"Bartleby the Scrivener"

Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) is one of those tantalizing stories that invite multiple fascinating interpretations:

Bartleby is an eccentric individualist who refuses to conform to social norms.  Society wins.

Bartleby is a mentally ill homeless man who becomes one of society’s disposables.

Bartleby is H D Thoreau, passively resisting authority and paying the price.

Bartleby represents all the victims of greedy capitalism.

Bartleby is a victim of the mindless, mechanical work of industrial society.

Bartleby represents natural human rights (to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?) in conflict with the property rights of capitalist, industrial society.

Bartleby is a Christ-figure or, at least, “one of the least of these” that Christians are commanded to treat as if they were Christ.  His fate illustrates the incompatibility of capitalist, industrial society and Christian values.

Bartleby is the trial sent by God to test the state of the lawyer’s soul as one of the Elect or one of the damned.

Bartleby represents the dehumanization of those caught in the capitalist machine.

Bartleby is a projection of the lawyer’s own dehumanization and his powerlessness to save himself.

Bartleby represents the extreme exercise of free will, allowing him complete freedom, though it leads to his death.

Bartleby represents the universal human condition of the individual in conflict with society.

 

Well, some are more fascinating than others.

 It’s important to note that the full title of the story is “Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street.”  It’s hard not to infer that Melville intends to comment on the financial center of capitalism.  Nor is it unreasonable to expect the reader to interpret it as such.  The first-person narrator, the lawyer, has found himself a safe, comfortable, and lucrative niche protecting the property rights of capitalists on Wall Street.  The lawyer’s office is tucked between two walls, one white, transparent and well lit and the other black, opaque, and dark.  Bartleby spends much of his time staring out the second blank wall.  Is Melville suggesting that the work of Wall Street walls us off from each other? That the capitalists enjoy the view of a bright wall while the workers’ outlook is dark? That the lawyer is comfortably located between the two, earning a good living in service of the capitalists supported by the labor of his office workers.  Do the walls represent the divisions between economic classes in a capitalist society? 

And what of the work that the office workers perform?  A scrivener is a human Xerox machine, literally copying documents by hand and then laboriously checking the copies for accuracy as the lawyer reads the original aloud.  This mechanical, mindless work is paralleled by the predictable behavior of the workers, who themselves seem somehow “programmed.”  The elderly Turkey is mild-mannered and productive in the morning but turns erratic, and error-prone in the afternoon.  The young Nippers, on the other hand, is restless and nervous in the morning but settles down in the afternoon.  Does their robotic behavior reflect the mind-numbing nature of industrial work under capitalism?

Into this Pavlovian world enters Bartleby, who starts out as a reliable copier but refuses to participate in the checking of the documents, simply replying “I prefer not to” when called to work by the lawyer.  He then begins to reply in the same manner when asked to run an errand.  Eventually, he refuses to work at all and simply stares at the window at the dark, blank wall.  Unlike the lawyer, who fits comfortably into the world of Wall Street, Bartleby asserts his free will in the extreme, using “passive resistance” to defy the lawyer and his world. 

The lawyer, to his credit, tries every means of persuasion to win Bartleby’s cooperation before finally firing him.  Bartleby, however, refuses to leave the premises.  It seems he has been living there all along.  Rather than resort to calling the police or forcibly removing Bartleby himself, the lawyer takes the extreme measure of moving his office to another site.  But, this action, similar perhaps to Pilate washing his hands of final judgment on Jesus Christ, merely enables the lawyer to avoid taking any responsibility for the man.  When the new occupant of the lawyer’s old office space shows up to insist “you are responsible for the man you left there,” the lawyer, like Peter denying Christ, responds, “the man you allude to is nothing to me…no relation or apprentice of mine that you should hold me responsible for him.”

