Sometimes a book that one is reading matches up with current events in unexpected and amazing ways. Such is the case with Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, which Julia and I listened to on our way back from an Iowa wedding. I initially chose the work because I wanted to become familiar with Coates’s fiction, only to discover that it relates to conversations arising out of the Supreme Court’s attack on abortion rights.
The novel is about the underground railroad in slave times. Hiram Walker, a man with special powers, is a slave who is betrayed by a fellow slave when he attempts to escape. Following harsh treatment by his captors, he is rescued by the railroad and then becomes an underground agent himself.
Here’s a description of the betrayer:
No man was more esteemed among the coloreds and the whites of Elm County than Georgie Parks. He was the major, the ambassador, the dream, though the dream took its meaning from whatever vantage it was glimpsed from….There was a tantalizing shadow about Georgie. He would disappear for long periods or be seen out in Starfall or glimpsed in the woods at the oddest of hours. We had an explanation for these mysteries. Georgie was tied to the Underground.
It turns out, however, that Georgie has been pressured by whites to be used as bait to catch potential runaways. The trap works in Hiram’s case.
It was through the lens of this story that I found myself reading the tweets of one Kiki Djarin concerning a more contemporary underground railroad. This will be the railroad that is already being set up to get red state women desiring abortions to abortion centers in blue states—and to do so without incurring lawsuits, fines, or imprisonment for anyone involved.
A reactionary Supreme Court once gave us the Dred Scott case, in which slaveholders could retrieve slaves who had run away to free states, and it’s possible that comparable dramas will play out following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision. Missouri is already discussing laws that would prevent its residents from traveling to another state to get an abortion, and other states could well follow. The settled law on such matters is very much up in the air at present, and with the current Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter, anything is possible.
Anyway, Kiki Djarin’s tweets note that there are some offering help who can be trusted and some who can’t. In other words, there are Georgie Parkses out there who, even if they don’t deliberately betray you, can end up facilitating those who want to catch and punish you. Djarin warns,
If you’re in a state that just banned abortion, DO NOT reach out to these people who are offering to let folks stay at their place if they need an abortion.
Their offer of help may work as an unintentional trap, Djarin says:
While some of these folks are well-intentioned, and I do believe they want to help. None of them I have seen are part of an established abortion fund or abortion network. You cannot trust them.
These people have just gone on social media and publicly announced they are a safe haven for abortion seekers. Anti-abortion people are now watching them. Law-enforcement will learn their names. If you are seen with them… or your phone pings at their house…
Djarin speculates that some of these “saviors” may be in it for the glory:
These individuals are putting their hero complex before your safety. If they wanted to do this work, they would have gone to established networks and done the training, done the work and learn how to do this safely. Do not trust them.
Everybody is ready to be a hero. Right up until they get a letter from an attorney that their ass is possibly going to jail for helping you get an abortion. These people will sing to the high heavens about everything.
And then, there may be some offering help who resemble Georgie Parks even more. Djarin warns about people who “are going to pretend to help you for the purpose of trying to catch you.
As an alternative, Djarin advises doing what Coates’s protagonist should have done:
Instead, go to an abortion fund or abortion network. These places know how to transport you safely and discreetly. They have years of experience and have prepared for this exact moment. these individuals on TikTok and Twitter have not.
With an abortion network, the people you interact with have been properly vetted and you can trust them.
Djarin provides one trusted resource: https://twitter.com/NatAbortionFed.
In his ruling, Alito compared overturning Roe to overturning Plessy vs. Fergusson, the case that validated Jim Crow racism with its declaration of “separate but equal.” By citing the case, Alito revealed himself as a cynical troll, and the comparison is ridiculous. That’s because Dobbs has more in common with Plessy itself than its reversal. Plessy returned African Americans to second class citizenship after they had fought to be free, and now Dobbs is doing the same with women.
Coates is savagely eloquent about what it feels like to be property, and women may increasingly find those passages relevant as they too are treated as subordinate to the embryo they carry within.
Last week I came across a tweet from Louisville English professor Amy Clukey about the relevance of literature in dark times, such as when a fundamental right is being ripped away from American women—or to put it more accurately, when state legislatures are given permission to rip that right away. The observation put me in mind of something Percy Shelley says in Defence of Poetry.
First to Clukey, who tweeted,
Some are mocking literary scholars right now, like our close reading and theorizing novels and poetry is so stupid because it didn’t stop Roe from being overturned. Aren’t we useless and out of touch?
No. Literature is one place that women get to see themselves as people.
I remember getting into a similar debate at a conference on Islamic repression in Iran where a participant wondered about the inclusion of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Why concern ourselves about how Iranian women were reading various English-language classics, the activists wondered, when there were political battles to be fought. To which I answered that literature helps us figure out what we’re fighting for. It gives body to ideals that otherwise can all too easily by hijacked and even corrupted by narrow self-interest. Literature, I suggested (thinking of Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth) that work in conjunction with political action, functioning as a kind of compass.
