Ta-Nehisi Coates’s novel The Water Dancer, which I’m listening to at the moment, is hitting me particularly hard because of America’s continuing problem with white supremacism. The most recent outbreak—more recent even than the race-motivated Buffalo shooting—is the 31 members of the white nationalist Patriot Front group who were on their way break up an Idaho Gay Pride event, complete with shields, shin guards, masks, and other riot gear. Happily, violence was averted thanks to a timely 911 call to police, who arrested the men.
Northwestern historian Kathleen Belew, who specializes in “the white power movement, mass violence, & apocalypse,” uses a twitter thread to connect the dots between racism, homophobia, and other of white supremacy’s belief systems:
[T]o those asking why Patriot Front would target Pride: to the white power movement and some of the militant right, a host of social issues (abortion, gay rights, interracial contact, immigration, secularism) are all a problem for the same reason.
White power activists have long seen all of these issues as part of an interconnected conspiracy to lower the white birth rate, attacking their race and nation. They see this as an apocalyptic threat.
This is what connects attacks on the black community (Buffalo, Charleston) with attacks on immigrants (El Paso) with attacks on Jews (Pittsburgh) with attacks on Pride (Idaho, SF)
Belew notes that Coeur d’Alene, the targeted town in Idaho,
has a long history of white power activity going back to the late ’70s. It was the site of the Aryan Nations compound and remains symbolic both for the militant right and for peace activists that want to stop white power activism. But this is not an Idaho thing.
We should be thinking back way before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville (2017), because these groups have been working out of this playbook for decades, if not generations. The history of the earlier period can illuminate what comes next…
Among other things, Coates’s Water Dancer shows us how deeply racism is embedded in the American psyche. The novel is a slave narrative that unexpectedly morphs into “the most dangerous game,” the short story by Richard Connell where a man hunts his fellow human beings. In this instance, runaway slaves who have been recaptured are bought by a gang of disreputable Whites and set loose every night so that they can be hunted down by a mob. When the slaves are caught, they are pummeled, kicked and whipped and then returned to captivity, to be released again and again.
Coates pays close attention to class distinctions within the White community. There is “the Quality”—who benefit from slavery—and there are the poorer Whites, who do the dirty work of selling slaves and capturing them when they attempt to escape. The Quality don’t want to know anything about the darker side of things and despise the poor Whites for doing their dirty work for them. While the poor Whites hate the Quality with a deep passion, they regain their dignity by revisiting the same contempt upon the slaves. We see this relationship set forth in the opening chapters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Coates plays upon it as well.
I don’t have the book with me so can’t share a passage. I’ll just note that many immigrants, upon arriving in America, had a cultural advantage that most new arrivals to a country do not have: they do not start off at the bottom rung on the social ladder because they have another race they can look down upon. It’s a process that Noel Ignatiev describes in his book How the Irish Became White—from despised race to despisers—and Irish immigrants weren’t alone. In fact, the feelings are so deeply baked into many Americans’ core identity that one wonders if we’ll ever get over it.
And because it exists, we continue to see a version of the devil’s bargain described in Coates’s novel. On the one hand, there are the crass Whites—like Donald Trump (German family name originally Drumpf or Drumpft)—who do the dirty racist work. And then there is the Quality that, while they seek to distance themselves, feel that they need his supporters to maintain their privileged life style. They despise him but depend upon him, and he returns the favor.
Johannes Jelgerhuis, The Shop of the Bookdealer Pieter Meijer Warnars in Amsterdam (1820)
Wednesday
I had the honor of addressing a University of Illinois bibliotherapy class recently—online, of course—and the teacher has alerted me to a 1919 novel about the subject. Oberlin librarian Valerie Hotchkiss sent me Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop, and although I’m only a few pages into it, I can already report that we are on the same page.
A placard in the bookshop announces,
THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts Of all great literature in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes. Lovers of books are welcome here, No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke—but don’t drop ashes!
And further on down:
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing. Let us prescribe for you.
Early on we see proprietor Roger Mifflin explaining to a young advertising salesman why he doesn’t advertise. As you read his explanation, recall that the novel was written in 1919, when the world was just emerging from not only World War I but a world-wide flu pandemic:
And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don’t know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it! People don’t go to a bookseller until some serious mental accident or disease makes them aware of their danger. Then they come here. For me to advertise would be about as useful as telling people who feel perfectly well that they ought to go to the doctor. Do you know why people are reading more books now than ever before? Because the terrific catastrophe of the war has made them realize that their minds are ill. The world was suffering from all sorts of mental fevers and aches and disorders, and never knew it. Now our mental pangs are only too manifest. We are all reading, hungrily, hastily, trying to find out—after the trouble is over—what was the matter with our minds.
