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Thursday
Tuesday night the Lakers’ Lebron James broke the most prestigious individual record in basketball, one that many thought would never be broken and, given how James keeps scoring baskets despite being 38, are pretty sure will never be broken again. With a fadeaway jumpshot against the Oklahoma Thunder, James surpassed Kareem Abdul Jabbar’s scoring record of 38,387.
Of James’s many nicknames, the one that seems to have stuck was bestowed upon him by his high school teammates: King James. While the name probably alludes to the King James version of the Bible rather than to the monarch who commissioned the translation, still I thought I’d have some fun by applying Shakespeare’s praise of Britain’s James I to our own King James.
In Henry VIII, probably co-written with John Fletcher, Shakespeare concludes by having a character predict two glorious monarchs. The first is Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, whose christening the king is at that moment attending. The second is James. Here’s the passage:
Nor shall this peace sleep with her: but as when The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, Her ashes new-create another heir, As great in admiration as herself; So shall she leave her blessedness to one, When heaven shall call her from this cloud of darkness, Who from the sacred ashes of her honour Shall star-like rise, as great in fame as she was, And so stand fix’d: peace, plenty, love, truth, terror, That were the servants to this chosen infant. Shall then be his, and like a vine grow to him: Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine, His honour and the greatness of his name Shall be, and make new nations: he shall flourish, And, like a mountain cedar, reach his branches To all the plains about him: — our children’s children Shall see this, and bless heaven.
Think of Lebron rising star-like, as great in fame as was the player he is replacing in the record books. “Wherever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,” —or basketball court lighting—“his honor and the greatness of his name shall be.” Given the player’s remarkable prowess, we can say, without exaggeration, that he has “flourish[ed] and, like a mountain cedar, [has] reach[ed] his branches to all the plains about him.” In later years, “our children’s children shall see this, and bless heaven.”
Shakespeare’s praise of King James appears elsewhere, although less explicitly. I’ve learned from reading James Shapiro’s 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear that there is a significant allusion to James in Macbeth. (1606 was also the year of Macbeth.) James, who had recently ascended to the throne, believed he was descended from Banquo, and Shakespeare reshaped the historical record to flatter him.
In Shakespeare’s version, Banquo is not Macbeth’s accomplice in the murder of Duncan, as Holinshed’s Chronicles report, but an innocent friend and later victim. According to Shapiro, the “show of eight kings” in Macbeth was inserted with James in mind:
In this dumb-show each of Banquo’s royal heirs appears. The eighth one carries a magical mirror that shows Macbeth many more of Banquo’s descendants…This show of kings culminates in James himself, the eighth Stuart King of Scotland…
The mirror, Shapiro speculates, was physically positioned in front of James, thereby avoiding “the delicate issue of impersonating a living prince on stage.”
So think of our own King James as descending from a noble lineage of scoring champions, with the last two being Wilt Chamberlain and Abdul-Jabbar. Against all probability, Denham Wood has moved upon the old scoring record and there’s a new king in town.
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Wednesday
Yesterday I wrote about how, in the first book of The Iliad, Homer delivers a masterclass in leadership. Today I explore a more chilling topic raised by author: how those in power use a combination of mockery, threats, and actual violence to maintain control. It involves an incident that troubled me as a child and that I still find deeply disturbing.
Yesterday, I mentioned how Odysseus salvages a situation that supreme commander Agamemnon has botched. Thinking that he can use reverse psychology on the troops, Agamemnon has suggested they shamefully abandon the war effort and sail for home. Instead of feeling ashamed, however, they leap at the chance and head for their ships. It takes everything Odysseus can do to round them up and bring them back to a council of war.
