Shakespeare Wasn't Perfect

So The Atlantic has seen fit to publish more "Shakespeare authorship" conspiracy-mongering, this time masquerading as feminism by proposing a female candidate. But the piece doesn't quote even a single line of the real poetry that woman wrote. It can't, of course, because that would give the game away. If the piece let you read Emilia Bassano Lanier's actual poetry it would become dangerously easy to hear that Lanier sounds like herself, not like Shakespeare. So the "feminist" conspiracy theory is dedicated to silencing the voice of an authentic woman poet. (Nobody said it was a good masquerade.)

The Atlantic piece rehashes the same old tired arguments that have been rebutted hundreds of times before. This isn't about real debate. But the biggest mistake is the assumption that Shakespeare is above criticism, and always has been. That has never been true. Shakespeare authorship conspiracies are outgrowths of an unhealthy hero-worship of Shakespeare, treating him as some infallible demigod.

Don't get me wrong. I think Shakespeare is terrific. I wouldn't spend my professional life teaching and writing about him if I didn't. But I also think he's great enough that we can admit his failings. Bardolatry, the idol-worship of Shakespeare, keeps you from understanding him.

So the Atlantic article begins by talking about how great Lady Macbeth is as a character (true enough), and rhapsodizes about how many other great female characters Shakespeare wrote. Then the first argument is basically that Shakespeare must have been a woman to write such great women. There's a little hedging, but that's the claim. Only a woman could write Lady Macbeth. If something seems wrong there, wait. One of the other examples is The Taming of the Shrew.

Yes. That Taming of the Shrew. Where the wife is, uh, a shrew. Who gets tamed. That Taming of the Shrew. Which apparently only a woman could have written.

And that, uh. Well. Kind of a surprise.

Or it would be if we were applying normal everyday logic to Shakespeare's works. To most casual observers, and a lot of professional ones too, The Taming of the Shrew looks sexist, what with Petruchio starving his wife into submission. (That is not my interpretation. That is what the text itself says. He doesn't allow her any food until she knuckles under.) But maybe it gets better if we look more closely? Say if we apply some English-major tools, like looking hard at all the metaphors Petruchio uses to describe Kate? Oops, sorry, no, he's always comparing her to domesticated animals. Whoops. Actually worse than it looks from a distance.

Now, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, there is a tradition of serious scholarship, much of it by feminist women, dedicated to saving the play from misogyny and discovering subtle anti-sexist messages inside it. We don't want Shakespeare to be a sexist pig, so we're going to work hard to get around any politics we don't agree with. I've read a lot of that criticism, and it's smart. But other feminist scholars disagree and say, Nope, sorry, all the stuff about dominating and subduing women means exactly what it says.

What's different is saying, No. The Taming of the Shrew is SO feminist that NO MAN COULD HAVE WRITTEN IT. And that, to borrow a phrase from psychoanalysis, is crazy talk.

Rather, it's a defense against cognitive dissonance, much like what we see with members of cults. The unpleasant truth has to be closed out. Our doomsday prophet isn't wrong! It's proof of how right he is! Shakespeare isn't a sexist with bad four-hundred-year-old politics! He's a feminist! In fact, he's the greatest feminist ever. He's such a great feminist that he could not actually be a man!

Whoo boy.

The Atlantic article's preferred ghost-writer, Emilia Lanier, also features in Shakespeare scholarship as a way to get past things that make modern readers uncomfortable. You see, her maiden name was Bassano (which is the name the Atlantic article uses, even though she didn't publish under it). And she had Italian heritage, and maybe-just-maybe Jewish heritage as well, so she got put forth forty years ago as a candidate for the Dark Lady of the sonnets. There's no reason to believe that. All we know is that the Dark Lady had dark hair and dark eyes, which doesn't narrow much down. We can't prove that Shakespeare and Lanier ever spoke with one another.

But, you see, if we can say the Dark Lady was a Venetian Jewess, then some things that make us uncomfortable about act four of The Merchant of Venice cease to be problems. See, Shakespeare can't be an anti-Semite! He had a Jewish mistress! (As if an anti-Semitic Gentile marrying his Jewish mistress were not part of the plot of The Merchant of Venice.)

As with Taming, there's a lively debate about whether Merchant is anti-Semitic or cleverly critiquing anti-Semitism. But having Emilia Bassano Lanier actually write The Merchant of Venice is three steps further into crazy land. If Merchant had actually been written by a Jew, that would be one seriously self-loathing Jew. It's a shonda, I tell you.

The problem here is that Shakespeare is treated as above reproach, so obvious complaints have to be explained away. No one is allowed to speak ill of the divine William. But Shakespeare was not a god. He was human, and flawed, and when we refuse to see the things that make us unhappy or uncomfortable we are refusing to read him. Better to take him as he is, flaws and all.

It isn't just the so-called anti-Stratfordians who do this. They merely express a mutant form of the excessive reverence that keeps many people from looking at Shakespeare honestly. It's not an accident that the authorship conspiracy theories don't start until 1850, when the Shakespeare cult had already taken full hold. Shakespeare got built up into a secular divinity, and then people looked at his all-too-human biography and decided it was uncomfortably ungodlike. So they looked for a better candidate. It's the literary-biographical equivalent of making up a divine ancestor for the founder of your tribe.

The author of the Atlantic piece, like many other conspiracy theorists, claims that the "doubts" began in Shakespeare's lifetime. She went on twitter to say so, and to complain that documents critical of Shakespeare had been suppressed by scholars. I mean, some of those documents get reprinted in collected editions of Shakespeare for students, and they were in my college textbooks, but I guess if you have to look in the back of the book that's a conspiracy or whatever.

The real point is that none of those critical comments about Shakespeare are disputing that he wrote the plays. They are saying that his plays suck. The conspiracy theorists claim that the plays are too wonderful for mere William Shakespeare from Warwick to write himself. But the critics they point to as "evidence" are actually saying that the plays are not good.

That seems unthinkable to us, but that's only because we've drunk the Kool-Aid. Not everybody liked Shakespeare during his lifetime. At least one person is on record liking Shakespeare as a human being but not liking his art, because he thought Shakespeare was a hack. Not that Shakespeare was too much of a hack to write Julius Caesar. He thought that Julius Caesar was hacktastic. No really.

Shakespeare also had fans and admirers, lots of them. But he had haters, especially at the beginning and the end of his career. At the end of his life, and for many decades afterward, he was considered an intellectual lightweight whose plays were not learned enough. Not that he wasn't learned enough to write the plays. That the plays themselves were not learned. Not sophisticated. Not intellectual. Pretty good, for an old guy, but no John Fletcher and no Ben Jonson.

This goes against everything our culture tells us about Shakespeare. But it's true. It's documented fact. For a lot of the 1600s the works of Shakespeare were not treated as lofty works of erudition. They were considered good, stupid, old-fashioned fun. A guilty pleasure.

That's not the way we look at those plays any more, but it isn't necessarily wrong. And it isn't crazy. Shakespeare's worth taking seriously, but he's not supposed to be a religion. If he's never fun you're doing it wrong.

cross-posted from Dagblog. Please post comments there, not here.

Alas for Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe, one of the greatest of science-fiction writers, has passed away. His work was subtle and superb. Wolfe wrote paragraphs you could lose yourself in, like a labyrinth, and come out a changed person on the other side. He thought profoundly about what story-telling means as few other writers have. He was honored inside the genre and sometimes outside it, but deserved far more honor in both places. Any account of 20th-century American literature that omits Gene Wolfe is incomplete.

There are many places to start reading Wolfe: his novella "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," and his epic masterpiece The Book of the New Sun. But I would put in a word for the short story "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories," a meditative story which, depending on how you look at it, depicts neglected boy losing himself in a book of pulp science fiction or a book of pulp science fiction entering a boy's abusive environment to salvage him. It's the title story of the hilariously-named collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. (Wolfe also wrote "The Death of Doctor Island," which won the Nebula, "The Doctor of Death Island," and, somewhat later, "The Death of the Island Doctor.")

"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" was part of a famous and ghastly faux pas. The Nebula Awards MC, Isaac Asimov, actually announced at the awards banquet that "Island" had won that year's Nebula for Best Short Story, and Wolfe stood up to accept the award before Asimov realized that Wolfe was the runner-up. "No Award" had won for Best Short Story that year. If that sounds to you a bit like the story about Pynchon, the Pulitzers, and Gravity's Rainbow, both stories are from the same era and feature profound, boundary-pushing work. As I said, Wolfe was never honored enough, in his parish or out of it.

Here are just the first two paragraphs of "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories":

Winter comes to water as to land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying our work.

Godspeed, Mr. Wolfe. You wrote in something far more durable than sand.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

For Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was my hero. Urusla K. Le Guin is my hero still. She is gone from this world, and only her words are left to us. Those words are marvels.

I remember driving to a college interview with a copy of The Dispossessed on the passenger seat beside me, in case I arrived too early. My first computer password, at the beginning of college, was an anagram of her name. I remember reading The Dispossessed again when I moved to California, to console myself to the strangeness of the new planet where I found myself. And The Dispossessed is on my bedside table again, tonight.

