Recent Past in Village and at Home, In the Midst, and Coming Events

 

Dinosaurs sighted in Northport

That was a surprise as I was leaving the bank parking lot on Thursday morning, and I had to go back for a better view. Apparently both male and female T-rexes had been at the Leelanau Township Library. The plant-eating dinosaur over by the Depot did not seem fazed by the arrival of carnivorous cousins.

Other of us (non-dinos) were somewhat fazed by commotion on Waukazoo Street a little later. What was going on? It involved shutting off the water for our whole block, which meant closing our block off to vehicular traffic and unanticipated time off for the restaurants. 

Bookstore stayed open, though. We had lights. And now, on Friday morning, everything is back to normal.

Home Life

Life continued busy as we northern Michiganders launched ourselves into August. Raspberries have peaked, however, and rain overnight on Wednesday meant I didn’t have to water gardens on Thursday morning. I also picked what look like the last of the beans for this summer (having failed once more to stagger bean plantings). So a few things are no longer on my daily to-do list.

Purple on the outside,
these beans turn green in hot water.

We had our first August company, as my younger stepdaughter and her husband brought their adorable little camper and set it up in the yard for a couple of nights. 

Her sister drove up from Kalamazoo to join the fun, and we all had a collaborative al fresco dinner at the farm on Tuesday (featuring fresh Kolarik sweet corn, a neighborhood treat), followed by a night out at the new Bluebird on Wednesday (treated by the sisters). Wonderful, all of it! Tree guy pronounced our guests “cool,” and they found him “delightful!” Sunny was even exceptionally good with company in the house and yard—as long as there were plenty of tennis ball tosses and as long as her momma didn’t forget Sunny’s meals. I admit she had to bark a couple times to remind me.

Cherry pie was my contribution from one of the three quarts of fresh tart cherries Carlos Fuentes gave me from his gleaning adventure in a neighborhood orchard where he has known the owner for years. He picked and offered, I pitted. (The end of a potato peeler works great for pitting cherries, by the way.) Result: Yum!

My reading

I continue to make progress in the fascinating saga of the 17th-century life of Roger Williams, having gotten him at last from England to colonial America. Among the many, many fascinating facts and events, I was delighted to learn that before he undertook to act as missionary to the Native Americans, Williams took the time, on his own initiative, to learn the language and the customs of local indigenous peoples. The treatise he wrote at the request of the governor of Plymouth authorities and presented to Governor John Winthrop unfortunately exists no longer, but apparently he ruffled a few feathers when he argued (having learned the law in England under Coke) that the Native Americans did make use of the land on which they lived and therefore had legal ownership of it, that the land was not just lying there unused for the indiscriminate taking by Englishmen! He ruffled even more feathers, however, when he stated baldly that the English king was a liar. I am liking this Roger Williams fellow more and more all the time, but he offered his treatise to be burned when the authorities persuaded him that its existence put him in danger. As had so many others and as is still the case today, he gave in to the pressure of the group. 

Reading more than one book at a time sometimes brings surprises. One such for me is how well The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power, by Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, dovetails with the life of Roger Williams. Late 17th-century colonial America and the early 21st-century United States of America have more in common than I would have guessed. 

Three years earlier suffrage had been restricted to male church members, but during those three years, three years during which the population grew enormously, church membership became increasingly exclusive. Initially, one had had to do little more than sign the church covenant to become a member. That soon changed: to join a church now, potential members had to prove themselves “visible saints,” had to prove that they were among the precious few whom their Calvinist God would save. This forced potential members through a stringent and arduous process that included standing before the entire congregation and presenting evidence that God had made the seeker a saint…. This was no pro forma ritual. It was an intimidating, difficult, rigorous, and by no means always successful test. In most churches the congregation had to vote unanimously to accept the new member. Those who either did not seek or were rejected from membership could worship in a church—in fact, the law required them to do so. But they could not belong to a church.

As a result, only a minority of the population, and a decreasing minority, were church members and qualified as freemen with voting privileges.

- John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty

Who are the “true” Christians? Can a non-Christian be a good person (or a good American)? Should the laws of the community—colony, state, nation—be determined by churchmen? (If so, which churchmen?) What of people who disagreed, whether church members or otherwise? What of those who followed other religions or no religion at all? What gives law its authority? 

Kramer and Alstad argue that Americans today (though not only Americans) have internalized authoritarianism in ways we don’t even recognize. Blind submission to any authority, they say, has its root in self-mistrust, and self-mistrust comes from a psyche divided against itself, with one part labeled ‘good’ and the other part labeled ‘evil.’ They point out that most religions, including Buddhism, consider self-centeredness to be bad, selflessness the ideal good. And so, when we seek a positive good for ourself that does nothing for anyone else, we feel selfish and bad. The divide is embedded in our culture.

