On Fathers & Sons & Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

Thursday

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.

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Poetry Helps Balance Realism & Hope

Domenico Fetti, A Classical Poet

Wednesday

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 article by 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.

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Summer Solstice Unleashes Dark Forces

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.

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The Trump Who Had No Clothes

Vilhelm Pedersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

Monday

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

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Methought I Heard One Calling, “Child”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Bauerle, “Father and Child”

Spiritual Sunday – Father’s Day

Since today is Father’s Day, I share a George Herbert poem that, while it is addressed to God, captures a familiar familial situation: which is to say, a child’s rebellion against a father that appears to demand too much.

What I love about “The Collar” is that, no matter how “fierce and wild” the rebellion becomes, God’s love is constant. Somehow, in the midst of his temper tantrum, the speaker hears God calling out as if to a child who has been lost. I imagine this child to be the one described in William Blake’s poem “The Little Boy Found”:

The little boy lost in the lonely fen,
Led by the wand’ring light,
Began to cry, but God ever nigh,
Appeard like his father in white.

He kissed the child & by the hand led
And to his mother brought,
Who in sorrow pale, thro’ the lonely dale
Her little boy weeping sought.

Herbert’s speaker, who is just as lost, receives the same reassurance:

The Collar

I struck the board, and cried, “No more;
                         I will abroad!
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free, free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store.
          Shall I be still in suit?
Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
          Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
    Before my tears did drown it.
      Is the year only lost to me?
          Have I no bays to crown it,
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
                  All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit,
            And thou hast hands.
Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage,
             Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
          And be thy law,
While thou didst wink and wouldst not see.
          Away! take heed;
          I will abroad.
Call in thy death’s-head there; tie up thy fears;
          He that forbears
         To suit and serve his need
          Deserves his load.”
But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild
          At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, Child!
          And I replied My Lord.

The Father’s love is constant. On that you can rely.

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Sometimes Mercenaries Surprise Us

John Singer Sargent, Atlas and the Herperides

Friday

Twice in the past I’ve applied A.E. Housman’s poem “Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries” to Mike Pence’s actions on January 6. In yesterday’s hearings on Donald Trump’s attempted coup, we learned even more about the pressure that Trump, his lawyer John Eastman, and others put on Pence. It has become increasingly clear that the storming of the Capitol (and the cries to “hang Mike Pence”) was the final attempt to persuade Pence to either (1) refuse to certify Joe Biden’s victory or (2) leave the Capitol so that another Republican (perhaps Chuck Grassley, perhaps Republican state legislatures, perhaps our conservative Supreme Court) could do Trump’s dirty work.

One can’t call Mike Pence a hero for simply following through on his mandated Constitutional duties—just as one can’t praise the mercenaries in Housman’s poem for doing what they are paid to do. The poet’s surprise is that the soldiers doing the right thing comes as such a shock, just as it was a shock for the sycophantic Pence to buck Trump.

And let there be no doubt: the heavens of American democracy would indeed have fallen if Pence had refused to certify Biden’s victory. With Trump still in command of the military and popular unrest uncertain if the will of the people had been overturned, anything could have happened.

Instead, Pence’s shoulders held the sky suspended; he stood, and the earth’s foundations stay.

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries

These, in the days when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and the earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.  

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The Deep Roots of U.S. Race Hatred

Hunting a runaway slave

Thursday

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.

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Bookshops as Warehouses of Explosives

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.

Amen to that.

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Will Jan. 6 Evidence Change GOP Minds?

Tuesday

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.

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