If these comparisons to Christ seem to be a bit of a stretch, consider that, at one point when the lawyer is debating what to do about Bartleby, he overhears a conversation, which he believes at first is about his indecision but then realizes is actually about the mayoral election being held that day.  In Melville’s day, “election” would have a religious as well as a political meaning.  In the Calvinist theology in which Melville was steeped (http://philosopedia.org/index.php/Herman_Melville) one was predestined to be one of Elect (preordained by God for salvation) or one of the damned.  Is Bartleby a test of the state of the lawyer’s soul?  Is the lawyer one of the Elect or is he damned?  According to Matthew 25: 31-42 Christ will return on Judgment Day and determine who goes to heaven and who to hell based on whether one has treated those in need as if they were Christ himself. 

In the end the lawyer visits Bartleby in prison, where he is found facing a “high wall” among “murderers and thieves.”  Is it significant that Christ was crucified between two thieves?  Is it significant that when the lawyer returns to find Bartleby dead he makes a reference to him being at rest “With kings and counselors” (Job 3:14)? 

For all the compassion that the lawyer feels toward Bartleby, in the end he does not take responsibility for this “least of these” (Matthew 25: 40).  From a realistic perspective, we might say that the lawyer went far beyond what was reasonable to expect by not calling the police on Bartleby or throwing him out forcibly.  Yet, from a Christian perspective, we might say the lawyer utterly failed to meet the test that Christ set for salvation.  Is Melville questioning whether a capitalist society can also be a Christian society?  Or is he questioning whether Christian ethics is realistic and reasonable in the human realm?

If the lawyer, who seems to allow circumstances to determine his actions,  represents the Calvinist belief in predestination (absence of free will), does Bartleby represent the Transcendentalist belief in free will and individual responsibility?  If so, do the two characters represent the extremes to which the two positions can be taken?  Is it fair to condemn the lawyer for failing to meet Christ’s high standard for salvation?  Is it fair to glorify Bartleby for his (selfish?) insistence on individual “preference”?  Is Melville, like Hawthorne (see previous posts Oct. 2012 & May 2013), using Puritan Calvinism to critique romantic Transcendentalism and vice versa? 

For that matter, is Bartleby truly a victim of capitalism or society in general?  Or is he a victim of his own willfulness? 

I find myself intrigued, though, by the idea of Bartleby as a projection of the narrator’s own psyche.  To what extent has the narrator been dehumanized by his acquiescence to his social and economic circumstances? To what extent is it dehumanizing to deny the power of free will to individuals?  Does Bartleby represent the lawyer’s own dehumanization on one hand and his repressed desire to rebel and assert himself on the other?  If Bartleby is a fantastic version of the lawyer’s own psyche, does he take such an extreme form because the lawyer himself is so extremely passive, non-confrontational, and powerless? 

In any case, the story raises profound questions regarding social organization, material vs. spiritual well-being, religion, individualism, ethics, and our responsibility to each other as fellow human beings.

Breaking the Spell I

My Unitarian Universalist Adult Religious Education group is reading Daniel Dennett’s 2006 study of religion *Breaking the Spell.*  The plan is to discuss small chunks every two weeks or so through next May.  Therefore my plan is to post a series of commentaries, one chunk at a time, allowing for much more depth than most of my blog posts.  This post covers chapter 1, “Breaking Which Spell?” 

Dennett proposes to break the taboo against studying religion scientifically “as a natural phenomenon” even at the risk of breaking the spell, the “enchantment,” of religion itself.   I found it puzzling that he would spend so much time defending this proposal since I was under the impression that historians, social scientists, psychologists, etc., had been studying religion and religious experience long before 2006.  As a student at a Disciples of Christ sponsored college in the late 1960s, I was required to take two semesters of religion.  Both courses were scholarly studies of the Bible based on historical, textual, and linguistic evidence.  Jerry Falwell studied under the same professor as I did, and, according to the professor, he objected strongly and vocally to this approach to Biblical study.  The taboo was apparently real for Falwell (no surprise there), but the professor defended his approach on academic grounds and no students, faculty, or administrators that I knew ever objected.