If I may quote myself, I say something similar in the book I have just completed, which I’m currently sending out to agents. I too refer to a world war, but a later one:
In some ways, literature resembles religion: many people who barely give it much thought in ordinary times turn to it when life gets rough, just as they flood into churches following a cataclysmic event. During the London blitzkrieg, to cite one example, city bookshops sold out their poetry and their Jane Austen as well. People find themselves grateful that artists have provided these powerful words and images for moments when they really need them.
In his essay on “The Rise of English” (in Introduction to Literary Theory) Terry Eagleton points to the explosion of reading that followed World War I, which he says propelled literature to the forefront of academic disciplines. To quote again from my book:
If before the war the English ruling class saw literature as a way to soften striving women and rough working-class men, after the war sweetness and light seemed like a good idea for everyone, a way to make England whole again. Eagleton remarks that “it is a chastening thought that we owe the University study of English, in part at least, to a meaningless massacre.”
In his book Eagle quotes Professor of English Literature at Oxford George Stuart Gordon, who in 1922 wrote,
England is sick, and … English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.
This is very much how the bookseller in Morley’s novel sees things. At one point Mifflin implies that great books are better for us than lesser books, a point I also make in my own book:
It is small use to jeer at the public for craving shoddy books, quack books, untrue books. Physician, cure thyself! Let the bookseller learn to know and revere good books, he will teach the customer. The hunger for good books is more general and more insistent than you would dream. But it is still in a way subconscious. People need books, but they don’t know they need them. Generally they are not aware that the books they need are in existence.
Mifflin then qualifies his remarks slightly as he explains his role as a bibliotherapist:
I am not a dealer in merchandise but a specialist in adjusting the book to the human need. Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a “good” book. A book is “good” only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. A book that is good for me would very likely be punk for you.
And further:
My pleasure is to prescribe books for such patients as drop in here and are willing to tell me their symptoms. Some people have let their reading faculties decay so that all I can do is hold a post mortem on them. But most are still open to treatment. There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. No advertisement on earth is as potent as a grateful customer.
Nina George’s novel The Little Paris Bookshop (2015)features a bookseller who does exactly this. I critiqued the novel for that, noting that, in my experience, it’s very difficult predict how a story or a poem will fit someone’s needs (as Roger Mifflin acknowledges). There’s also something off-putting about someone pushing a book in one’s direction and saying that it will be good for you. Far better to discover it on your own—or at least, think you are discovering it on your own. As the Roman poet Horace notes, the best literature is that which delights while instructing (Sir Philip Sidney calls this “medicine of cherries”), with initial emphasis on delight.
If you read enough, however, you’ll find books that will heal what ails you. Sometimes you’ll find the right book for you when scanning a bookstore shelf. At times in my life, sometimes the life-changing work has seemed to jump off the shelf and into my hand (although I’m willing to acknowledge this might just have been skillful marketing).
Mifflin makes one other point in the early pages that I thoroughly agree with. “Living in a bookshop,” he contends, “is like living in a warehouse of explosives”:
Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world—the brains of men. I can spend a rainy afternoon reading, and my mind works itself up to such a passion and anxiety over mortal problems as almost unmans me. It is terribly nerve-racking. Surround a man with Carlyle, Emerson, Thoreau, Chesterton, Shaw, Nietzsche, and George Ade—would you wonder at his getting excited? What would happen to a cat if she had to live in a room tapestried with catnip? She would go crazy!
For gender balance, how about if we add (honoring the book’s 1919 publication date) Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, the Brontes, and George Eliot. But yes on a bookstore as a “warehouse of explosives.” To quote from my book once again:
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.
In other words, rightwing book police and liberals like myself believe that books change us. It’s just that we liberals contend that, by challenging us, poems and stories cause us to grow, both as individuals and a society. We contend that, if literature is introduced so that it stimulates rather than bores students, students’ perspectives are widened, often in ways that are bound to unsettle traditionalists.
When fending off rightwing parents and reactionary school boards, administrators, teachers and librarians will sometimes point out that they’re just teaching stories, not radicalizing the young. But as Laguna Pueblo novelist Leslie Marmon Silko points out in her novel Ceremony, stories
aren’t just for entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.
So yes, stories and poems will get readers to think outside conventional boxes. But if they read good books as opposed to books that have been carefully selected as inoffensive (“shoddy books, quack books, untrue books”), they are less likely to succumb to the damaging and toxic narratives that are all around us. They will be better able to navigate society’s complexities, which includes dealing with a wide diversity of people.
Mifflin’s discussion of literature’s explosive potential draws a logical query from the ad salesman:
How is it, though, that libraries are shrines of such austere calm? If books are as provocative as you suggest, one would expect every librarian to utter the shrill screams of a hierophant, to clash ecstatic castanets in his silent alcoves!
