Louis de Caullery, Christ and the Two Thieves at Golgotha
Spiritual Sunday
Reprinted from November 23, 2019
For reasons that some of my readers will know (and I hope will inform me), today’s New Testament reading involves the crucifixion, even though we are half a year from Easter. It features the story of the two thieves.
Perhaps it’s included now to make the point that salvation is spiritual rather than earthly. That seems to have been the theme in recent readings, including last week’s about the true temple being built of God’s love, not “beautiful stones” (see my post on the George Herbert poem about the passage). In any event, it gives me an excuse to share two fine poems.
Here’s the passage:
When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. The people stood by, watching Jesus on the cross; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:33-43)
Both poems focus on “the bad thief.” Harriet Monroe’s “The Thief on the Cross” (1905) ends with an intriguing question. Imagining that the bad thief goes to hell rather than heaven, she wonders how the conversation during Jesus’s descent into hell would have gone. She leaves the answer open:
The Thief on the Cross Harriet Monroe
Three crosses rose on Calvary against the iron sky, Each with its living burden, each with its human cry. And all the ages watched there, and there were you and I. One bore the God incarnate, reviled by man’s disdain, Who through the woe he suffered for our eternal gain With joy of infinite loving assuaged his infinite pain. On one the thief repentant conquered his cruel doom, Who called at last on Christ and saw his glory through the gloom. For him after the torment souls of the blest made room.
And one the unrepentant bore, who his harsh fate defied. To him, the child of darkness, all mercy was denied; Nailed by his brothers on the cross, he cursed his God and died. Ah, Christ, who met in Paradise him who had eyes to see, Didst thou not greet the other in hell’s black agony ? And if he knew thy face, Lord, what did he say to thee?
As I read heaven and hell, they are states we undergo when we are still alive. The one thief dies in a hellish state, the other gets a glimpse of “infinite loving.” He sees Christ’s “glory through the gloom.”
Put another way, in the two thieves we see two different ways of living and dying. The “child of darkness” sees nothing but “hell’s black agony” while the “thief repentant conquer[s] his cruel doom.” We can spend our last hours desperately clutching life or we can open ourselves to a vision of eternal love.
John O’Donnell’s more recent poem complicates the choice, pointing out that we all have more than a little of “The Bad Thief” in us. “Admit it: you’d have done the same,” he tells us.
In other words, the line between the “one redeemed” and the “one condemned” is very thin. We all waver between our belief in love and our panic over mortality. Only a scribbling “hack” makes the choice sound easy.
The Bad Thief John O’Donnell
We’d had to wait while someone went for nails. The soldiers stood around us, eating dates. I’d seen him once before, and heard the stories, though how on earth he’d ended up like this, with the two of us for company, I don’t know. A wind that smelt of hyssop-leaves. When I offered him my hand one big bruiser clanked his sword. “Word is,” I whispered, “you could save us all. Well, now’s your chance!” Admit it: you’d have done the same. But he just sighed: “Too late for me, though not for you.” His pale hand small in mine as they came towards us with the hammer. One redeemed, and one condemned, some hack scribbled later. But what was there between us in the end?
As I read “Bad Thief,” the compassionate line that ends “The Coward,” Eve Merriam’s poem about a deserter, comes to mind: “Coward, take my coward’s hand.” This in turn provides the answer to Monroe’s concluding question: Jesus greets us in our agony and extends to us his infinite compassion.
My recent posts have been so heavy (and long!) that I conclude the week on a lighter note. I love the way Gregory Orr tosses off what appears to be a casual observation (“Might as well give it away”) before hitting us with the zinger (“that saved your life”). My gratitude to poets for giving us these gifts knows no bounds.
How Lucky We Are By Gregory Orr
How lucky we are That you can’t sell A poem, that it has No value. Might As well Give it away.
That poem you love, That saved your life, Wasn’t it given to you?
Somehow I missed this Washington Post story so thanks to reader Maeve for alerting me to it. I can’t tell it better than reporters Laura Vozzella and Nate Jones:
A high school senior in rural Riner, Va., reported his English teacher to state authorities for the way she was teaching Beowulf.
“All my teacher wants to talk about is how the book is sexist because it portrays the warriors as men and not women,” the student wrote Jan. 30 to the teacher tip line that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had just set up to banish “divisive concepts” from public education. “I believe my teacher is in violation of Governor Youngkin’s Executive Order, which prohibits the teaching of ‘divisive topics.’”
First, a caution: I can think of many examples over the years of students hearing something different than what the teacher actually said. (I learned this early in my career.) Sometimes they hear half a thought, sometimes they miss humor, sometimes they don’t realize that a teacher is being provocative to spark a discussion. So we can’t know what this particular teacher really said.
