John Brown Speaks to Us

 John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois

      W. E. B. Du Bois’ biography of John Brown, though it relies on first-hand and documentary sources, is less a work of historical scholarship than a passionate polemic first published at a critical moment in American history.  Even as the mythic Lost Cause ideology was developing and the United Daughters of the Confederacy was erecting monuments in courthouse squares and city parks throughout the South, the NAACP was formed and Du Bois published this biography. [1]

      The book contains a detailed and sympathetic account of Brown’s career and includes lengthy quotation from writings by his family members and associates.  The reader can see not only the vicious motives and tactics of the slave-owners, but also the fragmented rivalry of those on the side of freedom.  In Du Bois’ account it is clear that Brown’s moral clarity, couched throughout his life in the rhetoric of the Separate Baptist Church in which he had been raised, was shared by very few Americans before the Civil War.  The greater part of those who opposed the expansion of slavery did so because they wished to avoid the competition of slave labor with free or because they supported the political sway of the North over the South.  Even among those who argued against slavery itself, a good many benevolent souls such as those in the American Colonization Society supported not integration but the return of slaves to Africa or their settlement in a new country in Central America. 

     One reason that few shared the “clear, white light” of Brown’s moral certainty is that, for all their charitable feeling, most white Americans kept their Black brethren at arm’s length.  Brown recalled from his childhood an incident in which he received hospitality in a householder’s home as he drove his father’s cattle to market.  There he met a Black slave of his own age who impressed him as “fully if not more than his equal,” yet who was treated harshly by his owner.  This personal acceptance was apparent in Brown’s adult life as he consistently practiced social equality, inviting Blacks into his home and visiting in theirs, informally adopting a Black son, and seeking to include Black collaborators in his work. 

     Brown is an excellent example of a man who sought progressive change, not out of pity but because he considered their freedom a necessary precondition for his own.  His education had been primarily from the Bible, and Biblical values and language were woven throughout his own thinking.  This orientation was not only in tune with broadly shared American standards at the time, but religion’s claim to universal authority is appropriate since slavery, like murder and the oppression of women, is condemned by virtually all modern moral standards.  Brown’s prophetic voice, while thoroughly Christian, can still appeal to all.

    For those who contemplate a life like Brown’s, historical fact and partisan view may be considerably entangled.  Du Bois clearly has an interest in maintaining not only that Brown was sane (if fiercely single-minded) but also that his plan to attack the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry had a reasonable prospect of success. [2]  Whether this point of the plot’s practicality is so or not must remain controversial and speculative, but for the modern reader the point is that Brown’s opposition to slavery was exemplary and his zeal cannot be faulted. 

     John Brown tells us that the price of repression is greater than the price of freedom, that violence is far more pernicious when it is institutional and habitual than when it is a matter of an evil-tempered individual.  Every day that the slave system persisted people became inured to its crimes against humanity, more accepting of its outrages, and thus more brutalized.  A more or less benevolent master remains a master.  In Brown’s opinion the solution must lie, not in the reformation of individuals as John Woolman had attempted in the eighteenth century, but in the alteration of society.  To allow an exploitative system like slavery, or, one might add, colonialism or capitalism, to continue is to sanction violence whether or not one is personally wielding the whip.  Lincoln eloquently argued in his Second Inaugural that the moral debt of slavery was always increasing and, painful though it be, must in the end be paid.  “If God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’"  Now, long after the Civil War, after the attempts by racists to perpetuate injustice have produced a hundred and fifty years of violence, lynchings, Jim Crow, and daily exploitation and repression, the cost is evident to all, and still rising. 

     Brown tells us, then, that the time to act is now.  Hesitation is complicity.  No shrewd calculation of odds can alter the facts that racism is wrong, that its ill effects consistently harden and deepen, and that it entails consequences that spare no one. [4]  Others may be depended upon to criticize, to temporize, to offer only financial support, but some feel called to take action.  Further, Brown speaks for the harder truth of his own day, that slavery’s foes must use “any means necessary,” and the price it seemed could be payable only in blood. [5]  He had abandoned the faith in political pressure and moral suasion to which his friend and associate Frederick Douglass still clung.  He sought to have a wider effect than Harriet Tubman had managed with her daring raids. (Tubman, in fact, supported Brown, joined with him in planning the assault on Harpers Ferry, and during the war served in the Union army.)   

