Elie Wiesel’s Night

Elie Wiesel’s Night is a poignant cry in the night, a record of a nightmare, and, ultimately, a work of historical fiction. After all, who could remember the words of so many strangers under such horrible conditions? Body and spirit were nearly ground to dust. Moreover, Night, like every testimony of history, is first and foremost a testimony of the author’s state of mind at the moment of writing.

Is Night literature? It is an artistic reflection on the Holocaust, but can any amount of art turn a disaster into something healthy? Why healthy? At least, we can expect literature to be healthy. But Night is more likely to spawn nightmares and stain and corrupt the word “night” so much so that the word will have to be replaced with a new word.

One does not overcome history by turning back to reflect on it, as Lot’s wife did when she turned back to look at the fires of Sodom, for in doing so she turned into a pillar of salt—a synechdoche, perhaps, for tears. Nor does one overcome history through ignorance.

In Ulysses Stephen Daedalus says he is trying to escape the nightmare of history, and he fails, but in Finnegan’s Wake he succeeds, he succeeds by vanishing from a narrative that is not a narrative, a narrative that cannot accommodate human beings, at least, not the illusion of persons who exist as unchanging identities. And that movement may well be Stephen’s promised moral for humanity: destroy the illusion of stasis, of identity, of unchanging phenomena.

The “hero” of Night, Elie Wiesel, is transformed by the Holocaust experience. He loses his faith and seems to grow stronger because of it. Unfortunately, the Holocaust hardly provides the conditions necessary for human beings to grow strong enough to grow healthy and whole and free of illusions. For that one must have ideal conditions: schools, at least teachers and an atmosphere largely free of stress.

Ironically, the pivotal moment in Elie’s loss of faith, i.e. in his loss of illusions, is his hallucination/vision of the Angel of Death. Why does this angel come during the Holocaust? Plenty of Jews and others lose their faith under much more humane circumstances. I lost my own freely, under conditions of plenty. The truth is that the very Jewish Angel of Death (excuse the personification) is always waiting for us, waiting to be confronted and understood. And perhaps it is precisely our refusal to own up to Death, a Death freed of religious trappings that prevents us from understanding the universal, that prevents us from changing and paradoxically brings upon us the deadly, mortifying Revenge of Psyche wherever humanity destroys itself.

I am not suggesting that we forget the Holocaust; I am suggesting that we strip it of its historical dressings so that we can better understand the universal, the kernel. Only in the shallowest sense does that mean we forget the Holocaust.

In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel identified Israel as “the only nation in the world whose existence is threatened.” How dated that claim sounds in the age of global warming, rising oceans and … well, meteors. In arguing for the preservation of any nation, Elie Wiesel does us no favors. Nations have always served the forces of division and borders are largely the products of empire building. Nationhood itself will one day be a dated concept, replaced, pehraps, by a nobler construct, something more flexible, rational and humane, something born not from greed, or, in Israel’s case—desperation…

Some peoples do not even have “nations” – I speak of the world’s coming artists, comedians, philosophers and all children of joy… They too are being liquidated, aborted, every day, by the forces of the world, since the beginning of civilization. Who will speak for them?

Shakespeare, Or, How to Destroy an Elizabethan Idol

Voltaire and Tolstoy condemned Shakespeare’s works on moral grounds, Nietzsche did so on aesthetic grounds, and yet I went through five years of high school and undergrad and graduate university “English” studies without reading or hearing a single criticism of Shakespeare. Blessed is the life of an idol, and the “priests” who earn their daily bread lecturing on the gospel of Shakespeare must be the last to … bite themselves. Today, literary criticism is a kind of archaeology of bones, an ivory-tower journalism that disguises its irrelevance, cowardice and laziness under a veneer of objectivity and jargon.

To be fair, perhaps the idol to be destroyed is not Shakespeare but Elizabethan Prejudice, which Shakespeare’s works were crafted to appease and validate. To see the appalling extent to which Shakespeare has done this, we must divest ourselves of the gross generalization that all literature is intrinsically dignified and uplifting. Since the right to free speech is relatively recent, Tolstoy and Voltaire may have enjoyed freedoms that Shakespeare never tasted; therefore, we can hardly be surprised that Shakespeare’s work is largely a flattering mirror for Elizabethan Prejudice.

