Fiction as Authoritarian Weapon

By Robin Bates | Published: December 21, 2022

Thursday

Imagine the following blissful scenario. I build a roaring fire in our wood stove, treat myself to a glass of eggnog laced with a shot of whiskey, and settle down with a book about…narratology.

“Narratology?!” I hear you say.

To be more specific, I settle down with Yale Professor Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative.

Actually, I don’t only read literary theory before said wood stove. Last week, in preparation for my talk on Charles Dickens’s Christmas stories, I settled down with A Christmas Carol and The Haunted Man and Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Christmas Storms and Sunshine.” I’m not always a dry academic.

Still, I must admit that I’m enthralled with Brooks’s book, which touches on many of my own concerns. You’ll be hearing some ruminations on the book in forthcoming posts, but today I focus on one of the dangers that fiction poses. We live in an age, Brooks observes, where story is threatening to overwhelm reality. Concerned by how large swathes of our population are surrendering to QAnon conspiracy theories and claims about a stolen election, Brooks writes,

Swamped in story as we seem to be, we may lose the distinction between the two, asserting the dominion of our constructed realities over the real thing.

Brooks is particularly concerned by how authoritarians impose constructed realities upon populations. To make his point, he looks at the famous Jorge Luis Borges short story, “Tlon Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.”

The story is about a world that has been invented and snuck into pirated copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica. As Borges explains the caper, the project to invent an imaginary place is pushed and financed by an atheist American millionaire who, while not believing in God, “wanted to demonstrate to this nonexistent God that mortal man was capable of conceiving a world.”

Unfortunately, in the story this fiction is so compelling that it starts to take over reality. Writing in 1947, the narrator notes that humans are easy marks for believing in Tlon since they have had recent practice in succumbing to the totalizing ideologies of communism and fascism:

Ten years ago any symmetry with a semblance of order—dialectical materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—was sufficient to entrance the minds of men. How could one do other than submit to Tlon, to the minute and vast evidence of an orderly planet? It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws—I translate: inhuman laws—which we never quite grasp. Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

Tlon proceeds, therefore, to disintegrate the world of adherents, just as QAnon, Trumpist fabrications, and other authoritarian fantasies have done so in our own time. The narrator elaborates what’s involved in people submitting:

Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) “primitive language” of Tlon; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty—not even that it is false.

Brooks’s recurrent theme is that we must always remember that fiction is fiction. What Borges describes, by contrast,

is what happens when stories become myths: when their status as fictions, ficciones, is forgotten and they are taken as real explanations of the world, as something other than “as if” constructions, as the object of belief. On the basis of such fictions become myths we erect theologies. Very much including political theologies.

And then, in what works as a commentary on much contemporary political reporting, Brooks adds,

But even without that fearful and all too present outcome, we may find ourselves inertly accepting the notion that all is story, and that the best story wins.

In other words, if the political press does no more than report contending stories—as opposed to truth checking those stories—then it has surrendered to fiction. We would do well, Brooks says, to listen to Borges, who

put us on warning that we must remain critical of the all-encompassing claims of story. We need to oppose critical and analytical intelligence to narratives that seduce us into the acceptance of dominant ideologies. We need as listeners and readers to resist a passive narcosis of response.

In the book I have just completed, I differentiate between literature that speaks only to the passions (the heart) and literature that speaks to head as well as heart (and I add spirit as well). That distinction, I contend, is what differentiates great lit from not so great lit. Brooks is getting at something similar although he focuses more on the reader making ethical decisions (head decisions) than on the quality of the work itself.

But more on this in future posts. For the time being, it is noteworthy how dangerous unbridled fiction can be. Indeed, Brooks opens his book with a cynical line from Game of Thrones: “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. No enemy can defeat it.” The observation is delivered by the dwarf Tyrion as he elevates Bran the Broken to the throne. We Americans have witnessed in our own recent history how far an unscrupulous man can go by relying upon nothing more than the fictions he tells.