     Du Bois seems to be straining just a bit when he enumerates the positive effects of the raid in spite of its military defeat.  He quotes Douglass: “If John Brown did not end the war that ended slavery, he at least began the war that ended slavery.”  Du Bois argues that his raid aroused the slave population leading to incidents of rebellion and presaging the hundreds of thousands of Black recruits that served in the United States Army.  The fear of insurrection from within and the conviction that Brown had brought a mere taste of the potential for armed Northern intervention created a sense of crisis that, Du Bois argues, hastened the conflict.  Finally, he says, Brown presented a moral dilemma to Americans in the most fundamental terms.  People heard of a good, indeed a Christian man, who sacrificed himself out of love for others, killed by the advocates of a system built on the sins of greed, cruelty, and lust. [6]       Few would question that Brown’s actions shifted the political parameters in his day.  Whereas anti-slavery propagandists had seemed the South’s chief antagonists, they now had to deal with the fact of armed opposition.  Just as the rise of Black power advocates like Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) and H. Rap Brown (later Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) made the nonviolent activism of Martin Luther King seem suddenly more acceptable, even those who did not approve of Brown’s actions became more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause, so his actions had a clear effect of hastening the end of slavery.

     Though many moderns may lack the fire and the courage of “the old man,” as he was often called in the days of his greatest action, he clearly advanced the cause of freedom.  Brown’s passion for justice is inspiring, and much of his analysis remains viable today.   Today, no less than in his era, racism remains a great evil, the pursuit of racial justice continues, and the movement’s most vigorous partisans feel as he did that action is imperative regardless of short-term consequences, whether for the nation or for the activist.  One need not share the rhetoric of Brown’s Calvinist theology to applaud his militance.  Right is right.

 

1.      1.  The book was published in 1909.  My copy is an International Press edition from 1962 including comments by Du Bois indicating his view of the book’s relevance after almost half a century.  It remains no less useful now when the work is more than twice as old. 

 

2.      2.  He claims that the primary reason for the defeat of Brown’s party, small though it was, was the failure of the timely arrival of supplies from the farm a few miles distant.

 

3.      3.  Lincoln had long been a supporter of such plans.  One hears little these days about his plan to establish Lincolnia, an African-American colony in the Chiriquí Province of Panama which foundered in the face of opposition by Panama, Nicaragua, and Honduras.

 

4.      4.  The murder rate among both white and Black remains highest in the states of the Deep South, for instance, where slavery was most brutal.

 

 5.     5.  I am reminded of the turn from its fifty years of pacifism taken by the African National Congress in 1960.

 

6.      6.  I find a parallel in the effect of photographs of early civil rights demonstrations in journals like Life and Look.

Notes on Recent Reading 42 (Bulgakov, Tedlock, Williams)

 

The Master and Margarita (Bulgakov) 

     A symphonic and sustained phantasmagoria, the novel has attracted considerable political comment because of the author’s difficulties under Stalin’s rule. Yet this reader suspects Bulgakov would have been ill at ease even under less despotic rule. His sense of the absurd, his social satire stretched to universals, his dazed reaction to the procession of experience, all make him a worthy successor to Gogol. 

      In their objective particularizing, the Pilate sections reminded me of Flaubert’s Salammbo, though I remain puzzled over thematic aspects of these passages which Bulgakov seems to wish to affirm as authentic by draining them of their supernaturalism, an odd compensation for the constant supernatural characters and sudden scene-shifting throughout. Perhaps the reader is meant to be caught off-balance. 

  Rabinal Achi (Tedlock) 

      One expects, I suppose, too much from an artifact like this, a vestige of pre-Columbian drama preserved in what looks like good condition by the merest chance.  

      It is many years since Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson’s picture of the Mayans as peaceful gentlemanly scholars has been devastated by decoding of the glyphs, most of which turn out to be records of the power of rulers proven by their military victories very like those found in Egypt or Babylon. So here the drama centers on the same sort of theme, the ritual submission and sacrifice of a conquered nobleman, performed in a highly ritualized atmosphere and bedecked with luxurious mythological context.