Here is an insight I had the other day about their idea: Ayn Rand’s “virtues of selfishness” philosophy does not introduce a new value system at all. It merely flips the good/evil division, insisting that selfishness is good and altruism bad. The “new” morality she offers is just as divisive as the old was, and, like Nietzsche, the “purity” her morality demands can do nothing to integrate what Kramer and Alstad identify as a divided psyche. In the obsession with purity, where someone following a traditional morality would have to twist her reasoning considerably to find altruism in a selfish choice or action, the Randian practitioner has to brand her altruism somehow as selfishness to feel good about herself. 

Kramer and Alstad write (and they are always very clear when stating their opinions that they are doing just that), 

In our framework[,] being self-centered is simply an aspect of being human, as is the capacity to truly care for others. Not only does each have its value and function, they are intertwined rather than totally separate or even separable. Any morality that separates the two, giving much more value to one (the selfless), cannot but deeply divide the psyche of those who accept this frame.

        - Joel Kramer and Diana Alstad, The Guru Papers: Masks of Authoritarian Power 

While they do not address Ayn Rand’s philosophy,* I find a general parallel in what they say about American society’s double message--the fascination with rule-breaking individuals, the romance of the “lawless” frontier, the American love affair with criminals and with fictional bad boys. 

“Rebellion is bad and dangerous,” on one side; and “Rebellion is not only exciting and exhilarating, it is freedom,” on the other. Double messages from parents have been shown to cause schizophrenia in children. The double messages a society puts out likewise must fragment its members, but here the resulting pathology is disguised by being the social norm.

A fascinating book! I was able to find The Guru Papers still available from my distributor so put two copies on my last order. One sold almost immediately. The other is still available. My own copy was already marked up by a previous reader, and I have marked it up even more. 

I finished reading The Meadow, by James Galvin, and still re-reading Mistress Masham’s Repose, by T.H. White, though I haven’t gotten through many pages of either book the past few mornings or evenings.

*Next day: Nearing the end of the book, I find this in a passage about guilt and frustration creating "a self-absorbing vicious circle, for most guilt can be traced back to guilt about being self-absorbed." They continue:

Either/or thinking creates various types of reactions. For example, the "me first" attitudes much in evidence these days (we call it the Ayn Rand syndrome [my emphasis added]) react against puritanical, selfless values by embracing self-centeredness as the "real truth." ...But being an either/or reaction...it also mistakes one aspect of the person for the whole. If we were instead to acknowledge the reality of self-centeredness along with the reality of care and love for others, we would be able to focus more on appropriately balancing the two, both in our own lives and in our social systems.

Coming bookstore author event

Trying to keep up with myself as summer races by, I managed (just barely) to get a press release to our county newspaper for the bookstore event next Thursday, a reading by and audience conversation with Jennifer Sager, whose book Steph’s Story won my heart. Jenny is a delightful person--read more about her here--and I hope many of my local bookstore friends and summer visitors will find time to come learn about her book and her sister. 

The date is August 13, the time 4 p.m., so you’ll have plenty of time to hear and speak with Jenny and not miss your cocktail hour, let alone dinner. 

Oh, and this very Saturday, August 8, is Northport's annual dog parade! Theme this year is “Pawty Like a Rockstar,” so we anticipate a lot of creative and colorful costumes. Wow! It's summer, and the hits just keep on comin'!

The President Is NOT a Pragmatist!

What I write today will matter to very few of you. It’s one of those boringly sincere attempts at clarification that generally meets with the response “Oh, who cares?” In this case, who cares other than philosophers? Well, that would be me, so I care, and if anyone else has the patience to bear with me for a few paragraphs, you have my heartfelt gratitude in advance. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

The president and his chief henchman in the Senate are often called “pragmatists” because they will do “whatever works” for their immediate gain. People applying the label to them believe that “whatever works” to win some particular victory, score points over opposition, solidify (if only temporarily) a position (however specious the support for it) – those people think that’s exactly what and all that pragmatism is. 

 

They are wrong. 

 

While those who call the president a “pragmatist” are clearly using the word in the casual, loose, inaccurate sense currently bandied about, the term is wrongly used in a much more important sense that would evidence knowledge of the history of philosophy – and I’m not asking the American public to go back and read Plato, for heaven’s sake, only to have some small, even superficial nodding acquaintance with America's most important contribution to world philosophy, a contribution as recent as the 20^th century. Twentieth century – remember that? Unless you’re an adolescent or a child, there should be something familiar there.

 

Sorry, that was sarcastic. Let me begin again. 