In that council we encounter Thersites, a man infamous for both his looks (he is bandy-legged, lame in one foot, and “the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion”) and his abusive tongue. Homer describes him as one
who knew within his head many words, but disorderly; vain, and without decency, to quarrel with the princes with any word he thought might be amusing to the Argives. (trans. Richmond Lattimore)
Thersites does not only speak for himself in his subsequent words, however, but voices the resentment that has been building up amongst the troops against Agamemnon and that has been given voice by Achilles. In doing so, he repeats some of the same accusations that we have just heard from that warrior. Achilles has called Agamemnon “the greediest of all men” and one who, while leaving the fighting to others, reserves the greatest part of the booty for himself. Thersites repeats the charge as he makes the case for returning home:
Son of Atreus, what thing further do you want, or find fault with now? Your shelters are filled with bronze, there are plenty of the choicest women for you within your shelter, whom we Achaians give to you first of all whenever we capture some stronghold. Or is it still more gold you will be wanting, that some son of the Trojans, breakers of horses, brings as ransom out of Ilion, one that I, or some other Achaian, capture and bring in? Is it some young woman to lie with in love and keep her all to yourself apart from the others? It is not right for you, their leader, to lead in sorrow the sons of the Achaians. My good fools, poor abuses, you women, not men, of Achaia, let us go back home in our ships, and leave this man here by himself in Troy to mull his prizes of honor that he may find out whether or not we others are helping him.
At this point in the story, the future of the Greek expedition hangs in the balance. Odysseus saves the day by astutely combining scornful rhetoric with strategic violence. Tactics that could not be used against Achilles can be used against Thersites, who becomes a proxy for the Greek hero. Grabbing Agamemnon’s scepter, symbol of authority, Odysseus begins by diminishing Thersites with his words:
Fluent orator though you be, Thersites, your words are ill-considered. Stop, nor stand up alone against princes. Out of all those who came beneath Ilion with Atreides I assert there is no worse man than you are. Therefore you shall not lift up your mouth to argue with princes, cast reproaches into their teeth, nor sustain the homegoing. We do not even know clearly how these things will be accomplished, whether we sons of the Achaians shall win home well or badly; yet you sit here throwing abuse at Agamemnon, Atreus’ son, the shepherd of the people, because the Danaan fighters give him much. You argue nothing but scandal.
Then come the threats:
And this also will tell you, and it will be a thing accomplished. If once more I find you playing the fool, as you are now, nevermore let the head of Odysseus sit on his shoulders, let me nevermore be called Telemachos’ father, if I do not take you and strip away your personal clothing, your mantle and your tunic that cover over your nakedness, and send you thus bare and howling back to the fast ships, whipping you out of the assembly place with the strokes of indignity.
Finally Odysseus backs up the threats with action, turning the scepter—meant to peacefully convey authority—into a weapon. In doing so, he reveals the hard power that always lurks behind soft power:
So he spoke and dashed the scepter against his back and shoulders, and he doubled over, and a round tear dropped from him, and a bloody welt stood up between his shoulders under the golden sceptre’s stroke, and he sat down again, frightened, in pain, and looking helplessly about wiped off the tear-drops.
This show of force impresses the troops. While their own lives would be better if they listened to Thersites—they would return home without further fighting–Odysseus has turned the man into a pathetic object of derision, something he could not have done with Achilles. Thersites here functions as a scapegoat: when the troops proceed to laugh at him, they are imagining themselves as princes, not as common soldiers. Odysseus’s move is right out of the authoritarian playbook:
Sorry though the men were they laughed over him happily, and thus they would speak to each other, each looking at the man next him: ‘Come now: Odysseus has done excellent things by thousands, bringing forward good counsels and ordering armed encounters; but now this is far the best thing he ever has accomplished among the Argives, to keep this thrower of words, this braggart out of assembly. Never again will his proud heart stir him up, to wrangle with the princes in words of revilement.’
Their laughter is of the sort described by Thomas Hobbes in his classic work Leviathan. As the 17th century political philosopher sees it, laughter is a means of asserting your authority in a world defined by the struggle for power. We laugh at others because it makes us feel superior to them (“sudden glory”) while hiding our own imperfections:
Sudden glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favor, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much Laughter at the defects of others is a sign of Pusillanimity.
Through bullying Thersites, who is in fact a “deformed thing,” Odysseus rallies the troops to his side. Although they were fleeing for their ships only moments before, now they are prepared to charge into battle:
So he spoke, and the Argives shouted aloud, and about them the ships echoed terribly to the roaring Achaians as they cried out applause to the word of godlike Odysseus.