Still, given that Beowulf is a very male work, I can imagine a teacher acknowledging this and the student taking offense. And it’s certainly the case that women students these days are often searching for woman warriors in their literature, which they won’t find in Beowulf. Although, come to think of it, there’s Grendel’s Mother. Oh, and Thryth, who has men killed who come into her hall. But sure, Beowulf was written for a society in which men did all the fighting. To call it sexist is meaningless given that most of human history has had the same division of labor.
The tip line, on the other hand, is something else again. It was set up by Youngkin to burnish his culture war credentials. He initially established during the closing weeks of his campaign when he ran an ad about a high school student (and son of a rightwing activist) who supposedly had been traumatized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (You can read my account of it here.)
Anyway, back to the tip line, which the Post reporters describe as follows:
Shortly after taking office in January, Youngkin announced that parents should report teachers who discuss “divisive” concepts in the classroom by emailing [email protected].
“We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations,” Youngkin said in a radio interview around the same time. “Help us be aware of … their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia, and we’re going to make sure we catalogue it all. … And that gives us further, further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.
The idea of such a spy system, of course, recalls George Orwell’s 1984:
Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother–it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak–‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used–had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
Fortunately, in Youngkin’s case the public hasn’t gone along. The Post reports that his administration “quietly pulled the plug on the tip line in September as tips dried up.”
If this particular initiative has failed, however, others are going full speed ahead. Reports are coming out of Texas rural school districts of hundreds of books being pulled off of school library shelves. These include some of Neil Gaiman’s fantasies (American Gods, The Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane), which have been deemed only appropriate for adults. The Hobbit, meanwhile, is now reserved for students in sixth grade and above.
For the record, I fell in love with Hobbit when I was in third grade. Many of my college students, meanwhile, read all of Gaiman’s works while they were in high school.
I’m searching for a list of the other books targeted by the Texas school, but I’ll say here that it sounds like the fascist right wants children reading below grade level in addition to engaging in one-dimensional thinking. Which I suppose is one approach to getting the next generation to adopt nutty conspiracy theories and dumb lies.
Today I continue summarizing a fascinating article on the power of rumor by my longtime Slovenian friend Mladen Dolar. It’s a piece that has significant implications for negotiating our fact-challenged world.
Yesterday I observed how Mladen sees rumor defeating Socrates’s truth and Ophelia’s innocence. Mladen begins the next section of the article, however, by showing Figaro and Count Almaviva (in Barber of Seville) triumphing over rumor, defeating Rosina’s guardian so that the count can marry her. Citing Rossini’s 1816 opera version of Beaumarchais’s 1775 comedy, Mladen notes that the rumor receives a remarkably upbeat (and therefore chilling?) treatment by Basilio. The guardian’s ally plans to use “calumny” to ruin Count Almaviva in Rosina’s eyes:
Calumny is a little breeze, a gentle zephyr, which insensibly, subtly, lightly and sweetly, commences to whisper. Softly softly, here and there, sotto voce, sibilant, it goes gliding, it goes rambling. Into the ears of the people, it penetrates slyly and the head and the brains it stuns and it swells. From the mouth re-emerging the noise grows crescendo, gathers force little by little, runs its course from place to place, seems the thunder of the tempest which from the depths of the forest comes whistling, muttering, freezing everyone in horror. Finally with crack and crash, it spreads afield, its force redoubled, and produces an explosion like the outburst of a cannon, an earthquake, a whirlwind, a general uproar, which makes the air resound. And the poor slandered wretch, vilified, trampled down, sunk beneath the public lash, by good fortune, falls to death
“If calumny ever had a eulogy, a panegyric, a song of praise, an anthem,” Mladen observes dryly, “then this is the one.”
Because Beaumarchais is writing in “the Age of Reason,” however, rumor does not win this time, and the lovers are reconciled and happily married. As Mladen notes,
[G]iven the optimism of the age, the power of calumny and rumors fails for once. The great irony of this piece is that, after extolling so persuasively the gigantic powers of calumny, this acclaimed calumny miserably fails in the end. True love wins. The pernicious and malicious stratagems of the depraved ancien régime are defeated – also with the help of the skills and intrigues of the shrewd servant Figaro, a self-made man for the new age. Where Socrates failed, there Figaro succeeded; Socrates couldn’t fight the slanderous shadows, but Figaro could. The servant can defeat the Master; shrewdness and cleverness can defeat rank. The message is: calumny and rumors can be outwitted. And, no doubt, one can detect in this the ultimate faith in the triumphant powers of reason, which can be the match even for the invincible forces of calumny and gossip (associated with the forces of the ancien régime).
