Kindred’s Race Lessons

By Robin Bates | Published: December 13, 2022

Wednesday

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

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

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

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

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

Reprinted from September 26, 2016

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional posts on Octavia Butler’s Kindred

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

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Musk Needs a Shakespearean Fool

By Robin Bates | Published: December 12, 2022

Tuesday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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France and England’s Titanic Match

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2022
France-England in 2022 World Cup quarterfinal match

Monday

Like much of the world, I’ve been riveted by the World Cup. It helps that my favorite team—France—is still in the mix. My love of French soccer goes back to my childhood when my family was visiting Paris (in 1962) for a summer of sightseeing (for my brothers and me) and of research (for my French professor father). I remember, upon a visit to the old Roman arena, watching five French school boys juggling a soccer ball during their lunch break. One lined up in the entryway and the other four, while munching on their baguette sandwiches, took turns with the ball, bouncing it on their feet before sending it spinning toward the “goal.” The goalie would grab the ball, roll it back to them, whereupon another would start juggling. I’ve rooted for France ever since.

But I like England as well and was torn as I watched the two countries play each other on Saturday in what many are calling the best World Cup game to date. The English played a wonderful attacking game but ended up losing, thanks to two magnificent French goals and a missed penalty by their all-time goal scorer Harry Kane.

Many are saying that England should have won. After all, they had twice as many shots (16-8), including shots on target (8-5) and corner kicks (5-2). They also had many more completed passes and dominated possession (57%). Nevertheless, France emerged victorious.

I think of a passage from Ralph Ellison’s invisible Man that seems to capture both the drama of the game and the outcome:

Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas. The long shot got the nod. The yokel had simply stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time.

To be sure, defending world champion France is hardly a yokel, nor was it the long shot. In fact, most people were predicting that France would win. Nevertheless, there were times in the match where France’s back line appeared to be doing a version of holding up their arms in stunned surprise. The two penalty shots awarded to England were brought about by French players panicking. England’s Bukayo Saka was the very personification of “violent flow of rapid rhythmic action.”

Only—and this is where the comparison breaks down—some experts who understand soccer better than I do say that France maintained its composure far better than I realized. Even as the defense was swarmed by attackers, the fullbacks (for the most part) kept their composure as they parried the attacks. If so, they were less like the stunned yokel and more like Lizzie when attacked by the goblin men in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market:

Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone
Lash’d by tides obstreperously,—
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire,—
Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee,—
Like a royal virgin town
Topp’d with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguer’d by a fleet
Mad to tug her standard down.

By the end of the match, despite wave-wasp-ship attacks, France still held its standard high. Like Lizzie, it was strong in its self assurance.

With former French colony Morocco next, will we need to shift to Casablanca to describe the next match? If France loses, it will at least be able to say, “We’ll always have Paris.”

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Mary Sang in This World Below

By Robin Bates | Published: December 11, 2022
Sandro Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat

Spiritual Sunday

Mary’s song to God is the focus of the today’s Advent lesson and it’s also the focus of a poem that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in 1936, right around the time he was starting work on The Hobbit. I mention the two together because “Noel” has a Nordic feel to it. The world could be Hrothgar’s mead hall following the Grendel attacks.

After a grim beginning, however, Mary’s song is heard. Suddenly, the hall is filled “with laughter and light.” The bells of Paradise, Tolkien assures us, now ring.

NOEL
Grim was the world and grey last night:
The moon and stars were fled,
The hall was dark without song or light,
The fires were fallen dead.
The wind in the trees was like to the sea,
And over the mountains’ teeth
It whistled bitter-cold and free,
As a sword leapt from its sheath.

The lord of snows upreared his head;
His mantle long and pale
Upon the bitter blast was spread
And hung o’er hill and dale.
The world was blind, the boughs were bent,
All ways and paths were wild:
Then the veil of cloud apart was rent,
And here was born a Child.

The ancient dome of heaven sheer
Was pricked with distant light;
A star came shining white and clear
Alone above the night.
In the dale of dark in that hour of birth
One voice on a sudden sang:
Then all the bells in Heaven and Earth
Together at midnight rang.

Mary sang in this world below:
They heard her song arise
O’er mist and over mountain snow
To the walls of Paradise,
And the tongue of many bells was stirred
in Heaven’s towers to ring
When the voice of mortal maid was heard,
That was mother of Heaven’s King.

