More on Wright's "Bright and Morning Star"

Richard Wright’s “Bright and Morning Star” was the subject of last month’s discussion.  First published in 1939, Wright’s story concerns a young African-American Communist Party organizer, Johnny Boy, in the Deep South.  Johnny’s brother Sug is in jail because of his own party activities.  Their mother Sue, is roughed up by a sheriff’s contingent sent to her home to try to make her “name names” of party members.

Sue is duped into giving names of party activists to a white sympathizer, Booker.  Johnny’s girlfriend Reva makes her realize this mistake.  Wright writes, “Her having told the names of Johnny-Boy's comrades was but an incident in a deeper horror.” Sue sets to intercepting Booker before he can tell the authorities the time and location of a meeting. She takes a gun concealed under a sheet.  She crosses a creek and climbs a hill to find Johnny Boy being tortured in order to make him talk.  Booker comes on the scene, and she shoots him dead. Pete, a member of the sheriff’s posse, in turn kills her.  

Wright presents us with a stark moral dilemma for Sue.  If she did nothing, the party meeting would have been raided, and the participants put at the mercy of the corrupt local authorities.  As it turns out, her action resulted in multiple deaths, including her own.  Wright’s story raises troubling questions about the use of violence for political ends.  What does Wright mean when he talks of a “deeper horror”?  He writes it is “call and counter-call, loyalty and counter-loyalty" struggling in her soul. 

"Bright and Morning Star," by Richard Wright

Richard Wright

It turns out that last month's author, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote in his piece "Why Write?" about this month's author, Richard Wright.

Sartre, writing in 1947, speaks of the alienation of Richard Wright.  What is the nature of Wright's work?  Is Wright a "pampleteer, a blues writer, or the Jeremiah of the Southern Negros"? His audience is not the "white racialists of Virginia or South Carolina, whose minds are made up," nor the "black peasants of the bayous."  Rather, he addresses himself to "the cultivated Negroes of the North and the white Americans of goodwill (intellectuals, democrats of the Left, radicals, CIO workers)."

After the Second World War Richard Wright moved to Paris, and remained an expatriate until his death in 1960 at the age of 52.  Sartre writes, "if he seems to be happy about the reception his books have had in Europe, still it is obvious that at the beginning he had not the slightest idea of writing for the European public.  Europe is far away.  Its indignation is ineffectual and hypocritical."

Sartre asserts that Wright's work is an example of what Baudelaire called the "double simultaneous postulation."  If he had written for whites exclusively, "he might have turned out to be more prolix, more didactic, and more abusive," whereas if he had only written for blacks, his prose would be "more elliptical, more of a confederate, and more elegiac."

If we in the United States have indeed entered a "post-racial" phase, as many believed after the election of Barack Obama as president, we would no longer need to apply the "double simultaneous postulation" to Wright's story.  How do you read Richard Wright?

Sartre on Writing

Doug Hill, a group member, sent me a beautiful note via postal mail last week.  Doug has been involved with Great Books on the Island for many years, and has led many a discussion himself.

Doug writes,

Dear Tom,
Regarding your closing question regarding the quote: "...there is a deeper and more immediate choice which is common to all of us"; what is the choice?
On further reflection, I think that the answer is there in plain sight. The title: "Why Write?" The first paragraph: "There is a ... choice"
To write or not to write. --Doug

Thank you, Doug. You remind us that oftentimes answers are indeed, "in plain sight." 

Sartre on Literature

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the towering figures of 20th century philosophy and literature.  This month's selection, "Why Write," was first published in 1947 in the journal Les Temps Modernes (Modern Times), founded by Sartre and his long-term companion, the author Simone de Beauvoir.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

A group of Sartre's essays from Les Temps Modernes concerning an existentialistic approach to literary creation was published in book form as "Qu'est-ce que la littérature" ("What Is Literature?")

"Why Write?" can be read as a manifesto of the Sartrian theory of committed literature: an imaginative literature that is engaged with the critical issues of its time.

The 1965 U.S. Edition of "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?"

Being Ordinate: Reinhold Niebuhr

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

On September 24^th, we took up an excerpt from Niebuhr’s “The Children of the Light and the Children of the Darkness,” first published in 1944.  He analyzes the crisis of democracy in the West.  What he terms “bourgeois democracy,” which resulted when the rising middle class wrested political power from the aristocracy, appeared to be under serious threat after years of depression and wars.