Having been raised as a Southern Baptist I will confess that my college religion classes did break what little was left of the “spell” that my religious upbringing had cast over me.  That spell, however, had already been put in question by high school biology (we studied evolution) and my own rational thinking.  Ironically, it was my formal and informal study of literature, poetry, metaphor, symbolism, mythology, world religion, philosophy, astronomy, and physics that recast the spell in much more sophisticated, figurative, abstract, and, yes, scientific terms. 

My reading of *The Housewife and the Professor* (see previous post) reminded me of my early fascination with Platonism, which I studied in college philosophy classes and which could be considered a religious world view.

And like many of my friends, who consider themselves “religious” or “spiritual,” I welcome the study of religion and the opportunity to expand my understanding of this aspect of my experience and understanding of the world.  I wonder why Dennett has not been exposed to more of us for whom religion, responsible scholarship, rational thinking, and scientific study are not necessarily at odds.

Related to this question is the second bone I have to pick with Dennett’s first chapter.  Why does he define religion so narrowly?  Here’s his “tentative” definition:  religions are “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.”  I understand the value of distinguishing between organized religion (“social systems”) and private religious or “spiritual” experience or belief.  But why must religion be limited to belief in a “supernatural agent  or agents whose approval is to be sought”?  Dennett seems to restrict religion to belief in an anthropomorphic “god” or “gods” with the power to pass judgment on us.  He seems to take the anthropomorphic language of traditional religion literally, without allowing for the capacity of believers to use the language metaphorically.

In other words, he seems to propose to subject fundamentalist, literalistic religious belief (such as that of Jerry Falwell) to an exhaustive scientific study but not the kind of religion that itself takes into account science and rationality or the kind that resists claims of certainty but simply maintains a mindset that is open to exploring the possibility of a supernatural reality (not necessarily a being or “agent”) or dimension in the universe. 

Finally, by Dennett’s definition, my own religious denomination of Unitarian Universalism, though it qualifies as a social system, would not meet his definition, and would therefore be considered a form of religious fraud, illegitimately taking advantage of the 501c3 tax exemption for religious organizations. 

I wonder if his “tentative” definition will undergo any loosening or broadening as his study continues to unfold.

The Housekeeper and the Professor

I would love to see a mathematician find a complicated mathematical system in this 2003 novel by Japanese writer Yoko Agawa.  I am certain it must be there, but finding it is above my pay grade.

What I can attest to is how the novel demonstrates that, like mathematics, art can transcend the disorder of lived experience and bring order out of chaos.

The Housekeeper is the daughter of a single mother who was abandoned by the father, and the Housekeeper is in turn a single mother raising her son alone, having been abandoned by the father.  The Professor is suffering from memory loss since a traffic accident in 1975.  He can remember nothing after that date except in 80-minute segments.  The Professor’s sister-in-law, now widowed, allows him to live in a cottage near her house and hires the Housekeeper to make his meals and clean for him, but she seemingly wants to have nothing to do with either of them—no visits, no phone calls, no communication whatsoever.

The characters represent broken lives, broken relationships, and broken memories.  Of course their identities are affected and perhaps that is why we never learn their real names.  But mathematics, the Professor’s field of study, becomes the unlikely means by which memory loss is transcended, new bonds and new identities are formed, and a new family is made.

The Professor has not forgotten his numbers, his equations, or his mathematical theories.  He spends his days working on (and winning) mathematics contests, and he uses math to relate to every character.  Every day when the Housekeeper arrives, he greets her as if they have never met before and asks her birthdate, which he then uses to espouse the meaning of the numbers and how they fit into a mathematical system.

He delights in teaching the Housekeeper and later her son, challenging them with mathematical problems and puzzles.  Though the Professor does not remember the Housekeeper or her son more than 80 minutes at a time, he relates to them, not only at the level of math, but at a human level, discontinuous though it may be.

