-class voters have a comparable innocence, not believing that this man, who speaks their language, would play them for suckers. After all, won’t he appreciate how loyal they are?

And so the wealthy find support amongst people whose financial interests are in direct opposition to their own. As long as they can keep playing that game, they will play it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Absalom Absalom!, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, poverty programs, Swann's Way, White working class resentment, William Faulkner | Comments closed

GOP Attacks on the Poor? Read McCullers

By Robin Bates | Published: February 26, 2023

Monday

Depressingly and predictably, Republican House members want to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. Unconcerned during the Trump years when their tax cuts for the wealthy ballooned the deficit into the stratosphere, they’ve now decided that red ink is threatening the country. In response to the news, someone on Spoutible (regrettably I forgot to record who) quoted activist Jake Blount from Carson McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

First, news of Republican plans. A Washington Post article reports,

Top House Republicans are exploring significant changes to the nation’s food stamps program, including benefit cuts and stricter work requirements, as some in the new majority scramble for ways to slash government spending this year.

Food policy experts say that such changes “could open the door to debilitating cuts” and “worsen an existing hunger crisis.” According to Vince Hall, whom the article describes as the chief government relations officer for Feeding America, a nonprofit network of more than 200 food banks that provided more than 5 billion meals last year, “We are strained to the breaking point with a major increase in demand coming next month. It is deeply disturbing to contemplate even further reductions to the SNAP program.”

And then there’s the fact that such assistance is dwarfed by the big-ticket budget items, such as Medicare, Social Security, and the military budget—items that Republicans are afraid to touch. In other words, their proposed cuts will have minimal effect on the deficit and considerable effect on people’s lives.

This is the kind of thing that gets activist Jake Blount riled up in McCuller’s depression-era novel. Appearing in 1940 and set in a Georgia mill town, Heart Is a Lonely Hunter captures the lives of people at the margins. Here’s what Blount has to say:

We live in the richest country in the world. There’s plenty and to spare for no man, woman, or child to be in want. And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start? There are corporations worth billions of dollars – and hundreds of thousands of people who don’t get to eat.

Blount is also right on target, no less in 2023 than in 1940, about the GOP’s deflection strategies—which is to say, how they play upon cultural fears to hide their plutocratic agenda. Worse than the country’s poverty, Blount says, is

the way that the truth has been hidden from the people. The things they have been told so they can’t see the truth. The poisonous lies. So they aren’t allowed to know.

While we’re on the subject of oppression, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention a remarkable African American character, the black doctor Benedict Copeland, who calls out the town’s racism. At one point he sounds like any number of Civil Rights-era leaders:

Our mission is to walk with strength and dignity through the days of our humiliation. Our pride must be strong, for we know the value of the human mind and soul. We must teach our children. We must sacrifice so that they may earn the dignity of study and wisdom. For the time will come. The time will come when the riches in us will not be held in scorn and contempt. The time will come when we will be allowed to serve. When we will labor and our labor will not be wasted. And our mission is to await this time with strength and faith.

Reviewing the novel in 1940, Richard Wright wrote,

To me the most impressive aspect of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is the astonishing humanity that enables a white writer, for the first time in Southern fiction, to handle African-American characters with as much ease and justice as those of her own race.

And to make the book even more relevant, McCullers has characters worry about rising fascism. It’s remarkable that she wrote her novel at 23.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Carson McCullers, food stamps, GOP budget cuts, Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, poverty, racism | Comments closed

Reading Proust as Lenten Observance

By Robin Bates | Published: February 25, 2023

Once again, this year’s Lenten discipline will involve taking up a challenging work of literature that I believe will deepen me spiritually. As poet priest Malcolm Guite observes, Lent is a good time for poetry since, through poems, we can arrive at “clarification of who we are, how we pray, how we journey through our lives with God and how he comes to journey with us.” Guite draws on Seamus Heaney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to make his point:

Lent is a time set aside to re-orient ourselves, to clarify our minds, to slow down, recover from distraction, to focus on the values of God’s Kingdom and on the value he has set on us and on our neighbours. There are a number of distinctive ways in which poetry can help us do that…
Heaney spoke of poetry offering a glimpse and a clarification, here is how an earlier poet Coleridge, put it, when he was writing about what he and Wordsworth were hoping to offer through their poetry, which was
“awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