Mifflin has a humorous, if not altogether convincing, reply:
Ah, my boy, you forget the card index! Librarians invented that soothing device for the febrifuge of their souls, just as I fall back upon the rites of the kitchen. Librarians would all go mad, those capable of concentrated thought, if they did not have the cool and healing card index as medicament.
And then:
[P]aradise in the world to come is uncertain, but there is indeed a heaven on this earth, a heaven which we inhabit when we read a good book.
One question about the Congressional committee investigating Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt is whether supporters will believe the evidence, regardless of how compelling it is. So far we’ve learned that, while everyone around Donald Trump was telling him that he lost the election—with the notable exception of an inebriated Rudy Giuliani—he went on to claim election fraud anyway. He also went on to raise a quarter of a billion dollars on that false claim, not to mention persuading followers to assault our electoral system.
I’d like to think that truth will win the day, but the final scene in Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo warns us against easy optimism. The play pits scientific truth against religious superstition, and even though Galileo himself (under threat of torture) recants his findings, it appears that truth will win out. That’s because Galileo’s pupil Andrea Sarti has smuggled his final book—Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences—out of the country, so that his discoveries will not die with him.
In the last scene, Andrea is sneaking the book across the border. While dealing with customs officials, he sees that several kids are preparing to break the milk jug of a woman they have labeled a witch, based on a shadow they see on her curtains.
Andrea: And how do you know she is a witch? Boy (points to shadow on house wall): Look! Andrea: Oh! I see. Boy: And she rides on a broomstick at night—and she bewitches the coachman’s horses. My cousin Luigi looked through the hole in the stable roof, that the snowstorm made, and heard the horses coughing something terrible.
Seeing this as an opportunity to introduce the boy to the scientific method, Andrea asks for more details about the hole in the roof. The boy senses that he is in the presence of a doubter:
Boy: You are not going to say Old Marina isn’t a witch, because you can’t. Andrea: No, I can’t say she isn’t a witch. I haven’t looked into it. A man can’t know about a thing he hasn’t looked into, or can he?
Like Trump pointing at Georgia suitcases supposedly filled with illegal ballots, however, the boy claims to have proof:
Boy: No! But THAT! (He points to the shadow.) She is stirring hellbroth.
Because a good scientist reexamines the evidence, however, Andrea lifts the boy up to the window:
Andrea: What do you see? Boy (slowly): Just an old girl cooking porridge. Andrea: Oh! Nothing to it then. Now look at her shadow, Paolo.
(The boy looks over his shoulder and back and compares the reality and the shadow.)
Boy: The big thing is a soup ladle. Andrea: Ah! A ladle! You see, I would have taken it for a broomstick, but I haven’t looked into the matter as you have, Paolo.
So what is the result? Not what Andrea hopes for. As he is given the go-ahead to cross the border, he looks back and sees the boy kick over the woman’s milk jug:
Boy (shouting after Andrea): She is a witch! She is a witch! Andrea: You saw with your own eyes: think it over! (The boy joins the others. They sing.)
One, two, three, four, five, six, Old Marina is a witch. At night, on a broomstick, she sits And on the church steeple she spits.
Brecht has a disconcerting way of exploding our cherished fantasies. In this play about the battle of science against superstition, a noxious superstition wins in the end. Those who want to see a woman as a witch—or who want to see those who attacked the Capitol as peaceful tourists, Antifa members, or spontaneous rioters—can persuade themselves to disbelieve our own eyes.
Those of us who put their faith in reason (including me) need to acknowledge this. And pray that Trump’s “alternate facts” don’t prevail once again.
Watching the hearings of the Congressional committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt, I was struck by the moral clarity of Liz Cheney, the daughter of the principle architect of America’s disastrous Iraq invasion and a man who promoted torture. It’s ironic that, if we are able to recover from Trumpism’s attack on our democracy, a Cheney will have played an important role.
Cheney reminded me of Abdiel, the angel in Paradise Lost who first stands up to Satan when the latter is planning his rebellion against God. Abdiel finds the necessary courage in the zeal with which he “adored the Deity, and divine commands obeyed.”
Satan has persuaded a large contingent of angels that God is robbing them of their freedom by promoting Jesus over them. Of course, “freedom” for Satan is what it is for any number of authoritarian personalities: freedom to impose his will on others. One hears the word “freedom” from many on the right, but it often just means the freedom to impose their will on people of color, women, LBGTQ folk and Democrats in general. Or, in the case of millionaires and billionaires, freedom from taxation and regulation. Here’s Satan sounding like a white supremacist spouting fears of being replaced, only the replacer here is Christ (“King anointed”):
Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, If these magnific Titles yet remain Not merely titular, since by Decree Another now hath to himself engrossed All Power, and us eclipsed under the name Of King anointed…
We must cast off this yoke of oppression if we want to be free, he tells the angels:
But what if better counsels might erect Our minds and teach us to cast off this yoke? Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust To know ye right…
Of course, Satan, like Trump, wants others to bend the supple knee to him, even as he rails against tyranny. From his point, anyone who doesn’t allow him the highest rank is a tyrant. Therefore God is a tyrant.