Fast forward a century, however, and things are not so rosy. Mladen quotes the famous opening sentence of Kafka’s Trial (1914-15):
Someone must have been spreading rumors about Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested.
Mladen observes that we have circled back to Socrates:
The peculiar thing with Josef K. is that we never learn what the allegations were, nor what he was charged with; indeed, he was never even charged and there was actually no trial (apart from one curious interrogation, with the title being a spectacular misnomer). Josef K. never had an opportunity to present his apology before the court, like Socrates. But, their separate fates come together in the end, at the point of execution, Socrates drinking the hemlock and Josef K. being slaughtered with a knife ‘like a dog’. They were both killed in the end on the basis of something that started as a mere rumour….There is the stark discrepancy between cause and effect.
And it gets worse—and more worrisome for those of us tracking U.S. politics—because Kafka shows how the rumor metastasizes. “What was a mere slander, a very slender slander,” Mladen points out, “is magnified by the Law, by the Court, becoming a whirlwind, against which there is no possible defense.” In our case, there are already signs that some of our reactionary Supreme Court justices are buying Trump’s “big lie” about election fraud and ruling on cases accordingly. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, for instance, appear sympathetic to the January 6 insurrectionists. Mladen shows the danger of such a development:
The Court [in The Trial] is the institution which is supposed to be based on Law, and ultimately on logos, the harbinger of logos in chaotic social turmoil, the impartial big Other to resolve any dispute. Yet the Court is entirely taken hostage by the other side of logos, hostage of rumors. It is a receding entity, massively omnipresent but nowhere to be seen (like the Castle – both the Court and the Castle are ‘subject to rumors’, emphatically so).
Believe it or not, it gets even worse as Mladen’s article takes an unexpected twist, this time courtesy of Cervantes. In the Spanish author’s “Dialogue of the Dogs,” we are told that the primary function of language is not truth-telling at all but exchanging gossip and rumors. The dogs Scipio and Berganza, suddenly discovering that they can speak, begin reflecting on the nature of speech. When Scipio rebukes Berganza for engaging in slanderous gossip, Berganza replies,
To be sure, Scipio, one has to be very wise and very circumspect if one wants to sustain two hours’ conversation without one’s words bordering on gossip. For I find in myself, although I’m an animal, that I’ve only to open my mouth a few times before the words come rushing to my tongue like flies to wine, and all of them malicious and slanderous.
Building on this observation, Mladen concludes that
gossip (rumours, slander, etc.) is not some minor deplorable deviation from what speech usually is and should properly be but, rather, pertains to the basic function of speech and sneaks in already at its origin. There is no speech without gossip, from the moment one opens one’s mouth.
What we have, Mladen extrapolates, is “the opposite of what is taken for granted.” The basic function of speech is not “communication and information” but gossip:
To speak is to speak maliciously, to speak is to gossip and to spread rumors, to speak is to denigrate. Indeed, where would we be if we were only to proffer confirmed information and sound statements? We wouldn’t last a minute if we were confined to sentences like ‘The cat is on the mat’ that analytical philosophy is so fond of. Actually, we might well cease to be human.
Mladen adds that, in Slovenian, the word for rumor and language are actually the same, another indication that rumor, not the search for truth, is language’s deepest purpose. He even wonders if philosophy itself is but “a higher kind of gossip, gossip in disguise, pretending to be morally elevated and well founded.”
So where does that leave us with Donald Trump and his election-denying, truth-bending, alternate-fact espousing disciples? At first glance, it’s discouraging to think that made-up stories come more naturally to us than truth-telling. As the saying goes, “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.”
I find it useful, however, to have a clear description of what we’re up against. As a professor, of course, I am thoroughly a creature of the Enlightenment, and I strive to be reasonable and fact-based in all of my interactions—with my students, with friends and family, with total strangers. Although I am not immune to self-serving biases, I aspire to something higher.
And this is when I recall an Adam Gopnik observation in a New Yorker article on the Enlightenment. (You can read my account of it here.) As Gopnik sees it, a commitment to reason, truth, tolerance, and justice is the exception in history, not the rule. The rule of law has always been fighting an uphill battle. Or as he puts it,
“Illiberalism” is the permanent fact of life. Moments of social peace and coexistence, however troubled and imperfect, are the brief miracle that needs explaining, and protecting.
In short, liberals like myself shouldn’t be surprised when others prove deaf to our appeals to reason. When we see right-wingers guilty of inconsistency or hypocrisy or prejudice—in other words, twisting language to serve their ends—we should stop thinking that pointing this out will have any effect whatsoever. If, as Berganza the dog puts it, “words come rushing to my tongue like flies to wine, and all of them malicious and slanderous,” then we will be clear that language’s natural proclivities are not on our side.