When he learns the Housekeeper has a son who must wait at home every day for his mother to return from work, the Professor insists she allow her son to come to his house after school.  When Root, as the Professor nicknames the son, accidentally cuts his hand with a knife the Professor is overwrought with worry and fear for the boy’s well-being.  The two bond over a love of baseball, although the Professor thinks the players and teams are pre-1975.  While Root carefully and cheerfully indulges the Professor in his pre-1975 memories, they are able to combine baseball and mathematics in their study of statistics.

Eventually the three characters begin to act like a family, the Professor becoming like the father that Root never had, the Housekeeper looking after him as she might care for her own aging and unknown father.

Mathematics is the means by which they transcend not only their own personal brokenness, but also the social disconnections of class, age, and gender.  The Professor is a highly educated man of professional class, while the Housekeeper works at a menial job as a domestic.  The older Professor could be her father and her son’s grandfather, but neither class nor age differences prevent them from forming a meaningful relationship.  The Professor’s love of mathematics transcends any bias against a working-class woman and her son being able to understand sophisticated mathematical theory. 

It might be possible to read some kind of erotic attraction into the relationship of the Professor and his Housekeeper.  A certain domestic intimacy develops and even a degree of personal intimacy as the Housekeeper cares for the professor’s physical needs when he develops a fever.  Certainly the sister-in-law becomes suspicious when the Housekeeper and her son spend the night at the Professor’s cottage during his illness and goes so far to have the Housekeeper fired.  Later we learn of a past romantic relationship between the sister-in-law and the Professor.  Could she have been jealous of the closeness between him and the Housekeeper?

In any case, once again it is mathematics that transcends the enmity between the sister-in-law and the Housekeeper, restores the domestic arrangement, and eventually leads to the formation of a larger circle of all four characters when the Professor is moved to a care facility and receives regular visits from his sister-in-law, the Housekeeper, and her son.  It is a mysterious mathematical equation, with special meaning between the Professor and his sister-in-law, that leads to the final resolution and the expanded circle of relationship.

The Professor believes that numbers existed before humans and that a mathematical order exists independently of the natural universe and the human realm.  His faith in an invisible order comes to sustain the Housekeeper as well as himself.  “Eternal truths are ultimately invisible,” he says, “and you won’t find them in material things or natural phenomena, or even in human emotions.  Mathematics, however, can illuminate them, can give them expression—in fact nothing can prevent it from doing so.”

This Platonic conception of an abstract reality transcending that which we can know with our senses becomes a source of reassurance and peace to the Housekeeper as she contemplates the Professor’s explanation of a “true line” extending “infinitely in either direction”:

 

                …I realized how much I needed this eternal truth that the Professor had described. I needed the sense that this invisible world was somehow propping up the visible one, that this one, true line extended infinitely, without width or area, confidently piercing through the shadows.  Somehow this line would help me find peace.

Thus does this seemingly simple but remarkable story of a domestic arrangement that evolves into a family circle suggest a much larger significance, with philosophical, even theological, implications.

As for a mathematical order in the story, it is perhaps notable that there are 11 chapters in the novel and that the central chapter, number six, contains the crucial crisis point when the Professor develops a fever, when the Housekeeper with her son spends the night to watch over and care for him, and when the sister-in-law, having observed this breach of what she considers the Housekeeper’s appropriate role, has her fired.  The first five chapters lead up to this crisis, and the last five unravel the resulting tangle of confusion and disruption to arrive at a final resolution.  This kind of symmetry is commonly found in art, and, like the mathematical system it is based on, brings order out of the chaos of lived human experience.

"I Have a Dream" and the Gettysburg Address

The August 24 March on Washington this past weekend commemorated the 1963 March, which culminated in the first Civil Rights Act, passed in 1964, but the actual 50^th anniversary is today, August 28, 2013.  Fifty years ago today Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech (http://www.archives.gov/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf), which, along with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/gettysburg.htm), is perhaps the best known piece of political oratory in American history.

King directly ties his speech to the American Dream and reminds us how that dream has been denied to most African Americans since they first set foot on American soil. 