With the rise of an authoritarian GOP and an authoritarian Supreme Court—not to mention the revival of authoritarian systems in various parts of the world—we are in dire need of such a compass. What Percy Shelley says about poetry’s power in dark times is therefore worth revisiting.
If poets are, in his words, the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” it’s because they hold open an expansive vision of humanity, even when human society is closing down human possibility. Shelley describes the expansive vision we get from the great Greek tragedians of 5th century BCE Athens as follows:
The imagination [when engaging with Aeschylus or Sophocles] is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life…. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.
So when Europe (as Shelley saw it) fell into darkness, poets such as Dante and the French romance writers kept that vision alive:
[T]he world would have fallen into utter anarchy and darkness, but that there were found poets among the authors of the Christian and chivalric systems of manners and religion, who created forms of opinion and action never before conceived; which, copied into the imaginations of men, became as generals to the bewildered armies of their thoughts.
I used a compass analogy but thinking of books as “generals to the bewildered armies of [our] thoughts” works as well.
To be sure, poetry should never be substituted for political action. We need to protest and write letters and run for office and vote, vote, vote. But literature will keep us grounded in what is essential. As Clukey notes, it will remind us—lest we forget—of what is involved with being a whole person.
Frontispiece to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1831)
Monday
The eloquent and very smart blog Marginalian has a suggestive post on how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can be read as a reflection on abortion rights. To be sure, it’s not an exact fit in that Dr. Frankenstein’s decision to create or not create his “Creature” is not the same as a woman choosing to continue a pregnancy or end it. Maria Popova’s point, however, is that responsible choice is essential, and she shows how Shelley explores the ethics involved.
Incidentally, at the end of today’s post I’ve provided links to many of my own posts on the abortion debate over the years. George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henrik Ibsen, Maxine Hong Kingston, Lucille Clifton, John Irving, of course Margaret Atwood, and even Virgil and Jane Austen provide useful perspectives on the issue.
Popova observes that Shelley’s titanic work touches on many issues that continue to confront us today, including “artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, racism and income inequality, the longing for love and the lust for power.” The novel’s “overarching concern,” she notes, is
the responsibility of life to itself and the question of what makes a body a person; the clear sense that any life is a responsibility — one not to be taken lightly, not to be sullied with vanity and superstition, not to be used as a plaything of power (my emphasis).
Rightwing attacks on abortion have, above all, become a power play. If the so-called “right to life” movement were truly concerned about life, it would do everything in its power to support life as it comes into the world and grows into adulthood. Instead, it loses interest as soon as the child is born, as shown by its readiness to cut (or fail to fund) safety net programs for young families. As Washington Post satirist Alexandra Petri savagely puts it, “We must protect life from conception until the moment of birth!”
Why’s that? Petri explains,
Once you have been born, you are a nuisance and, possibly, a woman — two categories the Supreme Court generally frowns upon. The born are always asking for things. You want baby formula? Uncontaminated formula? You want people not to be able to bring guns to your school? You want to be mirandized? Can’t we go back to that lovely place when you were just an exciting concept who might grow up to be a Supreme Court justice?
I know some right-to-lifers say the right things, at least when they appear on National Public Television. They claim that they will work just as hard on behalf of children after they are born as they do before. This, however, is just to convince us they are humane. The actual political behavior of the GOP contradicts their ready assurances. As Peter Beinart, editor-at-large for Jewish Currents, puts it,
It’s like throwing someone from a window and then promising to build a net. Worse: It’s like doing so when ripping up nets has been your life’s work.
But back to the Marginalian essay. In Popova’s framing of Frankenstein, the scientist faces the issue all potential parents face. Shelley’s warning, Popova contends,
rises from the story sonorous and clear as larksong: Life is not to be made, unless it can be tended with love — or else it dooms all involved to a living death.
In the case of Frankenstein, because he turns his back on his creation, it becomes a murderer. As Popova puts it,
Deprived of that primary bond of love, which moors us to the seabed of being to weather life’s storms, the Creature…is savaged by such profound self-loathing that he ends up destroying numerous innocent passersby who cross his sad path. “I am malicious because I am miserable,” he roars in one the truest and most devastating lines in all of literature, in all the common record of our reckoning with human nature.
Many women who unexpectedly find themselves pregnant grapple with whether it is more responsible to continue with their pregnancy or to end it. Some decide one way, some another, and no universal governmental policy can begin to approach all the factors and all the struggle involved in their decision. That is why, for the past 50 years, we have let them choose. We advise them to confer with their doctors and the wise people around them but, in the end, it is they who are putting their bodies on the line and so they who must make the call.