That, however, just means we need to fight harder for a tolerant and truth-seeking world. We can’t allow Socrates’s death to have been in vain.
Further thought: As I write this, I am learning that the charismatic, lie-spewing, Trump clone Kari Lake has just lost her governor’s race to the colorless but diligent Katie Hobbs in purple state Arizona. So reason can win out upon occasion.
The past week I reconnected with my dear friend and favorite Slovenian intellectual Mladen Dolar, and one of many rewards from our talk was getting to see a recent chapter, which appears in Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism, a collection produced by Slovenian colleagues. Mladen’s contribution explores the nature of rumor, which makes it only too relevant given the way that rumor, in the form of unhinged conspiracies, have taken over large segments of America (and not only America). In the course of his exploration, Mladen cites Socrates, Shakespeare, Beaumarchais, and Kafka.
Mladen begins by pitting Socratic logic and truth against opinion. At the core of Socrates’s philosophic mission, of course, is the search for truth:
Knowledge aims at truth – this is its ambition – and truth is binding and universal, not a matter of mere opinion. Knowledge has to be legitimized, it has to be based on sound argument, factual evidence and impartial objectivity, with all this to be ultimately grounded in logos.
Socrates’s aim, in his questioning, was to
dismantl[e] people’s opinions, destroying them, showing their lack of foundation, their ungrounded arbitrary nature. All it took was asking a couple of awkward questions; that was his favorite occupation.
Mladen then moves from opinion to rumor, which he says ranks even lower than opinion. He becomes positively lyrical as he describes how rumors grow and spread, and one can’t help think of all the rumors we have encountered in this past election season:
[W]hat defines rumors is that nobody quite subscribes to them. ‘I heard that . . .,’ ‘people say that . . .,’ ‘it has been suggested that . . .,’ ‘rumor has it . . .’1 Rumors have no author. They just circulate, anonymously, as if by themselves, impersonally, as the breeze of air stemming from nowhere and enveloping us, then passing on. And, on the way, the breeze easily turns into a tempest, a whirlwind – this metaphor actually became a running cliché about rumors throughout history. Their expansion seems to present the case of creatio ex almost nihilo, a tiny speck grows into a magnificent creature by the mere movement. There is no assignable origin of a rumor. One just hears it and passes it on, as a relay, and it augments by being passed on.
A rumor that has been spreading through Republican circles in recent years is that there is rampant voter fraud. Those who study the matter—in other words, who insist on evidence and logic—tells us that voter fraud occurs so rarely that it plays no role in election. Nevertheless, the rumor has become so deeply embedded in GOP circles that their politicians do everything possible to make voting harder and to ferret out cheaters. Unfortunately, as Mladen points out, the lack of evidence doesn’t undermine such rumors in the least. In fact, just the opposite is the case:
There is something like a mysterious conversion, a transubstantiation, that takes place with rumors: there is no proof, no origin, no author, no guarantee, but, nevertheless, they are ‘mystically’ transformed into a formidable force that is very hard, virtually impossible, to combat. Being without foundation, they nevertheless work, with their efficiency standing in stark contrast to their lack of ground or support. ‘Everybody knows’ that this is a mere rumor, based on thin air, but one cannot stop oneself from lending it an ear and allowing it to work.
Socrates, with his faith in philosophy, felt he was helpless in the face of rumor. In fact, it was rumor that caused him to be condemned to death by the Athenian assembly. As he noted in his defense (in The Apology),
There have been many who have accused me to you for many years now, and none of their accusations are true. These I fear much more than I fear Anytus and his friends [the present and identifiable accusers] [. . .]. Those who spread the rumors, gentlemen, are my dangerous accusers [. . .]. Moreover, these accusers are numerous, and have been at it a long time [. . .]. What is most absurd in all this is that one cannot even know or mention their names [. . .]. Those who maliciously and slanderously persuaded you [. . .], all those are most difficult to deal with: one cannot bring one of them into court or refute him; one must simply fight with shadows, as it were, in making one’s defense, and cross-examine when no one answers.
Many canvassers in this past election will tell you that talking with certain voters felt indeed like fighting shadows. The same is true of people who have lost family members to QAnon or the Trump cult (often the same). Mladen sees Socrates’s battle with rumor as our own condition:
Socrates, who fought false opinions and promoted the way to truth based on logos more than anyone else in history, to the point that he became the model and the beacon of this struggle, this same Socrates was powerless against the power of rumors that had been spreading against him for many years, rumors that had no basis whatsoever, yet resulted in the indictment, the trial, the sentence and death. He could easily fight the visible opponents. But, the ones he couldn’t fight were the invisible ones who paved the way for the visible ones. It’s like fighting shadows, but shadows won the day in the end. [R]umors, hearsay and slander got the upper hand over [the] glorious face of logos, truth and epistemology. It turned out that logos was helpless against rumors; the faceless anonymous avalanche won against the best of arguments.