When we think of the American Dream, most of us think first of economic prosperity, or, or at least the opportunity to achieve it.  We think of “the land of opportunity,” as countless immigrants have seen us, and the “rags to riches” myth of upward social mobility.  I say “myth” because, while it captures a universal aspiration and is a widespread belief, its reality has been denied to as many, probably more, than have achieved it, however hard-working and virtuous they may have been.

Yet the American Dream represents more than economic success; it also stands for political freedom, social equality, and personal fulfillment.  And King’s speech references those values as much, even more, than it does the dream of material prosperity.

If it is as famous as the Gettysburg Address, what characteristics does it share with Lincoln’s best known speech?  They both rest on what might be better called the American Promise than the American Dream.  They both expressly quote from the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and King cites the “unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

While Lincoln does not name the blight of slavery, he ties the principle of equality to “the unfinished work which those who fought here have so nobly advanced,” “the great task remaining before us,” and “our increased devotion to that great cause” for which so many have died.  Lincoln calls for “a new birth of freedom.”  Without saying so directly, he frames the Civil War as a struggle to fulfill that original promise of full political and social equality.

King, on the other hand, directly names the failures of that promise a century after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863—“segregation,” “discrimination,” “poverty,” and “police brutality.”  But, like Lincoln, he calls for a new resolve to fulfill the original promise of the American Dream—the promise of “liberty and justice for all.”

Both speakers are addressing but half the nation, Lincoln, the Union, still in the midst of war with the Confederacy; and King, African Americans and their white allies in the grip of struggle with segregationists and white supremacists.

 Lincoln’s rhetorical task is somewhat easier.  As he dedicates a burial ground for the Union dead, he is able to freely use “our” and “we” without excluding any of his Union audience, establishing an unqualified identification with his listeners that serves to unify them in their shared experience, values, and grand national cause.

King’s audience consists of both African Americans and white supporters.  He can use “our” and “we” when referring to their shared values and civil rights struggle, but often refers to African Americans in third person when referring to their experiences of racial injustice.  He sets aside a part of his speech to acknowledge “our white brothers,” who have come to realize that “their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.”  And the dream is expressed in terms of full inclusion for all, not only in the segregationist South, but also in “our Northern cities,” “the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire,” “the mighty mountains of New York,” and “the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.” “Our” and “we” shift back and forth from civil rights supporters to African Americans to all Americans.

Lincoln makes no reference to the enemies of freedom and equality in the slave-holding South.  The lines of war are clearly drawn and well understood.  His focus throughout his speech is the noble ideal of the Union cause.  The ignoble cause of the Confederacy is merely implied by unspoken comparison.

King, on the other hand, is concerned, not only with the legal segregation of the South but with the “slums and ghettoes” of the North.  And while he invokes the history of slavery and the “vicious racists” in the South, his dream is large enough to include all Americans sitting together “at the table of brotherhood,” joining hands “as sisters and brothers.”  He includes segregationists and racists in his dream of “all God’s children,” including blacks and whites, “Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics” singing together as equals “the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, Free at last, Great God Almighty, We are free at last.”

Thus as Lincoln transcends the divisions of the Civil War by focusing on the ideal of a nation united in freedom and equality, so King transcends the divisions of race by focusing on a dream that is all inclusive, even to the point of including white people in the words of a Negro spiritual.

The language of the two speeches is very different.  Lincoln’s is more solemn and stately, as befitting the dedication of a national cemetery, and more abstract, as befitting, perhaps, the more ceremonial occasion.  King’s language is more concrete, metaphorical, poetic, emotive, and rousing as he seeks to mobilize a movement in pursuit of legal redresses for a long history of suffering.  Lincoln is not making an abolitionist speech, but rather seeking to strengthen Union resolve to see the war through to its end.  King does not have the standing of national office from which to speak and must use his language to establish himself as a credible leader and to inspire his followers by putting memorable words to the dream in all their hearts.

Lincoln uses the language of a civic leader while King uses that of a preacher and an activist.  Yet their argument is the same:  the American Promise remains unfulfilled and its realization is worthy of sacrifice.  Our nation’s greatness, our nation’s future, and our nation’s endurance depend upon it.