Now for an apparently rhetorical question: How could Shakespeare’s audience enjoy his plays? As this is meant to be a serious questions, let me rephrase it: How could Elizabethean, plutocratic, white, male, Church-of-England aristocrats enjoy Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet or any other Shakespearean drama? Let us think outside our relatively liberal 21^st century box, cease viewing our history as star-struck tourists, and consider all the prejudices of those aforesaid Elizabethan men: hatred of Catholics, hatred of all non-Christians, hatred of other races, hatred of other nations, hatred of women. These and other prejudices are all validated by Shakespeare’s works, and this is not so surprising—not if one considers who paid for Shakespeare’s productions, and—not if one considers that Shakespeare’s world was marked by violent religious persecutions, and—not if one considers that his world did not afford dramatists the right to criticize its bigoted ruling class.

OTHELLO

Shakespeare knew how to capture the interest of his privileged audience. A black – becomes general of a Christian army and marries a Christian woman? This is a challenge to popular prejudice if we ever saw one, or is it?

Sadly, Othello was likely never intended to challenge Elizabethan prejudices as much as to confirm them. If Othello is a good man, a trustworthy man, an honest-dealing man and not a superstitious and sex-obsessed beast, than why does his name allude to brothel and bordello – two synonyms for houses of prostitution while the former actually meant prostitute? It doesn’t help that Shakespeare elicits laughter by having Othello suggest that sex is not a factor in his affair, for he admits he has lost his manly potency. And the matter is not improved by the fact that Othello married Desdemona in secret, behind her father’s back; this fact merely validates the base prejudice that minorities cannot be trusted and ought to be kept “outside”.

Although Othello succeeds in disproving the claim that he used magic to seduce Desdemona, the play validates the Elizabethan stereotype that all Africans are superstitious because Othello is obsessed with the magical properties of his Egyptian handkerchief.

As for Desdemona, please, she’s no feminist heroine, unless rebellion alone qualifies women for the prestigious title. Desdemona’s name contains sufficient warning: demon. A devil, she rebelled against the father and married outside European, aristocratic blood. No audience of Elizabethan nobles—and peasants too—would ever tolerate her being portrayed as a heroine. She is a demon and as such she is not normal, and that is putting it rather mildly in light of her death scene, in which she continues to live and even speak, with no sign of panic, well after her husband starts to smother her.

Furthermore, Shakespeare seemingly warns his priggish audience, be careful with your daughters! Do not invite the Other (the oppressed, the slave, the…) into your home, lest he reveals the horrible truth about how he and his people are abused and your pure, innocent and impressionable daughters are won over to the devil’s side!!!! Eek.

As for Iago, what is he but some greedy, ambitious, money-grubbing ladder climber? Elizabethan nobles would have spat on him and the entire category of men who pursue money and status by means other than war and marriage. Still, though despicable, Iago cannot be executed for causing the deaths of Othello and Desdemona and some other dubious characters.

ROMEO AND JULIET

What a bizarre, unfathomable display of emotional disability. A thirteen- and fourteen-year-old commit suicide over love? Well, why not? Nowadays Korean children of the same age commit suicide over school grades, and American children of similar age go on killing rampages, so maybe Romeo and Juliet is not a fantasy, and children like Romeo and Juliet did exist in Elizabethan times.

But what was the attraction to Shakespeare’s audience? Did this and other Shakespearean tragedies appeal to the morbid fantasies? The Romantic era was still a ways off. Did they treat the play as a warning for aristocratic families to make peace amongst themselves? How could that make sense if, in Elizabethan England, feudalism and spats between aristocratic families had been largely subdued by a powerful national monarchy and government (Civility: A Cultural History. Benet Davetian)? Well, consider that the play is set in post-Renaissance Italy, where national unity was relatively lacking and feuding between powerful families remained in vogue. But Romeo and Juliet is more than a scornful critique of the uncooperative and belligerent Italian spirit; and it is more than an affirmation of the Elizabethan spirit of aristocratic restraint; on close inspection, Romeo and Juliet is first and foremost an attack on the Italian—or Latin—religion.