For the last two falls I have been teaching my graduate students The Left Hand of Darkness. Last fall, I realized their edition had a typo, a crucial, meaning-changing typo, on the novel's last page. I went through my house looking for other editions to compare. It turns out I had five.

I have blogged in the past about the debts I owe to Le Guin as a writer, and those debts have only matured as I have:

I no longer know how many times I have read The Language of the Night.  [I]t was my first example of how to write an essay about a piece of fiction. More importantly, it was my first model of an essayist's prose, and I could not have had a better. Le Guin's prose, lucid and evocative, as clear and as complex as running water, still gives me my sense of what a paragraph or a sentence ought to be.

[snip]

I was all too slow to be aware of it, but this is the truth: I am trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. I am always trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. This is no less so because I do it without thinking of it; it is only more so. .... She is the essayist I wanted to be when I grew up, and she is the stylist whom I, having grown up, would like to be. ... In the middle of my life, better late than never, I am obliged and honored to acknowledge her as my master.

She was a late bloomer, who published her first novel the year she turned 37, and her first undeniable masterpiece, The Left Hand, the year she turned forty. That has always been a lesson to me.

She was an American Taoist, a real one, in a country where many who profess Taoism are deceiving themselves. She had no space for self-deception; the Tao, after all, is about dispensing with illusions. Her perspective was unblinking and undeceived, looking straight at truths most shy from. Many would call such a perspective cold but, precisely because she was so free of illusions, her viewpoint was astonishing warm. She wrote fantasy, but never trafficked in or tolerated the everyday lies and fantasies that our society breathes. Her novels took you to another planet, where you found yourself facing the truths of human nature that you shied away from every day.

She was fearless. She could not be intimidated. And her craft was profound.

I am thinking of her husband tonight, Charles, to whom she was married for decades, and who clearly served as helpmeet to her in a way that men of his generation expected of their wives and not themselves. Le Guin wrote, again and again, of deep monogamous bonds, the pairing for life, in a way that has to be, in part, a profound tribute to her own partner.

I would take, gladly, another year or two or five of her words, of whatever she was able and willing to share. But she had already written her last novel, and knew it. When she no longer had the physical stamina to write a novel, she faced that truth. Her accomplishment is complete tonight. She has already achieved more than anyone could ask.

Ursula Le Guin did not believe in heaven. She found the idea of an afterlife suspect. So all that remains of her tonight are her words. They will always be there if you want them. Let me say what a comfort they can be.

cross-posted from Dagblog, where all comments are welcome

Some People Are Not Duelable

I'm not a big proponent of bringing back customs and manners from hundreds of years back. The centuries I study were much worse to live in than this one. But there is one concept from Ye Olden Days that (suitably retooled), I have always found pretty useful. That is the concept of people being "not duelable." I use it in my academic writing. I use it in my daily life. I occasionally teach it to graduate students. And it turns out to be a concept that both the Age of Twitter and the Age of Trump badly need.

Now, dueling itself is a vicious custom and should not come back. But that custom contained one illuminating rule: dueling is something that happens between equals. (It's also restricted to the upper classes; humbler folk who fight with swords, like the playwright Ben Jonson, are just street brawling.) You only duel people who are, generally speaking, on your own level.

If you're a 17th-century gentleman, or a Russian aristocrat, or a young swell in Flaubert's Paris, you don't get in duels with servants or bartenders or some poor hapless working stiff. That's beneath you. (I'm not going to idealize this practice; this is mainly about not giving the hapless working stiffs a fair shot at the rich folk, or allowing the working stiffs to fight back.) Fighting those people isn't simply wrong. The wrongness isn't even the main problem. Fighting with those people is demeaning to you. It lowers you. It invites shame and ridicule.

Early in the 20th century (a little late for this sort of thing), the novelist Vladimir Nabokov's father got so angry about a yellow journalist's attack on him that he decided to challenge someone to a duel over it. (Neither Dr. Cleveland nor Dagblog endorses fighting duels or threatening journalists.) Did he challenge the person who wrote the article? No. That person was, from Nabokov Sr.'s point of view, just some greasy little scribbler, not worth the bother of tussling with. Papa Nabokov challenged the newspaper publisher. (The younger Nabokov has a wonderful chapter about this episode in his memoir, Speak, Memory.)  None of this is exactly Nabokov Sr.'s finest hour, but it taught me the basic "not duelable" concept, which has real value.

Let's broaden the definition of "duel" here to mean any public or semi-public conflict which, on some level, involves your reputation. That's what duels were: fights designed to protect one's reputation, and when someone was not duelable that meant that fighting them, or even challenging them, would only damage your reputation more. Some kinds of political slagging and point-scoring qualify, alas. So do some entertainers' public feuds: two rappers beefing with each other are both acknowledging each other as peers and trying to raise their profiles. And, like it or not, academic writing has its share of this, both because professional reputations are closely tied to that writing and because academic debate works, especially in the humanities, by disagreement. It is almost impossible to write a publishable article about Shakespeare where you don't at least politely suggest some other Shakespeareans are wrong about something. Often, people are much less polite. Sometimes scholars get into epic running beefs. The letter pages of the Times Literary Supplement are notorious for hosting ongoing tweedy vendettas. The question of who is duelable and who isn't in academic arguments is one I've given a lot of thought to, and it needs a post of its own.

One of my favorite examples of non-duelability in pop culture is Crash Davis in Bull Durham, flat-out declining to compete with boy idiot Nuke LaLoosh for Annie's favors: "I'm not interested in anyone who's interested in that boy." Translation: I'm not going to compete with that idiot, because he's not a suitable rival, and it would be demeaning to compete against him." Not duelable, bro.

Two major-party Presidential candidates going at each other is unpleasant and arguably unseemly. But you can't say that conflict is inappropriate. As nominees, they are peers. But if the President of the United States, with all the majesty of that office, decided to beef publicly with say, an ESPN personality like Jemele Hill, which is too crazy to ever happen, he would be attacking someone non-duelable. If he were to get petulant with an NBA player, that is fighting with someone non-duelable. Calling an unemployed NFL quarterback a "son of a bitch" in public is totally attacking someone non-duelable.

Trump does not make the duelable/ non-duelable distinction at all. He fights with people who have vastly different statuses. He goes after the grieving parents of an American serviceman killed in action. He beefs at Rosie O'Donnell, still, for God knows what reason. He gets in spats with the Emmys telecast and the Apprentice, with ESPN. The list goes on, unfortunately. It's depressing to see.

The first problem with this is it's wrong, because the people he goes after are weaker and have no defense. One of the basic reasons large categories of people were originally designated non-duelable is because those people did not have swords or guns. (The laws often restricted weapon ownership to the upper classes.) Picking on the poor grieving mother of a dead serviceman is a disgusting way to use your power. It's wrong because unjustly harms other people. It makes you a bully, and a thug, and an asshole.

The other two problems, which are interrelated, are problems because they harm you, rather than your target. The main problem is that it destroys your dignity. You get into the gutter to fight some rapscallions, what you win is a trip to the gutter. You get dirty and you make a depressing spectacle of yourself.

Trump does not preserve the dignity of his office. He screeches at people who are, since inauguration, vastly below him in station. Part of this is that Trump still insists on operating like a fairly low-level New York media figure, a guy who gets into arguments on a call-in radio show. He's like a less well-adjusted Howard Stern. Part of it is that, frankly, he's a psychologically damaged personality. The rest is that Trump has always behaved like someone from an entirely different social class, rather than like a normal, socially-adjusted rich New Yorker. For all his money, he has never been able to learn the rules of upper-class Manhattan, social norms that usually get expressed as "taste," "manners," and "class." That he's a rich guy with the manners, and open resentments, of someone from a much lower class has always been a big part of his appeal. But it's not an act; Trump isn't someone who can charm donors to the Met and then switch it up to bond with a cabbie. He genuinely doesn't understand the normal rules of upper-class behavior, including the rule that some fights are just beneath you.

What Trump gains by his refusal to observe decorum is the ability to attack people that Presidents usually don't attack. What he loses is the protective aura of his office's dignity. It feels wrong to insult a President of the United States in certain ways, but that's ultimately predicated on the fact that the President isn't going to shout crude insults at you, either. The aura is a two-way protection.

Normally, the dignity of the President's office keeps people from calling the President a bum, but Trump doesn't respect the dignity of office and so it doesn't protect him. If a pro athlete called a president, any president a bum, I'd usually think that was a classless move. But the President in question called another pro athlete a son of a bitch in public yesterday, so he's the one who changed the rules.

And related to the loss of dignity is the problem that when you get down in the gutter to fight with some guttersnipes, the guttersnipes might win. Trump publicly slagging on Colin Kaepernick and Steph Curry opened the door for LeBron James to just lay Trump out:

U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!

— LeBron James (@KingJames) September 23, 2017

That's not the golden political rhetoric of yesterday, but Trump is playing the playground diss game, and as playground disses go this is a classic. Trump has no one to blame but himself.

(I do not mean to imply that Mr. James is a guttersnipe. He is a sublime athlete and a philanthropist. But he's also a guy who sweats for a living, not somebody who gets called in to give the Cabinet advice. Do you remember when FDR got into that public insult match with Joe DiMaggio? That's right. You don't.)