 

The modern school of thought that came to be known as pragmatism, while forerunners of it can be found all the way back to Ancient Greece ("nothing new under the sun"?), originated right here in North America, with honors generally going to logician and experimental scientist Charles Sanders Peirce ((1839-1914). Peirce was by most accounts a difficult and eccentric individual, but he recognized that scientific research could not be carried out along the lines suggested by Descartes, wherein an individual begins an inquiry into truth by doubting everything, but instead requires a community of investigators who begin their investigations with the assumption that reality exists independent of opinion. 

 

I ask you, does this sound like the president’s approach? 

 

Pragmatism as applied to science simply is the much-vaunted scientific principle: based on what we know at the beginning, we predict the results of an experiment and then test our predictions. 

 

If a proposition is true, then anyone who investigated the matter long enough and well enough would eventually acknowledge its truth: truth is a matter of long-term convergence of opinion. “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

-      The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

 

Do not be misled by the phrase “convergence of opinion” and see in it truth as something conveniently made up out of whole cloth. Truth in science is subject to empirical testing. It is provisional, in that future testing can always uncover errors and thus increase knowledge, but Peirce, please note, did not doubt an underlying, pre-existent reality. It is because of reality that extensive experiments by a scientific community can uncover truths.

 

Most of us are not experimental scientists and are more familiar with the name John Dewey than that of Charles Sanders Peirce. John Dewey, I note, has long been made a whipping boy by certain conservative voices, but most of them (in my opinion, because that's what you get here, but I will not leave that opinion unsupported) are whipping a straw man they call “Dewey,” and not the philosopher I know at all. 

 

John Dewey (1859-1952) was concerned with social issues, including education and politics, and he brought the philosophy of pragmatism to bear on these issues. How so? He believed human beings investigate questions of right and wrong by setting up and testing hypotheses about issues, always keeping in mind that conclusions might require future revision. In other words, we learn through experience. Does that sound dangerous? 

Dewey was no wild-eyed mad scientist! He viewed all of human history as having already tested basic rights and wrongs. So we have no need need to experiment to learn that lying or murder or cheating are wrong. Human history has already made those experiments. In this, I believe Dewey remained Kantian, and we see the Golden Rule here, also, as Kant appealed to it in his various versions of the Categorical Imperative.  

 

Dewey on education is a huge subject, and although it is there that his critics generally aim at the straw man they construct, education is a side issue for me today., so I’ll merely quote again briefly from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy:

 

…Dewey focused on the nature and practical improvement of education, arguing that children cannot be understood as empty vessels, passively awaiting the pouring in of knowledge, but must rather be seen as active centres of impulse, shaped by but also shaping their environment.

 

Now I suppose if you see children as empty vessels waiting to have knowledge poured into them, you might find Dewey a wild-eyed radical, but who that has ever been around children – or ever been a child! – could hold the view that children are passive, empty vessels? Really?

 

Actually, I once knew an otherwise very intelligent person who believed that “doing” philosophy (as we all said in graduate school) consisted of “learning the moves” from the best teachers available. The best teachers were necessary because, this person believed, a student could never be (do) better than his or her teacher. I was amazed by such a view. A student unable to criticize? To me, that implied a student unable to think! And so, I ventured to inquire, you believe Western thought has been getting stupider and stupider since Socrates, because all of Western philosophy comes down to us through a succession of teachers and students who began at the feet of Socrates? Yes. Well, I didn’t buy it then and never would.

 

The pragmatists would never have bought such a view of philosophy or anything else, either. They believed in the progress of thought, in the growth of knowledge, and the gradually increasing enlightenment of human beings. --There are times, I acknowledge, when it is difficult to believe in progress of any kind. At least, it does not seem a steady march forward, does it? But that too is a big topic for another day. 

 

My main twofold point today is simply that (1) pragmatism is a serious, native-born American philosophy; and (2) pragmatism is not “whatever works for a single individual” – to score a point, win the pot, or whatever. Pragmatism has to do with the advancement of science and the betterment of society. 

Cheating and lying, blaming and name-calling undermine our trust in one another and would, as strategies adopted by us all, make our institutions unworkable. These strategies are not pragmatic! They may be the moves of an egotistical opportunist who can’t see further than tomorrow, but they do not serve to further the cause of business or government or science or ordinary life in civilized society or anything that might be called progress. 

President Obama was a pragmatist, and his first concern was for the United States and for all Americans. The Republican-led Senate, however, cared more about blocking any positive achievements that might reflect well on a Democratic administration than with across-the-aisle cooperation to make gains for ordinary Americans. Now, for all President Trump’s bellowing “America First!” his impulsive, richocheting utterances and shifting, unstable, momentary alliances illustrate something very different. 

In short, to call the current president a “pragmatist” is to give a good American philosophy a very bad name.