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Winter Solstice and Desert Places

By Robin Bates | Published: December 20, 2022
Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape (1811)

Wednesday – Winter Solstice

This year’s winter solstice occurs at a time when the country anticipates a major blizzard, which promises to wreak havoc on holiday travel. For this bleak midwinter moment, here’s a bleak Robert Frost poem.

Forget about the loneliness of animals smothered by new snowfall, Frost tells us. And forget about feeling small when facing the vast reaches of interstellar space. If you want to truly scare yourself at the prospect of emptiness, you have but to look within.

Initially, I was puzzled by Frost’s symbolism. When I imagine staring into an inner abyss, normally I color it black, not white. It so happens, however, that my faculty group has been discussing Moby Dick, and Melville does something similar to Frost with the color white. In “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter, narrator Ishmael reports feeling a “nameless horror” at thoughts of Moby Dick before concluding that it was “the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” Later in the chapter he elaborates:

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper…

“[O]f all these things,” Ishmael concludes, “the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”

I can well imagine Frost having this passage somewhere in his mind when he wrote his poem. Ahab’s quest is motivated not so much by revenge against the animal that deprived him of his leg but rather revenge against a universe that threatens to be about nothing more than death and annihilation. Similarly, for Frost, snow-covered nature proves to be nothing more than a metaphor for (borrowing from Ishmael) “the charnel-house within.”

Happy Winter Solstice!

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An Xmas Story about Political Polarization

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2022
George Richmond, 1851 portrait of Elizabeth Gaskell

Tuesday

Yesterday, I wrote about the enormous popularity of Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol in 1843. Of course, whenever a publishing venture proves so popular, other authors will follow. One such story seems particularly applicable to today’s America: Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Christmas Storms and Sunshine,” written in 1848. (You can read it here.)

It’s applicable because it speaks to political polarization. With worker unrest on the rise, 1848 was a particularly volatile year. Revolutions broke out all over Europe, leading Marx and Engels to write The Communist Manifesto. Although England itself didn’t experience a revolution, it was still a charged time, which may be one reason why Gaskell penned a story about two newspaper men, one Tory and one Radical, who happen to be next door neighbors. The story begins with an account of their newspaper rivalry:

In the town of —- (no matter where) there circulated two local newspapers (no matter when). Now the Flying Post was long established and respectable — alias bigoted and Tory; the Examiner was spirited and intelligent — alias new-fangled and democratic. Every week these newspapers contained articles abusing each other; as cross and peppery as articles could be, and evidently the production of irritated minds, although they seemed to have one stereotyped commencement, — ‘Though the article appearing in last week’s Post (or Examiner) is below contempt, yet we have been induced,’ &c., &c., and every Saturday the Radical shopkeepers shook hands together, and agreed that the Post was done for, by the slashing, clever Examiner; while the more dignified Tories began by regretting that Johnson should think that low paper, only read by a few of the vulgar, worth wasting his wit upon; however the Examiner was at its last gasp.

The story, however, focuses on the wives of the editors rather than the editors themselves. It so happens that the Tory wife has a cat but no children whereas the Radical wife has a child but no cat. That’s because, overwhelmed with motherhood responsibilities, she’s not always careful about keeping her larder carefully locked up, which makes it the target of the neighboring cat. Shortly after the story begins, said cat spoils the mutton she is serving for dinner.

This in turn causes the mother to beat the cat, thereby drawing upon herself the wrath of her neighbor.

I won’t go into all the various ways that the enmity is overcome but it involves the baby becoming ill, at which other points of contention fade into insignificance. By the end of the story, the two families are dining together. At one point, we see the Tory wife rocking the baby and the Radical wife stroking the cat.

At work, meanwhile, each man becomes more open-minded about the other. Now, they still don’t agree about their fundamental principles. But they don’t abuse each other to the extent they once did, leading Gaskell to conclude,

If any of you have any quarrels, or misunderstandings, or coolnesses, or cold shoulders, or shynesses, or tiffs, or miffs, or huffs, with anyone else, just make friends before Christmas, — you will be so much merrier if you do.