Abdiel points out that Satan talking about God as his equal misses the framework within which they all exist:
Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute With him the points of liberty, who made Thee what thou art, and formed the Powers of Heav’n Such as he pleased, and circumscribed their being?
Narcissist that he is, however, Satan gives all credit for his achievements to himself. As he sees it, he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps:
We know no time when we were not as now; Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised By our own quick’ning power…
For Liz Cheney, the higher power is the Constitution, to which Trump himself once swore an oath, as did many of those fallenangels legislators enabling him. To this yoke she submits her neck and bends the supple knee. To the Trumpist GOP, however, doing so is an affront. After all, she is putting the country’s founding principles over them.
Further thought: My friend and colleague Ross MacDonald, who has written a scholarly article on Milton’s angels, notes that angel issues were a hot issue when the poet wrote Paradise Lost. John Calvin was worried that, if people focused on guardian angels, they would focus on them more than on Christ. He even considered jettisoning angels altogether.
Milton acknowledges Calvin’s worry by elevating Christ above the angels. This elevation, in fact, is what triggers Satan’s rebellion. But Milton saw angels as too deeply embedded in people’s imaginations to ignore them. He therefore threads the needle, showing them as cherished guides to Adam and Eve but operating as a delegation, with each having different responsibilities. In other words, they don’t grab the spotlight the way that Satan does but divide counseling responsibilities; while powerful, they are noteworthy for their humility. They are everything that Satan is not.
This is what we want from our public servants and, for that matter, from all citizens: lean into your strengths but always remember that you are to use them in service of the greater good, not to aggrandize yourself. That is the only cause that will give your life meaning.
I’m intrigued by the insights into praying provided by Robert Pinsky’s “The Knight’s Prayer.” In the poem, we see a knight—perhaps a stand-in for the poet?—going through a series of stages before coming to understand prayer in a broader and more life-affirming way.
For much of the poem, the knight defines prayer as something against rather than something for. He “prayed in silence,” we are told, because “he found all vocal terms of sanctity impertinent.” On top of that, in praying he takes care not to adopt “the stagey pose of the figure in armor on one knee.” Praying aloud and in such a conventional pose would show that he was still too attached to worldly things.
Furthermore, he goes out of his way not to ask for anything in his praying—or as the poem puts it, he strove for “a near-absence of petition.” This even extends to not praying for the strength to not to ask for anything:
In his pride he began to abjure even The request for the strength to ask nothing.
Instead, he prays for steadfastness as he strives to be like the heroes “he most envied,” who “endured hardship and ordeals.” Their burden, as he sees it, was “worldly attachment,” while “bearing it was their mission.” He prays that God will help him fight against his own attachment to the world.
Note how his prayer continues to be phrased in the form of negatives: he doesn’t want to yield to what he sees as a weakness. The problem reveals itself in the next stanza. He’s so worried that “these prayers be for weariness of life, not love of Thee,” that he focuses on the stringency of the discipline, not on love. To this point in the poem, he’s focused on logic (“severely logical as a clever adolescent”), on discipline, on not doing it wrong. Righteousness clothes him like chainmail and he brandishes it.
Then something breaks. We don’t know what it is, only that a “personal extreme of woe and dread, neither heroic nor intolerable”—something that he thought he could find ways to silently pray about earlier in the poem—has somehow suddenly (he uses the word “abrupt”) become too much. Suddenly he fears silence and his soul, formerly so disciplined and focused, stammers to itself.
Previously he thought that “In fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” with fear being the operative word. Now he discovers “a new model for worldly attachment.” Now he finds himself not praying against but praying for.
Again, we are not told what this new attachment is, but we are given an analogy. The poet tells us that such praying is like loving and caring for a new-born child:
It was like the birth Of an infant: the father, in sudden Overthrow, turning from indifference To absolute care, a ferocity Of petition dwarfing desire…
It’s as though, prior to this moment, the knight thought he could control the prayer, and early in the poem we even encounter the words “vanity” and “pride.” When your heart is fully engaged, however, the prayer can become bigger than you ever thought possible, and your dreams of perfect competence vanish. It’s the moment when you feel “all of life flowing at once/Toward the new, incompetent soul.” Here’s the poem:
The Knight’s Prayer By Robert Pinsky
He prayed in silence.