They Light Our Way Along the Arc

Photograph by Marjorie Farrell

An essay's conclusion, writes William Dereshewicz, is not something we refer to as a fact but rather as wisdom. He allows that the ideas in an essay are “often openly impressionistic and provisional, colored by feeling, memory and mood,” going on to say,

But the essay draws its strength not from separating reason and imagination but from putting them in conversation. A good essay moves fluidly between thought and feeling. It subjects the personal to the rigors of the intellect and the discipline of external reality. The truths it finds are more than just emotional. – William Dereshewicz, “In Defense of Facts,” The Atlantic, January-February 2017

Not every reader is as fascinated by the essay form and its history as I am, but anyone who has been awake this past year realizes that there have been bloody assaults on truth and facts, and many of us find that cause for concern.

Although my new Atlantic arrived last Friday, it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon that I got around to Dereshewicz. I’d started the morning with the longest piece in the issue, “My President Was Black,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Mine, too, I want to tell Coates, and I have a lot more to say about that, but I’ll save it for another time. For now let me just say that all my readers who don’t subscribe to The Atlantic should go right out and buy the current issue, because the Coates article alone is worth the cover price. After you read the whole issue, you’ll probably want to subscribe. I hope so.

Here are a few lines from the editorial in the current issue:

Obama is not an unalloyed idealist. He has complicated feelings about the nature of humanity, and harbors few illusions, in particular, about the moral systems that govern many other countries. But he has always seemed sincere in his belief that America is a place that possesses a unique capacity to become better, and then better again. “The arc of the moral universe is long [my emphasis added], but it bends toward justice,” he often said, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., but he really meant that America’s arc bends toward justice.

That stopped me in my tracks. Light dawned, belatedly, in one bookseller’s brain! The title of Kathleen Stocking’s book: The Long Arc of the Universe – that was her reference!

Originally I didn’t care for the title. It seemed vague and having little to do with the content of the essays – but only because I had completely missed the allusion! When I’d shared my initial misgivings about the title with the author, she kindly refrained from pointing out my ignorance. I wish now she had not been so careful of my feelings!

Because now it makes perfect sense. It captures perfectly Stocking’s optimism in the future, a clear-eyed optimism she shares with President Obama, despite hard truths both have faced in this world.

Neither Obama nor Stocking is optimistic because they live in ivory tower isolation. Both have served – Obama in Chicago activism, the Illinois Senate, and the White House; Stocking in country schools, California prisons, and in the Peace Corps – in ways and places demanding a pragmatic, hands-on, the-buck-stops-here approach to problem-solving. Neither can say that the problems they tackled are now only historical footnotes. That should go without saying. Problems persist. The world is hard on people, and it’s harder on some than on others. But, like President Obama, Kathleen Stocking continues to have faith in the human capacity to become better and to make the world better. And both can say they put themselves on the line, personally, to do something toward that end.

Obama is quoted in the Coates article as saying, elaborating on the statement of Martin Luther King, Jr.,

To be optimistic about the long-term trends ... doesn’t mean everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line....

Well, if optimism had to mean that, there couldn’t be an optimist anywhere in the world, could there? Kathleen Stocking wrote me in an e-mail, following the November election:

Ruth Gruber died today. She was 105. She was in Germany hearing Hitler's rants in 1932 and sounded the alarm, but no one heard. She photographed the people in the camps, the boats of refugees turned away by the British warships from Palestine, and so on. It can happen again. And it can happen here. There's no doubt at all in my mind about that. But I also believe, with Obama (that whippersnapper, that youngster) that history is not a straight line. Our species is evolving toward greater and greater consciousness, but there is backsliding, detours, and the process is slow, in any event. Julian of Norwich had to pretend she couldn't read and write and that everything was coming from heaven and had to be translated. Because any woman who could read or write was in league with the devil. As we all know.

But as she writes in her most recent book of personal essays, The Long Arc of the Universe: Travels Beyond the Pale:

The hard thing about living anywhere, I decide, and traveling in general, is that one can never live long enough or see enough of the world to fully understand the long arc of the universe and make sense of it. Little bits are all we get, and it’s never enough to see the big picture.

Holiday decorations by Kathleen Stocking

I do not call myself a pessimist. At the same time, I often find it hard to be optimistic about “the big picture.” Little corners, yes. Pockets. Certain stretches of time here and there. But it’s true that none of us gets to see “the big picture,” the “long arc.” Kathleen Stocking and President Obama, however, remain optimistic in their long views, and they have seen much more than I can claim to have seen, so I’m taking their words seriously.