I ask it of you for the sake of that old angelic song, heard so many years ago by the shepherds, keeping watch by night, on Bethlehem Heights.

One can dream.

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Dickens’s Evolving View of Christmas

By Robin Bates | Published: December 19, 2022
Harold Cropping, illus. from Christmas Carol

Monday

At our church’s Sunday Forum yesterday, I talked about Charles Dickens’s vision of Christmas. While I pushed again the recent movie that contended that the novelist was “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” I did acknowledge that he helped to re-invent it. Of particular interest to me is how his view of Christmas evolved.

First, I noted that Christmas was alive and well 1000 years before Dickens came to it. The 9th century’s King Alfred, for instance, said that the Twelve Days of Christmas should be a time of celebration and no work.

To be sure Christmas, which probably has deep roots in both the Roman saturnalia and also in winter solstice celebrations, was banned by the British Puritans when they came to power in the 1640s. These religious purists, suspicious of the raucous feasting, ordered fasting to replace gorging. In a reverse blue law, shops were ordered to remain open on the day.

Charles II reestablished Christmas when he was restored to the monarchy, but the Puritan fear of wasteful extravagance never entirely went away. This became especially true when power shifted from the landed class to the mercantile class, with their Protestant work ethic. We see some of their language in Scrooge’s invective:

What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in ’em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”

Later he tells Bob Cratchit that Christmas is an excuse for “picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”

In my talk I contended that a new emphasis on Christmas arose not only in reaction to the middle class focus on profit but also to industrialization, urbanization, and atomization. Suddenly there was nostalgia for the old gentry and their communal Christmas festivals. Dickens didn’t invent the new fervor but he did provide enduring and memorable narratives to go along with it. Let’s say that he supercharged Christmas.

In doing so, he harkened back (I’m pretty sure) to Joseph Addison’s description of Christmas, written 140 years earlier. The fabled editor of the Spectator reports a supposed conversation with Sir Roger de Coverley, a country squire who,

after the laudable custom of his ancestors, always keeps open house at Christmas. I learned from him that he had killed eight fat hogs for this season, that he had dealt about his chines very liberally amongst his neighbours, and that in particular he had sent a string of hog’s-puddings with a pack of cards to every poor family in the parish. “I have often thought,” says Sir Roger, “it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the middle of the winter. It is the most dead, uncomfortable time of the year, when the poor people would suffer very much from their poverty and cold if they had not good cheer, warm fires, and Christmas gambols to support them. I love to rejoice their poor hearts at this season, and to see the whole village merry in my great hall. I allow a double quantity of malt to my small beer, and set it a running for twelve days to everyone that calls for it. I have always a piece of cold beef and a mince-pie upon the table, and am wonderfully pleased to see my tenants pass away a whole evening in playing their innocent tricks, and smutting [kissing?] one another. Our friend Will Wimble is as merry as any of them, and shows a thousand roguish tricks upon these occasions.”

Depictions of such Christian cheer show up in Dickens’s first works, Sketches by Boz and The Pickwick Papers, both published in 1836. What will change by 1843’s Christmas Carol is Dickens’s view of memory.

 In his Sketches by Boz essay, Dickens wants to banish bad memories from the holiday:

Look on the merry faces of your children (if you have any) as they sit round the fire. One little seat may be empty; one slight form that gladdened the father’s heart, and roused the mother’s pride to look upon, may not be there. Dwell not upon the past; think not that one short year ago, the fair child now resolving into dust, sat before you, with the bloom of health upon its cheek, and the gaiety of infancy in its joyous eye. Reflect upon your present blessings—of which every man has many—not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some. Fill your glass again, with a merry face and contented heart. Our life on it, but your Christmas shall be merry, and your new year a happy one!

Note how, in trying to rid the holiday of such memories, Dickens brings special attention to them. And as we will see in Christmas Carol, the potential death of Tiny Tim—revealed by the Ghost of Christmas Future—is important is converting Scrooge. Dickens, in other words, evolves to a position that, rather than trying to banish past darkness, one should face up to it. If the miracle of Christ is that love triumphs over death, then death has to be acknowledged.