According to Niebuhr, democracy needs a rationale that goes deeper than economic self-interest. He finds it in the contest between good and evil in the world, as embodied in the Christian doctrine of original sin: “Original Sin makes an important contribution to any adequate social and political theory, the lack of which has robbed bourgeois theory of real wisdom, for it emphasizes a fact which every page of human history attests.”

Niebuhr equates original sin with self-love.  When we indulge in egoism, we inevitably enter into “inordinate” types of aggressive behavior that aren’t accounted for in traditional democratic theories (what he terms the “liberal creed”).

He writes, “the temptation to inordinate expressions of the possessive impulse, created by the new wealth of a technical civilization, stood in curious and ironic contradiction to the picture of essentially moderate and ordinate desires which underlay the social philosophy of the physiocrats and of Adam Smith.” (Physiocracy was a French school of economic thought that stressed the importance of landed wealth.)

 In order to steer a middle ground between the overly optimistic views of the democratic thinkers of the 18^th and 19^th  centuries, and the “moral cynicism” of modern totalitarian regimes, a “Christian view of human nature” is required.

Who Killed Yoshihide's Daughter?

Japanese writer Akutagawa (1892-1927)

In Akutagawa's story "Hell Screen," Lord Horikawa commissions the artist Yoshihide to paint scenes of hell on a screen. Yoshihide says, "in the center of the screen, falling from the sky, I want to paint an aristocrat's carriage, its cabin woven of the finest split palm leaf... In the carriage, a voluptuous noblewoman writhes in agony, her long black hair tossing in the ferocious flames."

Yoshihide says he cannot visualize the burning cabin, and asks the Lord to have his men set a carriage on fire.  Horikawa assents to this request.  "I'll burn a carriage for you, and I'll have a voluptuous woman inside it, dressed in a noblewoman's robes. She will die writhing with agony in flames and black smoke -- I have to salute you, Yoshihide. Who could have thought of such a thing but the greatest painter in the land?"

On the designated evening, Yoshihide sees his own daughter in the carriage.  Yoshihide attempts to extricate her, but a samurai of the Lord stops him.  The cabin is set ablaze, the daughter dies a horrible death.

One of our participants on the evening of August 27th pointed out the monkey apparently tries to rescue the woman ("some black thing shot from the palace roof into the blazing carriage"), but is burned himself.  An amazing flourish by the author, and one that confirms the monkey is the most sympathetic character in the story.

Although Yoshihide may have overly striven to achieve realism in his art, the one truly responsible for the daughter's death is Lord Horikawa.

Ruth Benedict and Cultural Relativism

We came upon a paragraph in  Ruth Benedict's "Anthropology and the Abnormal" at our meeting last month so astonishing as an example of the idea of cultural relativism.  It describes anthropologist Reo Fortune's field work in Melanesia in a society "built upon traits which we regard as beyond the border of paranoia," in which nastiness among people, especially ones from different family groups, prevails.  Benedict writes,

Now in this society where no one may work with another and no one may share with another, Fortune describes the individual who was regarded by all his fellows as crazy. He was not one of those who periodically ran amok and, beside himself and frothing at the mouth, fell with a knife upon anyone he could reach.  Such behavior they did not regard as putting anyone outside the pale.  They did not even put the individuals who were known to be liable to these attacks under any kind of control.  They merely fled when the saw the attack coming on and kept out of the way. "He would be alright tomorrow." But there was one many of sunny, kindly disposition who liked work and liked to be helpful.  The compulsion was too strong for him to repress it in favor of the opposite tendencies of his culture.  Men and women never spoke of him without laughing; he was silly and simple and definitely crazy.  Nevertheless, to the ethnologist used to a culture that has, in Christianity, made his type the model of all virtue, he seemed a pleasant fellow.

"Anthropology and the Abnormal," by Ruth Benedict

1995 U.S. postage stamp honoring Ruth Benedict

In our July selection, "Anthropology and the Abnormal," Ruth Benedict distills a large body of anthropological field work that had been done in her time. She examines attitudes of  traditional cultures such as those of the Dyaks, Hopis, Fijians, and Yakuts regarding social behavior ranging from catalepsy (entering a trance-like state), bereavement, homosexuality and transgendering, megalomania, even simple humiliation resulting from having committed a minor flub like falling out of a boat.

Our group has in the past taken up the issue of "cultural relativism," the idea that human values are neither fixed nor permanent, but rather derive from social norms.

In her classic 1934 book Patterns of Culture, published around the same time as "Anthropology and the Abnormal," Benedict writes, "Social thinking at the present time has no more important task before it than that of taking adequate account of cultural relativity."