The philosopher of my heart is Henri Bergson, who lived in France from 1859 to 1941. In his heyday, he had been the equivalent of a rock star. The public swarmed his lecture hall at the Sorbonne – it was the place to be! – and finally a section of seats had to be cordoned off and reserved for students, because socialites had started coming in to the lecture preceding Bergson’s to assure themselves seats for the star.

Never a novelist, always a philosopher and teacher, he was nevertheless awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, but by 1940 his star had faded, and he lived quietly, out of the limelight. Then came the Occupation. Bergson’s earlier glory was not forgotten by those who had assumed power. Eager to piggy-back on his reputation, they offered him blandishments, their recognition – which apparently they thought would be an irresistible inducement. Bergson said no.

The immediate cause of his death during the Nazi occupation of Paris was bronchitis, but I have always suspected heartbreak. Ill for many years with crippling arthritis, on the arm of a caregiver he left his sickbed to register as a Jew, despite Nazi assurances that he was “exempt” from the new, odious racial laws. Again, he could have sold out, but he didn’t.

Bergson died on the fourth of January, 1941, and I have always imagined him on a cold winter day, in the city he loved, arriving home exhausted to die of a broken heart – in part because he had been a most optimistic philosopher, sure that the human spirit was evolving in something higher and finer -- and whenever I have told the life story of Bergson to someone unfamiliar with his name, it has been hard for me to keep tears from my eyes at the end. But the truth is that I wasn’t there. I did not know him. And the day he died was probably not, as it has always been in my imagination, the same day he stood in line to register for his yellow star.

Undoubtedly he felt deep, wrenching sorrow for what had come to Europe in his own last days, and I cannot imagine that his heart did not ache, terribly -- for the Jews, for France, and for the world. But that he chose to show solidarity with the persecuted, though he had never practiced the religion, was a choice entirely in line with his philosophy and his entire life. By his own definition of freedom, that is, arrived at as early as his 1889 doctoral dissertation (Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience), his was a free act in 1941, neither mechanical reflex nor directed from anything exterior to his own soul. It came out of everything he was, out of his entire life leading up to that moment.

And exercising his freedom would have been, necessarily, for him, an affirmation and demonstration of the possibility of freedom. Would he also have been able to maintain, amidst the horrors of that time in history, his faith in the evolution of the spirit?

Ready now for holidays

Richard Leakey of Kenya, when entering political life, was asked by an interviewer, “Are you willing to give your life for this country?” Leakey is a white man whose home is a black African country, and the subtext of the question was that in running for office he might risk death. His answer, however, spoke not to the risk of death but to commitment: “What else does any of us have to give?”

It is not for us to question life, Viktor Frankl wrote. Life questions us. How will we answer? An amazing, inspiring person! He saw the absolute worst of the twentieth century and somehow kept faith in humanity.

How do these people do it? How do they maintain faith and optimism, despite all they see first-hand that could drive them to despair?

There will always be those in the moral universe who blatantly steal and rob from others, as there will always be the less obvious free riders, who simply manage not to pay their legitimate dues. But at the same time there will also be, besides the mass of responsible dues-payers, those who not only pay their own dues but who move mankind forward (or at least keep us from being forever lost in the abyss) by being extraordinary, by doing more than their share, by achieving wisdom and by serving as models for the rest of us.

Moral progress, if there is such a thing, is not a smooth, direct line. Okay. There will be backsliding. All right. But does it exist at all, this moral progress? Is the human spirit evolving into something better? Was Henri Bergson able to believe that still as he closed his eyes for the last time?

Martin Luther -- not my favorite guy! -- thought faith a matter of grace: You are given the gift, or you’re not. But what if faith, like any virtue in the Aristotelian sense, is a matter of practice? You get up every day, regardless of circumstances, despite difficulties, and you do what you can. You’re as frightened as the next person, but you choose not to let fear paralyze you. And doing what you can, one day at a time, despite fear, strengthens your faith in the future and in your fellow human beings. Do you think it might work that way?

It’s the only way I can make sense of it – moral progress not as a matter of inevitability, not operating blind like the evolution of the physical universe, but as something created by human choices and actions. Because if the long arc of the universe is to bend toward justice, is it not up to each of us to do our part, though all we can see is our little bit of here and now?

Warmest holiday wishes, my friends. Keep the faith! And thank you for being in my life!

P.S. 12/23/2016 - Here is a very inspiring essay. My sister Bettie sent me the link. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, all!

Photograph by Marjorie Farrell

Random Discoveries and Recommendations

This morning’s "Shelf Awareness" newsletter, which I receive by e-mail each business day, included a report from the Codex Group, including survey information showing that most “personal recommendations” gaining books new readers are for backlist titles, not new books. Codex is also concerned that recommendations themselves come from and are a form of “random discovery” and that many new books that will be overlooked, undiscovered, and thus not personally recommended.