Even in his personal extreme Of woe and dread, which was neither Heroic nor intolerable but sufficiently Woeful and dreadful, he would not waver From that discipline.
In his vanity as severely Logical as a clever adolescent, he found All vocal terms of sanctity impertinent.
He also rejected gestures: the stagey pose Of the figure in armor on one knee, Hands and brow resting on the cruciform hilt Of a still-scabbarded weapon. The words and the pose contradicted themselves, their conventionality made them Symbols of worldly attachment.
Therefore in his own prayers he strove For intimacy, a near-absence of petition. In his pride he began to abjure even The request for the strength to ask nothing.
He prayed for steadfastness. In the exploits he most envied, heroes of old Endured hardship and ordeals. Worldly Attachment was their assigned Burden of imperfection: Bearing it was their mission.
Lest these prayers be For weariness of life, not love of Thee, He had read: a standard he admired Not in the name of love But for its stringency: the gauntlet Of chainmail not folded On the breviary, but brandished, Able for the task.
Then, that abrupt personal extreme Of woe and dread, neither Heroic nor intolerable: a cause To fear the silence. The soul Stammering to itself.
It was not “In fear of the Lord Is the beginning of wisdom.”
But in fear a new Model for worldly attachment:
It was like the birth Of an infant: the father, in sudden Overthrow, turning from indifference To absolute care, a ferocity Of petition dwarfing desire, All of life flowing at once Toward the new, incompetent soul.
Feigning indifference to worldly attachment reminds me of Sir Gawain when facing the Green Knight in the 14th century romance. Gawain thinks he can shrug off his love of life, only for the Green Man to show him that he cares for it more than he thinks. His pride is stung but he has been given a gift: you think you are in control until suddenly you’re not.
Prayer as “a ferocity of petition dwarfing desire.” Wow!
I have lots of thoughts about the Congressional hearings on Donald Trump’s January 6 coup attempt, which opened last night, and am working up a post that references Milton’s rebel angels. I’ll end this week, however, on a lighter note, an interesting footnote that my English professor son alerted me to. Apparently, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy played havoc with clock sales following its publication in 1759.
Toby Wilson-Bates alerted me to a pamphlet that appeared following publication entitled “The clockmakers outcry against the author of The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy. Dedicated to the most humble of Christian prelates.” The author complained,
The directions I had for making several clocks for the country are countermanded; because no modest lady now dares to mention a word about windingup a clock, without exposing herself to the sly leers and jokes of the family … Nay, the common expression of street-walkers is, “Sir, will you have your clock wound up ?”
Apparently the pamphlet also notes that virtuous matrons were disposing of their clocks for fear that they would excite “acts of carnality.”
The offending passage occurs in the second paragraph of the novel:
Pray, my Dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?———Good G—! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time,——Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question? Pray, what was your father saying?———Nothing.
Tristram is telling his life story and figures that he should start at the beginning—which is to say, at the moment of his conception. His mother, operating by chain of association, thinks of the clock at the moment that his father is impregnating her with Tristram. Her question functions as a comment about the clockwork way that Walter Shady goes about having sex.
Indeed, the elder Shandy, an Enlightenment enthusiast, is so captivated by machinery and scientific thinking that he can’t accept the world in all its messy unpredictability. His insistence that scientific forceps rather than midwife knowledge be used in his son’s birth play havoc with his son’s nose. He has such definitive notions on how a child should be raised that he spends all his time writing a book on the subject during Tristram’s childhood, all the while ignoring Tristram, who grows up on his own. Sterne’s book is largely a satire of attempts to over-regulate human behavior.
Apparently clocks were an unintended casualty of his satire—or perhaps not so unintended since Sterne, in his belief in acting naturally, would probably prefer us to respond to the sun and the seasons than clocks. I am reminded of John Wilmot’s own mention of clocks in his “Satyr against Reason and Mankind.” Contrasting “right reason” with mechanistic behavior, Wilmot writes,
My reason is my friend, yours is a cheat; Hunger calls out, my reason bids me eat; Perversely, yours your appetite does mock: This asks for food, that answers, “What’s o’clock?
