Reading Lit to Survive Prison

By Robin Bates | Published: March 12, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments closed

A Poem for Doubters and Lovers

By Robin Bates | Published: March 11, 2023
Paolo Veronese, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

Reading Proust before Dying

By Robin Bates | Published: March 9, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments closed

On Homer and Rethinking My Father

By Robin Bates | Published: March 8, 2023
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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Pullman and White Christian Nationalists

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2023
Philip Pullman

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Lit that Features the N-Word: What to Do

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2023
William Faulkner

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Hamlet: Shakespeare Grieving His Son?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

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

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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 , , , , , | Comments closed

March Has Come in Like a Liobam

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2023

Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951 at gmail dot com and I will send it/them to you. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.

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 , , , , , | Comments closed