Both also see themselves as renewing the original American Promise, both invoking the Declaration of Independence, King invoking the Emancipation Proclamation.  Taken together the two speeches mark historical milestones in the ongoing effort to realize the Dream.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Frederick Douglass (see previous post) is cited in Michelle Alexander’s 2010 study of structural racism in our contemporary American criminal justice system, as are W. E. B. Dubois and James Baldwin. 

These authors (and others) help to underscore the historical perspective Alexander brings to her analysis.  Douglass worked for and witnessed the abolition of slavery, only to see the rise of a new era of Jim Crow.  Dubois, the first African American sociologist, studied the “problem of the color line” at the turn of the next century in his well known The Souls of Black Folk.  James Baldwin witnessed the dismantling of Jim Crow and contributed to the rise of an era of Civil Rights.  Alexander documents this history to show that just as the abolition of slavery was followed by Jim Crow, the era of Civil Rights has been succeeded by a new form of Jim Crow, an ostensibly colorblind but actually racist system of mass incarceration.

Alexander meticulously substantiates how the seemingly race neutral War on Drugs and the criminal justice system function to imprison vast numbers of black and brown men far out of proportion to their percentage of the population compared to that of white offenders.  She then shows how discrimination continues after release from prison in employment, housing, voting, etc., and outlines the parallels between the current form of legalized discrimination and the historical Jim Crow laws.

As I read her book for the second time in the wake of the Trayvon Martin case (see previous post), I was struck with how the current drive for voting restrictions offers yet another example of a contemporary effort to disenfranchise people of color under the guise of supposedly race neutral policies.

Alexander calls for a new social movement to dismantle, not only this new form of what constitutes a racial caste system, but also the whole social structure that serves to support and sustain it.  Her book is not written in a style that is likely to spark such a movement.  Though it is strong on advocacy, it presents a largely academic case with a carefully constructed argument that is thoroughly documented.  While this approach establishes the credibility of her thesis, it may not have the popular appeal and broad accessibility to inspire the kind of activism she says is necessary to transform the deeply embedded system of colorblind racism that undergirds our contemporary form of racial caste.

A different kind of style and rhetoric, perhaps based in more visual and technological mass media, will be necessary to motivate people to activism.

What Alexander has done, however, is to provide the substantive academic basis for more popular forms of advocacy and agitation.

"What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?"

In honor of Independence Day this year, 237 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to reread Frederick Douglass’ speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered on July 5, 1852.  It didn’t occur to me at the time that the verdict in the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing of Trayvon Martin would be announced before I got my blog post done.

My original thought was to write about the speech as an under-appreciated rhetorical achievement in the history of American letters, but the death of Trayvon Martin and the court case against George Zimmerman dramatizes the continuing relevance of Douglass’ core argument.  And that may be more important than the brilliance of Douglass’ rhetoric.

First, let me say that I harbor no ill will toward the jury in the Zimmerman case.  As I watched the trial unfold on TV these last few weeks, I kept thinking how glad I was that I was not on the jury.  Though I felt that Zimmerman should be held accountable for profiling and stalking Martin while carrying a concealed weapon, I was not persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the actual killing rose to the level of murder, or even manslaughter, given the Florida self-defense law. 

Correct verdict under the law or not, though, it does not seem to rise to the level of justice either.  It seems like yet another example of an African American citizen being denied full equality in a nation that just weeks before the verdict had celebrated its promise of individual rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” of equality under the law, and of “liberty and justice for all.” 

Douglass was invited to deliver his oration at Corinthian Hall, Rochester, New York, to celebrate our nation’s founding as a free and independent state, guaranteeing liberty and justice to its people.  It was a ceremonial occasion and, in some ways, Douglass meets expectations by praising the nation’s founders and the high ideals inscribed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  But Douglass takes the opportunity to turn the speech into a political one, focusing on the inconsistency of a slaveholding society espousing the values of equality and liberty and calling for the abolition of slavery.  After excoriating his audience for the hypocrisy of celebrating the 4^th of July while allowing the injustices and cruelties of slavery to exist, Douglass ends by holding out hope that our nation will someday uphold the values and ideals embedded in our founding documents.