Indeed, the Ghost of Christmas Past can be seen as psychological scarring. We are haunted by past trauma, which threatens to blight our lives. Christmas is miraculous because it becomes a time, not to ignore our previous suffering, but to see it as co-existing with love and joy. Through our experiences with and knowledge of suffering, we are able to develop a deep sense of compassion.

In fact, in a later Christmas story Dickens shows what would happen if we were to blot out traumatic memories. In The Haunted Man, the protagonist has a spirit erase his mind, after which he evolves into—well—a haunted man:

Who could have seen his hollow cheek; his sunken brilliant eye; his black-attired figure, indefinably grim, although well-knit and well-proportioned; his grizzled hair hanging, like tangled sea-weed, about his face,—as if he had been, through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity,—but might have said he looked like a haunted man?

Who could have observed his manner, taciturn, thoughtful, gloomy, shadowed by habitual reserve, retiring always and jocund never, with a distraught air of reverting to a bygone place and time, or of listening to some old echoes in his mind, but might have said it was the manner of a haunted man?

 Only after a benign spirit reverses the wish and restores the man with memory does he develop a compassionate soul.

In my presentation, I noted how the great Christmas stories always feature darkness. I told the story of how, when my father, returning from World War II, attended Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life with my grandfather, my grandfather insisted on walking out of the film midway through because he found it too depressing. And indeed, the film is very dark—especially when George Bailey blows up at his family—which makes its Christmas ending all the more powerful. The same is true of film versions of A Christmas Carol, which I remember frightening me out of my wits when I saw them as a child.

In short, A Christmas Carol caught the public imagination and elevated Christmas because it wasn’t afraid to show images of death in its pages. Scrooge grapples with his mortality and, through that struggle, rediscovers his heart.

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Oliver’s “Bobcat” as an Advent Poem

By Robin Bates | Published: December 17, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

It took me years to realize that Mary Oliver’s poetry is shaped by her religious view of the world. Now that I am alert to this, and now that I know of her Episcopalian background, it seems self-evident. For instance, I now read “Bobcat” as an Advent poem.

Oliver describes herself and her companion unexpectedly spotting a bobcat on a night drive. For one who loves nature as much as Oliver does, that sighting has the force of miraculous revelation. Not only does her heart thud and stop at the sight of “those lightning eyes! that dappled jaw! those plush paws!” but she is put in mind of how, in the far north, the lynx lounges “in trees/ as thick as castles,/ as cold as iron.” In other words, in the darkest and most forbidding of landscapes, light blazes forth.

And then, like Robert Frost, Oliver finds a message in the moment, which in this case is an Advent message. We can think, if we want, that the “truth of the world” is “the miles alone in the pinched dark.” That does in fact appear to be our reality much of the time. But in this miraculous moment, she senses the Christmas vision: “the push of promise” and, because that hope renders us vulnerable, “the wound of delight.”

When we’ve had that experience, the world is no longer dark. Instead, “as though in a dream,”

we drive
toward the white forest
   all day,
     all night.

Here’s the poem:

Bobcat
By Mary Oliver

One night
     long ago,
       in Ohio,
         a bobcat leaped
like a quick
     clawed
         whirlwind of light
            from the pines
beside the road
     and our hearts
          thudded and
           stopped–
those lightning eyes!
     that dappled jaw!
         those plush paws!
              In the north,
we’ve heard,
    the lynx
       wanders like silk
          on the deep
hillsides of snow–
    blazing,
       it lounges in trees
          as thick as castles,
as cold as iron.
    What should we say
        is the truth of the world?
           The miles alone
in the pinched dark?
    or the push of the promise?
       or the wound of delight?
          As though in a dream
we drive
      toward the white forest
         all day,
            all night.