Mladen draws his first literary example from Hamlet where, in one of the most unpleasant scenes in that great play, Hamlet says that Ophelia will not escape the rumor (or calumny) that she’s a whore:
Hamlet talks to Ophelia after the grand scene of his soliloquy in a most peculiar dialogue where he keeps insulting and humiliating her. Among other things he says the following: ‘If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, farewell’ (3.1.135–9). This is a very harsh line: no amount of chastity and purity will save her; there is no way she could protect herself against calumny and rumors; and this is the only dowry that Hamlet can think of to give her for her possible future marriage. You shall be stained if you stay in this filthy world, stained by calumnious words and rumors…
Mladen points out that Hamlet’s injunction—“Get thee to a nunnery”—is itself “ambiguous and double-edged”:
[I]t appears that the nunnery would then present a safe haven against this ubiquitous stain. But…does he really want to protect her innocence from calumnious filth, or isn’t it rather that, by the very way of addressing her, he himself produces the calumny, the very stain that he is warning her about, the stain from which she will never recover? Isn’t it rather that he, her lover, is the source of calumny he allegedly wants to protect her from? Treating her implicitly like a whore and sending her to a nunnery – how could she ever escape her fate? Nunnery, mentioned five times in the scene, functioned at the time as a euphemistic term for brothel, hence the utter ambiguity. Can one detect the allusive subtext that he may be sending her to the whorehouse where she allegedly belongs?
I’ll share the rest of the article in tomorrow’s post. For the present, however, just think of how many people in our political world find insidious ways to spread false rumors. I think especially of Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, who often claims to be, not accusing, but merely asking questions—and then challenging people to prove themselves innocent of what he has hinted.
Note how, if you defend yourself in these instances, you give the rumor a certain amount of air. Defending yourself, therefore, becomes a sucker’s game. It’s why candidate for Arizona governor Katie Hobbs refused to publicly debate the former television host Kari Lake, a 2020 election denier who lies as frequently as Trump. As Trump said approvingly of Lake, “If they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen.’”
But if logic, reason and truth are excluded from the get-go, then the debate cannot be a debate and those who favor truth and logic automatically lose. Hillary Clinton learned this when she debated Trump, which could well have been the lesson that Hobbs learned. It also appears, as of this writing, that Hobbs will win what has been a very close race.
I’ll take up what Mladen says about Beaumarchais’s Figaro and Kafka’s K (from The Trial) in tomorrow’s post. To give you a teaser, however, Mladen observes that Beaumarchais (and Rossini in his Figaro opera) represent a European Enlightenment view of the matter. Kafka, not so much.
Over the past 10 years or so, I’ve shared chapters from the book I’ve been writing. I will be sending it off this week. Today’s post is the conclusion, which I’ve just revised for the umpteenth time. Enjoy and don’t hesitate to send me feedback.
Conclusion: Activating Literature’s Power fromBetter Living through Literature: The Power of Books to Change Your Life
During the 1950s and 1960s when I was a child, people believed that reading literature made one a better person. Between fiction and drama’s unique abilities to immerse us in imaginary worlds and poetry’s power to affix our minds with powerful images, literature appeared to have life-changing potential. Granted, my own view of the matter was skewed, raised as I was by bookish parents in the hometown of the Sewanee Review, but that faith wasn’t limited to the college educated. My wife’s family, small farmers in southeast Iowa, subscribed to a Book of the Month club, from which they would regularly receive literary classics. Meanwhile, nationwide, Reader’s Digest found an audience for a series of masterpieces made easily digestible through abridgement.
The country may well have turned to literature in those post-war years out of hope that the creative imagination would counterbalance what had been one of the most traumatizing half centuries in human history. At some deep level, people recognized that poems and stories could help us push back against, or at least provide a counter perspective to, the bloodlettings of two world wars, a worldwide influenza outbreak, a worldwide depression, and murderous dictators in Italy, Germany, Spain, the Soviet Union, Japan, and China. Because literature provides special insight into what it means to be human even in difficult circumstances, we thought that literature, perhaps, would help us rebuild a better world.