The bigger question is whether the dictator of North Korea is duelable for an American president. All of Trump's predecessors thought not, and didn't waste time trading insults with a small-time dictator. Trump, who has no sense of dignity, is getting into a slagging match and, on balance, losing. But actually, this is not at all how people used to talk before duels. Duels are about saving face, but also about finding a way out of conflict if you can: a lot of energy focused on finding a way to say everybody's honor was satisfied without anyone bleeding out. Sometimes that failed, but that was the focus. Papa Nabokov found a way not to fight that duel. Trump and Kim are not looking for an elegant way out of this. They are woofing at each other like playground antagonists, both scared of looking "weak" by backing down. It's a situation that usually leads to the two knuckleheads trading blows because they're afraid not to.

The danger, of course, is that if these two idiots come to blows, it's not just them.

 cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

In Defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge

Oh, joy. The War on the War on Christmas is back. People are hollering that now that Trump has been elected, everyone is going to have to say "Merry Christmas" all the time and have "Merry Christmas" said to them all the time, whether they like it or not, and they don't like it, screw them anyway. What better way to express the meaning of Christmas? It's so very far from the spirit of Christian humility and love that I find myself, against all odds, ready to mount a defense of Ebeneezer Scrooge.

As we all know, Scrooge's response when wished a "Merry Christmas" is to say "Bah! Humbug!" We all know that, from early in childhood, as Scrooge's tag line. And we don't worry about what it means, exactly. It's an old-timey phrase that Scrooge says, and we get that it's negative. We learn the phrase much too early for the word "humbug" to be in our vocabulary for other reasons. So we don't think about it. But Scrooge is saying something very specific. The word "humbug" means fraud. Scrooge is saying that the holiday of Christmas is a fraud and an imposture. And, as Dickens's original readers all knew, Scrooge is saying that for well-established religious reasons.

Scrooge is expressing a religious objection to Christmas. A Christian religious objection to Christmas. Although Scrooge isn't shown as especially pious (because the whole story is set up to make him lose his argument), he is speaking for a long English Protestant tradition that viewed Christmas as a bunch of non-Biblical paganish nonsense. Those Puritanical Protestants had a strong  theological point here, in that the December 25th date is sooooo totally not Biblical.

(I'm not going to walk you through the details, but think about the Gospels' reference to the shepherds tending their flocks by night. What kind of shepherds tend their flocks outdoors at night near the end of December? Terrible, terrible shepherds who are letting all of their sheep die of painful exposure to the cold. What is wrong with these shepherds? Why don't they bring the flocks in for the winter like everyone else does? Do they hate sheep? But I digress. The answer is, it's not actually winter in the Gospel story.)

Anyway that have-you-heard-this-before rap your atheist office-mate annual lays on you across the cubicle divider about how Christmas is really this pagan holiday that Christians took over blah blah etc. etc., turns out to be basically accurate. But your atheist explainer friend has unwittingly borrowed that argument from a group of hard-core Christian fanatics from earlier centuries, who were absolutely determined, on the grounds of their faith, not to celebrate any Papist idolatrous nonsense like Christmas.

Ebeneezer Scrooge is recognizably descended from those Christian hard-liners, which is why his first name is Ebeneezer. Giving your children names from the Old Testament, rather than the name of a later Christian saint, is a Puritan practice, and into the 19th century that combination of Jewish first name and English last name is a sign of Puritan family history, the same way having a first name like "Rainwater" suggests that your parents were hippies. (If you see an early American named Ezekiel, Abraham, or Nathaniel, you can be 95% certain they have New England Puritans in their family tree.) Ebeneezer Scrooge is actually named after a rock (no, really) from the first book of Samuel. He's got a stony heart, right? But notice that his hard-firsted partner, Jacob Marley, also has an Old Testament/Puritan name. The nice guys in A Christmas Carol don't get those Old Testament names. They're named Bob and Fred.

Also notice that, partly because of stubborn religious objections, Christmas was not actually a legal holiday in Dickens's England. As in, no one had to close their store. That little exchange near the beginning where Bob Cratchit asks for Christmas off (or, and this is worth noticing, Scrooge prompts Cratchit to ask for Christmas off: "You'll be wanting the whole day off tomorrow?") makes no sense to us today. Why does Bob have to ask for the holiday off? Everybody gets the holiday off. Actually, they don't, because it's not actually a holiday. So give Ebeneezer Scrooge his propers: even at the beginning of the story, he gives Cratchit Christmas Day off when he doesn't have to. He closes shop on a day he could have done business and he pays Cratchit a full day's pay for a bogus fake holiday, a fraudulent humbug that Scrooge probably thinks of as un-Christian. He even goes out of his way to make sure to that Cratchit asks, which means that however much Scrooge huffs and grumbles he has actually decided to give Cratchit the paid day off before Cratchit asks. So don't be so hard on the guy.

Now, my boy Charles Dickens is very intent on promoting Christmas, for lots of reasons. Part of it is about a larger High-Church Anglican movement bent on reviving traditional holidays. And part of it, famously, is commercial, because Dickens wanted to promote Christmas gift-giving. (He published a lot of work in once-a-year annuals designed to be given as Christmas presents; A Christmas Carol was first published in one of these Christmas-gift-ready compilations.) He wants to make the strongest case for Christmas he can. And therefore, by and large, he leaves Jesus out of it.

A Christmas Carol always works from the premise that Christmas itself is not religiously defensible. The Ghosts make every conceivable argument for the Christmas holiday EXCEPT the argument about Jesus's birth. They never go to the Bethlehem story, never even get close. Because there's no way to con Scrooge, or frankly to con the readers, into accepting that this is actually Jesus's birthday. Dickens knows better than to make an argument he can't win.

So Dickens makes a case for a non-sectarian, ultimately secularized Christmas, based on recognizably but not exclusively Christian values, such as generosity, and a generally small-c conservative emphasis on the pleasures of tradition. (Dickens is working the tradition angle from the first few sentences of the story, in ways that work all the better because they don't call full attention to themselves.) And in there Dickens slyly folds in his message that the best way to celebrate Christmas is to buy things.

Now, I love A Christmas Carol. It tells its story very well. But then, I'm a superstitious Papist. What do I know? But I want to point out that one of the things A Christmas Carol is doing is taking Christ out of Christmas. And it does that in 1843. So don't tell me it's some modern liberal conspiracy. Charles Dickens did it, long before any of our grandparents were born. And he invented the holiday we all know today: a commercial and secular holiday that's about vague, feel-good sentiments and about tradition for tradition's sake, rather than about any actual religious content per se. Dickens made Christmas for everyone, because if it were actually about Jesus most Christians would not have accepted it.

Ebeneezer Scrooge doesn't accept Christmas because of Jesus. Ebeneezer Scrooge doesn't accept that Christmas has anything to do with Jesus. And no one in the story who comes from the Afterlife tries to tell him any different. What turns Ebeneezer Scrooge around is a general set of positive values, loosely tied to Christianity but by no means tied to any specific sectarian identity: kindness and generosity, warmth and affection, values that you'll tend to find among believers of nearly every religion. Scrooge likes to hear the Christmas bells, but you'll notice he doesn't actually attend any church. He's not observing a religious holiday. He's just in it for the peace on earth and goodwill to men.

So, however you celebrate these winter holidays, let's keep Dickens and Scrooge (reformed version) in our hearts this winter: a warmth and generosity that extends itself to all without exclusion, without getting hung up on the details of doctrine or on membership in any specific sect or tribe. Wish people well this holiday season with no strings attached, without being stingy of your good will. And God bless us, every one.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Dylan's Nobel and the State of American Literature

I was very pleased when Bob Dylan got the Nobel Prize today. But I understand a number of people were not. Almost immediately upon the announcement my social media stream was full of disgruntled poets complaining that Dylan should not be eligible for the prize. (The silver lining was that one of the talented poets I know was immediately pushing back on this.) And by mid-afternoon the websites of major periodicals were full of think pieces, ready for tomorrow's print editions, about why Dylan should not have won.

So Friday morning America's newspapers will be filled with these editorials about how our fellow American Dylan does not deserve this prize. That will be a change from most years, when those same newspapers have no earthly idea whether or not the new Nobel laureate should have won, because even the editor of the books page does not really know who the new Nobel laureate is.

Do you see the connection? This year, the Nobel committee gave the prize to a figure with global stature and an international audience. That is not the only benchmark of merit, obviously, and I have always been glad that the Nobel sometimes elevates lesser-known writers. But to say that fame should not matter at all, in the terms of a global literary prize, is absurd.

Let's be clear: the idea that a songwriter is not a writer is transparently false and historically ignorant. By that standard Homer would not be eligible for the Nobel Prize. The Prize does not specify particular genres. It says only "in the field of literature" and the definition of literature changes over time. The novel was once a despised junk form, as was live theater before it, and the migration of low genres to high places will always continue. The real complaint is that a popular artist won. The horror!

The complaint is that a famous pop artist won something that "rightfully" belongs to more "serious" artists. But that complaint only masks the real problem. The real problem, for American poetry and all of American literature, is why none of the "serious" artists has a broad popular following.