"The Man Who Loved Islands," by D.H. Lawrence

Has Cathcart become withdrawn?!?

It is the summer of 1927.  You are relaxing on your English "holiday," what we Americans refer to as "vacation," and upon opening the fresh issue of the venerable London Mercury magazine, shown at right, immediately dive into D.H. Lawrence's new short story, "The Man Who Loved Islands."

Lawrence biographer John Worthen has written that the story can be read as a "critique of the idea of the isolated individual."

"Philosophy and Knowledge," by Bertrand Russell

Lord Russell

At our May 28th meeting we considered the above-named excerpt from Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy, first published in 1912.  Russell here offers us an extended discourse based on the central motif of Shakespeare's Othello*, i.e., Othello's false belief that Desdemona loves Cassio.

Russell has given us an excellent example to test his theories on knowledge.  It would be hard enough to state definitively one's own feelings of love, let alone those of another.  Russell writes:

We may say that a truth is self-evident, in the first and most absolute sense, when we have acquaintance with the fact which corresponds to the truth. When Othello believes that Desdemona loves Cassio, the corresponding fact, if his belief were true, would be "Desdemona's love for Cassio." 

This would be a fact with which no one could have acquaintance except Desdemona; hence in the sense of self-evidence that we are considering, the truth that Desdemona loves Cassio (if it were a truth) could only be self-evident to Desdemona. 

How very different is Russell's conception of self-evident truth from that of our Thomas Jefferson (all men being created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness ...)

Russell goes on "...no fact about any particular existing thing can be self-evident to more than one person.  On the other hand, facts about universals do not have this privacy. Many minds may be acquainted with the same universals; hence a relation between universals may be known by acquaintance to many different people."  

He had previously stated that what he terms "knowledge by acquaintance" can only exist when there really is "such a fact."  Russell would deem the Declaration's assertion of these self-evident truths to fall short of the standard he sets.

Whether Russell would consider the Jeffersonian truths "universal" was beyond the scope of our discussion, as his definition of universal truths is put forth in an earlier chapter of The Problems of Philosophy. 

Russell's book stands as a rigorous exploration of categories of knowledge.  He uses the English language with great precision to delineate these categories. Therein lies the ultimate value of the piece.

The group is to be congratulated for tackling works by three major philosophers (Mill, Santayana, and Russell) in three consecutive months.

*Incidentally, when Huntington Public Library's Carolyn Hasler and I started the book group in January 2005, The Tragedy of Othello was the group's inaugural selection!

Bumper Sticker Santayana-isms

George Santayana (1863-1952)

At last month's session, on April 16th, we took up George Santayana's essay "Masks," from his 1922 book Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies. Santayana was a Harvard-based academic philosopher for over 20 years before he resigned his post to become a full-time writer. His literary output was vast, and included philosophical tracts such as The Life of Reason and Realms of Being, poems, essays, a three-volume autobiography, Persons and Places, and a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, The Last Puritan, which became a best seller upon its publication in 1935.

It was remarked at the meeting that Santayana's greatest gift was creating pithy sentences you could put on a bumper sticker.

The famous saying "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," for example, is from Santayana.

"Masks," is a profound exposition on the postures and costumes and yes, masks, we all adopt to get through the hurly-burly of our daily lives.  Santayana employs an over-arching metaphor of the world as a stage (a nod, of course, to the Bard). He talks of tragic masks, comic masks, Carnival(!), and offers as his denouement to the piece a section titled "The Mask of the Philosopher." In this last section he writes, "Among tragic masks may be counted all systems of philosophy and religion."

In looking back over "Masks," permit me to offer my candidate for line best suited for a bumper sticker (and perhaps you have one as well):

"We should see more and believe less."

8 Personal Qualities for Troubled Political Times According to Mill

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

On March 26^th, our group’s subject was John Stuart Mill’s “The Criterion of a Good Form of Government,” a chapter from his book Representative Government. Mill considers how political philosophers describe the elements of a good government. He sees these elements becoming boiled down to “a partition of the exigencies of society between the two heads of Order and Progress.”

He goes on to delineate the following qualities of individuals that contribute to Order:

• Industry
• Integrity
• Justice
• Prudence

 Additional qualities that lead to Progress are

• Mental Activity
• Enterprise
• Courage

Mill concludes the Order and Progress debate, in reality, hinges on a false distinction between the two societal goals, and it's “unscientific and incorrect.”