A similar argument could be made today.  How do we celebrate our nation’s founding and its highest civic values on one day and on another day in the same month watch as lawyers in our “justice” system defend their client by justifying racial profiling and the killing of an unarmed black teenager on grounds of self-defense when that client had deliberately stalked that innocent teenager walking home in the rain?  Yes, we can hold out hope that Zimmerman will be held accountable in a wrongful death suit and that someday our nation and its citizens will truly live up to the ideals they espouse and celebrate, but that is cold comfort to those who mourn the loss of Trayvon Martin, who will never again  walk home.

Even though Frederick Douglass had been invited by the white civic leaders of Rochester, New York, to deliver this ceremonial speech, he knew full well that their deference to him was only for superficial show.  That is why in his opening words he presents himself as a modest, self-deprecating public speaker and why he goes on to position himself as an outsider, who, like all African Americans, slave or free, cannot enjoy the full benefits of “your” 4^th of July, “your” Declaration of Independence, or “your” heritage of equality and freedom.  And that is also why he presents himself as an educated, well-spoken, eloquent speaker whose performance belies his modesty and indirectly argues for his full equality with those privileged white civic leaders.  Douglass references the nation’s founding documents, the words of its forefathers, the Bible, as well as his own educated white contemporaries and in so doing establishes his literacy, his education, his credibility, and his humanity, despite having been born into slavery.

Repeating a common trope of African American rhetoric, he compares his people to the Biblical Hebrews who suffered under slavery in Egypt and were delivered to freedom in the Promised Land.  He lifts up the suffering of American slaves, drawing on powerful emotional imagery to dramatize their plight: 

“…I see clouds of dust raised on the highways of the South; I see the bleeding footsteps; I hear the doleful wail of fettered humanity, on the way to the slave markets, where the victims are to be sold like horses, sheep, and swine, knocked off to the highest bidder.  There I see the tenderest ties ruthlessly broken, to gratify the lust, the caprice and rapacity of the buyers and sellers of men.  My soul sickens at the sight.”

               Throughout, both directly and indirectly, he holds up the mirror of hypocrisy to those who would celebrate their national Independence Day:

 “            "The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense, and your Christianity as a lie.”

How many “free” African Americans today join in our 4^th of July celebrations with conflicted hearts,

remembering the injustices of the past along with the promises of our founders, smarting from their

own experiences of prejudice and racism, and questioning, like Douglass, whether this 4^th of July

celebration includes them?

Although Douglass is speaking of American slavery, he himself was free, though under the Fugitive Slave Law he could be returned to his owner at any time should that owner be identified, and while he had escaped the slavery of the South, he lived with the racism of the North, the very racism of those who had the temerity to invite an escaped slave to deliver their 4^th of July oration, as if he were one of them.  Only the blind arrogance of misplaced self-righteousness could expect the victims of racism to praise their oppressors’ history and values.

Yet Douglass concludes with faith in the Constitution, and while that may undercut his verbal assault on American hypocrisy, it nonetheless saves him and us from despair.  His call to action would fail did he not leave his audience with hope of abolishing slavery and racism.

Similarly, may the realization of our own contemporary failures in overcoming color prejudice and racism leave us not in despair but with renewed conviction that our anti-racist words and actions are not in vain and that the dream of people like Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King for full equality and justice for all may someday be achieved in our country.  (See also previous blog post on Frederick Douglass *Narrative of an American Slave,* December 2009.)

The Great Gatsby

I have not seen the latest film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, but the commercial hype led me to reread what at one time in my life I might have said was my favorite novel of all time.