Agamemnon, this time effectively, follows up Odysseus’s call, eliciting a response that is compared to waves crashing against a cliff:
So he spoke, and the Argives shouted aloud, as surf crashing Against a sheerness, driven by the south wind descending, some cliff out-jutting, left never alone by the waves from all the winds that blow, as they rise one place and another.
So how does an authoritarian rally the troops? By scapegoating marginalized persons through the use of insults, threats of violence, or even actual violence. If you do it well, your audience will ignore their own concerns and follow you anywhere.
Further thought: Political scientist John Stoehr, whose columns I follow on The Editorial Board, notes that the tactics used by Odysseus are not limited to demagogues but can be seen at work in society as a whole. Whites retain control in an increasingly diverse society by appearing moderate while relying on a police force that functions like an occupying army. (Whites don’t see the police this way, of course, but others do.) As Stoehr puts it in a recent column:
Occupying armies—in order to keep the peace, uphold the law and preserve the order—periodically send a message to the local population that disorder will not be tolerated. To that end, they will seek out and destroy someone, usually the weak, with a spectacular display of violence.
That’s what happened last week in Huntington, California. The city’s occupying army made an example of a Black man with no legs. (They said he was armed with a knife.) They shot to death Anthony Lowe, Jr., as he ran from them in terror on his tumps. Who’s in charge. The occupying army.
White power elites and police departments have also countenanced, if not outwardly endorsed, extralegal violence, such as lynchings in the Jim Crow south and routine police violence today. Certain members of the GOP won’t even allow the gun violence of current White terrorists to be labeled terrorism and look for ways to minimize their actions. Their main problem with the recorded killings of George Floyd and Tyre Nichols is that they threaten to expose the workings of the system.
That system can be seen clearly in Odysseus’s handling of Thersites.
In Stoehr’s view, America’s best hope lies in “reasonable White people” rejecting the constituent elements of that system–White supremacy, White fear, White privilege and sense of entitlement–and instead making common cause with people of color.
Agamemnon and Achilles square off in a Pompei mosaic
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Tuesday
Having spent time over the past three years talking about Divine Comedy, TheAeneid, Absolom and Architophel, Rape of the Lock, In Memoriam, Paradise Lost and Moby Dick, our faculty discussion group has moved on to The Iliad. For those who know Sewanee faculty, our other members are John Reishman, John Gatta, Ross MacDonald, and (our newest member) Pamela Macfie, all from the English Department.
After our first discussion of Iliad, I am convinced more than ever that one of Plato’s attacks on Homer is wrong. Contra the philosopher’s criticism, the poet offers an absolute masterclass on leadership.
Plato’s critique occurs in The Republic when he is accusing literature of being several steps removed from truth. Plato has Socrates say that Homer’s renditions of such professions as charioteer, general and doctor are inferior to what we would get from actual charioteers, generals, and doctors. The same goes for legislators, as Socrates notes in the following interchange:
Socrates: [W]e have a right to know respecting military tactics, politics, education, which are the chiefest and noblest subjects of his poems, and we may fairly ask him about them. “Friend Homer,” then we say to him, “…if you are able to discern what pursuits make men better or worse in private or public life, tell us what State was ever better governed by your help?…
Glaucon: I think not; not even the Homerids themselves pretend that he was a legislator.
Socrates: Well, but is there any war on record which was carried on successfully by him, or aided by his counsels, when he was alive?
Glaucon: There is not.
The question is not whether Homer was an actual legislator, however, but whether The Iliad could help someone become a better legislator. Our group concluded that the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles, around which the entire poem revolves, should be read by every aspiring leader.
Agamemnon, who heads the allied Greek forces, feels himself humiliated when he is forced to give up a woman he has captured. The situation is this: Chryseis is the daughter of a priest of Apollo. When the Greek leader, despite proffered ransom money, refuses to return her, Apollo unleashes a plague upon the Greeks. After nine days of watching the troops suffer, Achilles—their most fearsome warrior—calls a council meeting and queries the Greek seer Kalchas about the plague’s cause. After ensuring he will not be punished for telling the truth, the seer points to Agamemnon.