The truth is that there is not a single living American poet who is a serious contender for the Nobel Prize. I wish that were not so, but it is. That is not meant as an insult to any of wonderful poets who are working today, or to the talented poets among my friends, or to my friends' accomplished mentors. Those poets are wonderful. A few are unsung national treasures. But they are, nonetheless, mostly unsung, and not one is a legitimate national figure, let alone an international figure. I saw someone today, in a serious publication, negatively comparing Dylan to Richard Wilbur. Now, Richard Wilbur is a gifted artist who deserves respect, but to say that he is a global figure in real contention for the Nobel Prize is simply delusional. If I could put an American poet up for the prize I would nominate Ferlinghetti, but I do not for a second expect that Ferlinghetti will win. No living American poet has that kind of international stature.

This is not because the individual poets lack talent or dedication. It is because American poetry, with its institutions and ambitions and professional culture, has turned away from wider relevance. No American poet is even attempting to write for a broad national audience today, and a young poet who attempted it would be considered a hack. More importantly, there is no infrastructure in place for an American poet to write for the general public. But if you ignore for the wider public for decades on end, it will ignore you back and then forget about you completely.

And, lest we forget, the Nobel Prizes are specifically intended for those who have done "the greatest benefit for mankind" and the Prize in Literature specifies "the person who in the field of literature the most outstanding work in the ideal direction." The "ideal direction" part clearly specifies some attempt at public uplift, which has not been part of American poetry's general ambitions for some time now. "The Times Are A-Changing" does display that ambition, pretty clearly, even if many working poets would find that corny. The finding-it-corny part, actually, is the heart of the problem. I get it, poets, I get it. You don't want to be Carl Sandburg. Congratulations: you're not.

Now, I have also seen a number of complaints by and on behalf of novelists and fiction writers, with whom I still strongly identify despite the long lapse of my artistic practice. But to them, too, I say: be honest. There may be, and I would say that there are, a handful of American novelists who are plausible candidates for the Nobel. But they are merely plausible, and perhaps even dark horses. If Oates or Pynchon or DeLillo or Roth won I would be happy, but I would never say that I had expected it all along. And I recognize that many people would have said, "Hmm. Okay." My own favorite for the prize is Le Guin, who would surely be a controversial winner in her own right, and who has done her work in a despised popular field. There are a few people who could win the Nobel, but no one who is an overwhelming favorite. None of them are culturally central in that way. Toni Morrison? Sure. But she's won already. There are other Americans whom I would like to see win, but none of them can say that they were robbed if they don't. None of them, much as I love them, are owed that prize.

But it's important to ask why not. It is not about lack of literary gifts. Nobody could ever say that Pynchon or Oates does not have enough talent. And some of this is audiences turning away from the written word to various electronic media. I know that. But American fiction has also lost part of its claim on the public arena by relinquishing that claim. Are we even trying to write the Great American Novel anymore? Maybe. But I'm not so sure. I worry that American fiction has ceded something of its public ambitions. If we don't have a Tolstoy among us, it is partly because, of course, the conditions are not there to create a Tolstoy may not exist any more, but also because American letters, not simply the writers themselves but the agents and editors and teachers and critics, have lost interest in producing one. I would like our ambitions to be greater and our horizons wider.

Forgive me if this post has been negative. It was prompted by a wave of public grumbling and complaining, of the kind I like least: the claim that an artist does not deserve something. To say that Dylan does not deserve this prize is ungenerous and small-minded, because many more artists deserve than get. To say that someone else was owed the prize instead is vainglorious and delusional, because no artist is ever owed anything but the chance to make art. And the worst trap for any artist, or any artist's backer, is to complain about what someone else has achieved, when the answer -- the only answer -- is to try to become better. Talking about taking something away from Dylan is petty and mean. We should talk about making our "serious" literature more serious.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Why Art?

Why study the arts? Some politicians ask the question as a joke, mocking this or that discipline as impractical. Those who defend the arts and humanities answer in economic terms, arguing for the rich and versatile skills one learns in the humanities classroom. I have made that economic case myself. As far as it goes, it is true. But it is not the only argument, and it does not go far enough.

We need the humanities because we are human. We need the arts because we are mortal. We need art and poetry because everyone we love will some day die.

We are human, and so we have problems that we cannot solve. That is not pessimism. Life is also full of beauty, wonder, and fulfillment. But even the best life includes the certainty of pain and loss. They are sure to come, and there is no "practical" solution for them.

Medicine can cure disease, it can ease suffering, it can extend life. It cannot banish death. Medicine does remarkable things, and I am grateful for it. But the larger problem remains.

Human ingenuity and practicality and industry can do wonders, and I am lucky for everything technology has done for me. But technology does not end the problems of the human spirit: loss and loneliness, wounded hearts and broken souls. We will never have a technological fix for these problems. There is not an app for that.

Right now, somewhere in California, some of the richest men alive are trying to find a technological solution to the problem of death. They have come to believe, or at least to hope, that money and technology will buy them immortality. What does this teach us? That people like Larry Ellison, Sergei Brin, and Peter Thiel, for all their fabulous wealth and admirable math skills, can be complete idiots. This problem is not to be solved in the way they hope. (The idea that immortality would come out of Silicon Valley, whose products are not built to last even a single decade, is hilarious.) The problem that they want to overcome is called "thermodynamics." It is part of the nature of all things. Silicon Valley's riches do not change that. They only fuel the hubris that lets billionaires mislead themselves.

None of us, personally or as a society, are ready to look straight ahead at problems like death, or to think about them too long. We have built marvelous toys to distract ourselves, like children putting off bedtime. The old folk saying about only using ten percent of our brainpower is not quite true; the truth is we use ninety percent of our brain power to trick ourselves out of dealing with the truths we can't face.

But we will all find ourselves, sooner or later, dealing with problems that money and technology cannot solve:

                   Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
                   mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
                   che la diritta via era smarrita.

                  (In the middle of our road of life,
                  I found myself in a darkened wood
                  Where the right path was lost.)

When that happens, and it will happen to all of us, we will be stuck with it. We will not be able to write a check. We will not be able to take a pill. We will not be able to ask Siri for the answers. The new car won't save us, because we'll already be off the road.

For these moments, humankind has invented the many arts and disciplines called "the humanities." Philosophy, art, literature, history, religion, theater. These disciplines do not solve the fundamental problems in the sense that those problems go away. No poem will keep you from dying. But all of these arts search for ways to deal with those problems, to come to grips with them honestly. Technology solves the problems that can be solved. Art faces the problems that cannot be solved.

Those problems do not go away. But the accumulated human wisdom of a few millennia does often help. Sometimes, what you need most is perspective, and sometimes, alas, there is nothing to give you but perspective. Philosophy, literature, and art are tools for broadening and deepening your perspective. You are a thinking soul in a difficult and transient material world. When there is nothing for you to do except to think, nothing you can change but your own thoughts, Tolstoy and Milton and Yeats are there to help.

And when all else fails, as eventually it must fail, the arts provide consolation. When the matter fails you, you will be forced to seek the comfort of self-deception or to reach for the hard-won consolation of difficult truths. For some, that consolation is philosophy, for others faith, for still others art. But I would humbly suggest that you rely on everything you can.

If nothing else, the arts and humanities give us something durable to think about in our fleeting, temporary world: things that, if not eternal exactly, are at least durable. When the world changes under your feet, the thought of something that came long before you and will remain long after you are gone is a kind of comfort. At least, it has been for me. And then I am like the poet Keats, who could no longer deceive himself about his death), looking at the ancient Greek pottery which would outlive him:

     When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man ...

What else to say? We are flawed and human and fragile, and we need all the friends that we can get.

 

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Political Advice from the Past

I'm at a rare books library this week, with politics happily tuned down to a lower volume. That's true even though the library is around the corner from the Capitol Building, and almost across the street from the Supreme Court. So I was in town for Mitch McConnell's continued resistance to the eminent Merrick Garland, but I am busy doing other things.]
What do I have to say about Obama's strategy, and the Republicans' obstruction? Not much today; maybe next week. But I did get a piece of odd political advice in one of the 17th-century books I was reading yesterday. The book wasn't as useful as I had hoped it would be, and would be even less entertaining to you, but at one point the author (Thomas Scot, about whom you heard so much in grade school), throws out two couplets about the importance of guile and strategy in high office. First, he writes:

Not simple truth alone can make us fit
To beare great place in State, without great wit.

Honesty is not enough for high office; maybe necessary but not sufficient. Good-hearted simplicity is not a qualification. How that might apply to Obama and his antagonists, I leave for you to think through on your own. But Scot finishes his little epigram with these lines:

For when the Serpent comes to circumvent us,
We must be Serpents too, or else repent us.

And there, in honor of St. Patrick the expeller of serpents, is where I will leave it for today.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Brett Foster Goes Out Singing

I was blogging today about art, especially about poetry and about grief, but that post was interrupted by the news of an old friend's death. My own thoughts about grief can wait. I will still be thinking them tomorrow. Today I give way to the beautiful, kind-hearted poet and scholar Brett Foster, who has passed out of this world. He was a better man than I have ever been, and I will miss him.