Glad is the world and fair this night
With stars about its head,
And the hall is filled with laughter and light,
And fires are burning red.
The bells of Paradise now ring
With bells of Christendom,
And Gloria, Gloria we will sing
That God on earth is come. 

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Autumn’s Sobbing Violins Wound My Heart

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2022
Paul Verlaine

Friday

I find myself recalling the poetry of French poet Paul Verlaine these days, perhaps because Sewanee recently has been beset by dark and dismal weather. On Tuesday I shared “Tears Fall in My Heart” while today I turn to “Autumn Song.”

When I was attending school in France in 1964-65, Verlaine led the list of poets we were required to memorize. My favorite part of the school days were the two sessions devoted to poetry, with half an hour closing out the morning session and half an hour the afternoon. (School went from 9-12 and 2-5, with no school on Thursday and half day on Saturday.) Along with Verlaine, we learned poems by Apollinaire, La Fontaine, Victor Hugo, and others I can’t remember. Verlaine is the one who stays with me the most.

Given that his verse is so mesmerizing, I sense that Verlaine has a place in the French cultural imagination similar to that enjoyed by Wordsworth in the British, Burns in the Scottish, and Robert Frost in the American. His poems are often aural gems, which one hears in the opening lines of Autumn Song.” Long, drawn-out assonance captures the sobbing violins of autumn:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’autumne…

The Poetry Foundation essay on Verlaine observes that he was often overcome by despair, brought on by “overwhelming and contradictory feelings of fear and hope,” and that “only in poetry could he find temporary peace.” And indeed, there is something soothing in reciting one of Verlaine’s melancholy poems. I can’t begin to do justice to the sounds in my translation—I’m skilled neither as a poet nor as a translator and furthermore my French is rusty—but here goes anyway:

Autumn Song

The long sobs
Of the violins
Of autumn
Wound my heart
With monotonous
Languor.

All choking
And pale
When the final hour sounds
I think back
To the days of yore
And I weep;

And I set off
Carried away
By an ill wind
First here
Then there
Buffeted
Like a dead leaf.

Seldom has depression been conveyed so sonorously. Verlaine almost gives it a good name.

Original

Interestingly, the opening lines from the poem were used by the allied forces to signal to the French Resistance that D-Day was about to begin. Here’s the poem in French:

Chanson d’automne

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure;

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

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Rethinking Oleanna

By Robin Bates | Published: December 7, 2022
Eisenstadt, Macy in Oleanna

Thursday

Yesterday I mentioned absolutely hating the new film version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. When I was in Slovenia, I encountered a play that I also hate but am rethinking after hearing a philosophy student’s presentation. I’m still not won over by David Mamet’s Oleanna but am now seeing it in a new light.

Oleanna is basically a “he said, she said” sexual assault case where one is never able to determine entirely what happened or who is at fault. In that way, it differs from the recent film She Said, which I saw while in Ljubljana and in which the guilty party is evident. The question there is whether film producer Harvey Weinstein, a harasser and rapist, can be exposed, not whether he is guilty. Although Oleanna, like the 2019 She Said book by New York Times reporters Jodi Kanto and Megan Twohey, was also made into a movie, I suspect that She Said will do better at the box office. Audiences generally prefer to have clarity in their crimes.

Rightwing David Mamet gets to beat up on two of his favorite targets in Oleanna: entitled professors and radical feminists. Working class Carol, out of her depth in professor John’s college class, goes to him for help, during which time he repeatedly talks over her, not really hearing what she’s saying. Misunderstandings between them compound until, by the second act—bolstered by a shadowy feminist group—she returns making accusations of sexual harassment and eventually rape. He is denied tenure, fired, and in the end resorts to violence against Carol.

The Slovenian student was writing about the play because she had recently seen a professor fired for false accusations (or so she believed) of sexual harassment. For her, the professor in the play is innocent. For me, on the other hand, John is at least guilty of a kind of mental abuse, failing to truly listen to Carol but using his entitled position to impose his narrative on her. Entitled professors are a particular peeve of mine since I believe we are meant to serve our students, not egotistically take advantage of them.