An article I blogged on twelve years ago, by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, compares reading literature carefully to the ancient practice of lectio divina, which involves “reading Scripture slowly, listening for the word or phrase that speaks to you, pausing to consider prayerfully the gift being offered in those words for this moment.” Reading this way, she says,

can change the way we listen to the most ordinary conversation. It can become a habit of mind. It can help us locate what is nourishing and helpful in any words that come our way—especially in what poet Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said”—and it can equip us with a personal repertoire of sentences, phrases, and single words that serve us as touchstones or talismans when we need them.

And:

In each reading of a book or poem or play, we may be addressed in new ways, depending on what we need from it, even if we are not fully aware of those needs. The skill of good reading is not only to notice what we notice, but also to allow ourselves to be addressed. To take it personally. To ask, even as we read secular texts, that the Holy Spirit enable us to receive whatever gift is there for our growth and our use. What we hope for most is that as we make our way through a wilderness of printed, spoken, and electronically transmitted words, we will continue to glean what will help us navigate wisely and kindly—and also wittily—a world in which competing discourses can so easily confuse us in seeking truth and entice us falsely.

Last year I looked for such gifts in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, although I only completed Book I and parts of Book III. In previous Lents I turned to the collected poetry of George Herbert, John Milton’s Paradise Regained, the religious poems of T. S. Eliot, and Dante’s Paradiso.

This year I am focusing on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, a work that has always intimidated me. This is in part because of its length, in part because of the author’s extra-refined sensibility (too subtle for me?), in part because my French professor father lionized it (can I read and appreciate as well as he did?). All of these are reasons to take it on.

Besides, I recently realized, from reading Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, that Proust has a lot to teach me about the nature of fictional engagement. As the Yale literature professor sees it, Proust understands, in a profound way, why we are drawn to novels. Because our senses can only tell us so much about another person, Proust contends that only through imagining what other people must be feeling and thinking can we overcome our separateness from them:

[N]one of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a ‘real’ person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of ‘real’ people would be a decided improvement. A ‘real’ person, profoundly as we may sympathize with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift.

Although we may see someone else experiencing a misfortune, Proust notes how little our senses can reveal to us the nature of that misfortune. The same is even true when it comes to our own misfortune:

If some misfortune comes to [another person], it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indeed it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either.

One reason we have difficulty understanding each other, and understanding ourselves, is because the change process occurs so slowly. Speaking of the world’s sorrows and joys, Proust observes that

we should have to spend years of our actual life in getting to know [them], and the keenest, the most intense of which would never have been revealed to us because the slow course of their development stops our perception of them. It is the same in life; the heart changes, and…its alteration, like that of certain natural phenomena, is so gradual that, even if we are able to distinguish, successively, each of its different states, we are still spared the actual sensation of change.

Literature, by contrast, gives us these precious insights. Because it deals with our spiritual selves, it finds a way to penetrate “those opaque sections,” thereby connecting self with other–and self with oneself–as mere empirical observation cannot. Whether through symbol, plot, character, setting, atmosphere, or other literary tools, it finds ways to translate the essence of others in ways that we can grasp. Or as the narrator puts it,

The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself.

In other words, it doesn’t matter that fictional characters are made up. “The feelings of this new order of creatures,” Proust writes, “

appear to us in the guise of truth, since we have made them our own, since it is in ourselves that they are happening, that they are holding in thrall, while we turn over, feverishly, the pages of the book, our quickened breath and staring eyes. And once the novelist has brought us to that state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his book comes to disturb us as might a dream, but a dream more lucid, and of a more lasting impression than those which come to us in sleep; why, then, for the space of an hour he sets free within us all the joys and sorrows in the world…

We can learn how the heart changes, Proust says, “only from reading or by imagination.”