Books recommended on this blog are definitely personal recommendations—usually mine, although there may be a guest reviewer from time to time—and “random discovery” pretty much covers the territory for how I stumble upon books I love. Not always. Sometimes a publisher offers a review copy, and if the book sounds like something I might read, I take up the offer, hoping for the best. More often, I must say, a synopsis from the publisher or author tells me it just isn’t my kind of book--and if it’s a book I wouldn’t read myself, how could I recommend it?

As for the books I find by serendipity, let’s face it: “random” in book discovery doesn’t exactly have the impersonality and lack of judgment of atoms colliding. There are clues ahead of time—the aforementioned synopsis, cover blurbs, an introduction or preface, sometimes the author’s established reputation. Books having to do with Michigan, especially northern Michigan, are apt to get my attention, whether fiction or nonfiction. The others? If the Buddha Had Kids was sent to me by the publisher after a rep inquired and I said yes, I was interested. The Tiger’s Wife has been the choice of so many book clubs I’d have had to be brain-dead not to have heard about it.  A customer brought in My Grandfather’s Blessings (see right-hand column) with a stack of other books to add to her trade credit account. High Tide in Tucson came the same way, the author’s name well known to all of us who love books. I can’t remember how The Concise Dictionary of Chinese-English Language fell into my hands, but I’m glad it did. (I think I found it somewhere in the U.P.) That covers a handful of recent Books in Northport recommendations. Typing “book review” in the search bar at the top of the page will take you to others.

A couple of the fiction titles mentioned in my third paragraph above were also part of my post on “Fiction and Judgment.” But now, my latest rave--

High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver (HarperCollins, 1995), is a collection of essays that defies one-word description, unless with a meaningless word like wonderful” or “fabulous.” Some of the essays are hilarious, e.g., “Life Without Go-Go Boots” and “Postcards From an Imaginary Mom.” Others are quietly thoughtful, like the title piece, “High Tide in Tucson.” Still others, such as “Stone Soup,” are justifiably angry over things more people should be angry about. Kingsolver writes of her own life and about writing, and good writing about writing always interests me, but she also writes about the world of nature and the world of artifact and artifice. In the later category are essays on prehistoric Native American sites in the Southwest and a decommissioned missile silo, both with remarkable reflections and insights.

The problem is, which essays to discuss, and what passages to quote, in recommending this book? The trouble is that with this collection, as with My Grandfather’s Blessings, I find myself wanting to quote the entire book!

While not all of Kingsolver’s essays are concerned with fiction, by a long shot, you won’t be surprised that I would read the ones that are with special attention, and so, in the spirit of some kind of continuity, or at least follow-up, I’ll focus on an essay called “Careful What You Let in the Door,” one that takes on that question of violence in fiction, part of our recent discussion.

When I watch a film whose plot capitalizes on the vulnerability of women to torturers, maimers, rapists, and maniacs, I take it personally. I feel preyed upon. I don’t enjoy sitting through another woman’s misery even if I keep telling myself that her big problems there are really all just ketchup. It still hurts to watch. For me, a recreation [read ‘re-creation’] of simple violence has no recreational value. So why would I ever create an act of violence in a novel? My answer has to do with the fact that I don’t consider a novel to be a purely recreational vehicle. ...Art is entertainment but it’s also celebration, condolence, exploration, duty, and communion. The artistic consummation of a novel is created by the author and reader together, in an act of joint imagination, and that’s not to be taken lightly.

A few readers stir restlessly. Isn’t Kingsolver missing an awful lot about of film by taking all movies to be only pure recreation? Suppose we divide movies into two groups and books into two groups, with one group of movies and one of books labeled “pure entertainment,” intending nothing serious. I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t help answer the violence question for me. Kingsolver says of what she calls “slice & dice” entertainment (I remember the righteous indignation of a young coworker many years ago over the bloody mayhem of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” a film whose title apparently was insufficient to warn her away), “See enough of this bang-you’re-dead kind of thing and you’ll start to go numb around the edges, I guarantee.” But it was the more serious “Silence of the Lambs” that she felt culturally obligated to see and that made her feel “preyed upon.” (No, I didn’t see it, and I won’t.)

As a serious novelist, Kingsolver takes the question of fictional violence seriously:

I find I’m prepared to commit an act of violence in the written word if, and only if, it meets two criteria: first, the act must be embedded in the story of its consequences. Second, the fictional violence must be connected with the authentic world.