From what I see of his teaching, John should be denied tenure on the basis of that, along with his corrupt grading practices (he promises Carol he will give her an A if she comes to regularly meet with him). If he didn’t feel so privileged, he wouldn’t have gotten into this situation in the first place. I see him setting himself up for his own fall.

But more than that, I see playwright Mamet as a privileged man himself revealing his obsession with assertive women, who he fears will emasculate him. The play, in this way, is a depiction of white male panic–which, as we are seeing in the United States right now, too often concludes in violence. (Male insecurity is also at the core of Glengarry, Glen Ross, which in my opinion is a far better play.) And because panic drives the narrative, Carol seems a caricature of feminism, not a real person.

She especially seems unreal when, bolstered by her feminist friends (whom we never see), she returns and makes her accusations. Suddenly, bolstered by feminist discourse and victim protections that didn’t exist before the 1970s, she has found a way to change the power dynamic. While I can see why that would appeal to her, her robotic words don’t strike me as convincing.

They did ring a bell with the Slovenians, however, especially with the philosophy professor who had invited me to hear the student’s presentation. Eva Bahovec, a decades-old friend, heard in the student the political dogma that she used to hear from party bureaucrats in socialist Yugoslavia. For her, the Mamet dialogue was only too recognizable.

It was a strange reversal. Here was I, a man, attacking the male professor for his sense of entitlement while Eva, a feminist academic who is attracting Slovenian women to the traditionally male discipline of philosophy in very exciting ways, was critiquing the feminist student.

Looking at my own response, I believe my own extra fury came from seeing what I regard to be a caricatured version of my profession. Because I resented being lumped in with such a professor, I lashed out at the play. But I must acknowledge that this is how satire often works, with the author using caricatures to generate wide-ranging and heated debates. As I sat in a coffee house afterwards with Eva’s students, I wondered whether I shouldn’t credit Mamet for the lively discussion that ensued. When they, like Eva, went after the student, I speculated that there might be more to the drama than I previously thought.

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The Green Knight Film? Ugh!

By Robin Bates | Published: December 6, 2022

Wednesday

I had been resisting watching the recent Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—I’m invariably disappointed when I watch my literary loves translated to celluloid—but when the movie popped up in the menu during our return flight to America, I said, “What the hell.” I’m still trying to wash the memory from my mind.

I didn’t just dislike it. I hated it. With the burning fury of ten thousand suns. Today’s post explains why.

I must acknowledge that the filmmaker faced an impossible task. SGGK is a poem of breathtaking complexity, one of my five favorite works of all time. It is, first of all, a profound meditation on our relationship with death, composed by a poet who had either first-hand or second-hand experience with the Black Plague. Paradoxically, it is also a comic masterpiece. Key to the story is the figure of the Green Knight, who is both a death-dealing giant and a laughing, fairly reasonable, all-green visitor offering Camelot an evening of entertainment. How does a filmmaker capture that mixture?

The answer: he didn’t and perhaps couldn’t. Instead, we get a joyless drama with a mute monster and a knight fearing for his manhood. In the end, it’s unclear what Gawain has achieved.

Here’s how I interpret the poem. King Arthur’s Court thinks that it has arrived at a couple of failsafe ways for dealing with death. One is its Christian belief system, with its promise of life after death. A second is its knightly code, with its belief that a knight will attain glory if he sacrifices his life for king and country.

A suspicion of sensuality, especially of sexuality, also works its way into the mix. An ideal knight should be like Galahad or, to choose a non-fictional knight, the 15th century’s Chevalier de Bayard, who was “sans peur and sans reproche” (without fear and above reproach). The poem invokes this ideal, with its Gawain (unlike the Gawain in the movie) rejecting sexuality.

Green Knight represents a challenge to this value system. A Green Man figure from pagan lore who, like nature, can regenerate himself (the movie at least gets this part right), he doesn’t agree with anything that denigrates the delights of nature. His mission is to determine whether these people, at their core, really have the contempt for life that they claim to. Gawain seems to calmly shrug off death as he rides out to receive the return axe blow, but does he really believe this or is he in denial. The poet wants to know this as well.