      Tedlock, a participatory anthropologist (he prefers the term “dialogic” anthropologist) who had himself initiated as a shaman, a poet and founder along with Jerome Rothenberg of the influential Alcheringa, is surely the ideal guide for a work of this sort.  His edition of the Popul Vuh is probably the best both for artistic and scientific reasons, but this work left me disappointed.  While the Popul Vuh provides a fascinating, provocative, and dramatic creation story, the Rabinal Achi offers mainly aggression, though clothed in stately and operatic mythological and rhetorical finery.  

A Lovely Sunday for Creve Coeur (Williams) 

     This late play, first staged in its final form in 1979, is theatrical and entertaining with considerable comedy as well as the author’s characteristic pathos. The reader may sit back and enjoy the lines of the extravagant Dorothea, her Teutonically weighty roommate Bodey, and her waspish coworker Helena. Often richly comic but sympathetic nonetheless, each is defined by the blinders they wear. The trajectory of the plot is clear from the outset, lending dark shadows to the scene, heightened by the presence of Sophie Gluck, a frantic, grieving, and mentally ill neighbor. The conclusion of the play, in which Dottie decides to join the picnic excursion, accepting the presence of Bodey’s brother in spite of his poor taste, beer, and cigars, indicates that she will survive despite her lover’s betrayal, though with radically reduced expectations. 

     The stage set is unusually significant in this play. The discordant and shabby décor of the ladies’ apartment is the occasion for humor, not squalor or real despair. If this play never reaches the heights or depths of Williams’ masterpieces, it is funnier than most, and the characters, though recognizable, are sufficiently individualized to engage the audience for the hour and a half of this extended single act. Williams was a master of the stage, and these four women, though quite unlike one another, are all quite amusing to those of us in the audience as they all do their best to pursue happiness, through frustration, poor judgement, and repeated defeat. There is, perhaps, a sort of courage, if not good taste, in the “fierce purple carpet.”

The Belated Eroticism of Agathias Scholasticus

Numbers in parentheses refer to poems in Book 5 of the Greek Anthology. The Greek original and a new translation of 5.294 follow the discussion. 

     In the sixth century of the Christian era Agathias Scholasticus produced a new edition of the Greek Anthology, taking the editor’s privilege of including a generous share of his own epigrams. His period marked the transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages. During his lifetime the eastern emperor Justinian required citizens to profess Christianity, suppressed the pagan rhetors, and ended government support for the neo-Platonic Academy. Agathias himself was steeped in pre-Christian tradition; many readers suspect he had only a veneer of Christianity. He was a substantial historian, continuing Procopius’ History of Justinian, while practicing as well as a lawyer and civic activist. As pater civitatis he assumed the management of the renovation of the public latrines in Smyrna, inspiring him to write epigrams celebrating the salutary improvement he had brought, but also moralizing: “All the extravagance of mortals and their expensive dishes excreted here have lost their previous charm.” (GA 9.662 and 642) 

      The fifth book of the Anthology, titled "Amatory Epigrams” contains twenty-three poems by Agathias, virtually none of which expresses simple, straightforward passion. The poet himself problematizes his erotics in an epigram lamenting the unsuitability of each option for love object. (302) Every choice, he laments, is accompanied by inconvenience. Neither courtesans, nor virgins, nor wife, nor other men’s wives, nor widows, nor serving maids will do. One might as well, he concludes, imitate Diogenes and choose masturbation. 

      Though that conclusion hardly sounds romantic, Agathias is nonetheless capable of deploying certain familiar romantic tropes: the complaint of a watchful duenna (289), the lover’s subjugation by the beloved (299) or suffering a sleepless night and hoping for a dream, at least, of love. (237) 

      Other epigrams cover a surprisingly broad range. They include conversational pieces such as a graduate student’s letter home missing his girlfriend and male friend (292), a comment on the isolation of women (297), and a simple declaration of heterosexuality. (278) Though considering age in general the enemy of desire (273), he appreciates the sexiness of an old lady. (282) 

      A group of his epigrams depend upon word games and jeux d’esprit. In one (218) he describes what seems to be an adulterous intrigue using names adapted from contemporary drama, while in another he plays on the mythological associations of the name of Ariadne. (222) 