As we have seen in these pages, those hopeful readers have had plenty of company throughout the ages. Many of history’s greatest thinkers have seen the life-changing effects that poems and stories have had on their own lives and then explored the impact they can have on the lives of others. We’ve seen Plato, who was shaken to the core by The Odyssey, warning about the danger posed by such passions running unchecked in civil society. We’ve seen Aristotle, a brilliant political scientist, counterarguing that tragedy-induced catharsis prepares citizens for good governance. The Aeneid so inspired Sir Philip Sidney that he regarded it as must reading for men going to war, and he may well have conjured up Virgilian battle scenes as he fought his last battle in the Spanish occupied Netherlands. Samuel Johnson attributed much of his profound understanding into human nature to his visceral encounters with Shakespeare’s tragedies, King Lear especially.
And so it has been with the others profiled here. As he witnessed men and women fighting for individual rights in the early 19th century, Percy Shelley recognized energies that are also at work in poets who wrote centuries earlier, including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, and Shakespeare. Utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill, paralyzed by depression when his vision of a more just and egalitarian society appeared to have reached a dead end, found a way forward thanks to the poetry of William Wordsworth, especially his poem Intimations of Immortality. (Mill would go on to become one of the pioneers of a liberal arts education.) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s attributed many of their history-changing insights into the nature of 19th century capitalism to Balzac’s Human Comedy novels, which they deeply admired, and if Sigmund Freud is the founder of modern psychology and the primary developer of the process of psychoanalysis, it is in part thanks to the impact that Oedipus and Hamlet had upon him. Sandra Gilbert made major contributions to the feminist movement, especially the articulation of female anger and determination, thanks to her love affair with Jane Eyre, and Wayne Booth and Martha Nussbaum’s compelling accounts of how literature can promote multicultural democracy are rooted in their own immersive reading experiences, especially Jane Austen and Mark Twain for Booth and Sophocles, Euripides, Henry James, and Ralph Ellison for Nussbaum.
We’ve discussed some of the reasons why, despite the surge of interest in literature following World War II, scholars downplayed its practical effects upon readers, a view too often passed on to future English teachers. But while some of that skepticism continues to linger on literature classrooms, many believe that literature can play a vital role in creating a more diverse and tolerant society. That poems and stories can move us out of our narrow confines and provide us with a more expansive view of the world is why former colonized populations, women, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, LBGTQ folk, the physically and neurologically challenged, and other members of historically marginalized groups have found it so powerful.
Literature’s success in opening minds to multicultural pluralism is also a major reason why certain noteworthy authors became the target of conservatives in the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s and why rightwing forces today are increasing their attacks on school libraries and classroom curricula, not to mention public schools themselves. Several times in these pages I’ve compared reading literature to playing with dynamite or waving a loaded gun, and many rightwing extremists would agree. They fear that once young readers—or readers of any age—immerse themselves in books, powerful feelings, ideas, and even movements will be unleashed. While rightwingers and liberals don’t agree in much, they both regard literature as potentially lifechanging.
The question before us, then, is less whether literature can change lives, but rather how and to what end? The thinkers surveyed in this book provide a variety of answers, and if I have done justice to their ideas, you can draw on them in formulating your own view of the matter. Speaking for myself, two thinkers in particular stand out. Riffing off a Charlie Chaplin observation, I use Percy Shelley for long view, Wayne Booth for close-up. As Shelley sees it, great literature helps bend the long arc of history towards freedom while Booth believes that literature is the ideal friend for negotiating our day-to-day challenges. Between them, they provide a powerful account of how literature can make our lives better.
Shelley, you will recall, claims that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” His underlying assumption is that humans long to step into their full potential, which is thwarted by various social and historical factors. The greatest literature understands this longing and gives voice to it—and in the process, helps make change happen. To be sure, as Shelley openly admits, sometimes the process is agonizingly slow. It may take centuries, if not millennia, for literary vision to be legislated into social practice. That’s one reason why poets are unacknowledged.
Yet audiences can at least catch a glimpse of human possibility within our poems and stories. Greek spectators at 5th century BCE Athenian plays, for instance, witnessed titanic female characters, even though women at the time were still being legally treated as second-class citizens. And yes, universal suffrage was still 2400 years away in the West. But when socio-economic conditions finally changed, feminist activists discovered that dramas that once seemed harmlessly entombed in dusty museums suddenly spoke with oracular power. Performances of Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Euripides’s Medea in the 1970s, speaking a deep human truth, assured women that they could command the world stage. To apply the words of literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, they seized hold of memories that flashed up at a moment of danger and opportunity. Literature transcended time and place as past works were “blasted out of the continuum of history” and became “charged with the time of the now.”