While Popova treats Victor Frankenstein as the father, her argument works better if he is seen as those who force a woman to have a child against her will—and who then wash their hands of all responsibility for what happens to mother and child. Think of them as akin to absentee fathers. As Popova puts it, “Unable to love the life he has made, [Frankenstein] fails to rise to the fundamental responsibility that parenting demands.”
Instead, having created a life “out of vainglorious ambition and existential loneliness,” he “flees from his own creation in horror.” Here’s the moment from the novel:
[The Creature’s] jaws opened, and he muttered some inarticulate sounds, while a grin wrinkled his cheeks. He might have spoken, but I did not hear; one hand was stretched out, seemingly to detain me, but I escaped and rushed downstairs. I took refuge in the courtyard belonging to the house which I inhabited, where I remained during the rest of the night, walking up and down in the greatest agitation, listening attentively, catching and fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life.
Later, when the Creature disappears from the scene, Frankenstein believes he has escaped all consequences:
I threw the door forcibly open, as children are accustomed to do when they expect a spectre to stand in waiting for them on the other side; but nothing appeared. I stepped fearfully in: the apartment was empty, and my bedroom was also freed from its hideous guest. I could hardly believe that so great a good fortune could have befallen me, but when I became assured that my enemy had indeed fled, I clapped my hands for joy and ran down to Clerval.
Of course, there are consequences. Now that Roe v Wade has been overturned, will the right-to-life people take responsibility for women who become gravely ill or even die because doctors, fearing the law, are reluctant to perform timely abortions? Will they deal fully with the emotional scars of women and children who give birth to their rapists’ children—or even to children they don’t want or are not ready for? Will they take responsibility for the poverty that might otherwise have been avoided had a woman or a couple chosen to abort? Or will they run out of the room, clap their hands for joy, and then pretend that the problem has taken care of itself.
Frankenstein, at least, takes responsibility. As he puts it,
In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being.
If the right-to-life movement were truly interested in life, it would do all in its power to support women and children in poverty, to ensure mandated and paid maternity leave, to guarantee universal health care so that the United States would not lead (by a long shot) all developed nations in infant mortality.
But “right to life” has never been about life because this country’s rightwing is not interested in life, as indicated by their opposition to gun safety and vaccinations and police accountability and their support for the death penalty. Life for these people, as it is initially for Victor Frankenstein, is to be used as a plaything for power.
Until their actions demonstrate otherwise, ignore their protestations to the contrary.
Previous Posts about Abortion Issues (in reverse chronological order)
Appeasement doesn’t stop bullies, and having overturned Roe v Wade will not stop the right from going after other rights. Margaret Atwood understands this.
Given Amy Comey Barrett’s rightwing positions on abortion, healthcare, and LGBTQ rights, she can be compared to Aunt Lydia in Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.
A recent Atlantic article provides a compelling explanation for why rightwing evangelicals love Trump: feeling embattled, they have traded core principles for power. Like Doctor Faustus.
Camilla is a woman who fights back against Aeneas. It proves to be all in vain, which may be the case of those opposing rightwing justices on the Supreme Court.
With Hulu set to release Handmaid’s Tale tomorrow, I gather together all my past posts on Atwood’s dystopian classic. The novel isn’t only important for liberals but has lessons for rightwing women as well.
Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale is topping bestseller lists at the moment. The reason is probably because of the GOP’s prospect of success in curbing reproductive freedom.
Donald Trump’s characterization of late-term abortions as “ripping” harken back to a verb used in Macbeth. Most people, however, would argue that both Trump and Macduff are describing caesarians.
The late Antonin Scalia claimed to be a strict textualist and would have found some excuse to support Texas’s law designed to close down abortion centers. There’s a Scalia-type character in Midsummer Night’s Dream. Fortunately, by the end of the play he has been overruled.
As reproductive service centers are closed down by conservative state legislatures, attempted self abortions are on the rise. For a literary depiction of a desperate woman there is Hetty Sorrel from George Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Shock strategies by anti-abortionists may work on Congress but are less likely to work on women. As the body poems of Lucille Clifton demonstrate, women already know much more about their bodies than Congressmen do.
Our society’s impasse over abortion is like the impasse in Ibsen’s Doll’s House between Thorvald and Nora: he insists on moral absolutes, she resents being infantilized.
The sting videos by anti-abortion activists are designed to shock. But being shocked by the use of dead bodies for medical research is nothing new, as seen in the grave robbing scene in Tom Sawyer.
Paul Ryan may resemble Angel Claire in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, but there’s a vicar in the novel who shows us a better way of dealing with a “fallen” woman.
I’m writing today’s post in an Omicron haze, which is why this Antony Hecht poem about Saul and David speaks to me at the moment. A “villainous spirit” has possessed Saul, and while my own illness is not like Saul’s—his is more psychological or spiritual than physiological—I feel that I too have been intimately acquainted with what the poet describes as “snub-nosed, foul of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent.” For three days, I have felt “no peace on pillow or on throne.”