The passage that interrupted the clock trade also reminds me of another sexual innuendo that, for a while, made it impossible to talk about china in polite company. In William Wycherley’s 1675 comedy The Country Wife, Lady Fidget is having an adulterous affair with Horner after having told her husband she is going out to buy china. When Sir Jasper Fidget finds her in Horner’s apartment, Horner claims that she has come to examine his china collection and they go into a back room. When Lady Squeamish, another of Horner’s mistresses, shows up, she (unlike Sir Jasper) figures out what’s going on and insists that Horner provide her with china as well:
Re-enter Lady Fidget with a piece of china in her hand, and Horner following. L. Fid. And I have been toiling and moiling for the prettiest piece of china, my dear. Horn. Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could. Mrs. Squeam. Oh, lord, I’ll have some china too. Good Mr. Horner, don’t think to give other people china, and me none; come in with me too. Horn. Upon my honour, I have none left now. Mrs. Squeam. Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan’t put me off so. Come. Horn. This lady had the last there. L. Fid. Yes indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge, he has no more left. Mrs. Squeam. O, but it may be he may have some you could not find. L. Fid. What, d’ye think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too? for we women of quality never think we have china enough.
In a follow-up play (The Plain Dealer), Wycherley has fun referencing his earlier play by having a couple of characters discuss the effects of this china scene:
Olivia: I’m resolved to make you out of love with the play. I say, the lewdest, filthiest thing is his china; nay, I will never forgive the beastly author his china. He has quite taken away the reputation of poor china itself, and sullied the most innocent and pretty furniture of a lady’s chamber; insomuch that I was fain to break all my defiled vessels. You see I have none left; nor you, I hope.
Eliza: You’ll pardon me, I cannot think the worse of my china for that of the playhouse.
Olivia: Why, you will not keep any now, sure! ‘Tis now as unfit an ornament for a lady’s chamber as the pictures that come from Italy and other hot countries; as appears by their nudities, which I always cover, or scratch out, whereso’er I find ’em. But china! out upon’t, filthy china! nasty debauched china!
Needless to say, both china and clocks made comebacks after these works appeared. For a while there, though, clockmakers and china salesmen were worried.
Yesterday Julia and I celebrated our 49th anniversary. Well, we didn’t exactly celebrate it, given that Julia was running my mother to the doctor after another fall and then taking off for a pre-cataract appointment with an ophthalmologist. I, meanwhile, was madly putting together a talk on literary angels and then delivering it. It felt like old times when we both had full-time jobs.
Still, I had time to think of memorable moments in our life—graduating and marrying on the same day (June 8 1973), three births, one son’s death at 21, ups and downs in our respective careers, journeys abroad, grandchildren, many, many foreign students living with us. It doesn’t take much for me to remember movies we saw together, books we read together, and all those other experiences that make up a life together. To be sure, it hasn’t always been harmonious, but by having worked through various tensions and disagreements, we know we have built something that will last..
This James Weldon Johnson poem gets at some of what I feel now. Here’s to #49, Julia.
The Only Beauty That Is Never Old
When buffeted and beaten by life’s storms, When by the bitter cares of life oppressed, I want no surer haven than your arms, I want no sweeter heaven than your breast.
When over my life’s way there falls the blight Of sunless days, and nights of starless skies; Enough for me, the calm and steadfast light That softly shines within your loving eyes.
The world, for me, and all the world can hold Is circled by your arms; for me there lies, Within the lights and shadows of your eyes, The only beauty that is never old.
Gustave Doré, Satan struggling through Chaos in Paradise Lost
Wednesday
This evening I’m giving a talk on angels as they appear in contemporary fantasy fiction so I’ll use today’s post for some initial brainstorming. The talk is the third of three on angels for Vacation Bible School, and, in the first, Dr. Becky Wright of Sewanee’s Theological Seminary informed us that the angels that show up in the Old and New Testaments are metaphorical rather than literal and were indeed seen that way. It was only in later years that they hardened into actual beings. Or, as we used to say when studying Marxist intellectual history at Carleton College, a once dynamic concept became reified, a shell of its former meaning.
Becky noted that translators always have to make a choice when they translate malakh (Hebrew) and angelos (Greek): both words mean both messenger and angel. Sometimes the translators choose one, sometimes the other, but in both cases we need to drop the notion of beautiful and androgynous beings with flowing locks showing up. After all, Becky pointed out, their first words are often, “Be not afraid,” and why should someone be afraid of a Hallmark card angel.
It’s more useful, she noted, to think of angels as metaphors for divine inspiration, similar to the way that Homer and the ancient Greeks personified creative inspiration as the muses. When one feels one has received a message, one searches for a way to visualize the experience and angels are one visualization.
Once Becky pointed this out, I felt right at home. After all, metaphors—or, to go broader, figurative language—are the meat and potatoes of literature, including contemporary fantasy. So what is the symbolic significance of angels in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens, and China Mieville’s Perdito Street Station?
I’ll confine myself to Pullman for today’s post. The second talk in the series was my Sewanee colleague Ross Macdonald’s discussion of angels in Paradise Lost, and the poem is Pullman’s jumping off point. In fact, “his dark materials” is a line from the poem, a reference to the material that God uses to create worlds.