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French Team Resembles a Skunk Cabbage

By Robin Bates | Published: December 15, 2022
Skunk cabbage

Friday

The World Cup final that many were predicting—Argentina vs. France—has come to pass, with most of the excitement on the Argentina side. (Full disclosure: I am a France fan who is going out of his way to be objective here.) After all, France won the trophy four years ago while the world cup is the one trophy that the sublime Lionel Messi has never won. Possibly the greatest player ever, the 35-year-old Messi scored the assist of the tournament when, rolling back the years, he took a ball at the midfield line, shed two Croatian defenders, turned one of them entirely around in the box, and slotted a tap-in goal to an onrushing teammate. How can one not root for more Messi magic in the final?

France, meanwhile, has played hunkered-down soccer, its defense absorbing opposition attacks with only an occasional counterattack. Most people felt that England and Morocco, who dominated time of possession, were much more exciting. For their part, French fans had to settle for their team only winning. Think of Les Bleus as Mary Oliver’s skunk cabbage.

In her poem about the perennial that smells like rotting meat, Oliver notes that “what blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.” Unlike the flowers that come later in the season, which she notes are “the last subtle refinements, elegant and easeful,” the skunk cabbage has a primal instinct for survival. Or as Oliver puts it,

Appalling its rough
green caves, and the thought
of the thick root nested below, stubborn
and powerful as instinct!

And:

Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.

Plant biologists note that the plant’s smell attracts flies, carrion beetles, bees, mosquitoes, sow bugs and the larvae of butterflies and moths—referred to by Oliver as “a continual spatter of protein” (although I haven’t encountered any reference to the skunk cabbage absorbing the insects the way a Venus flytrap does). The plant can also generate heat far warmer than the surrounding air (up to 70 degrees), melting the snow around it. Nature’s first flowering plant, therefore, represents not only “the turning” of the seasons but a “dense and scalding reenactment” of death and life.

In France’s case, what is stubborn and powerful, what is daring and brawn, is the will to win. Some gave up on the team after it lost its entire midfield along with the season’s ballon d’or winner to injury, but out of those “deaths” has come new life. Don’t look for “tenderness” and “longing” in Les Bleus.

So while the rest of us dream about the soccer equivalent of “ferns and flowers and new leaves unfolding,” the French team “sling[s] its bunched leaves up through the chilling mud.” Here’s the poem:

Skunk Cabbage
By Mary Oliver

And now as the iron rinds over
the ponds start dissolving,
you come, dreaming of ferns and flowers
and new leaves unfolding,
upon the brash
turnip-hearted skunk cabbage
slinging its bunched leaves up
through the chilling mud.
You kneel beside it. The smell
is lurid and flows out in the most
unabashed way, attracting
into itself a continual spattering
of protein. Appalling its rough
green caves, and the thought
of the thick root nested below, stubborn
and powerful as instinct!
But these are the woods you love,
where the secret name
of every death is life again – a miracle
wrought surely not of mere turning
but of dense and scalding reenactment. Not
tenderness, not longing, but daring and brawn
pull down the frozen waterfall, the past.
Ferns, leaves, flowers, the last subtle
refinements, elegant and easeful, wait
to rise and flourish.
What blazes the trail is not necessarily pretty.

In my comparison, I overstate somewhat. There is something dazzlingly pretty about an Mbappe run, a Griezmann pass, and a Giroud header. France would not have advanced as far as it has if it were it merely workmanlike. But once it has dazzled, the team settles down into skunk cabbage mode, its defense “attracting into itself a continual spattering of protein.”

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To Know the Dark, Go Dark

By Robin Bates | Published: December 15, 2022
Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold

Thursday

Thanks to wind and rain, we lost power last night, which means today’s post is coming to you late. As Julia and I sat in the dark, I thought of Wendell Berry’s wonderful “To Know the Dark,” so that’s the poem you get today:

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

I like to think the poem is about depression and am brought to mind of of the positive spin that psychologist philosopher Thomas Moore puts on the condition. In Care of the Soul Moore writes,

The soul presents itself in a variety of colors, including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve only of white, red, and orange – the brilliant colors…. In a society that is defended against the tragic sense of life, depression will appear as an enemy, an unredeemable malady; yet in such a society, devoted to light, depression, in compensation, will be unusually strong.