I am far enough into the first volume to know that Proust—whose boyhood self is constantly reading—will speak more about the truths that fiction teaches us. I’ll report back regularly on further insights.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged In Search of Lost Time, Lent, Malcolm Guite, Marcel Proust, Peter Brooks | Comments closed

In Russia, It’s Always 1984

By Robin Bates | Published: February 24, 2023

Friday

As evidence that Vladimir Putin is getting desperate about his invasion of Ukraine upon its one-year anniversary, Atlantic columnist David Frum summed up his recent national address with a familiar quotation: “Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.” In other words, the Russian dictator was blaming all of his troubles on a foreign entity.

Putin’s Eurasia, of course, is the United States. Oh, and NATO.

Orwell’s Eurasia, meanwhile, is one of the countries with which Big Brother’s Oceania is always at war, the other being Eastasia. Or rather, Big Brother is generally at war with one and allied with the other, although which is which changes regularly. In any event, whenever things are going wrong in his own country, he always blames it on the enemy, even while, at the same time, touting glorious victories. Note the following television report:

A trumpet call, clear and beautiful, floated into the stagnant air. The voice continued raspingly:
’Attention! Your attention, please! A newsflash has this moment arrived from the Malabar front. Our forces in South India have won a glorious victory. I am authorized to say that the action we are now reporting may well bring the war within measurable distance of its end. Here is the newsflash— —’
Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week, the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty….
‘Oceania, ‘tis for thee’ gave way to lighter music. Winston walked over to the window, keeping his back to the telescreen. The day was still cold and clear. Somewhere far away a rocket bomb exploded with a dull, reverberating roar. About twenty or thirty of them a week were falling on London at present.

If Putin is willing to sacrifice thousands of men to capture strategically unimportant Bakhmut, it may be so that he can trumpet “a glorious victory.” Meanwhile, think of those 20-30 bombs as Russia’s reversals in Ukraine—Russian casualties and deaths are approaching the 200,000 mark. Putin figures he can escape blame, however, if he can get Russians to focus all their anger on nebulous outside forces. To date, Putin has been as effective in this tactic as Big Brother:

A new poster had suddenly appeared all over London. It had no caption, and represented simply the monstrous figure of a Eurasian soldier, three or four meters high, striding forward with expressionless Mongolian face and enormous boots, a submachine gun pointed from his hip. From whatever angle you looked at the poster, the muzzle of the gun, magnified by the foreshortening, seemed to be pointed straight at you. The thing had been plastered on every blank space on every wall, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Brother. The proles, normally apathetic about the war, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of patriotism. As though to harmonize with the general mood, the rocket bombs had been killing larger numbers of people than usual.

In 1984, a foreign adversary is not enough so Big Brother adds a domestic one in the figure of Goldstein. As always, Jews make the most effective scapegoats:

The programs of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party’s purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even—so it was occasionally rumored—in some hiding place in Oceania itself.

I’m not sure if Putin has a Goldstein to blame along with the United States and NATO—surely he has—but we certainly know who American rightwing extremists have chosen: that pedophile commie Joe Biden and his band of Democrats. As Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green tweeted earlier this week, “Today on our President’s Day, Joe Biden, the President of the United States chose Ukraine over America, while forcing the American people to pay for Ukraine’s government and war. I can not express how much Americans hate Joe Biden.”

No wonder Greene and her ilk are rooting for a Putin victory.