In a fury, Agamemnon lashes out and, since Achilles has forced the issue, demands that the warrior recompense him by handing over his own captive (Briseis). Achilles objects in no uncertain terms:
You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart. Never once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people for battle, or go into ambuscade with the best of the Achaians. No, for in such things you see death. Far better to your mind is it, all along the widespread host of the Achaians to take away the gifts of any man who speaks up against you. (trans. Richmond Lattimore)
While concurring that Agamemnon is clearly in the wrong—in fact, he is constantly making poor leadership decisions—our group noted that the two men have different imperatives. Agamemnon, who is trying to hold together the Greek alliance, can’t afford to be publicly humiliated, regardless of the justice of the accusations against him. In some ways, lashing out at Achilles, who has demonstrated superior leadership qualities, reveals his own insecurities. While failing to command the respect that Achilles does, he also recognizes—and resents—his dependency on his greatest warrior.
Both Agamemnon and Achilles are provided off-ramps by Nestor, the wisest of Greeks, who offers the following advice:
You, great man that you are, yet do not take the girl away but let her be, a prize as the sons of the Achaians gave her first. Nor, son of Peleus, think to match your strength with the king, since never equal with the rest is the portion of honor of the sceptred king to whom Zeus gives magnificence. Even though you are the stronger man, and the mother who bore you was immortal, yet is this man greater who is lord over more than you rule. Son of Atreus, give up your anger; even I entreat you to give over your bitterness against Achilleus, he who stands as a great bulwark of battle over all the Achaians.
Agamemnon will take this advice later, when it is too late, but for the moment he spurns it, revealing his insecurity when he says,
Yet here is a man who wishes to be above all others, who wishes to hold power over all and to be lord of all, and give them their orders…
This is a classic case of projection.
Just as Agamemnon doesn’t acknowledge the respect due to a great warrior, so Achilles doesn’t fully recognize Agamemnon’s governing challenges. As Ross noted, it’s as though Agamemnon is the coach and Achilles his star player, and we see regularly what happens to teams when coach and star are at odds. Achilles quits the alliance and then, working through his goddess mother, obtains Zeus’s promise to make the Greeks pay for Agamemnon’s insult. In other words, comrades with whom Achilles has been fighting shoulder-to-shoulder will pay with their lives to prove his indispensability.
Agamemnon’s bungling continues. In Book II, hoping to galvanize the Greeks into an assault, he attempts reverse psychology, telling his forces that Zeus has commanded them to “go back to Argos in dishonor,” where their effort will come to be seen as
a thing of shame for the men hereafter to be told, that so strong, so great a host of Achaians carried on and fought in vain a war that was useless against men fewer than they…
John Reishman, a Notre Dame graduate, noted that legendary coach Knute Rockne would use such an approach to fire up the Fighting Irish football team. After hearing themselves described as women, the players would charge onto the field to prove themselves men.
We noted that Agamemnon, having just lost his major warrior, perhaps uses the strategy to reunite the Greeks in a shared sense of purpose. In this instance, however, the ploy backfires as the Greeks are only too happy to run to their ships and prepare to set off for home. Only frantic damage control by Odysseus keeps the force from entirely disintegrating.
(I’ll have more to say in a future post about Odysseus’s strategy since, as one of our members noted, it has some worrisome application to authoritarian practices in our own society.)
To sum up, Plato shouldn’t ban Homer from his ideal republic but instead invite him in to teach the future leaders of the state. And regarding future leaders, it’s worth noting that Sewanee’s new president, about whom everyone is excited, has probably read The Iliad. John Reishman tells me that Robert Pearigen, when a Sewanee undergrad, may well have taken the course “Representative Masterpieces,” in which the old epics are taught. While we probably can’t attribute Pearigen’s success as the Millsaps president to Homer, we can predict success at Sewanee if he avoids Agamemnon’s insecurity and temper tantrums, respects the gifts of the talented forces who serve under him, and listens to the wise Nestors around him.
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Monday
Thanks to Trump wannabe Ron DeSantis and various other GOP politicians, Black History is under more assault than it has been in years. Suddenly school libraries and school curricula are being scoured of America’s troubled racial past. Someone recently tweeted (spouted actually since I’ve shifted over to Spoutify) that “the people who threw rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school are now upset their grandchildren might learn about them throwing rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school.” (Ruby Bridges Goes to School has been under assault in Texas schools.)