I will leave the best words to Brett himself, and to his poem "Tongue Is the Pen," written during his illness, which is more eloquent than I could ever manage. His poem begins with a citation to Isiah 43, and opens:

I am making all things new! Or am trying to,
being so surprised to be one of those guys
who may be dying early. This is yet one more
earthen declaration, uttered through a better
prophet’s more durable mouth ...

I cannot tell you how beautiful a friend Brett was, or how much I treasured him. I can only leave you to read his own words. But I will close with the end of Brett's poem:

And speaking of things overheard, you heard right:
if I have to go out, I am going to go out singing.

Praise for the Foremothers

This is how it works: men and women do things - write books, build institutions, start movements - that change your life forever, and the men get into the history books. The women mysteriously fall out of the story, over and over. How many times have you heard or read the words, "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to be free"? How many of you can name the writer off the top of your head? That's what I'm talking about. As Virginia Woolf put it, "Anonymous was a woman." Men learn to make their debts to other men public, to make a virtue of acknowledging what they owe their forefathers, and to forget what they owe women.

I like to think of myself as pro-feminist, and I was raised by a woman who had a badge and a gun. But when I list the writers and teachers who have been influences on me, the women somehow get left out. I don't do it on purpose, or know that I am doing it. No one is ever explicitly taught to do that, but somehow in our time and place it keeps happening.

If you asked me which teachers in college had been the greatest influence on me, I would have named two younger men, early in their teaching careers. That is true as far as it goes. Those teachers were obvious role models for me, and bits of their old teaching personae still show up in my classroom. If you asked me who my senior role model was when I was an undergraduate, I would have named a particular eminent man, a beloved and revered figure who was nearing retirement. But while I still think of that professor with affection and reverence, his influence on my own teaching is virtually non-existent. There is no trace of his pedagogy in my classroom. When I was nineteen, under the spell of his charisma, I thought that I would follow his particular specialty myself, but that has not been the case. I stopped studying his field even before I had graduated.

On the other hand, until about five years ago I would not have singled out the influence of the very senior female professor, the person I have blogged about as "Professor V.", who taught the introductory lecture classes for the major. It wasn't until I had finished a PhD, found a job, written a book, and achieved tenure that I began to reckon with her deep and pervasive influence on my scholarly practice. I use some intellectual tools and approaches that Vendler herself seems to think of with dislike or indifference, but there remains a baseline of critical practice that Vendler herself laid down, a bright thread of her influence that runs through the way I read poetry no matter how many other, less Vendleresque, threads I weave. And that level of influence is only more striking because Vendler only taught me intro in a lecture class with hundreds of people. She has never known me as anything but an 18-year-old face in a 10-am crowd. But even her lessons for beginners had an influence I will likely never shake off.

But to be honest with myself, Vendler was not the first woman to have an intellectual influence on me. It is only that, like many other men, I have unconsciously dropped the female influences from my intellectual autobiography. The first book of literary criticism I ever bought, which I bought for myself as a high school student, was written by a woman. The first scholarly book I ever bought, the first book with footnotes, was written by a woman, too. It was Jane Ellen Harrison's Mythology (bought, I think, in the gift shop of the Boston Museum of Science), a book that was probably too erudite to be on the kid's shelf where I found it, but I doggedly read that book and the endnotes too. Partly because Harrison got to me so early, before there was even any intellectual radar to get under, I still have a soft spot for her particular approach to Greek mythology, the so-called Cambridge Ritualist school.

If my childhood interest in mythology led me to Harrison's scholarship, my teenaged interest in science fiction led me to my first book of essays about literature. It was Ursula K. Le Guin's The Language of the Night. Like the Harrison book, it turned up randomly in a gift shop aimed at the young, offered among books it only superficially resembled. Maybe because those books dealt with fantasy or fairy tales, and maybe also because they were written by women, they were offered to young people without much thought given to how challenging those books might be. Le Guin, like Harrison, slipped through the lines because she was being underestimated.

I no longer know how many times I have read The Language of the Night. And while it was not the full-dress academic literary criticism that is part of my job today, it was my first example of how to write an essay about a piece of fiction. More importantly, it was my first model of an essayist's prose, and I could not have had a better. Le Guin's prose, lucid and evocative, as clear and as complex as running water, still gives me my sense of what a paragraph or a sentence ought to be.

I am occasionally complimented by other academics for the clarity of my academic prose. That of course is just what people say when they are being nice to me, and we are still talking about academic prose. I can never really know how clear my own writing seems to other people. But clear writing is, at least, something I value. The most obvious influence on my scholarly writing is my main scholarly mentor, my famous doctoral advisor and his own famously clear and jargonless prose. That is certainly true in itself. He is a great influence on me, and I became his student because I valued many things his work embodies. But I did not meet that mentor until late in my twenties, when I already had a degree in creative writing from another university. Other influences had shaped my writing long before I met Stephen. If I had asked about those influences even a few years ago, the first name I likely would have said is Orwell's, and that's not untrue either. Orwell's essays, and perhaps especially his newspaper columns, have been important. But until the last few months I think I would not have mentioned Le Guin, and she may be the most important influence of all.

I was all too slow to be aware of it, but this is the truth: I am trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. I am always trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. This is no less so because I do it without thinking of it; it is only more so. Her style is the ideal against which I am measured in my own judgment. She is the essayist I wanted to be when I grew up, and she is the stylist whom I, having grown up, would like to be. My fiction shows less of her influence, and is the poorer for it. But as an essayist I am and remain her apprentice. She has never met me, nor I her. But she has left her mark on everything I write. Her influence has only grown stronger, further from the surface and deeper in the structure, as my writing has matured. In the middle of my life, better late than never, I am obliged and honored to acknowledge her as my master.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Winnowing the GOP Field with Jane Austen

Scott Walker has left the Republican presidential primaries: the first dropout who was once considered a major contender for the nomination. That, and the departure of Rick Perry, leaves us with only fourteen or fifteen candidates left. In fact, the real number is much smaller than that, because of an economic concept called the Pareto principle; there have never been sixteen choices, because the Pareto principle cuts the number down to a smaller number of practical options. But since I am a book nerd rather than a math nerd, I am going to illustrate this statistical idea with my old friend Jane Austen and her Pride and Prejudice.

In Pride and Prejudice, Mr and Mrs Bennet have imprudently had a family of five daughters and no sons. Since there's no son, Mr Bennet's estate is going to distant relatives when he dies, leaving his widow and five daughters in poverty. The five girls' only hope is to marry well. But since there are five of them, there is the real danger that they will crowd each other out so that none of them gets married. Other characters ask why the Bennets have allowed all five daughters out "into society," meaning the marriage market, at once instead of letting one daughter out at a time, so that Daughter Number Two wouldn't start going to balls until Daughter Number One was married. The Bennets take a laissez-faire approach which hopes that all five girls can find husbands; the neighbors fear a Tragedy of the Commons in which the glut of Bennet sisters on the marriage market keeps any of them from being married.

Neither scenario is correct. Three sisters get married, two do not, and the two who do not are never in even the remotest danger of a marriage proposal. The Bennett sisters offer three, rather than five, real choices for potential suitors. Two of the five sisters are eliminated from consideration by the Pareto principle, which says that any option which comes behind another in all criteria being considered is thereby eliminated from consideration: "Pareto dominated," as they like to say at 538. If I'm choosing a motel for the night, I might balance my choice between low cost on one hand and amenities like good cable or a free breakfast on the other. Maybe I'll go with Chain A, which costs more but provides HBO and a waffle buffet, or the much cheaper Chain B, with its basic cable and continental breakfast. But I am not even going to consider Chain C, which costs $20 more than Chain B but doesn't offer ESPN or breakfast. Why would I pay more not to get a Danish? Chain C is Pareto dominated, eliminated from the field of choices.

Now, the eldest of the five Bennet sisters, Jane, is universally agreed to be the best-looking. She is also easily the nicest of the five. Daughter Number Two, Elizabeth, is the second-prettiest (as we know from the behavior of a failed suitor who only considers looks), but not especially nice; she can have a sharp tongue. On the other hand, Elizabeth is by far the smartest. Meanwhile youngest sister, Lydia, is far and away the easiest of the five. (I tried to find another term like "affable" or "agreeable," but none of these are quite accurate. Lydia is distinguished from her four sisters because she's the one most likely to have sex before marriage.) And of course the sisters are all equal on some criteria, such as wealth and family background. A man who needs a rich dowry, or who can't bear the thought of Mrs Bennet as a mother-in-law, is going to rule all five sisters out of consideration.

An especially shallow suitor (and the novel does have one), would just rank all five sisters by physical attractiveness: Jane first, Elizabeth second, and Mary last. By that standard, Elizabeth would be Jane's closest rival. But most people looking for a spouse are at least a little smarter than that, and choose along more than one axis, so that Jane and Elizabeth are never actually in competition with each other for serious suitors. If you're looking for pretty and nice, Jane is the clear winner, and someone looking for someone like Jane is not going to consider Elizabeth at all. Elizabeth is less physically attractive AND more likely to take your inventory with other people there listening.