A new question: Oh Romeo, why did Shakespeare make you such a monster? Barely a teen, yet you lament that Rosaline defended her virginity from your advances too zealously! Immediately afterwards, you kiss Juliet at first sight, commit two murders, receive an official banishment from the city, and take Juliet into the grave with you. Monstrous villain! That—at least, is what Shakespeare’s Elizabethan, Church of England audience must have thought.

In Shakespeare’s time and country, marriage between 13- and 14-year-olds was becoming rare, so his aristocratic audience could enjoy a sense of moral superiority over Juliet’s mother and nurse (the women, of course!) when they pressure Juliet to marry at the age of 13. That sense of superiority would only be magnified by the Capulet’s insistence that Juliet should marry someone named Paris, whose name was already associated with the Trojan adulterer and—in Shakespeare’s time—was likely associated with the abhorrent religion of Catholic France, Paris having been its capital since 508 A.D.

Romeo Montague was not named by accident: he is Rome-o, and therefore he is also semantically associated with the then stigmatized Church of Rome, the Catholic Church. And Rome is legendary for having been built on hills, or mounts; and Montague is a rare English surname from the French meaning peaked mountain. Anyway, the Catholic connection explains why Romeo compares Juliet to a shrine, a saint and a pilgrim; and it also explains why Lady Capulet speaks of Saint Peter’s Church. Etceteras.

J-uliet is Rome(o)’s J-esus. Rosaline is the eternal virgin, or rose, the flower traditionally symbolic of the Virgin Mary, supreme idol among some Catholics. The nurse hints at this kind of letter-play when she says,

“Doth not

rosemary and Romeo begin both with a letter?

[…]Ah. mocker! that’s the dog’s name; R is for

the—No; I know it begins with some other

letter:—and she hath the prettiest sententious of

it[…] (Act 2:4, 1351-52, 1362-64)

Some other letter? She speaks obscurely. R is for the—what? The Romans or with the Catholics of Rome, who are identified by and synonymous with rosemary, that is, with the Rose and with (the Virgin) Mary?

Quietly interspersed in this Elizabethan stew of popular prejudices, Shakespeare placed hints and warnings about the education of young people and the danger of a secular form of idolatry that calls itself Love. In fact, Romeo and Julie, Othello and many other Shakespearean plays, are partly intended to promote and validate the conservative prejudice against romantic love and the conservative or noble tradition—the tradition that favored arranged marriages.

KING LEAR

What on Earth could have attracted Elizabethan aristocrats to this exhibition of royal madness and dementia? Were they interested in learning some deep moral lesson about the nature of the human mind? Of course not! They watched because Lear’s exhibition of madness and dementia serves to caricature anyone who worships Apollo and the gods of Nature—and, by extension—it serves to caricature all non-Christians.

King Lear invokes the name of Apollo and is quickly reprimanded by the moral-monster, Kent, for taking his god’s name in vain. Lear believes in the visible gods of the Greek pantheon and he sees nothing beyond the visible world except “nothing,” so “nothing” becomes a recurring motif in the play. Lear’s problem would have resonated deeply with the anti-Catholic sentiments of Shakespeare’s time as part of the argument against the Catholic Church was that it worshipped visible objects like statues of saints and virgins. The wisdom of the Protestant, Church of England belief that a living God exists beyond the visible world is also indirectly touted through mad Lear’s ‘failings.’

Gloucester expresses his despair with the words, “the gods / They kill us for their sport” – a line with little force in a world far removed from state-sanctioned acts of religious persecution, but it was surely onerous and indicative of a grave delusion to Elizabethans.

As for Cordelia’s marriage to the King of France, this either flatters the British sensibility or—more likely—it appals that sensibility because France was officially Catholic and—in Shakespeare’s time—it’s enemy. The Catholic connection explains why Cordelia’s tears are compared to the “holy water” used in Catholic ceremonies. In other words, while we moderns may lament Cordelia’s undeserved death, Shakespeare’s audience would have seen it as a perfectly deserved punishment for a woman who married into the blood of heretics.