I remember when I had my own Black history awakening. The local NAACP, of which my father was a member, had purchased a number of books for Sewanee’s Black school. As it was summer, my father brought them home, which is how I came to read biographies of George Washington Carver and Harriet Tubman. I was inspired by their stories.
Such stories did not show up in my seventh grade Tennessee history class, where plantation slavery was barely mentioned and the major cause of the Civil War (so we were taught) was economic differences between the north and the south. (Also, while learning much about Tennessee favorite son Andrew Jackson, we were never taught about the Cherokee trail of tears that he instigated.) There are important reasons why the nation needs a “Black History Month.”
Lucille Clifton has several poems about White erasure of Black history. In “why some people be mad at me sometimes,” she succinctly writes,
they ask me to remember but they want me to remember their memories and i keep on remembering mine.
During a visit to South Carolina’s Walnut Grove Plantation, Clifton took a tour and was struck by the guide failing to mention the slaves. She had to prod the man to learn that a field of unmarked rocks was actually a slave graveyard. When she looked at the plantation’s inventory, she discovered that the female slaves were even more invisible than the male slaves. The poem makes powerful use of puns in its pointed climax:
at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989 by Lucille Clifton
among the rocks at walnut grove your silence drumming in my bones, tell me your names.
nobody mentioned slaves and yet the curious tools shine with your fingerprints. nobody mentioned slaves but somebody did this work who had no guide, no stone, who moulders under rock.
tell me your names, tell me your bashful names and I will testify.
the inventory lists ten slaves but only men were recognized.
among the rocks at walnut grove some of these honored dead were dark some of these dark were slaves some of these slaves were women some of them did this honored work. tell me your names foremothers, brothers, tell me your dishonored names. here lies here lies here lies here lies hear
Clifton knows that, in correcting the historical record, she will draw fire. In “i am accused of tending to the past,” she protests that she is not shaping history but merely reporting it. Like it or not, it will speak through her:
i am accused of tending to the past as if i made it, as if i sculpted it with my own hands. i did not. this past was waiting for me when i came, a monstrous unnamed baby, and i with my mother’s itch took it to breast and named it History. she is more human now, learning languages everyday, remembering faces, names and dates. when she is strong enough to travel on her own, beware, she will.
Is Black history strong enough to travel on its own yet or do we still need a Black History month to nurture it a bit longer. Is it still a baby that Ron DeSantis can suffocate in its cradle? I’m not entirely sure.
Nor do I entirely understand what to make of Clifton’s warning. Will failure to tend to our Black past result in a vengeful Black populace? The poem was written around the time that Rodney King was beaten senseless by Los Angeles cops, leading to riots, so maybe that’s what Clifton has in mind here.
If so, subsequent Black history has been far less a threat to Whites than Clifton predicts. In fact, the real danger to the country is White violence, not Black. I have yet to see White supremacists paying a price for their assaults.
But I agree with “History” learning new languages, faces, names, and dates. I don’t think that DeSantis will be able to turn back that clock.
Valentin de Boulogne, St. Paul Writing His Epistles
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Spiritual Sunday
I had a jolt today as I was looking over today’s epistle reading, from St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians. One of the passages, I realized, gets parodied—or at least alluded to—in Midsummer Night’s Dream. This give us an opportunity to explore in some depth what Shakespeare is up to.
Paul is writing about the difference between human wisdom and God’s wisdom. Only those who have experienced the Holy Spirit, he writes, can “understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.” By contrast, those who rely only on the senses, the intellect, and the heart are “doomed to perish.” Here’s the passage:
Yet among the mature we do speak wisdom, though it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to perish. But we speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,
“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him”—
these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what human being knows what is truly human except the human spirit that is within? So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.