There is something about the writing style, the wedding-cake richness and artifice that greatly impressed me as a college student.  This time, the language, while I could still admire it, struck me as more pretentious than I had ever thought before, and that, of course, reflects on the narrator, Nick Carraway, who struck me as more snobbish, more deceptive (perhaps self-deceptive) and evasive than I had remembered.  He presents himself as a product of the Midwest, which is more “decent” and less corrupt than the East Coast and East Egg.  Yet Nick is in the thick of enabling two adulterous affairs and covering up the truth of a traffic accident that resulted in someone’s death. 

Nevertheless, as with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, there is incredible power in language that can take the ugliest, most sordid of human experiences and transform it into artistic beauty.  But that is what art and imagination can do, and that is largely what the novel is about, for Gatsby has that same power of imagination to take someone as shallow, hollow, and, as Nick says, “careless” as Daisy and transform her into a romantic ideal.  Nick also projects his romantic idealism, not only onto himself, but also onto Gatsby’s character and onto the whole tragic tale.

If one can look past the misogyny and anti-Semitism of the novel, one can perhaps appreciate how Nick allegorizes its events into a cultural narrative of the American experience and ultimately into a universal statement of the human dilemma, in which we find ourselves forever caught in the web of contradictions between our imaginative vision and the ashes of our own corruption (except that Nick seems to present himself as an innocent bystander rather than a full participant). 

Gatsby’s story parallels the quintessential American success story and I could not help but think of some of his literary forbears—Rip Van Winkle who transforms himself from a hen-pecked husband into the town raconteur after disappearing for twenty years; Ichabod Crane, the fortune hunter, who is attacked by the headless horseman (see previous blog posts Feb. 6, 2013); and, of course Benjamin Franklin, whose project to achieve human perfection pre-figures Gatsby’s self-improvement notes on the book cover of his boyhood copy of Hopalong Cassidy (see previous blog post March 12, 2010).  Like Rip, Gatsby transforms himself from the poor son of “unsuccessful farm people” into a product of his own imagination.  Like Ichabod he courts a woman more for the dream of “money” that she represents than for her own character.  And like Benjamin Franklin he projects the image of a self-made man, who has pulled himself up by his own bootstraps.

In the classic American success story it is hard work and moral virtue that takes one from rags to riches.  In Gatsby’s case it is imagination, opportunism, and criminal activity which bring him to the lavish mansion across the bay from the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock.  The American Dream of material prosperity, in this version, rests on a rotten foundation of moral corruption.

West Egg and East Egg on Long Island Sound represent not only the Midwest and East Coast, but also the New World and the Old World, new (cheap) money and old aristocracy.  Just as the original European settlers glorified and romanticized their plunder of North America, so Gatsby justifies his criminal career in terms of his romantic ideal, personified somehow by the wholly inadequate Daisy. 

In the end we realize that, like all of us, as Gatsby pursues his dream he ultimately hurtles toward his own death.  And the novel suggests that his story is somehow emblematic of the American experience, full of romantic idealism that founders on corruption and destruction.  Between the quintessential city of New York, where their money is made, and the homes of the wealthy on Long Island Sound lie the ash heaps of vulgarity, duplicity, betrayal, violence, and crime.  Overlooking it all are the sightless eyeglasses of T. J. Eckleberg, an abandoned advertisement that seems to represent either the godlessness or the god-forsakenness (or both) of the whole American experiment.

But, of course it is not just American culture; it is the universal story of our human potential for greatness alongside our capacity for evil. 

And so, the dark side of the “success story” is that of ill-gotten gains, and the “love story” is marred by greed, deception, and adultery.  And Nick’s “coming of age,” to the extent that it is that, is aborted by his failure to recognize the evil inside that he carries with him when he returns to the “decent” Midwest.

In Nick’s eyes Gatsby’s sordid life is redeemed by the power of romantic idealism, and perhaps the same can be said of the American dream and the whole human enterprise.  But the phrase “Great Gatsby” also rings hollow with irony, as the mythical host of lavish parties ends up dying alone in his swimming pool at the hands of a misguided revenge-seeker and buried with a bare handful in attendance at his funeral.