      Another group of Agathias’ poems testify to the power of symbolically displaced, or fetishized eroticism. For instance, in one (285) he kisses her “girdle” instead of her flesh, while in another he relishes the cup that has touched her lips. (261) In others he addresses the lamp that has overseen his amours (263), and describes the gift of a “coif” that can becomingly bind her midriff. (276) 

      In general the poets of the Anthology are as likely to speak of one night stands with prostitutes or men as of enduring affairs of the heart. Thus Agathias’ casual and worldly persona is likely less a reflection of his own emotional sensibility as of the norms of his age. In the proem to his edition of the collection as a whole he suggests that poetry is primarily a source if pleasure for the surfeited or jaded appetites of his listeners. This pose is explicit in the introductory verses which take the form of an address to his audience, a cultivated company headed by the leading local cavalry officer. They would have enjoyed a dinner as lavish as the host could make it. Wine was certainly flowing. Perhaps it was before the flute-girls that Agathias would have been asked to present some elegant epigrams, the best of earlier times mixed with a number of the new.  

     This dramatic setting is useful reinforcement to Agathias’ opening image. Agathias declares that he means to spread a verbal πανδαισία, for which Liddell and Scott offer the glorious if slightly mystifying definition “a complete banquet, a banquet at which nothing fails.” He fears that the guests may be already sated (ἐμπεπλησμένους) with literature, stuffed, indeed, to belching (τὰ σιτία προσκόρως ἐρυγγάνειν) with the magnificent and varied board of poetry already available from earlier eras. 

     The weight of the greatness of Greek tradition is evident in the poet’s heavy use of convention in metrics, imagery, and theme. Yet, after a rhetorical claim that he expects a reader to be indulgent toward his work out of courtesy alone, he promises to provide novelty. (l. 20) The poem has little to say about love itself and a good deal about barriers to love. While it is true that most love literature from all ages is concerned with overcoming such obstacles, their description is usually accompanied by considerable praise of the beloved. Agathias’ poem takes the passion for granted and speaks only of impediments.

    The poem appeals to me for its decadence. Reminiscent of the great Pervigilium Veneris, the poem implies a refined pleasure in simply contemplating the barriers to satisfaction, maintaining the lover’s sustained pre-orgasmic condition. I am reminded of the Daoist sexual regimen which eschewed completion of the sexual act in an effort to build qi. One might consider Agathias’ poem and others like it as the product of a hedonism for which simple love has gone flat or, whether alternatively or simultaneously, as a contemplative exercise, a kind of meditation on desire. 

translation note 

     Believing the modern ear to be deaf to the ancient meters, even apart from the change from quantitative to accentual/syllabic prosody, I have not attempted to duplicate the elegiac couplets characteristic of the epigram form. Instead the whole thing is basically in iambic hexameter, a rare choice in English. There is most often a line by line correspondence between Greek and English. An extra syllable hangs on the end like a prolonged sigh. 

Greek Anthology 5.294 

The envious old woman lay next to the young, 

fixed crosswise over all the broad expanse of bed, 

extended like a bastion to block invaders there. 

My lady’s veiled by ample folds of sheets and quilts. 

Her so conceited handmaid barred the entry door.

She lies asleep, weighed down with too much unmixed wine. 

Still unafraid, I reached out with my hand to lift 

 and open up the bar that latched the door. The draft 

from one quick wave of cloak then quenched each fiery torch. 

I slinked through crosswise softly through the room, 

Avoiding then the sleeping guard I pulled myself 

in further, underneath the bed frame, lying prone 

 I pulled myself up just a bit to lean against 

the wall and propped up there I then did face my love. 

Caressing both her breasts I lightly kissed her face. 

My lips played all about and felt her softness there. 

The only prize I captured was her lovely mouth.

The only sign I had of my advance that night 

I haven’t breached the walls of her virginity. 

That still remains untouched. For now I will not try. 

The ramparts will not stop me. Should all go my way, 

I’ll weave a wreath for you, o Cypris of love’s spoils. 