Compare this with “Bottom’s Dream,” in which the self-confident amateur actor attempts to describe his tryst the night before with the queen of the fairies:
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was,–and methought I had,–but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom… (emphasis mine)
Bottom is not the only buffoonish Shakespeare character to capture a brief glimpse of ethereal realms. Consider Caliban, at his most lyrical, telling two other buffoons, Stefano and Trinculo, about the island:
In both Midsummer and Tempest Shakespeare explores his profound longing for something intangible and expresses his deep frustration that he cannot capture that something in his poetry. In Midsummer we encounter his frustration in the gap between a playwright’s aspiration and what shows up on stage. After Hippolyta complains about the play performed by the local townfolk—“This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard”—Theseus observes that even “the best in this kind are but shadow.”
If Shakespeare, who wrote “the best in this kind,” sees even his own efforts as “but shadow,” what hope for the rest of us?
For his part, Prospero in Tempest talks about the fragility of our attempts to capture our dreams. The “great globe” undoubtedly alludes to the Globe theatre as well the earth. In any event, all will melt into thin air:
St. Paul, articulating a vision that seems—certainly to the worldly wise—to be just as evanescent, says that, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, we will find ourselves able to “speak God’s wisdom, secret and hidden.” Whereas if we rely on that which is only human, we will grasp no more than “the human spirit that is within.”
Years ago, before I joined Julia in attending church services, I used to say that I didn’t need religion because I had literature. While I no longer it’s a case of either/or—both have become vital to me—I wasn’t entirely wrong. Both attempt to put us in touch with a spiritual realm that continually eludes us. I think that’s what Shakespeare is telling us through his allusion to Paul’s letter.
What clinched my decision to start attending church was rector Bill Pregnall, a wise man who never once pressured me to join, telling me that he sensed that I longed for mystery. That truth hit me like a thunderbolt and I have been involved in church ever since. This weekly Sunday column is part of my never-ending exploration of that mystery.
Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851)
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Friday
Sewanee College, where I serve as an occasional visiting professor, has just chosen a new president—and given that I submit a weekly poem to the town newspaper, I chose Rudyard Kipling’s “If” to greet the news.
I remember being put off when I encountered the poem in high school, what with its patriarchal “you’ll be a man, my son!” finale. It struck me as overly macho. When I read it now as I enter my 70s, however, I applaud the quality of the advice. The poem provides essential leadership tips for men and women alike.
Kipling’s balancing act is brilliant, especially in such lines as trusting yourself but remaining open, dreaming while not getting lost in dreams, thinking but not getting hung up on your conceptual framework.
And then there’s the advice, which Wimbledon offers to players (they can read it on the wall as they enter center court), to regard both Triumph and Disaster with equanimity. And when disaster strikes, to stoop and rebuild “the things you gave your life to,” even if you must do so with “worn-out tools.”
We probably don’t want our presidents risking everything on one throw of the dice (although sometimes large gambles must be taken). On the other hand, presidents need Kipling’s next piece of advice: to “force heart and nerve and sinew/To serve your turn long after they are gone” and to exhort yourself to “hold on” even when you’d rather give up.
It’s also wise to neither get stampeded by the “crowds” (staff, faculty, students, the public) nor lose yourself in an elitist bubble (trustees, big donors). And not to be hurt when people behave according to their institutional roles in their dealings with you. When I headed my department, I found it particularly hard to acknowledge that people who knew me previously were suddenly responding to me as chair, not as Robin Bates.
Kipling’s next piece of advice—don’t let either friends or foes get you down—reminds me of a witty interchange in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Feste the fool tells us he is made better by his foes and worse by his friends, explaining to Orsino,
Marry, sir, [my friends] praise me and make an ass of me; now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself, and by my friends, I am abused: so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives why then, the worse for my friends and the better for my foes.
Finally, Kipling advises that leaders should let “all men count with you, but none too much”—which I interpret as needing to respect everyone while maintaining a distance. So if you spend a full sixty seconds out of every minute putting these precepts into practice, all should go well.
Of course, as Kipling himself warns, disasters will still occur. But by following his advice, you’ll at least give yourself the best chance of success.
If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same; If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much; If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
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Thursday
Yesterday I talked about how novels—and narrative in general—help us find meaning in life. According to comparative lit professor Peter Brooks, the novel “offers us our best understanding of what it means to live, to have lived, to construct a life.” He says something similar about fictional characters.