In the poem, the psalm-singing David breaks through Saul’s illness. Hecht describing David’s lyre as “Pythagorean strings” may be an allusion to W.B. Yeats’s “Among School Children”:
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras Fingered upon a fiddlestick or strings What a star sang and careless Muses heard…
In any event, “father of music” Pythagoras not only discovered musical intervals but he believed that music could function as medicine.
If David’s “modal artistry” is healing, it’s because through it he assembles the “very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired/Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord.” Perhaps these “Sons of Morning” are those mentioned in the Book of Job (38:7). Where were you, God asks of Job, “while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”
Saul and David By Anthony Hecht
It was a villainous spirit, snub-nosed, foul Of breath, thick-taloned and malevolent, That squatted within him wheresoever he went …….And possessed the soul of Saul.
There was no peace on pillow or on throne. In dreams the toothless, dwarfed, and squinny-eyed Started a joyful rumor that he had died …….Unfriended and alone.
The doctors were confounded. In his distress, he Put aside arrogant ways and condescended To seek among the flocks where they were tended …….By the youngest son of Jesse,
A shepherd boy, but goodly to look upon, Unnoticed but God-favored, sturdy of limb As Michelangelo later imagined him, …….Comely even in his frown.
Shall a mere shepherd provide the cure of kings? Heaven itself delights in ironies such As this, in which a boy’s fingers would touch …….Pythagorean strings
And by a modal artistry assemble The very Sons of Morning, the ranked and choired Heavens in sweet laudation of the Lord, …….And make Saul cease to tremble.
Yesterday, as I lay wrapped in my misery, unable even to read, I googled a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute (by the Hamburg State Opera)and just let the musicwash over me for two and a half hours. I did the same with Schubert’s Mass in G and Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. I didn’t entirely cease to tremble—I still felt awful after the pieces concluded —but they got me through some rough spots. I didn’t feel “unfriended and alone.”
While, in the January 6 Congressional hearings, we’ve learned about various government officials who heroically thwarted Donald Trump’s coup attempt, sometimes their heroism comes with an asterisk. After all, if some of these men had spoken up during Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial—just as if John Bolton had spoken up in the first—they might have stopped the toxic myth of a stolen election in its tracks. Instead, they waited for a year and a half, giving Trump’s lies a chance to metastasize.
Perhaps they deserve the reward of the heroic gunner in Victor Hugo’s novel Ninety-Three.
Set in the year 1793, Hugo’s novel describes a cannon that has gotten loose and threatens to destroy the ship. (I believe this is the origin of the phrase “loose cannon.”) It’s a disastrous situation, not to mention a fairly good metaphor for the damage that Trump has been inflicting on our own ship of state:
This is perhaps the most dreadful thing that can take place at sea. Nothing more terrible can happen to a man-of-war under full sail.
A cannon that breaks loose from its fastenings is suddenly transformed into a supernatural beast. It is a monster developed from a machine. This mass runs along on its wheels as easily as a billiard ball; it rolls with the rolling, pitches with the pitching, comes and goes, stops, seems to meditate, begins anew, darts like an arrow from one end of the ship to the other, whirls around, turns aside, evades, rears, hits out, crushes, kills, exterminates. It is a ram battering a wall at its own pleasure. Moreover, the battering-ram is iron, the wall is wood. It is matter set free; one might say that this eternal slave is wreaking its vengeance; it would seem as though the evil in what we call inanimate objects had found vent and suddenly burst forth; it has the air of having lost its patience, and of taking a mysterious, dull revenge; nothing is so inexorable as the rage of the inanimate. The mad mass leaps like a panther; it has the weight of an elephant, the agility of a mouse, the obstinacy of the axe; it takes one by surprise, like the surge of the sea; it flashes like lightning; it is deaf as the tomb; it weighs ten thousand pounds, and it bounds like a child’s ball; it whirls as it advances, and the circles it describes are intersected by right angles. And what help is there? How can it be overcome? …You can reason with a mastiff, take a bull by surprise, fascinate a snake, frighten a tiger, mollify a lion; but there is no resource with the monster known as a loosened gun. You cannot kill it,—it is already dead; and yet it lives. It breathes a sinister life bestowed on it by the Infinite. The plank beneath sways it to and fro; it is moved by the ship; the sea lifts the ship, and the wind keeps the sea in motion. This destroyer is a toy. Its terrible vitality is fed by the ship, the waves, and the wind, each lending its aid. What is to be done with this complication? How fetter this monstrous mechanism of shipwreck? How foresee its comings and goings, its recoils, its halts, its shocks? Any one of those blows may stave in the side of the vessel. How can one guard against these terrible gyrations? One has to do with a projectile that reflects, that has ideas, and changes its direction at any moment. How can one arrest an object in its course, whose onslaught must be avoided? The dreadful cannon rushes about, advances, recedes, strikes to right and to left, flies here and there, baffles their attempts at capture, sweeps away obstacles, crushing men like flies.