Pullman has a love-hate relationship with Milton, however, and ascribes to William Blake’s perspective that “Milton was of the devil’s party without knowing it.” In Pullman’s trilogy, then, he turns Milton on his head by making his fallen angels the good guys and the loyal angels the bad guys.
I find this to be a slightly shaky foundation for a story since, much as I admire Blake, I don’t agree with his view of Paradise Lost. As I see it, Satan is one of literature’s great depictions of a charismatic narcissist, and I think Milton intends for us to fall for his charisma before becoming aware of his emptiness. But set that aside. Pullman’s Satanic rebel is a couple, Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter, who go to war with God, his archangel Metatron, and his legions of angels. They have a few angels on their side, as well as witches and giant polar bears.
In Pullman’s version, God is not the actual creator but an angel who took credit for creation, which means that Pullman is not as radical as he appears. (In other words, “God” isn’t really God.) The author’s target is people who claim to speak in God’s name while twisting God to serve their own purposes. But if this is Pullman’s purpose, why not just go after the church rather than having this titanic battle in heaven, complete with flying machines and bombs.
For the record, Pullman targets the church plenty. The church we see in the trilogy is a cross between the Catholic Church of the Spanish Inquisition and the fundamentalist Protestant church of Calvin’s Geneva. Both are obsessed with purity and obedience, which means that they are prepared to do everything they can to keep children from thinking for themselves and from enjoying sexuality. They are fanatical opponents of sensuality.
The reason for the aerial battles is that Pullman wants his battle against intolerance and narrow-minded religiosity to be as spectacular as Milton’s battle in heaven. Pullman has said this His Dark Materials is his own Paradise Lost. But where Milton uses his poem to “justify the ways of God to man”—to find divine meaning to our suffering—Pullman wants us to focus on living our lives fully and sensually. He wants us to build the kingdom of heaven on earth—or to use phrase he uses, the republic of heaven.
We should not want to become angels, he notes, because they are ethereal. Pullman’s angels, rather than glorying in their immateriality, envy humans. As Mrs. Coulter notes when she is in the process of using her beauty to seduce Metatron into a trap where she and Asriel can destroy him,
[S]he trusted to her flesh, and to the strange truth she’d learned about angels, perhaps especially those angels who had once been human: lacking flesh, they coveted it and longed for contact with it. And Metatron was close now, close enough to smell the perfume of her hair and to gaze at the texture of her skin, close enough to touch her with scalding hands.
For those who think that Heaven is heavenly because it is purely ethereal, Pullman has a countervision. In his vision, Christian Heaven is a barren place, dark and empty. At one point, protagonists Lyra and Will find a way to release those trapped there—at least those who haven’t deluded themselves into thinking that their sense-starved existence is Paradise—and the dead souls are thrilled when they get a chance to mingle with the elements. Here’s Pullman describing the moment when they move from the afterlife to earth:
The first ghosts trembled with hope, and their excitement passed back like a ripple over the long line behind them, young children and aged parents alike looking up and head with delight and wonder as the first stars they had seen for centuries shone through into their poor starved eyes.
The first ghost to leave the world of the dead was Roger. He took a step forward and turned to look back at Lyra, and laughed in surprise as he found himself turning into the night, the starlight, the air…and then he was gone, leaving behind such a vivid little burst of happiness that Will was reminded of the bubbles in a glass of champagne.
As Robert Frost says, “Earth’s the right place for love, I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
If Lord Asriel and Mrs. Coulter are not able to defeat Metatron, then he will impose his will directly on the world rather than having to go through the church. In other words, we will have orthodoxy or fundamentalism on steroids. Some version of Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, in other words.
But because they take down Metatron, the next generation will be able to think for themselves and taste, without guilt, the forbidden fruit of sexuality. In fact, we see Lyra actually feeding Will a “little red fruit” in the lead-up to their lovemaking scene. Their love, which both the church and Metatron have been doing all they can to prevent, saves the world.
Hmm, love saving the world. Where else does one encounter that idea? Maybe Pullman isn’t as anti-Christian as he seems.
I’m currently reading Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens (1990) in preparation for a Vacation Bible School lecture I will be giving on angels. I’m the third of three lectures on the subject–angels in the Bible, angels in Paradise Lost, and angels in contemporary fantasy—and I’ll share my insights in future posts. For the moment, however, I found a scene that I’m imagining as a comic rendering of Vladimir Putin ordering Russian soldiers into Ukraine.
First, a word on Good Omens, which is a remarkable collaboration between two of the greatest contemporary fantasy authors. Pratchett stands out amongst fantasy practitioners since he writes comic fantasy, which is a departure from the deadly serious fantasy that is the norm. (Think Tolkien.) Good Omens has more of a Pratchett than a Gaiman feel to it.