 ἡ γραῦς ἡ φθονερὴ παρεκέκλιτο γείτονι κούρῃ 

δόχμιον ἐν λέκτρῳ νῶτον ἐρεισαμένη, 

προβλὴς ὥς τις ἔπαλξις ἀνέμβατος: οἷα δὲ πύργος 

ἔσκεπε τὴν κούρην ἁπλοῒς ἐκταδίη: 

καὶ σοβαρὴ θεράπαινα πύλας σφίγξασα μελάθρου 

κεῖτο χαλικρήτῳ νάματι βριθομένη. 

ἔμπης οὔ μ᾽ ἐφόβησαν ἐπεὶ στρεπτῆρα θυρέτρου 

χερσὶν ἀδουπήτοις βαιὸν ἀειράμενος, 

φρυκτοὺς αἰθαλόεντας ἐμῆς ῥιπίσμασι λώπης 

ἔσβεσα: καὶ διαδὺς λέχριος ἐν θαλάμῳ 

τὴν φύλακα κνώσσουσαν ὑπέκφυγον ἦκα δὲ λέκτρου 

νέρθεν ὑπὸ σχοίνοις γαστέρι συρόμενος, 

ὠρθούμην κατὰ βαιόν, ὅπη βατὸν ἔπλετο τεῖχος: 

ἄγχι δὲ τῆς κούρης στέρνον ἐρεισάμενος, 

μαζοὺς μὲν κρατέεσκον: ὑπεθρύφθην δὲ προσώπῳ, 

μάστακα πιαίνων χείλεος εὐαφίῃ. 

ἦν δ᾽ ἄρα μοι τὰ λάφυρα καλὸν στόμα, καὶ τὸ φίλημα 

σύμβολον ἐννυχίης εἶχον ἀεθλοσύνης. 

οὔπω δ᾽ ἐξαλάπαξα φίλης πύργωμα κορείης, 

ἀλλ᾽ ἔτ᾽ ἀδηρίτῳ σφίγγεται ἀμβολίῃ. 

ἔμπης ἢν ἑτέροιο μόθου στήσωμεν ἀγῶνα, 

ναὶ τάχα πορθήσω τείχεα παρθενίης, 

οὐ δ᾽ ἔτι με σχήσουσιν ἐπάλξιες. ἢν δὲ τυχήσω, 

στέμματα σοὶ πλέξω, Κύπρι τροπαιοφόρε.

Kleist’s “A Poet’s Letter to Another”

 

A new translation of Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” precedes a discussion of the author’s poetics. 

1.      A Poet’s Letter to Another

 Recently, when I found you reading my poetry, you went on with extraordinary eloquence about form and applauded me using the terms of the school where, you like to presume, I was educated.  You praised me in a way that made me feel ashamed, dwelling on the appropriateness of the underlying meter, of the rhythm, of the charm of melody and the purity and correctness of expression and the language in general.  Please allow me to say your mind lingers on those topics by your own choice.  It would have proven the greatest worth, had you not noticed these characteristics at all.  If I could grasp my heart while composing, detach my thoughts and present them to you without any further elaboration, you too, friend, it seems to me, would find nothing then lacking.  A thirsty person cares little about the bowl but rather is concerned with the fruits that are brought to him in it.   It is only because the thought, like certain evanescent, unrepresentable, chemical substances, must be linked with something more coarse and physical in order to appear visible that I use such devices when I write to you, and you then go looking for speech, language, cadence, and musicality.  Delightful as these things may be to the extent that they reveal the spirit, still, in and of themselves, when observed from this higher point of view, they are nothing but a genuine, if understandable and necessary, evil.  With reference to such things, art can only strive to conceal them as much as possible.  I take pains to do my best to give my expressions clarity, the verse form significance, and to lend grace and life to the sound of the words.  My goal is that the art should not appear at all but rather the thought alone which the words embody.  For it is a characteristic of all correct form to express the spirit instantly and without mediation while a deficient form, like a bad mirror, is constricting and can bring nothing to mind but itself.   If as your first impression, you praise the formal qualities of my little unpretentious literary works, you arouse in me quite naturally a concern that my poems possess altogether false rhythmic and prosodic associations and that your consciousness fastens on the melody or the pattern of the verses matters entirely removed from what had I had really cared about.  Otherwise why would you fail to respond to the spirit I took pains to put into words just as one would do in conversation, when I had hoped to encounter your spirit with my own without attention to the clothing of my thought?  Your insensitivity to the heart and essence of poetry and your highly developed responsiveness for form and the accidental (amounting nearly to disease) dominates your judgement as a result, I would say, of the school of thought from which you come.  Doubtless this is not the intention of that school which is as clever as any that has appeared among us, though not entirely without fault, considering the paradoxical mischief of its teachings.  But this insensitivity to the essence and core of poetry, with the irritability developed up to the point of illness, for the accidental and the formal, is a habit of your mind in general due to the school from which you come.   I have noticed that, when reading the work of writers altogether different from me, your eye cannot, to use a proverbial expression, see the forest for the trees.  When we take Shakespeare in hand, how unproductive are the interests to which your taste leads you in comparison to the great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances this splendid poet should awaken in your heart!  How could I be concerned about repartee and witty wordplay on the bloody field of Agincourt?  Or when Ophelia says of Hamlet “O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!”  Or Macduff of Macbeth “He has no children.”  What value then remains to the iambs, rhymes, assonances and such devices, to which your ear is always attuned as if nothing else mattered? - Farewell!