Fortunately, the heroic efforts of two men save the day:
Suddenly in the midst of this inaccessible circus, where the escaped cannon was tossing from side to side, a man appeared, grasping an iron bar. It was the author of the catastrophe, the chief gunner, whose criminal negligence had caused the accident,—the captain of the gun. Having brought about the evil, his intention was to repair it. Holding a handspike in one hand, and in the other a tiller rope with the slip-noose in it, he had jumped through the hatchway to the deck below.
What follows is even more breathtaking than the committee hearings. A second man throws a bale of paper between the wheels, at which point the gunner darts forward with a spike:
The bale had the effect of a plug. A pebble may block a log; a branch sometimes changes the course of an avalanche. The carronade [cannon] stumbled, and the gunner, availing himself of the perilous opportunity, thrust his iron bar between the spokes of the back wheels. Pitching forward, the cannon stopped; and the man, using his bar for a lever, rocked it backward and forward. The heavy mass upset, with the resonant sound of a bell that crashes in its fall. The man, reeking with perspiration, threw himself upon it, and passed the slip-noose of the tiller-rope around the neck of the defeated monster.
The combat was ended. The man had conquered. The ant had overcome the mastodon; the pygmy had imprisoned the thunderbolt.
For his heroism, the cannoneer is applauded, just as we are applauding those who resisted Trump’s coup:
The old man looked at the gunner.
“Step forward,” he said.
The gunner advanced a step.
Turning to Count Boisberthelot, the old man removed the cross of Saint Louis from the captain’s breast, and fastened it on the jacket of the gunner. The sailors cheered, and the marines presented arms.
Then, since it was the gunner’s fault that the cannon got loose in the first place, there’s this:
[P]ointing to the bewildered gunner he added:
“Now let the man be shot!”
Stupor took the place of applause.
Then, amid a tomb-like silence, the old man, raising his voice, said:—
“The ship has been endangered by an act of carelessness, and may even yet be lost. It is all the same whether one be at sea or face to face with the enemy. A ship at sea is like an army in battle. The tempest, though unseen, is ever present; the sea is an ambush. Death is the fit penalty for every fault committed when facing the enemy. There is no fault that can be retrieved. Courage must be rewarded and negligence punished.”
These words fell one after the other slowly and gravely, with a certain implacable rhythm, like the strokes of the axe upon an oak-tree. Looking at the soldiers, the old man added,—
“Do your duty!”
People like Vice President Mike Pence and Attorney General William Barr, even while enabling our loose cannon-in-chief, at least stood tall in the closing moments. I’m not saying that they should be shot, but if they are to be rewarded for their courage, they must be punished for their negligence.
One other thing: Arizona State representative Rusty Bowers, who was threatened with violence by Trump supporters after refusing to send fake electors to the Capitol, said after his testimony that he would vote for Trump were he to once again be the Republican nominee. Barr, who told Trump that claims of election fraud were “bullshit,” has said the same. If they were the gunner in Hugo’s novel, it’s as though they would willingly release the cannon once again.
Having once chosen country over party, they sound prepared to reverse course in the future.
Weddings can be occasions for substantive conversations, and I had such a conversation with my eldest son this past weekend when we assembled for my nephew’s wedding. Our talk touched on some of his frustrations, including my failure to initiate phone calls—he usually calls me—and his desire for more substance when we do converse.
It was an important talk but, by the end, I felt like Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Hang on while I explain.
First, I must point to an obvious contrast. Okonkwo despises his father, so much so that everything he does is motivated by his desire to prove he is different. So whereas Unoko is “lazy and improvident,” Okonkwo is a super achiever:
He had no patience with unsuccessful men. He had had no patience with his father.
Unoka, for that was his father’s name, had died ten years ago. In his day he was lazy and improvident and was quite incapable of thinking about tomorrow. If any money came his way, and it seldom did, he immediately bought gourds of palm-wine, called round his neighbors and made merry. He always said that whenever he saw a dead man’s mouth he saw the folly of not eating what one had in one’s lifetime. Unoka was, of course, a debtor, and he owed every neighbor some money, from a few cowries to quite substantial amounts.
It so happens that Unoka also dies a dishonorable death. The novel explains that he
had a bad chi or personal god, and evil fortune followed him to the grave, or rather to his death, for he had no grave. He died of the swelling which was an abomination to the earth goddess. When a man was afflicted with swelling in the stomach and the limbs he was not allowed to die in the house. He was carried to the Evil Forest and left there to die.