Chapter 4 of Brooks’s Seduced by Story—“The Allure of Imaginary Beings”—opens with a series of related questions:
Why do we invest so much time and emotional energy in our relationships with imaginary beings? Why are the aspirations, the errors, the inner turmoil and erotic daydreams of Emma Woodhouse and Emma Bovary so important to us. We know when we open the novels in which they figure that the persons we are going to meet aren’t “real,” yet that makes us no less eager to meet them, no less highly invested in how we feel about them, how we admire and criticize them, how we anticipate their emotional highs and lows, how we fear for their failures and hope for their successes.
Just as he follows the lead of Walter Benjamin (see yesterday’s post) when discussing the power of narrative, so in his discussion of character Brooks takes his cues from Marcel Proust. At one point, talking about his fictional painter Elstir and his fictional composer Vinteuil, the author of In Search of Lost Time explores how they appear to erase the real world. This leads Proust to reflect,
The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit a range lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we can do with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.
Elsewhere Proust says that intercourse with fictional creations opens up a deeper knowing than intercourse with actual people, explaining,
A real human being, however profoundly we sympathize with him, is in large part perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, presents a dead weight which our sensibility cannot lift….The novelist’s happy discovery was to have the idea of replacing these parts [of real persons], impenetrable to the soul, by an equal quantity of immaterial parts, that is to say, parts which our soul can assimilate.
One way Brooks illustrates Proust’s point is by noting the difference between imagining a character and encountering a cinematic version. Noting that he’s never seen a satisfactory Emma Bovary on film, he writes,
Emma Bovary may be very difficult to literalize because she is herself a creature of daydream, fantasy, the wish to be other and elsewhere. Her virtue for us as readers lies partly in her noncoherence as a flesh and blood creature.
On Proust’s point about the challenges presented by actual people, Brooks writes,
To be inhabited in this manner by the fictional…allows us to discover in the space of a couple of hours what it would take us years to learn in life—or that we might not learn at all since the profound changes in life are hidden from us by the slowness of their process. The heart changes in life; that is our worst sorrow; but we know this change only in reading.
And further on:
Represented persons give us an understanding of life, and of ourselves, that real persons cannot. Why is that? In daily life what Proust calls “habit” fills us with a lazy blindness; the novel as optical instrument alone restores vision.
Habit—which is to say, pre-set categories into which we can comfortably slide—aren’t the only danger to seeing clearly. For dramatic effect, Brooks quotes Adam Smith on the need for imagination to preserve our humanity. The senses, the political economist says, will take us only so far. Brooks says that Smith’s passage on torture in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) should be required reading in the CIA:
Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers…. By the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into his body, and become in some measure the same person with him, and thence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.
Smith here is not talking about fictional characters but one can see how they provide us with (in Brooks’s words) “a fuller realization of another kind of being in the world.” Later in the chapter, after citing a passage by Keats, Brooks writes,
Readers, like poets and novelists, are also chameleon poets, taking joy in Iago as well as Imogen, provisionally giving up personal identity in order to be in and filling some other body…
And elsewhere:
That we can talk about Dorothea Brooke or Eugene de Rastignac beyond the boundaries of the pages we have read is testimony not so much to our wish that we could invite them to dinner with us as to our need to reimagine our own existences through their eyes…The ego learns its own shape by trying on others. The more cognitively challenging the process, the better. That’s why we need the novel.
“More cognitively challenging” is a tacit acknowledgement that great literature helps us reimagine more fully than not-so-great literature. The same distinction is implied in Brooks’s assertion that,
in the novels we value most, [becoming immersed is] not a passive or escapist process but one that has a cognitive and critical function. Character in the novel gives us, in the old yet still fresh words of Matthew Arnold, a “criticism of life.”
And finally,
[W]e need fictional representation of persons in order to understand the most elusive and consequential issues of our limited human existence.
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Wednesday
The more I read and reread Peter Brooks’s Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative, the more impressed I am. As the Yale comparative literature professor sees it, we use novels to figure out the meaning of life. Drawing on cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, Brooks writes,
What readers look for in the novel is closed to them in their own lives: the knowledge of death that they cannot have in life and which alone confers meaning on life. It is with the end of a life that its meaning becomes apparent.