Past posts on the Russo-Ukraine War

Jan. 3, 2023—Victor Hugo: Zelensky as Hugo’s Enjorlas
Nov. 2, 2022– Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky: Can Russian Lit Lead to Atrocities?
Oct. 24, 2022—Putin as Murakami’s Manskinner Borus and Russia’s Terror Tactics
Oct. 10, 2022—Russian Rockets, Male Insecurity, and Gravity’s Rainbow
Oct. 9, 2022—The Crimean Bridge and Bridge over the River Kwai
Oct. 3, 2022— Will Putin Use Jadis’s “Deplorable Word”?
Sept. 28, 2022—Think of Russia in Ukraine as Doctor Frankenstein
Sept. 25, 2022—Henry IV, Parts I & II: Russia’s Falstaffian Mobilization
Sept 20, 2022— Ukraine Must Unite Athena with Poseidon
Sept. 14, 2022—Bulgakov: Ukrainian Grass Will Grow Again
Sept. 13, 2022—A Shevchenko Poem Papered over by Russian Invaders
Sept. 12, 2022: Panic Reminiscent of Red Badge of Courage Gripping Russian Soldiers
Aug. 28, 2022—The War Song of Vladimir Putin
August 24, 2022—Katie Ferris: Poems of Love in a Burning World
August 3, 2022 – A Murakami Villain Surfaces in Ukraine
June 6, 2022— Putin and Gaiman’s Good Omens
June 1, 2022—Farewell to Arms: Hemingway’s Insights into War Atrocities
May 29, 2022— John Greenleaf Whittier: How Can We Weigh the Cost of the War Dead?
May 23, 2022—Which Poets Should Ukraine Honor?
May 16, 2022— For Whom the Bell Tolls: Hemingway Would Understand Ukrainian Resistance
May 11, 2022— Russia Has Always Hated Ukrainian Lit
May 4, 2022— The Russian Invaders as Tolkien’s Orcs
May 2, 2022—Cavafy’s Thermopylae and Mariupol
April 27, 2022—During War, Poetry a Necessity
April 26, 2022— Comparing Housman’s Thermopylae with the Battle of Mariupol
April 20, 2022—Russian Poet Brodsky’s Controversial Take on Ukrainian Independence
April 19, 2022— Russia vs. Ukraine, Pushkin vs. Shevchenko
April 4, 2022—Brecht on Dictators Who Give War a Bad Name
April 3, 2022—Brecht: Don’t Become Numb to Suffering
March 30, 2022—Chekhov, Babel, Pushkin: Authors as Nationalist Symbols
March 27, 2022—I Am the Very Model of a Modern Russian General
March 13, 2022—Did Russian Officials Recruit Gogolian Dead Souls
March 12, 2022—Malcolm Guite: He Beholds the City with Tears in His Eyes
March 9, 2022—Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down: What Russia Can Expect If It Wins
March 8, 2022—Murakami and Kyiv’s Zoo Crisis
March 7, 2022—Cavafy, Adrienne Rich, and Ukrainians’ Decision to Stay or Leave
March 6, 2022—Putin, Like Milton’s Satan, Assaults Mankind
March 4, 2022—A Bakhtinian Reading of Zelensky
March 3, 2022—Vladimir Putin as Sauron
March 2, 2022—Serhiy Zhadan: Where Fears Meets Courage
Feb. 27, 2022—Ukrainian Poet Kaminsky’s Call to Resist Oppression
Feb. 24, 2022—Zelensky Cites Russian Poet Yevtushenko
Feb. 22, 2022—On Stalin, Putin, and Orwell’s Napoleon

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 1984, George Orwell, Russo-Ukraine War, Ukraine | Comments closed

DeLillo Predicted Ohio’s Toxic Disaster

By Robin Bates | Published: February 22, 2023

The toxic cloud in Netflix’s *White Noise*

Thursday

A number of people have noted that the recent train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio, which sent up toxic fumes and forced mass evacuations, resembles the one in Don DeLillo’s 1985 White Noise, the postmodern classic recently made into a Netflix movie. Indeed, although DeLillo doesn’t say in which state the drama occurs, it has a Midwest rust-belt feel to it, which is why the filmmakers set it in northeast Ohio. It so happens that the filming sites were just over an hour’s drive from East Palestine.

At any rate, those who have read the novel may have had a sense of déjà vu upon seeing footage of the Norfolk Southern accident. (I say this because déjà vu is one of the symptoms that arises from exposure to the poisonous gas in White Noise.) Here’s a character describing what he can see of the wreck:

The radio said a tank car derailed. But I don’t think it derailed from what I could see. I think it got rammed and something punched a hole in it. There’s a lot of smoke and I don’t like the looks of it.

DeLillo is masterful at describing the many forms denial takes amongst Blacksmith’s residents, including Jack Gladney, Professor of Hitler Studies at College-on-the-Hill. While the family tries to eat dinner to assure themselves all is well, there’s an underlying tension. Their conversation includes such rationalizations as the following:

“They’re not calling it the feathery plume anymore,” he said, not meeting my eyes, as if to spare himself the pain of my embarrassment.
     “I already knew that.”
     “Good.”
     “Why is that good?”
     “It means they’re looking the thing more or less squarely in the eye. They’re on top of the situation.”