Throughout the novel, Okonkwo strives to be the anti-Unoka, and for a while it appears that he will succeed. Achebe notes that he is a self-made man, one who has—through dint of ambition and hard work—pulled himself up by his own bootstraps:
With a father like Unoka, Okonkwo did not have the start in life which many young men had. He neither inherited a barn nor a title, nor even a young wife. But in spite of these disadvantages, he had begun even in his father’s lifetime to lay the foundations of a prosperous future. It was slow and painful. But he threw himself into it like one possessed. And indeed he was possessed by the fear of his father’s contemptible life and shameful death.
Okonkwo’s fear of being weak like his father, however, gets him into trouble. At the end of the book, flexing his muscles, he kills one of the British colonists involved in “the pacification of the primitive tribes of the Lower Niger.” Then, realizing that the others will not join him in his rebellion, he hangs himself. Guess where suicides end up. As one of his fellow tribesmen explains to the British,
It is an abomination for a man to take his own life. It is an offense against the Earth, and a man who commits it will not be buried by his clansmen. His body is evil, and only strangers may touch it. That is why we ask your people to bring him down, because you are strangers.
We think we are not like our parents until we discover that we are.
Now, Darien and I do not a Unoko-Okonkwo relationship. Far from it, as I admire him tremendously, all the more so because he has taken a path far different from mine: I am a professor who found a position he loved and stayed there for 36 years whereas Darien is an entrepreneurial soul who will work for a company for only as long as he is learning new things. When the learning ends, he goes off in search of new opportunities. He only recently left a company where he was paid very well in order to start his own company. Yet for all his different interests, Darien admires my dedication to my students and my love of literature
As we talked, I found myself thinking back to frustrating telephone conversations with my own father, who was a professor of French literature. He too would not call me—I would always be the one to initiate the discourse—and he was always working conversations around to his own concerns. Furthermore, since I admired him tremendously, I could never figure out why our conversations never got as deep as I wanted them to get. Instead, I found myself listening to him discussing his course syllabi, just as Darien hears me talking about my book, my blog, and my tennis game. While I also express enthusiasm for his own endeavors (as my father did with mine), I’m not able to add much if anything to Darien’s understanding of them. He has ventured into waters that are unfamiliar to me.
In short, while I thought I had a different relationship with Darien than I had with my father, I find myself replicating the same patterns. Like Okonkwo.
Unlike Okonkwo, however, I have read Things Fall Apart and can learn from these frustrations. While I don’t know much about the world of business, I can (if I listen carefully) apply works of literature where appropriate. Darien is an avid reader—he read Moby Dick while commuting and, like his father, is a big Tom Jones fan—so if we discover useful parallels, we can both learn something. And have fun at the same time, with each bringing something to the table.
Anyway, I made a special point of calling him on Father’s Day. And we had (I think) a substantive conversation.
Several years ago, my friend Sue Schmidt asked me to find some positive literary responses to the dark times in which we are living. After hearing from yesterday’s January 6 committee hearings about the concerted efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election—the plot was wider and deeper and came closer to succeeding than we initially realized—I rerun that post today.
Sue’s request came after a series of depressing posts about Donald Trump, and I got her point. If literature just confirms us in our pessimism, what’s the use of it?
A lovely New Yorker articleby Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat captures the necessary balance between unflinching realism and hopeful outlook. In the poems that she cites, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, and Audre Lorde acknowledge the evils of racist society. They also signal constructive responses, however, and their commitment to truth means that we must take their hopefulness seriously.
In thinking about truth-tellers, I am reminded of Marx’s famous observation in his “Preface to Hegel” where he criticizes attacks on religion. While he himself believes that religion is “the opiate of the masses,” he argues that philosophers should not limit themselves to stripping people of their illusions—or as his metaphor has it, to strip the garlands off our shackles so that we can see the cold, hard iron. Genuine criticism, Marx writes, must push towards hope:
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.
Marx’s observation applies as well to those who see literature’s task as nothing more than unmasking terrible conditions. Criticism that takes the form of joyless political science is guilty of this. Literature, on the other hand, can combine truth with hope, framing reality in such a way that we can imagine changing it. Danticat has a great Lorde quotation to this effect:
Poetry, she said, is how we name the nameless. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
I advise my students to follow a similar progression. “First immerse yourself in the work,” I tell them, “then reflect upon the work, and finally act upon the insights that emerge.”
Danticat introduces me to one Brooks poem that I did not know but which wonderfully shows how optimistic striving can overcome harsh reality. “Speech to the Young: Speech to the Progress-Toward” is designed to warn them about
the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers…
“Even if you are not ready for day,” Brooks tells her audience, “It cannot always be night.” Therefore, she concludes, do not live “for battles won” or for “the-end-of-the-song.” Live instead “in the along,” in the “progress-toward.”
I see the down-keepers, sun-slappers, self-soilers, and harmony-hushers as those people who nip optimism in the bud so that young people won’t get their hopes up. Their pessimism is designed to cushion themselves against the disappointment of battles lost.