On the other hand, there are suitors who value intelligence, and who might prefer Elizabeth to her prettier sister, especially if they put less of a premium on beauty alone. Elizabeth is more than pretty enough to marry, and much, much smarter than most other young marriageable ladies in the novel, so she attracts her own suitors. But there's virtually no overlap between men who pursue Elizabeth and men who pursue Jane. If you're interested in beauty and sweetness, Jane Pareto dominates Elizabeth. But Elizabeth isn't universally dominated because she has something that her sister doesn't. If you're interested in beauty and brains, Jane isn't really in the running because, while she is not stupid, neither is she unusually bright. Jane and Elizabeth each have their own distinct group of suitors and occupy different parts of the decision space.

Likewise, a caddish suitor looking for someone to sleep with rather than to marry is going to be much more interested in Lydia. Jane and Elizabeth may be prettier and, in the abstract, sexier. But they don't crowd Lydia entirely out of the decision space because she offers something they don't. If you're looking for premarital sex, the fact that Jane is hotter doesn't make her a better choice. The sexier sister who won't sleep with you is not a better choice than the still-perfectly-sexy sister who will. So Lydia, Jane, and Elizabeth present three distinct alternatives, appealing to three different kinds of men.

But the other two sisters, Mary and Kitty, are eliminated from consideration because neither offers a genuine alternative to the other three sisters. Instead, they both come off as inferior imitations of one of those three. Mary, who is clearly the homeliest, has staked all her chips on showing off her brains. Her problem is that Elizabeth is still much, much smarter. Mary's attempts to seem smart are painfully laborious, all too clearly the product of ponderous study, while Elizabeth is quick as lightning. And, worse yet, Elizabeth is also much prettier than Mary. Poor Mary can't win, and doesn't. No suitor is going to pursue Mary while Elizabeth is available.

Likewise, Kitty is a paler imitation of Lydia, almost surely the second-easiest. (She clearly knows about some of Lydia's illicit romance and keeps that secret, whereas the other three sisters would almost certainly narc on Lydia immediately.) But second-easiest, in this case, means not as easy. Anybody interested in Kitty is going to be more interested in Lydia. So, like Mary, Kitty is Pareto dominated. She is one of the eliminated choices and has to live vicariously through Lydia's imprudent adventures.

Now, our crowd of Republican candidates likewise represents a number of significant alternatives, each with its own sector of the decision space, and a number of also-rans who are basically ruled out. The candidates are competing on different strengths, most obviously on their conservatism and their electability, but there are other characteristics that resonate with Republican primary voters; the exact list is up for debate. Performance of authority seems to be salient, so that Fiorina doing her best alpha-dog act at the second debate helped her enormously. And, alas, there is clearly a subset of GOP voters that is looking for the best racist dog-whistler.

Trump doesn't compete on electability at all. But he performs authority well, he traffics in various fringe beliefs that are current among some of the party base, and  he doesn't so much do the racist dog whistle as he calls his racist dogs at the top of his voice. If you were planning to run as a maverick outsider and pick up support with some subtle racial signaling, Trump has you beat on every level. He is more of an outsider than any first-term Senator or far-from-DC governor can claim to be. He is also more maverick-y than anyone else, being not merely a maverick but a bull in a china shop, untethered by any restraint or sense of prudence. You can't be more outrageous than Trump. And if you were hoping to pick up a few white-pride voters, Trump had you beat out of the gate when called Mexicans rapists in his announcement speech. Other "outsider" candidates looking for that particular slice of white support are Pareto dominated by Trump.

There are other examples. Huckabee and Santorum are both running as not-very-electable champions of Christian conservatives. But Huckabee is both more appealing to Christian conservatives and more electable than Santorum is (meaning not so very electable, but not as hopeless as Santorum). This leaves Santorum no air to breathe at all. If Bobby Jindal was hoping to be the non-white hardcore conservative candidate, Ben Carson (even more hardcore and less white) has him beat. If Jindal was hoping to be the Chance to Reach New Voters, Rubio has him beat (because the Latino vote is much bigger than the South Asian vote).

Where we are really not seeing much competition is in the Electability sweepstakes, with the candidates whose basic appeal is that they can win in the general election. Right now the primary voters don't seem interested in electability at all; the most recent polls show Trump, Carson, and Fiorina, three candidates who haven't won a single election between them, with more than half the combined support of GOP voters. As I've argued before, the most surprising thing is not how well Trump is doing but how poorly Jeb Bush, the presumptive electable alternative, is doing. And no one has yet emerged as the main electable candidate, the way Mitt Romney emerged last time around. The 2012 Republican primaries featured one main Electable Option, Romney, and a bunch of competitors for the role of Uncompromising Conservative. This time we have a clear Uncompromising Outsider, pretty much safe from challenge on his native turf, and no solid Electable Mainstream Option. In 2012, no Republican could hold onto the Lydia Bennet role for more than a week or two. This time, no Republican has seized the Elizabeth Bennet role for even a week.

The Democratic primary, on the other hand, already has a pretty clear and recognizable shape. There's a party-establishment favorite, Clinton, whose main appeal is her electability, and a dark-horse challenger, Sanders, whose main appeal is his ideological closeness to the base. Then you have a couple of also-rans like Martin O'Malley or Jim Webb,  Pareto dominated by Clinton because they are at once less liberal and less electable than she is. And you have the non-candidate, Biden, sitting out because he would be dominated by Hillary if he got in now (he's slightly less electable and equally mainstream), but that would flip around if Hillary were suddenly undone by a major scandal. (If Hillary turned out to be, say, selling weapons to Iran and using the money to fund the Nicaraguan contras, to choose a purely hypothetical example, she would suddenly be less electable than Biden.)

Where I would expect to see movement in the Republican campaign is on the mainstream, electable side. Trump cannot be beaten at Trump's game. Candidates like Cruz or Rand Paul are going nowhere this year. Neither is Carson, really, even if he's outpolling some more likely contenders right now. But someone could conceivably take over the mainstream/establishment/viable-in-a-general-election role that Jeb Bush hasn't managed to keep or win. Yes, some of the other mainstream/moderate candidates are hopeless. No primary voter would vote for George Pataki, who is both to the left of Jeb Bush and less viable in the general election than Jeb Bush, when they could simply vote for Jeb Bush. The same basically goes for Lindsay Graham. But while Jeb himself can't manage to break ten percent in the polls, one of the other candidates in his general category could overtake him. People like Rubio and Kasich, or even Christie despite his serious problems, would be smart to stick around.  They aren't really competing against all 13 of the other candidates. They aren't even competing against Trump. Not yet. They're competing against Jeb Bush for the position of Reasonable Party Dad that he mysteriously can't nail down. Then whoever manages to establish himself in that role can go toe-to-toe with Trump under the "Yes, but I can beat Hillary" banner.

And if none of the "electable" establishment candidates emerges as a major contender, then we will be on new and unexpected ground.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

No, Colleges Still Teach Shakespeare

You may have seen news stories, timed for Shakespeare's more-or-less birthday, claiming that top American colleges have stopped requiring Shakespeare. This is not news (nothing about college requirements has changed lately), and not really true. The study uses a very specific and misleading definition which allows it not to count most of the ways that Shakespeare is actually taught in college English departments. The study refuses to accept anything but a required stand-alone Shakespeare-only course as a "Shakespeare requirement." If Shakespeare is only part of required courses, that doesn't count. And if a department has a requirement that drives most of its students into Shakespeare courses, that doesn't count either. This is misleading.

Worse, the study then rants about the various things that can be "substituted for Shakespeare" at various schools, cherry-picking various electives with titles like "Detective Fiction," "Digital Game Theory," or "Creatures, Aliens, and Cyborgs" and fulminating that these trendy classes are replacing Shakespeare. This isn't just misleading. It's outright dishonest. The authors of the study, having read the requirements for the fifty-two schools they're discussing, know full well that these courses don't fulfill the requirements that would otherwise demand Shakespeare. The schools offering the three courses I just named require courses in earlier literature, and those courses do NOT fulfill them. The authors of the study know this. They just pretend not to.

Now, I myself could only benefit from more Shakespeare requirements. I'm a professor of Shakespeare, after all. And I certainly value Shakespeare at least as much as the folks who wrote this study did. But this report is a big nothing. When you take out the dishonesty and spin, it's less than nothing.

A little background: this study is from ACTA, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which is a conservative organization dedicated to having trustees and donors micromanage academic decisions that have traditionally been left to faculty. (ACTA says it's for "Academic Freedom & Excellence," but in practice it seems upset that academics have too much freedom to make academic judgements.) And ACTA, for its own reasons, limited its study to the fifty-two highest-ranked colleges and universities in the US, according to the US News & World Report rankings. (They got fifty-two by taking the top 25 "National Universities" and top 25 "Liberal Arts Colleges"; because of ties in the rankings, that's a bit more than 50). So they didn't bother looking at the schools the vast majority of students actually attend, which might or might not say something about ACTA's own biases.

What is notable is that the focus on "Top 25" schools means that ACTA included three schools that do not have English majors. West Point, Harvey Mudd, and MIT have "literature" majors instead. MIT's literature major has two tracks, one of which looks like a traditional English major (and thus tracks its students toward studying Shakespeare) and one of which doesn't. The others have more general literature requirements that aren't necessarily focused on literature in English at all, which makes the lack of a Shakespeare requirement not terribly newsworthy. French and Classics majors mostly aren't required to take Shakespeare either. That didn't stop ACTA from listing these schools without English departments as schools where the "English major" doesn't include Shakespeare.