Moore goes on to counsel us to “develop a taste for the depressed mood, a positive respect for its place in the soul’s cycles”:

Some feelings and thoughts seem to emerge only in a dark mood. Suppress the mood, and you will suppress those ideas and reflections. Depression may be as important a channel for valuable “negative” feelings, as expressions of affection are for the emotions of love. Feelings of love give birth naturally to gestures of attachment. In the same way, the void and grayness of depression evoke an awareness and articulation of thoughts otherwise hidden behind the screen of lighter moods…. Melancholy gives the soul an opportunity to express a side of its nature that is as valid as any other, but is hidden out of our distaste for its darkness and bitterness.

Moore also suggests using the older term of “melancholy” in place of depression and says that exploring melancholy is a powerful means to come to terms with aging and mortality. And while he never quite talks about darkness blooming and singing, there’s this:

Because of its painful emptiness, it is often tempting to look for a way out of depression. But entering into its mood and thoughts can be deeply satisfying. Depression is sometimes described as a condition in which there are no ideas – nothing to hang on to. But maybe we have to broaden our vision and see that feelings of emptiness, the loss of familiar understandings and structures in life, and the vanishing of enthusiasm, even though they seem negative, are elements that can be appropriated and used to give life fresh imagination.

All that being said, Julia and I passed up the opportunity “go dark” and instead found our battery-powered lanterns and retired to bed with our books. It’s good to know, however, that other options are available.

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Kindred’s Race Lessons

By Robin Bates | Published: December 13, 2022

Wednesday

I see that Hulu has come up with an eight-part series based on Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), a powerful work I used to teach in my American Fantasy class. I share today a post I wrote about the novel six years ago. But first, here are some thoughts in response to a Literary Hub article on the work and its television adaptation, which has me rethinking certain ideas I had while attending college in the early 1970s.

While Butler is justifiably famous for her pioneering works of dystopian science fiction, she has pointedly observed that Kindred is not science fiction since “there’s absolutely no science in it.” Instead she calls it “grim fantasy,” which indeed is why I included it in my fantasy course. In the work, the protagonist, a black woman married to a white man, unaccountably finds herself transported back to slave times. But more on that in the essay below.

What I learned from Literary Hub article is that Kindred (according to Butler) was “a kind of reaction to some of the things going on during the 60s when people were feeling ashamed of, or more strongly, angry with their parents for not having improved things faster.” Apparently Butler didn’t like how young African Americans believed that “if they had been enslaved, they would have simply fought back harder, refusing to accept the slave masters’ punishments.” This belief, Butler worried, arose from their underestimating the severity of slavery and just how terrifying the past actually was. Therefore she

set out to write a novel that would sear that phantasmagoric violence into her readers’ psyches, a novel they could not ignore—and, more critically, could not forget. Its brutality, then, was central to its teleology, even if that made it difficult to read.

When I was attending college in the early 1970s, I remember the casual contempt that activists, White and Black alike, had for Uncle Toms. Somehow, we thought we would have been different. I now realize we were indulging in self-congratulatory illusions, which Butler’s “grim fantasy” should awaken us to. A good historical novel like Kindred alerts us to who we really are, not who we think we are.

Reprinted from September 26, 2016

I have been teaching Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979) in my American Fantasy class and it couldn’t have come at a better time. As the body count of African Americans killed by police continues to climb, this time travel story of a modern black woman who suddenly finds herself subjected to slavery-era violence seems all too timely.

Nor is Kindred only about that. Because Dana has a white husband, the book is able to explore multiple levels of racial friction. There is no easy polarization between the races in this novel. Instead, we see how systemic racism impacts even a loving interracial marriage.