Poetry, by contrast, reminds us that daylight is possible.
Further thought: I suspect that Brooks is alluding to Emily Dickinson’s “Some keep the sabbath going to church” when she counsels her reader to “live in the along.” Here’s the last stanza of Dickinson’s poem, where a bobolink serves as her clergyman in the great church of the outdoors. Note that Dickinson, like Brooks, focuses on the process of living, not on some static final result:
God preaches, a noted Clergyman – And the sermon is never long, So instead of getting to Heaven, at last – I’m going, all along.
Joseph Noel Paton, The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania (1849)
Tuesday– Summer Solstice
Today, to observe the summer solstice, I’m reconfiguring a post I shared ten years ago. The occasion is referenced in a number of literary masterpieces, which sometimes use it to explore the clash between Christian Britain and its pagan past. Pre-Christian Britain viewed Midsummer Night’s Eve as a time when the world was particularly susceptible to supernatural visitations, and the belief persisted despite attempts to root it out. That’s because, governed as it was by the natural calendar, Midsummer Night’s Eve spoke to beliefs and needs that Christianity failed to address.
For instance, in Sir Gawan and the Green Knight, a natural green man is pitted against Christian Camelot and succeeds in humbling the knights. Nature is a more powerful force than they have acknowledged.
In the Wife of Bath’s tale, meanwhile, Alison slams begging friars or “limitours” (one of whom, the lecherous Huberd, has just insulted her) for banishing fairies, elves, and incubi from the world. That’s because, in so doing, they have stripped women of their power:
NOW IN THE OLDEN days of King Arthur, Of whom the Britons speak with great honour, All this wide land was land of faery. The elf-queen, with her jolly company, Danced oftentimes on many a green mead; This was the old opinion, as I read. But now no man can see the elves, you know. For now the so-great charity and prayers Of limitours and other holy friars That do infest each land and every stream As thick as motes are in a bright sunbeam, Blessing halls, chambers, kitchens, ladies’ bowers, Cities and towns and castles and high towers, Villages, barns, cowsheds and dairies— This causes it that there are now no fairies. For where was wont to walk full many an elf, Right there walks now the limitour himself In both the later and early mornings, Saying his matins and such holy things, As he goes round his district in his gown.
In banishing the fairies, it’s as though the friar has replaced dangerous, sexualized nature spirits with himself:
Women may now go safely up and down, In every copse or under every tree; There is no other incubus than he, And would do them naught but dishonour.
Shakespeare tapped into the rich tradition in Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), and his play itself was wildly popular in Victorian and Edwardian times. In Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906), for instance, Puck is all that is left of “the people of the hills,” but he is called forth by children reciting passages from the play in a fairy circle and introduces them to figures from pre-Christian England. In her 2009 novel The Children’s Book, A. S. Byatt shows members of the Bohemian set celebrating the summer solstice with an annual reenactment of the play.
Byatt’s characters are drawn to the pagan rituals and the play because of their dissatisfaction with dull bourgeois pragmatism, sterile science, and the nature-destroying aspects of industrialization. But although the Victorians were in love with supernatural beings, their fairies, unlike Shakespeare’s, were cute and fairly harmless. Children, seen as a emissaries of Wordsworth’s innocent nature, often played the attendant fairies in theatrical versions of Midsummer Night’s Dream and still do today. Perhaps when we think of the play, Mendelssohn’s music plays in the background.
Elizabethan England would have seen fairies as darker forces. After all, being less technologically advanced, the Elizabethans couldn’t be as enthusiastic as Byron and other Romantics were about untamed nature. Floods like those caused by Titania’s and Oberon’s domestic quarrel would have been no laughing matter:
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea Contagious fogs; which falling in the land Have every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents: The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard; The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green For lack of tread are undistinguishable: The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest: Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound: And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which: And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original.
Nor is it only non-human nature that is out of control in the play. Human nature also has descended into midsummer madness. For instance, we watch as natural desire
–propels Helena to abase herself before Demetrius: “Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me./ Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,/ Unworthy as I am, to follow you”;
–causes Lysander to make moves on Hermia and then to abandon her in the woods: “What, should I hurt her, strike her, kill her dead? Although I hate her, I’ll not harm her so”;
–pits Lysander and Demetrius in a deadly battle against each other for the affections of Helena;
–pushes Titania (as Shakespeare scholar Jan Kott has pointed out) towards bestiality;
–results in babies deformed by moles, harelips, scars, and other “prodigious” marks.
Fortunately, this being a comedy, nature proves benign in the end. Oberon reconciles the lovers, sorts things out with his wife, and promises good births.
But reading the play today or thinking about pagan solstice rituals, we may overlook their power. Only a culture that thinks it can dominate the natural world will regard uncontrollable nature spirits as cute.