Like the other Shakespearean tragedies, King Lear is less a tragedy than a national anthem for bigots, but it distinguishes itself from the other ‘tragedies’ by being half a comedy or mockery. King Lear’s mockery of pagan and ‘unconverted’ kings begins with Lear’s name, which is a homophone for leer – “a sidelong glance suggestive of sexual desire or malice.” The old king is further made to seem ridiculous in virtually everything he says and does: his decision to divide his kingdom before his death but during his dementia, his foolish test of love, his abuse at the hands of his daughters, his voluntary surrender of his best daughter to the king of France (France was not in England’s good books in Shakespeare’s time), his banishment of the only man who cared about him, his failure to recognize the same man in disguise, his talking to nature and to himself, his invocations of Apollo (judging from ancient Greek sources, Apollo was a barbaric and vengeful god whose idea of helping amounted to producing disasters.), and—for good measure—the old man’s failure to recognize his good daughter disguised as the fool, as there’s good reason to believe Shakespeare intended them to be played by the same actor. Similarly, Gloucester’s attempted suicide scene is a grotesque comedy. After all this—is King Lear still a tragedy? Sure, as much as all of Shakespeare`s works mirror the tragedy of Elizabethan values.

Finally, consider the bastard, poor Edmund. Does Shakespeare’s drama attempt to win sympathy and understanding for children born out of wedlock? Ha! You must be kidding. Shakespeare caters to every noble, blue-blooded, monogamistic bigot in his audience with the first line that springs from Edmund’s mouth: “Thou, nature, art my goddess.” You see, he’s not a very Christian bastard, is he? And doesn’t that prove something? Doesn’t that validate a certain prejudice or two? Upon hearing his opening line, Shakespeare’s righteous audience might have thought, “Heathen! Godless, unconverted, swine!” And Shakespeare intentionally plays Edmund into their hands knowing that they would never tolerate a play that challenges their prejudices about children born to ‘unfaithful’ women. And so, not only does he make Edmund a worshipper of the ancient nature goddess, but he makes Edmund a believer in astrology, a forger, a destroyer of marriages, a murderer, a speaker of prophetic gibberish, and … in case this isn’t enough, he makes Edmund utter his own condemnations.

HAMLET

Hamlet is first and foremost a religiously biased play. This should be obvious from the name of its tragic failure, Hamlet, whose name, in Shakespeare’s time, meant a small village without a church. Consequently, Hamlet’s name would have conjured up popular prejudices against the unconverted.

Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s purity and his anger about her quick remarriage is patently Catholic, and, thanks to King Henry VIII, the entire Catholic “problem” was deeply associated with the issue of marriage, divorce, remarriage and purity. Shakespeare’s audience could hardly have watched Hamlet without being reminded of Henry VIII break with the Roman Catholic Church and the cult of the Virgin Mary. (Hamlet’s mother’s name, Gertrude, comes from the Germanic word for marriage, and so is the Germanic equivalent of Mary, whose name could have conjured up the hated image of the pro-Catholic Mary I, Queen Elizabeth’s immediate predecessor. Though Shakespeare’s audience was likely unaware of English-German word play, its presence is consistent with my reading).

Hamlet’s visions of ghosts serves both to appeal to the latent superstitions of the Elizabethan aristocrat and to mock the superstitious leanings of the unconverted. His dead father’s ghost’s complaint that he was condemned to purgatory because he didn’t have the opportunity to ask for a trendy and expensive Catholic deathbed absolution would—in the eyes of an Elizabethan audience—mark him as a Catholic.

Hamlet further fulfills the negative stereotype by neglecting his studies and behaving like a madman towards Ophelia, whom he reputedly approached at night, uninvited, in the manner of a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth, with his tights around his ankles. This “abominable” behaviour satisfied the bigoted audience’s inclination to demean the unconverted and the small-town, uneducated riffraff.

MACBETH

Two Shakespeares exist: on the one hand, a Shakespeare who catered to the demands of his narrow-minded audiences, on the other hand, the Shakespeare who wrote to the future.