The plot goes as follows. Dana finds herself dragged back in time whenever one of her ancestors, a white slave owner named Rufus, faces death. She can return to the present only when she herself feels that she is in danger of dying. She makes six trips back in time, once with Kevin. (Anything she is touching goes with her.) While her own trips occur over a 20+ year interval, as in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books very little time elapses in 1976 America. This means that she first encounters Rufus as a drowning child in 1815 and last leaves him when he is a plantation owner in the 1830s.

Dana, it turns out, has a blood connection with Rufus, which explains why he is able to call her back. She also knows which slave he must impregnate to start her line. If Rufus dies before giving birth to Dana’s ancestor, then presumably Dana won’t exist. (The 1985 movie Back to the Future has this plot element.)

Butler isn’t just being cute with these relationships, however. She is exploring how Black-White and also Black-Black relationships are distorted by racism. Dana therefore has mixed feelings about Rufus, whom she sees as having potential. He is even redeemed to a degree by his love for an African American woman, a relationship that is of course impossible in this society. Unfortunately, he becomes increasingly cruel as he seeks to override his empathy.

Where the story really hits home is in the relationship between Dana and her white husband. When Dana is first dragged into the past and then returns, Kevin can’t believe what she tells him about the experience. This is understandable, of course, but it is also an extreme version of how whites and blacks, even today, experience the world differently.

In fact, when Kevin accompanies Dana on one of her trips back, he sees the slave system as more benign than she does. After all, he’s dining with the master while she is witnessing slaves being whipped. Kevin may be an open-minded white man who is married to an African American woman, but we see numerous blindspots. At one point, for instance, he has romantic dreams about exploring the “Wild West” and has to be reminded by Dana that this history was less romantic for the Native Americans.

As the book continues, Dana sees unsettling similarities between Kevin and Rufus, including a desire to possess her. To Kevin’s credit, however, he spends the five years when they are separated (this in the 1820’s) working for the underground railroad and almost dying. He also deeply loves her and does all he can to get back to her. But there are things about her reality that he just can’t see.

Dana, meanwhile, has her own blindspots. For a long time, she judges one house slave severely for buying into the master’s agenda, not realizing that people must often make such compromises in order to survive. She herself is regarded with suspicion by the field slaves, and sometimes even the house slaves, for her relatively privileged position with regard to the master. Her challenge is to understand their reality. By the end of the novel, she has come closer.

One scene in particular resonated with the class. Never knowing when she will next be pulled back in time, Dana packs a kit of things that she will need to help her survive. (It is always tied to her waist so that she won’t leave it behind.) This, we said, is like African American youths going out in the world with a set of instructions in case they are stopped by the police. One never knows when one is going to be plunged into an entirely different reality.

St. Mary’s College at the moment is having an on-going series of discussions, workshops, panels, lectures, and other events to address diversity issues, so my students were particularly open to Kindred. We concluded that, like Dana and Kevin, we must have conversations that never stop.

White students (and faculty) require these conversations become they must become aware of the advantages of privilege, how we don’t need to worry about certain things. One of the best ways to become aware is to talk to students of color. The latter, very understandably, are often tired of having to educate white students about how their experiences are different. But as one African American student said to me, “It frustrates me that I always have to be the one to tell them—but then I figure that, if I don’t, they’ll never learn.”

I thanked her for her generosity and said that we all stood to gain if we work together. The Dana-Kevin marriage can survive systemic racism.

Additional posts on Octavia Butler’s Kindred

We Must Revisit Slavery to Find Healing
Learning from Butler to Grapple with White Privilege

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Musk Needs a Shakespearean Fool

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2022

Tuesday

This is a small news item that, nevertheless, caught my attention. That’s because it put me in mind of Shakespeare’s fools.

Apparently, Tesla and Twitter owner Elon Musk attempted to do comedy the other night. David Chappelle, a once noteworthy comedian, invited Musk to his show with (as far as I can tell) the intent of giving Elon some comic moments. Instead, Musk was greeted by loud booing. It’s not clear whether this was for how he is destroying Twitter and for his own virulent tweets, including one calling for the prosecution of Dr. Fauci.