And then, talking about the significance of the death of a major character, Brooks directly quotes Benjamin:
The flame that consumes this stranger’s fate warms us as our own fates cannot. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life at the flame of a life he reads about.
And further:
Of all the gifts [the novel] offers, this is the most certain: the end….The novel is not important because it portrays the fate of a stranger for us, but because the flame that consumes the stranger’s fate warms us as our own fates cannot. What draws the reader to a novel is the hope of warming his shivering life at the flame of a life he reads about.
To which Brooks adds,
There we are again: in the forlornness of our modern condition, deprived of “counsel,” it is the novel that brings us warmth through its capacity to make us understand the end.
Of course, many novels do not end in a death, but Brooks is just using this extreme case to accentuate his point about novels helping us find meaning. Mentioning Samuel Richardson, Dickens, Balzac, Charlotte Bronte, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Henry James, and Proust, Brooks says that those novels that “best define the genre for us tend to be long…because their meanings must be played out over passing time: people age, make mistakes, regret decisions, choose new partners, perhaps learn something about life.”
At its most powerful, Brooks contends, the novel “offers us our best understanding of what it means to live, to have lived, to construct a life.” The chapter concludes,
Narrative may be the best discursive and analytic tool that we have for transmitting what we know about life, and for constructing a life in time as something that has shape and meaning.
Brooks also has fascinating things to say about the significance of literary characters but I’ll save that discussion for tomorrow.
The idyllic Black community in Toni Morrison’s Paradise
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Tuesday
The horrific police killing of Tyre Nichols differs mainly from other police killings in that (1) so much about it, including police bloodlust, has been captured by recordings; (2) the police killers were all Black; and (3) the policemen were immediately fired and arrested. The second point has especially drawn attention. Isn’t this what integrating police forces was supposed to prevent?
The dark fact, however, is that when police forces are granted virtually unquestioned immunity, then individual police will take advantage of that power, regardless of their race. Toni Morrison is one author who understands the violence that Blacks are capable of when given power previously granted only to Whites. I have in mind her novel Paradise.
The novel follows the history of a town set up by African Americans in the 1890s, which is to say, after the failure of Reconstruction and the reinstatement of Jim Crow discrimination. Encountering racism from not only Whites but light-skinned Blacks, the group sets up their own town, which becomes a kind of dark-skinned paradise (light-skinned Blacks aren’t allowed in). Morrison makes it clear, however, that such splendid isolation will eventually recoil upon itself, which it does.
Faced with changing times in the 1960s, including militant young people and self-assertive women, the town fathers conclude that four women living in a former convent are the source of all their problems. What results in a murderous rampage, complete with lynchings, of the sort usually associated only with Whites. Here’s how the book opens:
They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time. No need tohurry out here. They are seventeen miles from a town which has ninety miles between it and any other. Hiding places will be plentiful in the Convent, but there is time and the day has just begun.
They are nine, over twice the number of the women they are obliged to stampede or kill and they have the paraphernalia for either requirement: rope, a palm leaf cross, handcuffs, Mace and sunglasses, along with clean, handsome guns.
And further on:
Earlier, when they blew open the Convent door, the nature of their mission made them giddy. But the target, after all, is detritus: throwaway people that sometimes blow back into the room after being swept out the door. So the venom is manageable now. Shooting the first woman (the white one) has clarified it like butter: the pure oil of hatred on top, its hardness stabilized below.
Once one sees other people as “detritus,” all kinds of inhumane acts are possible. And just as the Black town fathers in Morrison’s novel believe that killing the Convent women will cleanse the town, Tyre Nichols’s killers may have thought the same. As Dr. Rashad Shabazz of Arizona’s School of Social Transformation observes, there is ample research
that suggests anti-Blackness is a factor in American policing. And Black officers, agents of an institutionally racist system, are affected by this. Anti-Blackness affects Black people too. And this might explain why Black police officers exhibit more anti-Black bias than the Black population as a whole.
America’s semi-fascist right, at the present, is keen to ban Toni Morrison novels from public school libraries and curricula. In doing so, they fail to appreciate how the Nobel Prize-winning author is not afraid to tell truths that challenge Black people as well as White.