The first Shakespeare was a brilliant caterer who satisfied the theatre-going public’s demand for lust, violence, murder and conflict. He gave his Elizabethan audiences what they wanted; he appealed to all their lowest fears and desires and he made sure never to offend the ruling class. I understand: he was not independently wealthy.

The first Shakespeare risked upsetting his good white, male patrons with Macbeth, a portrait of a heinously corrupt monster who also happens to be a white man with a decorated military history.  Under no circumstances could Shakespeare have allowed Macbeth to voluntarily, by his own will, murder his king and the king’s sons. Such treason would have produced a bad taste in the mouths of his noble patrons, those good white men and women. What does Shakespeare do to ameliorate the plot? He brings three witches to the rescue. They trick Macbeth into committing his crimes. This is guaranteed to appeal to the sexist, superstitious and Christian-biased beliefs of the noble Elizabethan mind. Hecate, the chief witch, even calls Macbeth a “son astray” just to make sure no one thinks a true Christian could be seduced by witches (btw, the irony of Hecate’s reproaches to her subordinates is sublime). And—just to make sure no common man was offended by Macbeth’s actions, Shakespeare made sure Lady Macbeth’s overpowering rhetoric gives the audience one more scapegoat on which to heap the white man’s crimes.

The second Shakespeare encrypted his critique of England and Queen Elizabeth in his ugliest tragedy, Macbeth. This is why the play bears next to no resemblance to the historical Macbeth, King of Scotland, and refers to another beth, —namely Queen Elizabeth (Beth is the diminutive for Elizabeth), the female tyrant who here serves as a metonym for the murderous, imperialistic British Empire that still washes its hands of its colonial nightmare. The important difference, here, is that the British imperialistic spirit is not driven by witchcraft but by priestcraft and its religious prophecies of future kingdoms, military victories and glory. But, in fact, the difference between witchcraft and priestcraft is entirely illusory, as Macbeth’s visions seem almost lifted out of the Book of Revelations. As historians know, Britain thought and still thinks of itself as the “house of God” – that is, to make a Hebrew pun, it thinks of itself as  “Elijah-beth.”

What, is it true, that we please our audiences best when we give them sickness and sin? Shall we ever take the “conflict” out of out plots and enjoy a little sunlight and fresh air?

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

Did Shakespeare make a serious effort to diffuse the anti-Semitism of the Elizabethans with a sympathetic portrait of a Jew or with a general critique of those values to which Jews, no less than others, are beholden? No. Instead we have Shylock. His name likely evoked ‘wedlock’ and thus foreshadowed the Shylock’s loss of Jessica, his Jewish daughter, to the ‘heathen’ Lorenzo. The name may also have evoked ‘Warlock,’ which in Shakespeare’s time referred to the devil as well as to witches.

Shylock is a type of the predatory banker and financier whose greed and hatred of humanity drives him to embody a monstrous parody of Christianity: instead of receiving the flesh of Christ for the purpose of receiving grace from spiritual debt, he demands Antonio’s flesh as a payment for the financial debt of others. Could anything have seemed more abhorrent to a Christian audience?

Shylock’s daughter is named Jessica, a name—like her father’s—which Shakespeare seems to have invented, as if actual Jewish names were lacking. Why Jessica? Was it to invoke the then notorious Jesuits or Jesus Christ and, thereby, to foreshadow the girl’s marriage to a Christian (admittedly, Antonio would be a Catholic Christian, but even in Elizabethan times that would have provided a relative pleasure, for we can safely assume that even then the prejudice against Jews was stronger than the prejudice against Catholics.). Alack—what if Lorenzo converted to Judaism? There’s no evidence that either side converted, but it’s clear that Jessica is operating in defiance of her caricatured father, and so the whole affair suggests that she is saved by Lorenzo, whose name has historical connections to the papacy and to a saint.

Who is Portia? Jessica’s friend! Ha-ha-ha! A Jewish girl befriends a girl whose name means pig, it being the feminine form of the Roman family name Porcius! And the low comedy doesn’t stop here, as three ships come into port.