But the authorities are no more on top of the situation than Ohio Governor Mike DeWine was in East Palestine. At one point, DeWine was swallowing the false assurances of the railway company and acting accordingly, only to learn that the situation is far worse.

In the novel, no one knows what or who to believe, which means that rumors fly wildly:

It was said that we would be allowed to go home first thing in the morning; that the government was engaged in a cover-up; that a helicopter had entered the toxic cloud and never reappeared; that the dogs had arrived from New Mexico, parachuting into a meadow in a daring night drop; that the town of Farmington would be uninhabitable for forty years.

Remarks existed in a state of permanent flotation. No one thing was either more or less plausible than any other thing. As people jolted out of reality, we were released from the need to distinguish.

In this environment, people who have long predicted the apocalypse, including a Jehovah’s witness, get their moment of glory. After talking to the man, Gladney reflects on those excited about the end of the world:

I wondered about his eerie self-assurance, his freedom from doubt. Is this the point of Armageddon? No ambiguity, no more doubt. He was ready to run into the next world. He was forcing the next world to seep into my consciousness, stupendous events that seemed matter-of-fact to him, self-evident, reasonable, imminent, true. I did not feel Armageddon in my bones but I worried about all those people who did, who were ready for it, wishing hard, making phone calls and bank withdrawals. If enough people want it to happen, will it happen? How many people are enough people?

White Noise is a postmodern masterpiece in part because DeLillo foresaw how social media would create its own force field. Remember, he’s writing at a time when television, radio, and the National Inquirer still dominated. Although the internet was only in its infancy and iPhones, Twitter, TikTok, and President Donald Trump have not yet happened, he described their effect with uncanny accuracy.

He ends the toxic cloud episode with an interesting question: if media coverage determines the importance of an event, then does absence of coverage render it insignificant? In other words, does social media determine reality? A man tracking the television coverage raises the issue in a rant:

“There’s nothing on network,” he said to us. “Not a word, not a picture. On the Glassboro channel we rate fifty-two words by actual count. No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don’t those people know what we’ve been through? We were scared to death. We still are. We left our homes, we drove through blizzards, we saw the cloud. It was a deadly specter, right there above us. Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? Are they so callous? Are they so bored by spills and contaminations and wastes? Do they think this is just television? ‘There’s too much television already—why show more?’ Don’t they know it’s real? Shouldn’t the streets be crawling with cameramen and soundmen and reporters? Shouldn’t we be yelling out the window at the reporteers, ‘Leave us alone, we’ve been through enough, get out of here with your vile instruments of intrusion.’ Do they have to have two hundred dead, rare disaster footage, before they come flocking to a given site in their helicopters and network limos? What exactly has to happen before they stick microphones in our faces and hound us to the doorsteps of our homes, camping out on our lawns, creating the usual media circus? Haven’t we earned the right to despise their idiot questions. Look at us in this place. We are quarantined. We are like lepers in medieval times. They won’t let us out of here. They leave food at the foot of the stairs and tiptoe away to safety. This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is under serious thread. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media. The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn’t been great loss of life, don’t we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn’t fear news?”

Now, it so happens that the rightwing media is trying to gin up fear about East Palestine, but it’s got nothing to do with understaffed railways, gutted regulations, greedy corporations, and corporate bribes to the GOP. Instead, it’s claiming that the Biden administration doesn’t care when poisonous gasses kill white people (Trump was a 70-30 winner in this part of Ohio). If Fox News can make reality, then this will be how some come to regard the train disaster.

Seeing American reality clearly, DeLillo would not be surprised by the crazed conspiracy theories and Obama birtherism and election denialism that have seized parts of America since 1985. And because denial of reality is an integral part of the authoritarian playbook, it makes sense that the protagonist of White Noise would be a Professor of Hitler Studies.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Don DeLillo, East Palestine train accident, environmental disasters, postmodernism, toxic gas release, White Noise | Comments closed

How great literature can change your life