As we await the continuation of the Congressional hearings on Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, my son Tobias Wilson-Bates has noted that the Trump cult reminds him of the sycophants in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” As Toby tweeted,
The Emperor’s New Clothes is an amazing theory of power. Like, there are so many levels to that story from the power of groupthink, to complex forms of commodity fetishism, and revolution. It’s all in there!
If that’s the case, will the investigative committee be like the little boy in the story, dispelling all illusions when it states the obvious?
The political obvious is that Donald Trump not only lost the election but then did everything he could to throw the election results into confusion, including incite his violent followers to threaten, intimidate, and otherwise pressure Mike Pence. When all his other attempts to overturn the results failed, his last best hope was to delay the certification of the election and hope that the resulting chaos would give him, as president and commander in chief, something to work with. When Pence refused to go along, Trump sicced his paramilitary supporters and an amped up crowd on him.
And yet, over half of all Republicans claim that Trump won the election and contend that the sacking of the Capitol was no big deal. Trump has been like the weavers in Andersen’s story, creating a fiction that his supporters convince themselves to believe.
The fiction in the story is a set of clothes that (so the two “weavers” contend) are so fine that they will be “invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office, or who was unusually stupid.” They then proceed to do nothing at all with the fabrics they are given other than stuff them into their bags:
When the king can see nothing on their looms, he sends in his “honest old minister”:
Both the swindlers begged him to be so kind as to come near to approve the excellent pattern, the beautiful colors. They pointed to the empty looms, and the poor old minister stared as hard as he dared. He couldn’t see anything, because there was nothing to see. “Heaven have mercy,” he thought. “Can it be that I’m a fool? I’d have never guessed it, and not a soul must know. Am I unfit to be the minister? It would never do to let on that I can’t see the cloth.”
“Don’t hesitate to tell us what you think of it,” said one of the weavers.
“Oh, it’s beautiful—it’s enchanting.” The old minister peered through his spectacles. “Such a pattern, what colors!” I’ll be sure to tell the emperor how delighted I am with it.”
First this minister, then another, then the emperor himself, then his retinue convince themselves that the emperor is wearing magnificent new clothes. When the emperor goes on parade, the populace accepts the fiction as well:
So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, “Oh, how fine are the Emperor’s new clothes! Don’t they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!” Nobody would confess that he couldn’t see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.
Donald Trump has been weaving non-existent clothes his entire life. I thought for a while that his greatest con was first getting elected president and then convincing millions that he had done great things when in actuality he’d accomplished almost nothing of substance. Now, however, I’m not so sure. Maybe his greatest accomplishment has been convincing millions that he won an election he actually lost.
In the story, Andersen supposedly added the little boy who cries out the truth at the last moment, and my son observes that it may be the least realistic part of the story. After all, people who are duped would often rather cling to the deception than acknowledge they’ve been made fools of. As Toby notes, this ending is “an entirely too convenient deus ex machina in an otherwise perfect dystopian social horror!”
Here’s the moment of truth-telling:
“But he hasn’t got anything on,” a little child said.
“Did you ever hear such innocent prattle?” said its father. And one person whispered to another what the child had said, “He hasn’t anything on. A child says he hasn’t anything on.”
“But he hasn’t got anything on!” the whole town cried out at last.
This is the moment that people like me long for: the House investigators revealing the truth for all to see and the whole town at last crying out, “But he hasn’t got anything on!” Or in the words of Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, who quoted Gertrude Stein after hearing from a Trump lawyer that there had been no significant voter fraud in the 2020 election, “So there’s no there there.”
In his final paragraph, Andersen himself suggests a more pessimistic ending. There we see things proceeding on just as before, the truth having made little impact:
The Emperor shivered, for he suspected they were right. But he thought, “This procession has got to go on.” So he walked more proudly than ever, as his noblemen held high the train that wasn’t there at all.
That’s the secret to success as the GOP currently sees it. If they walk more proudly than ever, maybe they can keep the illusion going.
Further thought: Tom Nichols, a conservative and NeverTrumper, has offered up the following explanation for some of the willful blindness that one encounters amongst Trump supporters. It corresponds with the behavior depicted in Andersen’s story:
I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.
We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.
Nicols also quotes a passage from the film version of Jean le Carré’s novel Soldier, Sailor, Tinker, Spy: A British spy says of a Soviet spy that he is “a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
Another poetic sighting:
Trump lawyer John Eastman, who at Trump’s behest tried to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the election results, is in a lot of trouble since he appears to have acknowledged to witnesses that he knew doing so would be illegal. Realizing this, he sought a pre-pardon from Trump, writing, “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works.”
Some wag on twitter turned the request into a modernist poem:
I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works
Another tweeter, seeing resemblances between this and William Carlos Williams’s famous “This Is Just to Say,” wrote the following:
I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works