Anyway, there were interesting follow-up discussions on (of course) Twitter about why some rich people think they have a turn for comedy. One answer is that people around them are always laughing at their jokes, which means that it comes as a shock to them to discover the laughter is not genuine. As satirist Hilaire Belloc observes in Cautionary Tales for Children,

The laughter of the lesser lynx
is often insincere.
It pays to be polite, he thinks,
if royalty is near.

So when the lion steals his food
and kicks him from behind
he smiles, of course…
but oh! the rude remarks that cross his mind.

Perhaps being surrounded by sycophants explains why the richest man in the world appears to have lost his way. To right himself, he could use a good fool—which is to say, one who uses comedy to speak truth to power. W.S. Gilbert’s Jack Point explains how it works in the Gilbert and Sullivan musical Yeomen of the Guard:

I can set a braggart quailing with a quip,
The upstart I can wither with a whim;
He may wear a merry laugh upon his lip,
But his laughter has an echo that is grim!

When they’re offered to the world in merry guise,
Unpleasant truths are swallowed with a will –
For he who’d make his fellow-creatures wise
Should always gild the philosophic pill! 

As it is, the richest man in the world appears to have lost his way. And while we might hope that his association with Chappelle would do some good, it’s not clear that he himself is still up to the job. After all, what comic would invite a humorless billionaire to share the stage with him—unless, at least, he planned to use him as a foil, which did not appear to be Chappelle’s intent.

Serving as a fool for the rich and powerful is not an easy job, as Feste in Twelfth Night knows all too well: Olivia has fired him before the play opens (perhaps he made a premature joke about her dead brother), and he needs another joke to get back in her good graces. The fool in King Lear, meanwhile, expresses the fool’s dilemma: sometimes a good comic is damned no matter what he (or she) says or does. In the following interchange, Lear’s fool has just made jokes about the ex-king making “thy daughters thy mothers: for when thou gavest them the rod, and put’st down thine own breeches.” He then goes on to say,

Fool: Prithee, nuncle, keep a schoolmaster that can teach thy fool to lie: I would fain learn to lie.

Lear: An you lie, sirrah, we’ll have you whipped.

Fool: I marvel what kin thou and thy daughters are: they’ll have me whipped for speaking true, thou’lt have me whipped for lying; and sometimes I am whipped for holding my peace. I had rather be any kind o’ thing than a fool: and yet I would not be thee, nuncle…

Whatever Chappelle’s original intent, he did get off some good barbs at Musk’s expense. For instance:

–“It sounds like some of the people you fired are in the audience”;
–(referring to Musk’s Mars aspirations), “his whole business model is fuck Earth, I’m leaving anyway”; and
–(after a desperate Musk asked him what he should do in response to the booing), “Don’t say nothing. It’ll only spoil the moment. Do you hear that sound, Elon? That’s the sound of pending civil unrest. I can’t wait to see what store you decimate next, motherfucker. You shut the fuck up.”

Despite these comebacks, however, Chappelle appeared discomposed by the booing and ineffectively attempted to stop it before abruptly ending the show. Chappelle appears to have lost some of his own comic touch—his once remarkable ability to gauge the public pulse—as can be seen in his attacks on the vulnerable trans community. In these he has been violating Jonathan Swift’s #1 rule about comic satire, which is that a satirist should never hit down.

But back to Musk. When a joke gets made at your expense, one of your few good options is to laugh at yourself. Did the billionaire, in the words of Gilbert’s Jack Point, at least manage to “wear a merry laugh upon his lip,” even though “his laughter ha[d] an echo that is grim!”

Actually, it sounds like Musk didn’t even manage that much since the next day he tweeted that only 10% of the audience were booing him while the rest were applauding. That sounds like an explanation provided by a sycophantic underling, and it reminds me of Smithers’s consoling words to his boss Mr. Burns in a comparable situation on The Simpsons: “They weren’t saying, ‘Boo!’ They were saying, ‘Bu-urns!’”

While advocating that the rich and the powerful hire professional fools, however, I also have to acknowledge that it might not do any good. As Swift again observes, “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”

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