In other words, the series of tests that Gawain undergoes in the Green Knight’s castle (Gawain doesn’t know that Lord Bertilak is the Green Knight) are to determine whether Christian knighthood has in fact found a way to rise above nature. Gawain gets a full of blast of nature at its most intense, which is to say sex and death. He is tempted by a woman’s beauty and he is shown death in all its grisly detail (the dead animals that the lord of the castle brings home each day). While he resists the temptations and fears of the flesh to a point, in the end he surreptitiously accepts a life-saving sash from the lady. When all is revealed, as GK points out, Gawain cares for his life after all.

GK has no problem with this. As he sees it, it’s only natural. Gawain, however, is appalled at himself for what he regards as his cowardice, and the movie seems to agree with him. It seems upset when he runs away from the Green Knight and proud of him when returns. In other words, it buys into the very value system that the poem is questioning.

As I see it, the poem thinks that Christianity has so demonized nature that a rebalancing is necessary. A delightful and humorous tale, the poet figures, is the best way to restore perspective. After all, everyone is so damned serious about their Christian beliefs and their focus on the afterlife that they are forgetting to enjoy the life that is before them. They refuse to admit that earthly delights, including sex, are a gift not to be spurned.

Forget about delight and humor in the movie. Instead we watch Gawain torn apart by his death fears before achieving (I think) some kind of peace. To be sure, the Gawain in the poem never reconciles himself with his natural urges, but it’s in the overall context of the knight’s laughter. The poem’s Gawain could tread a more balanced path if he chooses.

And a thought on the knight. There are stories where our fear of death is so great that death manifests itself as a monster. Take Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” for instance, where death stalks the partying aristocrats one by one. The poem gives us a healthier vision of sex and death, which is one reason I love it so much. There we see Death—and his consort Sexuality—as provocative, tough-love instructors.

The film, on the other hand, takes all the fun out of the story.

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A Poem for a Dark, Dismal Day

By Robin Bates | Published: December 5, 2022
Edouard Cortes, Place Vendome in the Rain

Tuesday

A poem by 19th century French poet Paul Verlaine has been on my mind all day, perhaps because a dismal rain has been falling in Sewanee and is supposed to persist throughout the week. When I attended a French school at age 13, I had to memorize this poem, and parts of it have never left me.

“Tears Fall in My Heart” is one of Verlaine’s numerous depression poems. Like many if not most poets, Verlaine suffered from depression, which he transformed into haunting lyrics. This is one of them:

Tears Fall in My Heart
By Paul Verlaine
Trans. by Richard Stokes

Tears fall in my heart
As rain falls on the town;
What is this torpor
Pervading my heart?

Ah, the soft sound of rain
On the ground and roofs!
For a listless heart,
Ah, the sound of the rain!

Tears fall without reason
In this disheartened heart.
What! Was there no treason? …
This grief’s without reason.

And the worst pain of all
Must be not to know why
Without love and without hate
My heart feels such pain.

For those of you who know French, here’s the original:

Il pleure dans mon cœur
Comme il pleut sur la ville;
Quelle est cette langueur
Qui pénètre mon cœur?

Ô bruit doux de la pluie
Par terre et sur les toits!
Pour un cœur qui s’ennuie
Ô le bruit de la pluie!

Il pleure sans raison
Dans ce cœur qui s’écœure
Quoi! nulle trahison? …
Ce deuil est sans raison.

C’est bien la pire peine
De ne savoir pourquoi
Sans amour et sans haine,
Mon cœur a tant de peine.

Such poems have the paradoxical effect of making a dismal day more bearable.

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Confused about Gender? Read 12th Night

By Robin Bates | Published: December 4, 2022
William Powell Frith, Olivia Unveiling

Monday

As I was teaching Twelfth Night to a University of Ljubljana Shakespeare class, I kept thinking how important it was that students encounter Shakespeare’s astounding vision of gender complexity. Slovenia no less than the United States is encountering rightwing attacks on LGBTQ+ initiatives, although thankfully the Slovenes are not witnessing mass shootings, attacks on power grids, and fascists with guns intimidating drag shows. Still, one of my former students—now a high school teacher—said that a student at their school, caught in gender confusion, committed suicide recently. Although his parents were supportive, general social disapproval proved too much.

I’ve written in the past how Twelfth Night gives us a framework to better understand gender. To repeat some of those ideas here, my reading of the lightning strike that splits the ship, separating twins Viola and Sebastian, is Shakespeare’s way of conveying how we internalize social labels at an early age. Suddenly we are thinking of ourselves as either male or female. What the play goes on to make clear, however, is that humans are far more complex than this binary.