Shelley, then, was right about literature tapping into a timeless yearning for freedom. By capturing humanity’s “essential being,” to use Allan Bloom’s phrase, the great authors of every age uncork a power that can never be entirely put back in the bottle. The human truths they convey are universal because they cross racial, ethnic, gender, national, and other boundaries. Through these pages, we have been noting one instance after another of literature stepping up when history has sought to keep people down: Anna Karenina for an unjustly imprisoned doctor, Little Women for an abducted Pakistani girl, various Shakespeare plays for the members of South Africa’s African National Congress imprisoned by South Africa’s apartheid authorities. Black poet Maya Angelou turned to Charles Dickens’s abused Oliver Twist when figuring out how to process a particularly gruesome lynching, and W.E.B. Du Bois probably recalled his beloved Three Musketeers—and the slogan “All for one and one for all”—as he was founding the NAACP (1909), an organization that brought Blacks together so that they could resist the White terror that was undoing Reconstruction’s gains.
Citing these specific instances begins to move us from Shelley’s framing to Booth’s. The Chicago theorist’s vision of literary works as friends allows us to rethink our relationships to them. As he puts it, poems and stories call for us to practice “ways of living that are more profound, more sensitive, more intense, and in a curious way more fully generous than [we are] likely to meet anywhere else in the world.” Elsewhere he observes that they prompt us “to desire better desires.” I’ve recounted my own story of using Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird to negotiate my way through race hatred in the 1960s; of my former marine student using Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to work through his Afghanistan War experiences; of a student lacrosse student deciding to change his college behavior after identifying with the young man in Rime of the Ancient Mariner; of a student raised by Alabama fundamentalists using Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to come to a more balanced view of reason and faith.
The notion of books as friends also makes it incumbent on us to figure out whether they are good for us. Is this an acquaintance who has our best interests at heart and words of useful advice or a friend whom we link up with because we just want to have a fun night out. Is this possibly a friend who is actually bad for us? It requires judgment and experience on our part to tell the difference. We must be critical in our reading just as we must be critical in our friendships.
Of course, caveats are always in order when discussing literature’s transformative power. Books by themselves can only do so much and, as revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon notes, sometimes they must work in conjunction with other forces to bring about meaningful change. And of course, given the bewildering range of responses that any individual work will elicit, it’s not always clear how the change process works. That’s why literature doesn’t lend itself readily to anyone with specific political goals, why it doesn’t submit itself tamely to outside agendas. Perhaps the most we can definitively say is that, if the literature is good, we can be confident of the results: it will move us emotionally in healthy directions and shape our thinking in positive ways. As we have noted, thinkers from Aristotle to Sir Philip Sidney to Samuel Johnson Percy Shelley to Friedrich Engels to W.E.B. Du Bois to Martha Nussbaum have noted that the best authors are those who are most true to experience and do most honor to humanity’s richness. In a 2018 New Yorker essay, Indian author Salman Rushdie, responding to the torrent of lies emanating from the Donald Trump White House, pointed out that the classics will always remain relevant because of their commitment to truth. At a time where political con artists face few constraints to manufacturing their own realities, we find in good literature a “no bullshit” zone, a friend that will have our deepest interests at heart.
And because this is the case, then a special responsibility is laid upon those who connect others with books, whether they be teachers, librarians, parents, critics, therapists, social workers, clergy, book discussion group leaders, or just friends recommending a good read. If you fit into one of these categories, as I suspect you do, then see yourself as one handling a rare, precious and, yes, sometimes dangerous substance. Sure, there are risks involved, but the risks are worth it because the potential payoff is so great. Your job, as a literature coach, is to listen closely to your charges’ concerns, steer them to the books that you think will do them the most good, listen closely to their reading experiences, and then help them interpret and apply what they have read. Oh, and then to get out of their way. Having linked them up with the power source they need and directed their attention to the switch, you must leave the rest to them.
As I write this, women across Iran are tearing off their head scarves, risking injury, imprisonment, and death to stand up for their freedom. And I think of how, around 40 years ago in Iran, literature professor Azar Nafisi turned her apartment into a classroom after she and her students were expelled from the university and forced into veils. One of the works they read was Lolita and another Pride and Prejudice. I don’t know whether Nafisi could have predicted that they would find, in Nabokov’s novel, a depiction of the tyrannical men who were entrapping women in their own fantasies and, in Austen’s work, a radical call for women to resist social and parental pressure and to stand up for their right to make their own marital decisions. While these women might not have seen the road to effective political action at the time, maybe they are doing so now—or maybe they have passed some of that vision along to children and grandchildren. As Shelley notes, literature’s vision of freedom serves to keep the flame of hope alive in dark times, providing a space where the impossible can seem possible.
Throughout the centuries, great thinkers have understood the tremendous energies at work in literary language—which is to say, language at its most thoughtful and intense. From personal experience and from observation, they know that losing oneself in a great poem or story can turn one upside down and inside out, while tapping into and harnessing this force can lead to foundational change. One of the most powerful tools for leading us to the individual and the social transformation we crave is at our fingertips. We have but to immerse, reflect, and act.