THE TEMPEST

The Tempest is a most pleasant fairytale about Prospero, the Duke of Milan, a man who was a disciple of the forbidden, very unchristian, black arts. In the moral context of Elizabethan England’s religious mania, which was not so different from the spirit of the Inquisition that marred much of Catholic Europe, any disciple of the black arts deserves whatever suffering he receives. Therefore, the Duke’s forced expulsion to an island is just and good. And, although the Duke defeats his enemies, Shakespeare quite prudently does not let him return to power in Milan without the Duke first renouncing magic.

Voltaire Tolstoy

Kafka

What if Kafka was right, what if Max Brod should have heeded the following deathbed request:

“Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.”

Let us not assume, rather selfishly, that Kafka was kidding or was not himself, let us attempt to defend and therefore respect his wish.

Why burn his work unread?

First Reason: In no way was Franz’s writing intended to be public. It is a deeply personal and private writing, almost an extension of his diary and letter writing. Reading it to the public often made him laugh—not because the content was funny but because reading it to the public seemed so inappropriate.

Second Reason: His writing communicates one man’s perception of the absurdity and meaninglessness of life in Germany, possibly of life in general. Much of his work reflects his personal, professional experience of the onerous, impersonal and labyrinthine German bureaucratic and legal system. While his writing may testify to one man’s ability to keep his imagination alive, it is hardly a celebration of the imagination, nor does it provide useful insights into human behaviour, and—finally—since it is neither hope or happiness inspiring perhaps we can agree that it is not particularly recommendable to the public.

Third Reason: For Franz, writing was as much a torment as a pleasure. Bouts of creativity kept him up late at night, alienated him from his wife, weakened his already delicate constitution and was no help in his struggle with tuberculosis. Why would he wish it on others?

Fourth Reason: His major works were left unfinished on account of the demands of his professional life, domestic duties and his poor health. Possibly, he felt that even his finished works were not truly finished works, that is, perhaps he sensed that they did not fulfill his authorial potential.

In light of these reasons to respect Franz’s wish, how do we respond to Harold Bloom, who not only ignores Franz’s wish (as I have done) but heaps further disrespect on him by claiming the following, “Despite all his denials and beautiful evasions, [Kafka's writing] quite simply is Jewish writing”? Bloom’s statement is both bold and reductive. No one can deny the influence of Judaism on Franz, but to say his work is “simply” Jewish might underestimate the influence of the man’s German education and his professional work as a German bureaucrat and lawyer. The absence of metaphor, attention to mundane details and the nameless characters and placeless places in Franz’s works hardly attest to a Judaic influence; these qualities echo the impersonal world of bureaucracy. Indeed, since I have worked with government bureaucrats—the influence is simply unmistakable.

In conclusion, disregarding Franz’s wish to belong to no one seems both perverse and flattering. That said, the time may yet come when we will honour his brave self-assessment and respect his noble wish.

James Joyce

Why read Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake? As a fan of both books, as someone who still finds some amusement and insights in Joyce’s works, perhaps I will seem to contradict myself by issuing a condemnation of Finnegan’s Wake. But seriously, James condemned himself by stating the following about FW:

“I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”

At worst, these are the words of an egomaniac and a sadist bent on tormenting a class of professionals he largely dismissed; at best, these are the words of a most subtly sarcastic comedian. He wants them to “argue” – you understand, to argue and not to achieve epiphanies and moments of cerebral-aesthetical bliss! Think of the cunning and malevolence… and yet, think of the gall or absurdity of openly stating his evil design…

Ha-ha-ha.

Oh, wait, this isn’t funny at all, is it?

“The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.”

What? You egomaniacal monster! My whole life? Well, actually I don’t mind devoting my whole life, or at least my waking hours, or at least those hours—or minutes—when I’m not otherwise employed, but I would only do so if your books gave me happiness and good precepts by which to live, and I fear you never intended to provide either, so there!

Ultimately, reading James’ works is an exorbitant exercise suited only for book workers, i.e. polyglot and lexically overdeveloped academics—and yet, not even for them!

What the world needs is sustainable literature—literature the whole world can learn to enjoy with relative ease and without a crippling investment in post-secondary education. Or what, shall happiness and wisdom belong exclusively to the wealthy? Ah, no, what they call education is an industry and largely a colossal waste of time.