Now, of the 52 schools that ACTA deigned to examine, it's true that only only 4 require a stand-alone course in Shakespeare-and-nothing-else. But there are three things that ACTA isn't telling you about:

1. Historical period requirements. Nearly every school that ACTA surveyed, 47 of 52, requires English majors to take at least one course, and sometimes three or even four courses, in literature written before a certain date. For more than 40 of those schools, that date is 1800 or earlier; for another half-dozen or so, it is before 1900, 1850, or 1830.

What does this mean? It means that to "get out" of taking Shakespeare you have to take something else from a similar time period, or earlier. There are about six schools on ACTA's list where you can hypothetically get off soft by reading Bleak House, Moby-Dick, or Wordsworth. (But to be fair, it would be pretty hard to fulfill all of Swarthmore's three required pre-1830 courses with writers from 1800-1830.)

At the rest of the schools, the vast majority that ACTA looked at, the choice isn't between Shakespeare and Lady Gaga. It's between Shakespeare and Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, or - at some places - Shakespeare and enormous quantities of Alexander Pope.

In practice, most students fulfill these requirements either with a Shakespeare course or with a thematic course that include a hefty amount of Shakespeare. (I once taught a course called "Love and Sex in Renaissance Literature" that included his sonnets, two of his plays, and his long poem Venus and Adonis, but also Sidney's sonnets, Spenser's sonnets, a chunk of The Faerie Queene, Marlowe's Hero and Leander, and healthy servings of poems by Donne, Herrick, Wyatt, Surrey, Petrarch, etc. This, by ACTA's lights, is "not a course focused on Shakespeare." And the word "sex" was in the title! Gadzooks!)

If students don't fulfill these requirements with Shakespeare, they're often taking a course in early literature that's harder, less popular, or both. Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, and Donne are all more difficult for undergraduates to read, and more challenging on a line-by-line level, than Shakespeare is. And here's an insider's tip: the 18th century, although wonderful, is the least popular literary period for English majors. It's much easier to get students to read King Lear than Clarissa.

This is not dumbing down the curriculum. Not by any means.  English majors graduating having "only" read Paradise Lost and not Hamlet is not a big crisis. But ACTA doesn't want to count these schools as "requiring Shakespeare." Smith College makes its students take TWO of three single-author courses: Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Those who avoid Shakespeare by reading Chaucer and Milton aren't going to be especially ill-educated. And in practice, almost all of the students will take Shakespeare and one of the other two. What does ACTA say about this requirement? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required." Oh no, the sky is falling!

2. Survey Courses. These are less popular than they once were, but several schools on ACTA's list still require students to take survey courses that include Shakespeare. Those courses have titles like "Major Poets," "Literary History," or "British Literature to 1700."

Most of the few actual English departments that don't require courses before 1700, 1800, or 1850 require a survey instead. Some schools require a number of courses before 1800 AND the survey. So students do get taught Shakespeare, in a way that's required for all majors.

This doesn't count for ACTA, either. So, for example, Yale University requires its majors to take THREE courses before 1800 AND two survey courses: "Major British Poets from Chaucer to Donne" (the semester that includes Shakespeare) and "Major British Poets from Milton to T.S. Eliot." But students can get out of the surveys by taking four advanced courses on the poets on the survey, two from each semester. So you could theoretically get a B.A. in English from Yale by reading The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost instead of Macbeth. But it would be a pretty rare student who does. Yale actually has a fairly conservative curriculum. But ACTA's verdict? "No course focused on the study of Shakespeare is required."

With requirements like that, does it have to be?

3. Limits to the number of Shakespeare classes.

Since the whole point of ACTA's polemic is that Shakespeare is being done wrong and pushed out of the curriculum, you'd think that they would point out that FIVE of the schools on their list limit the number of Shakespeare courses that can count toward requirements. (When we throw out the schools without English majors, that's 10% of ACTA's total.) At Bates, Bowdoin, Columbia, Princeton, and Rice students can only use ONE Shakespeare course to fulfill the pre-1800 requirements.

This doesn't mean that students at those schools aren't allowed to take more than one Shakespeare class. It means that the second, third, and so on Shakespeare courses are just electives. More importantly, it means that those schools require their students to read challenging early literature besides Shakespeare. The problem isn't that students at these schools are avoiding Shakespeare. The problem is that they use Shakespeare to avoid Chaucer, Marlowe, Spenser, Sidney, Donne, and Milton. So students have to be steered to reading more widely in early periods.

These schools don't require Shakespeare because Shakespeare is doing just fine on his own. Also, the dining halls at these schools do not require dessert. That's not some liberal War on Pudding. That's because the requirement isn't necessary in the first place.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

Fifty Shades of Mr. D: The Unwritten Rules of Romance Fiction

Hollywood is making some big Valentine's Day cash off Fifty Shades of Grey, the movie adapted from the first book of E. L. James's mommy-porn trilogy. Let me say right up front that I have not read these books, because life is too short for that. But, like every living human in the industrialized world, I've been bludgeoned with so much unrelenting chatter about these books that I can recap the general plot: buff young billionaire punishes and dominates sweet young virgin in his sex dungeon, but also everywhere else. Which part of that plot bothers you most probably depends on who you usually roll with. In most of my social circles, the sex-dungeon part is not at all the problem because, hey, consenting adults. On the other hand, the punishing/dominating/stalking/abusing outside the dungeon part is very, very much the problem because Which part of "consenting" did you not understand, fool? 

The idea that a bondage-and-domination couple act out the same exaggerated roles outside the bedroom is shaky as psychology and lousy as storytelling. (My understanding is that domineering Masters-of-the-Universe types who are into BDSM are more likely to be the ones getting tied up; that dissonance between someone's behavior in bed and his behavior outside it is a potentially interesting story hook.) But that domination outside the bedroom is downright ugly as politics. Kinky sex may not be everyone's cup of tea, but the person doing the "submitting" is actually making some of the decisions and has a safe word so that she or he can bail out. (If that's not the case, as in the ugly story of disgraced CBC radio host Jian Ghomeshi, it's not BDSM. It's just beating people up.) So in Fifty Shades of Grey, the hijinks with whips and restraints may disgust or bore you, but it's the rest of the story -- the boyfriend chasing the heroine around in helicopters and hacking her cell phone and so on -- that's really morally unacceptable. That's not a romantic guy; that's a stalker who might kill you.

I can't help comparing Fifty Shades to that perennial favorite, Pride and Prejudice. The comparison is obviously lopsided, because Jane Austen is one of the best novelists who's ever written in English and E. L. James is nowhere close. Austen is basically putting on a master-class in writing on the sentence-by-sentence level; reviewers have fun with James by picking out some of her clumsy, amateur-hour sentences for quotation. But Pride and Prejudice is one of the distant models on which Fifty Shades is built, because its influence (like the Bronte sisters' influence) is shot through all of romance fiction. Even if E. L. James has never read any Austen, all of the writers she imitates (such as the writer of the Twilight series) imitate Pride and Prejudice in various ways. And Christian Grey has distant but obvious resemblances to Austen's Mr. Darcy; both are aloof, emotionally-stunted but fabulously-wealthy guys deeply invested in their alpha-male status. (Grey also owes debts to characters like Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester, of course.) Darcy is part of romance fiction's DNA.

Every genre of storytelling has its own unwritten rules, which might never get articulated and which storytellers and listeners are sometimes not even consciously aware of, but which they stick to carefully. Even if no one has ever explained a rule, even if no one can explain a rule, the story will "feel wrong" to audiences if you break it. (The pioneering work on this was done long ago by Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale.) This applies both to high and low art, including to self-consciously high art. And sometimes it's those underlying unwritten rules that are most interesting.

Now, if a central element of the Fifty Shades plot is "heroine tries to get away from love interest, who follows her around," it looks like Pride and Prejudice works in exactly the opposite way. It is Austen's heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, who ends up more or less following Mr. Darcy around England, eventually showing up in his actual house. Although people will tell you Pride and Prejudice is about manners, Lizzy's actual behavior is totally outrageous: after turning down the D-man's proposal of marriage, and taking his inventory at fairly insulting length, she then turns up uninvited in his home -- one of the classic "Oh, hi!" moments in world literature.

Austen gets away with this, and lets her protagonist off the hook, by contriving to make it seem that none of this is Elizabeth's idea. Although the main structure of Austen's plot is "Elizabeth goes to places where Darcy is," Austen crafts the story so that it always appears that Elizabeth is going to those places for some non-Darcy-related reason, often without knowing that Darcy will be there. "Oh, hi" is actually a fundamental narrative principle of Austen's novel. It is crucial that Elizabeth always be thrown together with Darcy "by chance." But "accidents" in a novel are never actually accidents. They are always the result of deliberate design, and Austen, especially, is a meticulous designer.