She does not create fantasies of violence to titillate and excite but conceives fictional worlds to help us—and herself--understand and find our way through the world in which we live. The caveat with which she ends her essay echoes the title of the piece:

I will not argue for censorship except from the grassroots up: my argument is for making choices about what we consume. The artist is blessed and cursed with a kind of power, but so are the reader and viewer. The story no longer belongs to the author once it’s come to live in your head. By then, it’s part of your life. So be careful what you let in the door, is my advice. It should not make you feel numb, or bored, or demented, or less than human. But I think it’s all right if it makes you cry some, or feel understood, or long to eat sand for want of more, or even change your life a little. It’s a story. That’s what happens. 

Fiction and Judgment

Lately I’ve read some very compelling novels, no one of them like the others. The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, by Guo Xiaolu , was a glimpse into a world of experience completely different from my own, the narrator a young Chinese woman come to London to study English for a year. Quickly, impulsively, and through an initial misunderstanding (she thought his suggestion of a visit to his flat was an invitation to move in), she falls into a highly sexual relationship with a much older Englishman. They share passion and curiosity but cannot really understand one another, either culturally or as individuals. One of the most unusual and fascinating aspects of the novel is the focus on language, both English and Chinese--different parts of speech, tenses, large concepts and idiomatic expressions, as well as the difference between an alphabetic writing system and one based on characters that evolved from pictographic representations. At my suggestion, David has been reading the novel and, as I was, particularly enjoyed the young narrator’s assessment of how verbs live within the two languages:

Chinese, we not having grammar. We saying things simple way. No verb-change usage, no tense differences, no gender changes. We bosses of our language. But English language is boss of English user.

To see ourselves as others see us!

A friend loaned me an Icelandic novel, Under the Glacier, saying he couldn’t make head nor tails of it, and, frankly, neither could I. Tempting as it was to throw it aside halfway through, I finished it—and then wondered why I’d bothered. What on earth had possessed Haldor, Laxness, whose Independent People, written in 1946, won the Nobel Prize for Literature? Susan Sontag wrote a generous and thoughtful introduction to the Vintage paperback edition of Under the Glacier, tracing its myriad antecedents and influences in the following genres (I kid you not): science fiction; tale, fable, allegory; philosophical novel; dream novel; visionary novel; literature of fantasy; wisdom literature; spoof, sexual turn-on. She also called the work “wildly original, morose, uproarious,” but doesn’t the list rather suggest a jumbled hodge-podge?

Then came The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht. And yes, yes, I admit it: I am one of those snobbish readers skeptical of best-sellers. That’s probably why I took the path through the forest of used books, to begin with—for the sweet, secret pleasure of discovery. But fortunately another member of one of the reading groups I’m part of (the smallest one, the one hardest to schedule, the one of which we always wonder, Will it ever meet again?) chose The Tiger’s Wife for our fall discussion, because I’m so glad I didn’t miss this story! It begins with two young women, doctors, crossing an armed border to take medical supplies to what was recently part of their own country. The story probably takes place in “the former Yugoslavia,” although the country is never named, and that nonspecificity adds to the book’s power. The narrator has had a phone call from her grandmother, saying that her grandfather has died, and thinking of him brings forth all kinds of memories from her earlier life, as well as memories of the stories he told her from his own life, as far back as childhood. Some of the stories merge into primeval rural legends. Fact and fantasy entwine, along with dream and reality. Reality itself often makes little sense. Usually, I would be put off by fiction with these elements and impatient, during the tall tales sections, to return to realism, but not with this novel. It carried me along seamlessly, compellingly.

What, then, is the difference between Under the Glacier and The Tiger’s Wife? Why is one (in my opinion) a mess and the other a success? I don’t know if Obreht plotted her entire novel in advance or let the story lead her where it wanted to go, but my sense was of a writer who knew what she was doing, an author who could be trusted. With Under the Glacier I never had that sense at all. I felt like the butt of a long, pointless bad joke.

And this, finally, brings me to my main topic of the day: judgment. In what ways is it appropriate to judge fiction? Writers of fiction? And should an author judge his or her characters? To put it all together, should a novel and its characters and its author be judged on moral grounds?

The other day I had a conversation with a friend who was very upset about a novel she had just read. My friend did not like the choices that the main character made in her life. She, my friend, thought the writer was advocating the character’s way of life, since, after all, “she was the one in control of the character.” My friend took a Kantian view of the protagonist and felt that society could not function if everyone made the choices that character had made. I couldn’t help asking, “So you’re saying the author should have written a different book?” Mostly, though, I tried to listen without arguing. After all, my friend felt strongly, and there is no arguing with feelings. (This is a lesson I’m trying hard to learn.)

There was so much going on in her judgment. Is an author “in control” of fictional characters? Are they like marionettes, with the writer pulling the strings? My own limited experience with writing fiction suggests otherwise, but really, this question detours away from the main road I want to travel and explore today....