Poe

While we are right to see the causes of personal tragedies in the tragic shortcomings of the greater world, we are also right see causes of personal tragedies in the tragic failure of art or any personal work to sustain and nourish us. This means, by way of example, that we might not be surprised that Edgar Allan Poe drank himself to death, for his work, regardless of its morbid influence, is hardly something that might give one the strength to enjoy living. Works such as Poe’s, which are rooted in personal tragedy and vision, might be relatively meaningless to the many fans who experience his fiction as just that–fiction, something that stimulates and elicits no understanding of any deeper truths.

From Ancient Greek Drama

Ancient Greek tragedy is a lost world to me. I cannot feel its anguish. In fact, I honestly sense something comical about it, the Oedipus trilogy included. All that fear and dread of fetid family revelations. Sure, it’s no delight learning that you killed your father—but by Jove, cut yourself some slack Oedipus! After all, you killed him without intent to kill him, and he certainly intended to kill you when you were just a babe. So, his death was due punishment, and what could be sweeter than executing the very man who intended to execute you? Of course, I make bad jests, and all this blood makes a poor comedy. But then consider incest: a harmless deed, and—I say this without blushing (sorry mom)—hopefully his mother enjoyed the deed. Oops, I killed the man who tried to kill me; oops, I slept with the woman who gave birth to me. In short, Greek tragedy resembles comedy to me.

As for Agamemnon, please, he left his wife to fight for a strumpet for 10 years, and we expect his wife to chain herself to chastity? If you love a woman, but cannot please her, let another man do better, love says. As for the murders that followed her adultery: what else can one expect from people who know nothing of education?

Only the xenophobic, narcissistic, interbreeding, nepotistic, chauvinistic Athenians could see the tragedy in Greek tragedy. Nietzsche’s flattering appraisal that the Greek taste for tragedy evinces strength of spirit is just half of the story.

What about Athenian comedy? Why, with all its cruel parody and bile, it seems to warrant more tears than tragedy. Even Plautus could not write a comedy free of witty barbs, treachery and deceit born of greed. Reading such comedies, I sometimes feel like I am overhearing the crude invectives of a dog.

There’s much progress from ancient Athens to Elizabethan London. Shakespeare’s tragedies are not half as fantastical and funny as the Athenian tragedies, and his comedies are much less cruel. Sure, S. helped the upper classers laugh at our Bottom and at all the poor tradesmen in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it’s farcical rather than mendacious.

With Jonathan Swift satire is unleashed upon the world… for it was a world ready to tolerate some criticism, though not yet criticism of religion. Was Swift funnier than Shakespeare? Perhaps not, for with satire, tragedy and comedy are conjoined and consolidated into a form bearing little resemblance to its parents.

With Mark Twain, satire softens and turns towards comedy, though the comedy, or humor, remains chained to satire, social criticism, heresy and even philosophy.

Today, in the civilized world, high tragedy has evolved from the first mythological monsters into an open critique of the world, while low tragedy–both horror shows and tear-jerkers–remains half of Hollywood.

The future has no need of tragedy beyond what we can find in every thought. The future comedy will be what we shameless ones create.

Chekov’s Proposal

Chekov’s “The Proposal” is a good example of how a master writer promoted the liberal values of his time while being careful not to advocate the entirely anachronistic values of the distant future and thereby deny himself a readership. In this ironic tale about class power, a woman of the upper class attempts to teach a lesson to the poor, meek governess of her children. She wants to root out her meekness and teach her to be assert herself and defend her right to be paid fairly. This plot, or plan, is very topical. In Chekov’s time the Russian lower classes were already growing bold and whispering about a revolution. To present us with a representative of the upper class who actually encourages the poor to assert themselves—well, that is rich, that is delicious, if only because it is deliciously ironic and rather preposterous.

Does the governess learn to be “strong”? Of course, Chekov used the word ironically, to imply that the strength of the upper class was is not strength in the highest sense of the word. Therefore, the governess had no reason to learn her lesson—even if she could have, for it was a lesson that was poorly and cruelly taught. Had it been taught better, the lesson would have spoiled the literature, and the story would never have been published.