Austen carefully arranges all of these "accidents" because she is following a major unwritten rule of "romance" narratives: the heroine may not get the male character's affection by deliberately pursuing him. This rule is not officially articulated anywhere. But everyone follows it. If you downloaded twenty new romance e-books tonight, I am willing to bet you that none of those twenty involve our heroine seeing a man she likes, deciding to go after him, going after him, and getting him. That plot is excluded from the list of possibilities. This rule is most absolute in fiction aimed primarily at female readers.

This is not because it is impossible for a woman to attract a man's romantic attention deliberately. In the actual world, a heterosexual woman has ways to get a heterosexual man to notice her, and most straight adolescent girls have already mastered a list of these techniques: laugh at his jokes (especially the bad ones), hold extra eye contact, wear a nice dress, etc., etc., etc. While you can't win 'em all, you can bat a pretty good average. But if you are the heroine in a romance narrative, none of that will work.  It cannot work. The core rule is deliberate attempts to get the man will fail.

There are stories about women going after the man, but in those stories the women are villains (see: Gone Girl) or cautionary tales. And this seems connected to a wider set of cultural ideas about romantic relationships; as Phoebe wrote in a recent blog post: "For whatever reason, it's seen as insulting to a woman to speak of her relationship as having emerged from mutual attraction." It's likely even more insulting to imply that she did the chasing. Women who aren't imagined as having been pursued by men are imagined as being less valued.

There is an entire subset of narratives (Austen's Emma/Clueless; Gone with the Wind; Legally Blonde; etc.) where the heroine sets out on a deliberate campaign to win the wrong man, inevitably 1. failing to get the boy and 2. realizing that she is actually in love with another boy. (In Scarlett O'Hara's case, this ending is punitive: she spends the whole damn novel/movie chasing the unsexy one before realizing she'll never get him and that she's already blown it with the sexy one she does love. I'd feel bad for Scarlett, but she's a Confederate, so tough cookies.) Not only can you not get the one you want on your own, you can't even figure out which one you want on your own. The only narrative I can think of that comes close to breaking this rule is Sleepless in Seattle, where Meg Ryan spends the whole movie trying to get to the oh-so-romantically-bereft man she heard once on the radio, but even that film actually sticks to the rule; as soon as the Tom Hanks character sees her, he falls in love at first sight, so that the Ryan character never has to try to get him to like her, which never works in a story.

On the other hand, a straight male hero pursuing a female character (even, or especially, a reluctant female character) and getting her is clearly not against our rules of narrative. We tell that story All. The. Time. But a straight female heroine pursuing a male character and getting him is effectively impossible. No one is officially forbidden to tell that story, but we may as well be. Try it and you will hear that something is "wrong" with the story, that it doesn't "work."

Obviously, this unwritten rule forbids women from going after what they want, but it is strongly present in romantic fantasies aimed at women, even (especially) romantic narratives written by women for other women. These stories are about women's desires on a very basic level, but the rules require that those desires be officially disowned. You can get what you want. You just can't get it yourself. You have to get someone else to give it to you, and you have to do that unwittingly.

Both Pride and Prejudice and Fifty Shades follow this basic rule, as do the whole vast number of similar romantic narratives. Fifty Shades does it using the crudest and most obvious narrative solution possible: since she can't take the initiative, he will take it all. He'll follow her around, etc., etc., etc. One explanation for Fifty Shades's retrograde politics may simply be that E. L. James couldn't think of a less obvious way to move her story forward.

Pride and Prejudice, on the other hand, is cunningly designed so that neither Elizabeth nor Darcy seem to be doing the pursuing. The heroine-cannot-pursue rule is rigorously observed; indeed, there are a number of female characters, most glaringly Elizabeth's mother, who function to discredit outright or obvious pursuit of a husband. But Darcy is also usually not pursuing. The narrative logic of Pride and Prejudice is that once Darcy shows up at Elizabeth's house, the story is over; they're engaged. If Darcy approaches Elizabeth on any neutral ground, there is always a complicated advance and retreat; although each of these encounters is superficially different, the structure is always Darcy advances, a major plot revelation occurs, and Darcy scrams. (The given reason for retreat is always different; the structural effect on the narrative is always the same.) Austen is dedicated to creating the illusion that neither main character is seeking out the other.

Austen, of course, is not the only one who does this. Virtually every Hollywood romantic comedy is built on the "meet cute," whereby the male and female leads are introduced to one another by chance. He's not trying to meet her; she's not trying to meet him. It's always just, Oops! Just must be their lucky day. Disowning deliberate intentions turns out to be an essential part of the romance narrative.

What allows Austen to get away with this so smoothly is that she is enormously inventive in disguising her narrative moves and in creating plausible excuses for them. Austen is a great architect, and her novel is laid out in regular, symmetrical patterns. Readers respond to the book's soothing structural repetition, but if you consciously noticed how repetitive it was it would feel artificial and boring. Austen is wonderful at disguising those repetitions so that it seems like something new and different is happening; she camouflages the artfully-plotted symmetries and creates the illusion that a bunch of semi-random events are unfolding.

The novel has three parts, and in each of those three parts, right on schedule, Elizabeth visits a grand country house where Darcy happens to be. (Each of those houses is progressively more Darcy's own turf, until it's actually his own house.) The real reason Elizabeth goes to these places, the novel's reason, is that she has to be put in the same place as Darcy. But Elizabeth cannot be presented as deliberately doing that. So Austen contrives different narrative excuses; interestingly, they always involve Elizabeth going to whichever house for another woman, a close female friend or relative. This is dressed up in different guises:

1. Elizabeth's sister Jane falls dangerously ill at the country house where Mr. D. is staying with friends; Lizzy rushes to nurse her, and has to stay for several days
2. Elizabeth's best friend Charlotte has left home to marry the parson attached to a distant country house owned by D's aunt; Charlotte, homesick, invites Lizzy to visit, and Mr. D. turns out to be visiting his aunt
3. Elizabeth is touring Derbyshire with her own aunt, Mrs. Gardiner, who really wants to visit Darcy's house (which is on the Stately Homes of Derbyshire tour), so Elizabeth goes along, having heard that D. was away on business, and so ...

And so on. These are all superficially different. They are all the same move at the bottom. And Elizabeth is always nominally showing up near Darcy is in order to please a woman she already has a relationship with, rather than to start a relationship with Mr. D. The character has to have motivations that are not about Darcy. But these are just excuses for the the narrative to put her together with Darcy.

(All of these narrative excuses have their own excuses; Jane allegedly got sick because she walked to Netherfield Hall in the rain. But actually, it rained so that Jane would get sick, and Jane got sick so Elizabeth could go to Netherfield, where the novel needed her to be. And Charlotte's husband works for Darcy's aunt because Austen needs a second act here.)

The novel also needs to repeat the "third party gives Elizabeth information about Darcy" move over and over again, but Austen is always finding new ways to disguise it. Someone who dislikes Elizabeth tells her some news in order to hurt her; someone who loves Elizabeth writes a gossipy letter, assuming that Elizabeth already knows some news that she doesn't; someone randomly mentions some news without understanding its relevance to Elizabeth; it keeps on going. But it's always the same transaction: Elizabeth gets some information about Mr. D without Elizabeth asking or D. telling.

There are lots of go-betweens passing this plot information along. If Elizabeth can't go after Darcy, and if Darcy can almost never go after Elizabeth, there needs to be at least one go-between to relay information and also to move the plot forward. Austen manages this by having lots of go-betweens, in varied guises, almost none of whom are intending to move the Elizabeth-and-Darcy plot along but all of whom function to do so. Austen is ingenious enough to disguise many of these go-betweens as people trying to oppose the match. Heroine about to give up hope? Need to give her the news that she still stands a chance? Have someone show up and try to warn the heroine off. ("Why is this person suddenly so worried that Darcy is going to propose? What?") Then have that character double as the messenger who tells the D Man that he's still in the running. ("You told her not to marry me, and she said what? Huh.") It would look cheesy if a helpful friend did those tasks at the end of the story: too obviously convenient. But if an alleged "enemy" performs those tasks, it feels earned. That character is only opposed to the marriage inside the imaginary world of the story. In the deep machinery that makes the story run, that character is a crucial enabler of the marriage.

None of this makes Austen a feminist. I mean, she was writing in Regency England. And I would really, really love a great 21st-century storyteller to find a way to defeat the women-can't-pursue rule. But the differences between Austen at the dawn of the 19th century and James at the outset of the 21st are enormous, in ways that aren't to James's credit. Both Austen and James are stuck with the unwritten rule, bigger than either of them, that women can't just go out and get the men. James deals with that by having the man chase the woman even when the woman says no and isn't it all so sex-ay? Austen, on the other hand, deploys her nearly inexhaustible storytelling cunning in order to create the illusion that neither character is the main pursuer. And Austen, with artful indirection, lays out a subtle strategy that intertwines a prescription for playing the "good girl" with a prescription for playing a member of the upper classes. What permits Elizabeth to become Mrs. Darcy, i.e. to get the boy, is appearing never to strive for what she wants. But what qualifies Elizabeth to be a good Mrs. Darcy, i.e., a successful aristocrat, is also the ability to disown any striving or ambition, to get exactly what you want without appearing to try. That's a limited and equivocal kind of liberty, to be sure. But it's centuries ahead of Fifty Shades.

cross-posted from Dagblog