He nevertheless does offer a plan for good government, one that's based on human excellence as an amalgam of the human qualities just mentioned. He expresses another idea that's key to his argument when he says, “If there is anything certain in human progress, it is that valuable acquisitions are only to be retained by a continuation of the same energies which gained them. Things left to themselves inevitably decay.”

Mill goes on to invoke an eighth attribute: Originality, or Invention.  In other words, we must (a) be constantly vigilant in order to preserve democracy, and (b) discover fresh means to protect it from decay.

Do you find this Millian formulation relevant to today's politics?

An Interpretation of Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand"

A reader who has even a passing familiarity with the 19^th-century American author Nathaniel Hawthorne understands he struggled with the theological concerns of his New England forebears. The title character of Hawthorne’s story “Ethan Brand” began his philosphical musings during long hours spent by his kiln on the slope of Mount Graylock. Ethan Brand represents a type of individual who wrestles with concepts like Unpardonable Sin. He says upon his return to the mountain after a 20-year quest for the Unpardonable Sin, that it was “the sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man, and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!”

The character of old Humphrey fascinates me the most. He, like both Ethan and the Jew of Nuremberg who sells dioramic views to the local populace, is a wanderer.  Hawthorne tells us Humphrey’s wandering has a specific purpose: to inquire of people as to the whereabouts of his daughter, whom Hawthorne calls “the Esther of our tale.” When Humphrey sees Brand, he upbraids him for heisting his daughter away and pushing her into a life as a circus performer. She was, Hawthorne writes, “the very girl whom with such cold and remorseless purpose, Brand had had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.”

Later, Brand sits by the kiln by himself, and reviews his spiritual metamorphosis.  He thinks about how the “Idea that possessed his life had operated as a means of education,” but concludes, “So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That indeed, had withered – had contracted – had hardened – had perished!” It turned him into an unfeeling observer, “looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his study.” Hawthorne again means to tell us his sin-obsessed character viewed others, on whom he sought to impose his beliefs, as unwitting experimental fodder.

The Wandering Jew of Nuremberg also knew Brand’s reputation, and earlier in the story says “I find it to be a heavy matter in my show box – this  Unpardonable Sin. By my faith, Captain, it has wearied my shoulders, this long day, to carry it over the mountain.”

Do we ever discover what the Unpardonable Sin was? Based on our examination of Hawthorne’s astonishing allegory, I can only conclude: IF Hawthorne believes in Unpardonable Sin at all, it would be the sin of imposing a heavy-handed belief system on other people whom you intimidate intellectually. That would be enough to make anyone want to join the circus.

Concept Map for Hawthorne's "Ethan Brand"

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

At Monday night's meeting, on "Ethan Brand," by Nathaniel Hawthorne, we'll inquire as to what Brand is really searching for in his quest for the "Unpardonable Sin."

An important key to the story is Brand's relationship to the various people in his sleepy village in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. See the "concept map" below. It will serve as a step-off point when we get together for our discussion of Hawthorne's brilliant allegorical piece.

How do the characters interrelate?

Glossary of Terms in Keats from Greek Mythology

John Keats (1795-1821) wrote these great odes in his early twenties.

The three Keats poems we take up on January 22nd contain many allusions to Greek myths.  In order to understand them on the highest level, it pays to understand the mythological backstory.  What follows is a handy glossary to the terms you will encounter in these poems.

"Ode to a Nightingale"

Dryad: wood-nymph
Hippocrene: fountain on Mt. Hellicon sacred to the Muses, the nine goddesses of arts and sciences.
Bacchus: Roman name for Dionysus, Greek god of wine

"Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Tempe: A valley in Thessaly, northeastern region on the Greek peninsula
Arcady: Mountainous interior region of the Peloponnesus
Attica: Most southerly part of the Greek mainland

"Ode on Melancholy"

Lethe: River in the Underworld
Proserpine: Goddess of the Underworld
Psyche: Beautiful daughter of an unidentified king.  Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, was annoyed that people had ceased to worship at her shine because of Psyche's transcendent beauty. Aphrodite designed to make her son Cupid have Psyche fall in love with a man without wealth or reputation. Cupid and Psyche end up romantically involved in the end.

Additional note: "Ode to a Nightingale"
also alludes to the biblical story of Ruth. Ruth was a Moabite woman who returned to Bethlehem with her mother-in-law Naomi after the death of Naomi's husband and her two sons, one of whom, Mahlon, was Ruth's husband. Though homesick, Ruth loves her mother-in-law. She finds a new husband, Boaz.