If true strength is not the strength to demand one’s due wages and possibly risk unemployment, poverty and death, than what is it? The question of true strength could not be addressed by Chekov; to the masses it was and remains unthinkable, and though it is both the secret spirit of every revolution it is also the spirit that will never have its own revolution (in the narrow sense of the word).

Huckleberry Finn

In Huckleberry Finn we have the soul of America’s fears and — especially — its desires. To be like Huck, an unlucky lad but still luckier than unlucky; healthy and smoking cigars without a care in the world, unemployed and yet never hungry or miserable, living a life of adventure, too young to understand much about global problems (like racism), just a pirate living on stolen money. Ah, that’s the life, America, the World — that’s the vision Mark Twain gave us over a century ago. It wasn’t just a portrait of desire, it was a prophetic portrait, as today, more than ever, we live among pirates. I do not speak of Somali pirates who teach us small lessons about human nature, I speak of the revolutionary lessons about white collar criminals taught by submarine monsters who finagle entire countries into penury. Huckleberry Finn is not primarily about racism, it is, first and foremost, a book about money, deceit, hucksters, hecklers and fin-agling. Though I have savored Twain’s humor, one cannot read this book without tasting his vomit too, for it is no pretty portrait he painted.

Oh, it’s hard not to envy Huck Finn’s fishy life, all fins and free in the Mississippi.

Ovid’s Mid-ass

The remarkable thing about Ovid’s version of the Midas story is that it is more than a story about gold and greed, it’s a story about mankind’s inability to learn. True, Midas learns not to ask for the power to turn everything he touches into gold, but he no sooner learns this lessons than he commits a new error and receives the ears of an ass. That will teach him another useless lesson, for the world presents us with infinite possibilities for making new mistakes, and life is too short to learn about them all. Trial and error prove useless. King Midas does not learn how to avoid the temptations of stupidity, or, to speak more to Ovid’s point, he does not learn how to enjoy a life of modest poverty. Even as a lover of Pan (i.e. as an Earth lover), King Midas does not know how to at-tend to the Earth, as a gardener would; in fact, he loves Pan so disproportionately that he never understands the equation of life, the equality among all things (Sun and Earth included), and still sees only competition (not that it doesn’t exist between children and asses).

Odysseus, the First Anti-Hero

Odysseus, some will profess, is heroic for surviving in a largely uncivilized and immoral world. After all, he survived temptations his sailors did not, he deceived a one-eyed monster, and he returned home while others did not.

Not a single argument for Odysseus’ heroism can stand. At best, Odysseus is a fool and a scoundrel, or, in the language of Hollywood, he is the world’s best action hero. He fights one-eyed monsters and immoral men; he has a 7-year affair and hangs immoral women. Plus, the young girls love him, his wife and family wait 20 years for him, and a goddess escorts him. Among action heroes, you cannot beat Odysseus.

In fact, Odysseus is a disgraceful husband, a disgraceful father, a disgraceful son, a disgraceful brother (according to the cowherd) and a disgraceful leader. If you haven’t read The Odyssey yet, you just have to, if for no other reason than to laugh at the brilliance with which one author hid all the perverse habits and desires of the ancient feudal lord in sublime hexameter.Besides, it may amuse us to recognize modern failings in The Odyssey. For example, while plenty of modern military families remain affected by delinquent fathers, the norm is the father who, thanks to his (and often the mother’s, too!) enslavement to work, is hardly ever a father, and when he is with his children, hardly knows how to be their delightful companion. To overlook the perverse and irresponsible behavior in The Odyssey is not an innocent act of scholarly self-indulgence, it is socially irresponsible … yet this is understandable, for the perversity I speak of refers to completely normalized and largely accepted behavior.

The Bible has undergone much scholarly scrutiny and criticism in modern times; why have Homer’s works been spared? They have much in common with the Bible. Perhaps the scholar’s prejudice stems from a blind, left-eyed, left-wing preference for all things secular – as if they were one-eyed readers, readers blinded by perverse notions of heroism.