The play shows men exploring their female side and women exploring their male side. Furthermore, there’s a man (Antonio) who falls in love with another man and a woman (Olivia) who falls in love with another woman (although in her case she thinks Viola is actually a man).

In Count Orsino we have a man discovering he has a female side and mimicking what he believes to be their behavior. Commanding his musicians to play sweet music (“If music be the food of love, play on”), Orsino lounges around refining his sensibilities. In doing so, he so unnerves his servants that one advocates a deer hunt to restore him to his manhood:

Curio: Will you go hunt, my lord?
Duke Orsino: What, Curio?
Curio: The hart.
Orsino: Why, so I do, the noblest that I have:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purged the air of pestilence!
That instant was I turn’d into a hart;
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me.

Orsino is thrilled when Viola, disguised as Cesario, enters his household. What a relief to find another effeminate man!

And what about Viola. Whether or not she wants to transition, she certainly enjoys the freedom that comes with being a man. For the first time in her life she can roam freely and have open and frank conversations with a member of the opposite sex. Although Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally informs Meg Ryan that men and women can’t be friends, Viola reveals that there is a way. The woman just needs to pass herself off as a guy, at which point she can become a man’s BFF.

The reverse is also true. Although Orsino may be tongue-tied around Olivia—or at least, he uses emissaries rather than approaching her directly—he has no such difficulties around Viola. Unlike with Curio, to her he can unburden his heart. In fact, at the end of the play when he discovers Viola is really a woman, he requests that she remain a man for just a little longer:

Cesario, come;
For so you shall be, while you are a man…

I believe that it is this newly discovered freedom that draws Olivia to Viola/Cesario: what she really longs for—and falls in love with—is Viola’s mobility. She knows she doesn’t like being worshipped by Orsino–it’s as though she’s stuck on a pedestal–and an exaggerated sense of proper female behavior is behind her vow to mourn her dead brother for seven years. When emissaries approach her, her role decrees that she sit and listen. When she encounters Viola/Cesario, however, other possibilities open up. She doesn’t have to remain a pedestal object.

Olivia may not know that Viola is actually a woman, but I think somewhere deep inside she senses that Viola represents a path for her. If Cesario/Viola can imagine herself courting someone with the famous “willow cabin speech,” then Olivia can as well. Here’s Viola fantasizing about doing what a man does (i.e., court a woman):

[I would]
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Halloo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out ‘Olivia!’ O, You should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me!

Sure enough, after encountering this different way of being, Olivia is chasing after Cesario/Viola and, in the end, hustling Sebastian off to the altar.

And what about Sebastian? If Viola has a male side, Sebastian has a female side. Here he is describing his readiness to shed tears:

I am yet so near the manners of my mother, that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will tell tales of me.

When Olivia, thinking Sebastian is Cesario/Viola, proposes marriage, Sebastian readily assents. One imagines traditional gender roles being reversed in their household (as they were in England generally at the time, given that a woman was monarch).

In addition to women discovering that they have a male side and men discovering that they have a female side, there’s also Antonio, who clearly has homosexual longing for Sebastian. All we need, now, is for a woman to have a lesbian longings. And maybe that’s Olivia falling in love with Viola.

What Shakespeare understood is what conservative America is denying: humans are far more fluid when it comes to gender than the official party line will acknowledge. Our instinctive realization that this is so helps account for why people go to drag shows. It’s a chance to play around with parts of ourselves that otherwise are hidden. If we could all acknowledge this, life would be so much easier.

Shakespeare’s cross-dressing comedies (As You Like It and Merchant of Venice are the other two) enjoy playing around with our complexity. They do so in a way that people find to be fun, just like their modern equivalents. These include movies that one film scholar has dubbed “temporary transvestite comedies.” These include Some Like It Hot, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, Victor/Victoria, and She’s the Man (which is a teenpic version of Twelfth Night). It’s only the Malvolios of the world that take offense.

Unfortunately, these Malvolios are turning to terror tactics to threaten and attack gender play. Given the psychological dynamics of projection, this probably means that they are fighting to repress the female (or in the case of women) the male. Unfortunately, what we repress emerges as monstrous (Freud’s “return of the repressed”).

That monster is claiming victims.

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