Better Living through Beowulf

Pullman and White Christian Nationalists

By Robin Bates | Published: March 7, 2023

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Wednesday

In anticipation of Philip Pullman’s final installment of his Book of Dust trilogy, scheduled to come out in September (if he can pull it off), I’ve been rereading The Secret Commonwealth. Because of all that has happened politically since I first read it three years ago, I’m even more chilled by his description of the church organization that runs things.

What has changed has partly been the takeover of the Supreme Court by Catholic extremists, although that shift has also been accompanied by the increasingly strident language of Christian White nationalists. And then there have been the book bans, the virulent attacks on transexuals, the rise of antisemitism, and mass shootings by White terrorists. White nationalists like Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan are also calling the shots in the House of Representatives. All of this was playing in the back of my mind as I read a speech given before the Magisterium, an organization consisting of the different entities in charge of the church.

Like our own Christian nationalists, the Prefect believes people of faith are under attack. A sense of grievance and resentment pervades his remarks.

“Brothers and Sisters,” the Prefect began, “in the name and the authority of the Most High, we are summoned here today to discuss a matter of burning importance. Our faith has in recent years been challenged and threatened as never before. Heresy is flourishing, blasphemy goes unpunished, the very doctrines that have led us through two thousand years are being openly mocked in every land. This is a time for people of faith to draw together and make our voices heard with unmistakable force.

This initial defensiveness, however, then gives way to a sense of opportunity. Now is the time to start imposing our will on others:

“And at the same time, there is opening to us in the east an opportunity so rich and promising as to raise the heart of the most despondent. We have a chance to increase our influence and bring our power to bear on all those who have resisted and are still resisting the good influence of the Holy Magisterium.”

Having moved from victimhood to power fantasies, the Prefect then—and oh so logically— delivers the solution. Democracy, he declares, must give way to what the communists used to call the vanguard, which supposedly will speak for the whole:

“In bringing you this news—and you shall hear much more later—I must also urge you all to pray most earnestly for the wisdom we shall need in order to deal with the new situation. And the first question I must put before you is this: Our ancient body, here represented by fifty-three men and women of the utmost faith and probity—is it too large? Are there simply too many of us to make rapid decisions and act with force and effect? Should we not consider the benefits that would flow from delegating matters of great policy to a smaller, a more swift-moving and decisive council, which could provide the leadership that is so necessary in these distracted times.”

The Prefect, it so happens, is delivering someone else’s script, just as Russian president Dimitri Medvedev used to do for Vladimir Putin. The puppet master in this case is Marcel Delamare, who heads the nefarious League for the Instauration of the Holy Purpose, which sounds a bit like the Catholic Opus Dei:

No one would ever know, but he himself had written the speech for the Prefect to deliver; and he had made sure, by private inquiry, by blackmail, by bribery, by flattery, by threat, that the motion to elect a smaller council would be passed, and he had already decided who should be elected to it, and who should chair it.

Later, moving from the bad guys to the good, we get an explanation about why it’s so hard to fight against fanatics. Fardar Corman is a wise elder of the wandering gyptians:

The other side’s got an energy that our side en’t got. Comes from their certainty about being right. If you got that certainty, you’ll be willing to do anything to bring about the end you want. It’s the oldest human problem, Lyra, an’ it’s the difference between good and evil. Evil can be unscrupulous and good can’t. Evil has nothing to top it doing what it wants, while good has one hand tied behind its back. To do the things it needs to do to win, it’s have to become evil to do ’em.

This is always the struggle between democracy and autocracy. As we’ve learned over the past seven years, we can never take the Constitution for granted.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Christian nationalism, Philip Pullman, rightwing politics, Secret Commonwealth, white supremacy | Comments closed

Lit that Features the N-Word: What to Do

By Robin Bates | Published: March 6, 2023

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 Absalom Absalom!, Beloved, Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, n-word, racism, Song of Solomon, To Kill a Mockingbird, Toni Morrison, William Faulkner | Comments closed

Hamlet: Shakespeare Grieving His Son?

By Robin Bates | Published: March 5, 2023

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 Anne Hathaway, death and dying, grieving, Hamlet, Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell, William Shakespeare | 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*

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Spiritual Sunday

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

The biblical metaphor of dust, Shaw writes,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

March Has Come in Like a Liobam

By Robin Bates | Published: March 2, 2023

Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faulkner on Racism: Sadly, Still Relevant

By Robin Bates | Published: March 1, 2023

Thursday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lady Audley’s Secret: Iron Resolve

By Robin Bates | Published: February 28, 2023

Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No such slumbering for married men, Braddon threatens.

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

Proust on Why the Poor Support the Rich

By Robin Bates | Published: February 27, 2023

Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And:

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

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

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

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

GOP Attacks on the Poor? Read McCullers

By Robin Bates | Published: February 26, 2023

Monday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reviewing the novel in 1940, Richard Wright wrote,

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

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

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

How great literature can change your life