As yesterday was Armistice Day or Veterans’ Day (or “Remembrance Day,” as they refer to it here in Slovenia), here’s a poem by World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. At the beginning, the speaker assumes that God is on his side, but when “fury smites the air,” doubts arise (“Now God is in the strife/ And I must seek him here”). By the end, he wonders whether he will be able to find God again.
The very fact that the soldier is asking signals hope. God loves us most when we are at our lowest. When material clay wonders whether it will ever hear divine music again, that’s when mystic search truly begins.
A Mystic as Soldier By Siegfried Sassoon
I lived my days apart, Dreaming fair songs for God; By the glory in my heart Covered and crowned and shod.
Now God is in the strife, And I must seek Him there, Where death outnumbers life, And fury smites the air.
I walk the secret way With anger in my brain. O music through my clay, When will you sound again?
Since I’m expected to be non-partisan in the poems I submit each week to the Sewanee Mountain Messenger, for my election-related selection this week I chose two passages from Beowulf to capture opposing moods. I offer the first to voters despondent over Tuesday’s results, the second to those elated.
Since I freely share my political leanings on my blog here, I can report that the experience that Wiglaf feels after walking into the dragon hoard—this after he has helped Beowulf slay the beast—is what it felt like to survive the predicted Republican “red wave.” Despite facing a dragon threatening to burn down everything around us, we are still standing.
First, however, here’s the passage the describes how I would have felt had that red wave actually materialized. I would have related to Grendel after having had his arm torn off:
Then an extraordinary wail arose, and bewildering fear came over the Danes. Everyone felt it who heard that cry as it echoed off the wall, a God-cursed scream and strain of catastrophe, the howl of the loser, the lament of the hell-serf keening his wound.
After losing his battle with Beowulf, Grendel stumbles back to his underwater cave. That’s often where we want to be at such moments. For instance, it was where I wanted to be in 2016 when I learned that Donald Trump had been elected president.
Slaying the dragon, by contrast, involves pushing through depression and rediscovering hope. In Beowulf, dragons are associated with people within whom the life energies have ceased to flow. They hunker down in caves, or in cranky old age, refusing to recognize the riches all around them. Beowulf, like other figures in the poem associated with dragons (Heremod and the last veteran), is in danger of shutting down until the youthful Wiglaf helps him tap into the treasures within. This is symbolized by the liberation of the dragon’s treasure hoard:
[Wiglaf] went in his chain-mail Under the rock-piled roof of the barrow, Exulting in his triumph, and saw beyond the seat A treasure-trove of astonishing richness, Wall-hangings that were a wonder to behold, Glittering gold spread across the ground, The old dawn-scorching serpent’s den. … And he saw too a standard, entirely of gold, Hanging high over the hoard, A masterpiece of filigree; it glowed with light. (trans. Seamus Heaney)
As Republican election deniers have experienced one defeat after another, I find myself glowing with light. Democracy appears to have been saved to fight another day.
Given that we in the United States have been hearing about an impending “red wave” for months now—some pollsters were even predicting a tsunami or a level-two hurricane—last night’s mid-term elections have proved an immense relief to Democrats like myself. It appears that Christian nationalists, insurrection supporters, and big lie believers did not sweep all before them after all. At this point they are trailing in their attempts to win the Senate and have a fragile lead in House races.
In other words, much of what we experienced was “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But rather than Shakespeare, I turn to a Longfellow to capture some of what happened. But first, here are a few more results from the election to set up the poem.
Quiet Kartie Hobb, who goes around assiduously doing governmental business, is currently edging out television personality Kari Lake, who goes around spouting fascist rhetoric. Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman, with a record of helping the people in his community, has bested snake oil salesman Dr. Oz. Many of the 2020 election deniers endorsed by Trump were defeated by responsible politicians committed to making people’s day-to-day lives better. All of which is to say that Responsibility has been winning out over flame throwing.
Longfellow’s “The Brook and the Mountain” allegorically captures the encounter:
The brooklet came from the mountain, As sang the bard of old, Running with feet of silver Over the sands of gold!
Far away in the briny ocean There rolled a turbulent wave, Now singing along the sea-beach, Now howling along the cave.
And the brooklet has found the billow, Though they flowed so far apart, And has filled with its freshness and sweetness That turbulent, bitter heart!
Sadly, I can’t imagine the GOP becoming any the less turbulent and bitter if the brooklet emerges triumphant. In fact, I still anticipate a few to deny that their opponents have won, despite getting more votes. Many continue to believe that the politics of hate triumph over freshness and sweetness.