The plain truth is that my friend and I are both very judgmental individuals. For instance, when I drive into Northport and the driver in front of me fails to signal turns, you can bet I’m passing judgment!a minor example to show how leaping to judgment is second nature to me, as it is with my friend.

One very popular view in American culture today holds that it’s wrong to be judgmental, and young people who hold this view (I got strong doses of the view in the community college philosophy classes I taught) take it as inseparable from freedom. But the opposite view was held historically: Because we are free, we must judge ourselves and others. Any time I choose, whenever I take action, I have judged—whether after considered reflection or spontaneously (i.e., from my character as it has been formed through life). To judge another to have acted wrongly is to say, in effect, “I would not think it right to do that” or “I would be wrong were I to do that” or (more generously) “I hope I would not behave in such a way in that situation.” To judge that a person made a morally correct decision is (or should be) to think, "That's what I would do" or "I hope I would be able to act in such a way myself." In Kantian ethics, the standard I apply to others I also apply to myself. 

Kantian or utilitarian, or whatever religion or no religion, altruistic or totally ego-driven, because we are creatures who must make choices, we are also creatures who must judge. It is a necessary aspect of our nature.

Still, do we overdo it? Do we leap to judgment unnecessarily, after the fact, when nothing hangs any longer in the balance and when condemnation adds nothing of value? These are rhetorical questions, not real questions, because I believe the answer is Yes, and I hope my explorations into Buddhism will help me accept and understand more often than I condemn.

But my question of the day has to do with fiction, so let’s come back to our sheep, as the old French proverb has it.

Should an author judge her characters and present only characters making "moral" choices, and should we as readers judge an author by his or her characters’ choices and actions? Do we apply the Kantian moral imperative to fictional characters and, by extension, to their author? I told my friend that the main character in one of my short stories is a bigamist, but that hardly means I am advocating bigamy! It’s fiction, not a political platform. In each of my ten Burger Shack stories, there is a character either at an important moral crossroads or one who has gone through a crossroads without seeing it. Another way I think of characters in fiction is that there are people who might sit next to you on a long bus trip, and you’d find their company a nightmare, but if you read about that person as a character in a novel, given the author’s insights into how that character came to be the way he is now, your understanding might lead you to feel at least some sympathy, if not liking. That is part of the power of fiction.

In The Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, for example, the narrator is well aware that most people she meets don’t like her. She is one of the least popular students in her English class, known for what others see as her insufferable rudeness. When we read her story in the novel, we see her differently, from the inside. We see her in her complexity, her depth. In that way, fiction can teach us—if we let it—how to be more understanding of people in our everyday lives.

Many writers and critics insist that writers should not judge their own characters--that doing so turns fiction to melodrama and/or propaganda. Realism, science fiction, murder mysteries, fantasy—all are richer if the characters are more like us, multifaceted, flawed, struggling. Sometimes I do judge a writer because of characters presented, though, because a novel with nothing but thoroughly reprehensible characters engaged in criminal, violent, or otherwise heinous activities is not a novel I want to read. I have to feel some sympathy and understanding. I have to care about at least one character, or I won’t go far with the story. So yes, to that extent I do judge an author’s choices.

The subject came up because my friend was so troubled by violence in a novel she had just read, one that I loved but knew would be a problem for her. I asked her what she thought about what I call “supermarket” novels—those popular, best-selling paperback action stories people consume like potato chips. Does she not find their popularity appalling? And if not, why is it all right for those books to wallow in violence? "Oh, that’s different," my friend said. “That’s not the real world.” But any novel we find compelling is “real” during the time we’re reading it, and although one of my friend’s objections was that the novel she was troubled by did not depict “the real world” (it isn’t the world of Northport), clearly she accepted the character as “real” when she objected to the her choices. So is it okay for male writers to write about male characters being violent but different if a woman writes about a woman? Why? How can we apply a double standard to literature? Are fictional women allowed only interior adventures, nothing that involves action in their fictional worlds? That bothers me a lot. If women cannot be fully human in fiction, how on earth can they be fully human in life?

But I go back and forth on this myself, and viewing fiction moralistically is a difficult call. I remember reading the Greek tragedy “Antigone” in high school and having no trouble whatsoever judging Antigone as completely in the right and Creon as completely in the wrong. When I learned that the play was about the dilemmas of conflicting rights, I was aghast. Creon’s responsibility for the state and Antigone’s refusal to consider the political repercussions of her actions had flown right under my adolescent radar. I’d judged the characters simplistically, not seeing that both were right and both were wrong, and therein lay the tragedy. Seeing the complexity in that story was an important part of my growing up.

Tonight is the first discussion session of our group reading Moby-Dick together. What will we all make of Ahab? And what will we think of Melville for having created Ahab?