In the novel, the Antichrist has been delivered to an English hospital with the full expectation that he will bring about Armageddon when he grows up. A hospital mix-up, however, means that he is switched with another baby and brought up by a dull tax accountant and his wife. This wreaks havoc with Satan’s plans to have an all-out battle with the Almighty. Issues of nature vs. nurture come to the fore.
Responsible for the mix-up is the fallen angel Crowley, who has been doing Satan’s bidding for centuries. Crowley has become comfortable with his life on earth, however, and isn’t keen on it all coming to an end. He’s even become chummy with Aziraphale, his good angel counterpart, and we learn that he has never been an enthusiastic evil doer: he “did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.” (Elsewhere we are told, “He hadn’t meant to Fall. He’d just hung around with the wrong people.”) In any event, he now drives around in a Bentley, and his way of causing evil is disrupting everyone’s internet service from time to time.
When the time comes to drop the infant Antichrist off at the hospital, Satan assumes that Crowley will be excited by his chance to bring about the end of the world. I’m thinking that he’s excited in the way that Vladimir Putin is excited at the prospect of recreating the Tsarist empire of the 19th century or the Soviet empire of the 20th. Like many Russians, however, Crowley is less interested in restoring lost glory than in enjoying his comfortable middle-class life. You’ll pick up the discrepancy in enthusiasm levels in their interchange, which occurs over Crowley’s car radio. Satan speaks with the voice of whoever is performing at the time, which in this case happens to be Freddie Mercury of the rock group Queen:
“Ohshitohshitohshit. Why now? Why me?” he muttered, as the familiar strains of Queen washed over him.
And suddenly, Freddie Mercury was speaking to him: BECAUSE YOU’VE EARNED IT, CROWLEY.
Crowley blessed under his breath. Using electronics as a means of communication had been his idea, and Below had, for once, taken it up and, as usual, got it dead wrong. He’d hoped they could be persuaded to subscribe to Cellnet, but instead they just cut in to whatever it happened to be that he was listening to at the time and twisted it.
Crowley gulped.
“Thank you very much lord,” he said.
WE HAVE GREAT FAITH IN YOU, CROWLEY.
“Thank you, lord.”
THIS IS IMPORTANT, CROWLEY.
“I know, I know.”
THIS IS THE BIG ONE, CROWLEY.
“Leave it to me, lord.”
THAT IS WHAT WE ARE DOING, CROWLEY, AND IF IT GOES WRONG, THEN THOSE INVOLVED WILL SUFFER GREATLY. EVEN YOU, CROWLEY. ESPECIALLY YOU.
“Understood, lord.”
HERE ARE YOUR INSTRUCTIONS, CROWLEY.
And suddenly he knew. He hated that. They could just as easily have told him, they didn’t suddenly have to drop chilly knowledge straight into his brain. He had to drive to a certain hospital.
“I’ll be there in five minutes, lord, no problem.”
As it turns out, Crowley’s mission doesn’t go any better than Putin’s as both Earth and Ukraine survive to live another day. Moral: Don’t expect success when you lack buy-in from your followers.
Further application: While the Antichrist is growing up, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—make that the four horsepersons—are assembling. War is an arms dealer named Scarlett, who has auburn hair that “fell to her waist in tresses that men would kill for, and indeed often had.” We see a before and after description of “Kubolaland” that vaguely resembles Ukraine before and after the February 24 Russian invasion. Here’s before:
She was in the middle of a city at the time. The city in question was the capital of Kumbolaland, an African nation which had been at peace for the lat three thousand years. For about thirty years it was Sir-Humphrey-Clarksonland, but since the country had absolutely no mineral wealth and the strategic importance of a banana, it was accelerated toward self-government with almost unseemly haste. Kumbolaland was poor, perhaps, and undoubtedly boring, but peaceful. Its various tribes, who got along with one another quite happily, had long since beaten their swords into ploughshares; a fight had broken out in the city square in 1952 between a drunken ox-drover and an equally drunken ox-thief. People were still talking about it.
The Scarlett shows up, at which point all humor leaves the narrative:
She looked around the street: a couple of women chatted on a street corner; a bored market vendor sat in front of a heap of colored gourds, fanning the flies; a few children played lazily in the dust.
“What the hell,” she said quietly. “I could do with a holiday anyway.”
That was Wednesday.
By Friday the city was a no-go area.
By the following Tuesday the economy of Kumbolaland was shattered, twenty thousand people were dead…, almost a hundred thousand people were injured, all of Scarlett’s assorted weapons had fulfilled the function for which they had been created, and the vulture had died of Greasy Degeneration.
When it comes to Vladimir Putin and all other “masters of war,” the anger of Bob Dylan’s song is only too appropriate:
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could? I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