 

 

2.       

     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Brief eines Dichters an einen anderen” is a manifesto of hyper-Romanticism, fetishizing the value of imaginative production and suggesting that artistic works carry content that is miraculously beyond language, though necessarily expressed in inadequate words.   With a kind of belated neo-Platonic weakness for the abstract, Kleist, a writer whose works consist of words and words alone, insists that the materiality of his discourse, the ink on the page or sounds in the air, is an unfortunate concomitant of its more essential ethereal message.  This latter and more significant burden of his poetry proves, however, ineffable. 

     What makes this claim all the more Romantic is the heightened value attributed to poetry when properly understood which for Kleist borders on religious revelation.  For him the thoughts welling from his heart are paramount.  Just what these are he does not say, but he boldly maintains that that his poetry is required for life, like fruit to a thirsty man.  Ideally, he notes, the reception of poetry might resemble a conversation in which the mind of the reader engages that of the writer, but such an encounter is precluded by the reader’s obsession with literariness itself which blocks the vision of the reality beyond the page the writer seeks to project.  Kleist’s correspondent, he complains, cannot properly appreciate poetry due to his allegiance to a particular misguided “school” with presumably some variety of an academic or neo-Classical view of art as craft.  Such a view, Kleist maintains, misses the poetry, perceiving only the poetic usages.

      He makes, then, two claims.  First, endows the aesthetic product with immense if ill-defined potential and second, he insists that literary reception must be unselfconscious and, in a sense, preverbal, a matter of mind meeting mind in which words are potentially obstacles.  Such claims might seem both arrogant and obscurantist.  Kleist certainly conveys no interest in the other poet’s work, yet the reader has only Kleist’s passion to certify that his vision and his poetry are at all superior to those of his correspondent.  These grand claims are as well undermined in part by Kleist’s concession that his work is weighed down from the first by the “coarse” material of language.

     This posture could be taken as an index of the poet’s enthusiasm.  Like a shaman he assumes the role of messenger delivering revelations from beyond, and, like the shaman, he depends largely on faith.  In a more modest way writers today assert similar authority when they say that a poem “just came to me,” that “I couldn’t help writing it.”   

      Many people, of course, apart from critics, consume art with a minimum of analytic attention to its machinery.  For centuries the art that conceals art has been praised, but that is a refinement of craftsmanship, the polishing that erases the marks of the constructor’s hand, the final flourish of skill.  Kleist’s disavowal of literary professionalism is something else altogether, more a matter of mysticism or spirituality than of art alone.  In the Platonic hierarchy philosophy always trumps poetry.

      Yet Kleist’s importunate assertion of the importance of his utterance, his desire to silence competing poets and hold the stage alone, does not really differ from what any artist must do, seeking to attract attention to a single voice in a vast cacophony of voices.  Whether the maker is modest or not personally, on the page or on the gallery wall each can only scream for attention just as we all did as infants.  And as for the literary devices, those are like to magician’s (and the shaman’s) bag of tricks, and the show would be ruined were all its secrets out. 

      Kleist’s letter could be read as well as a lament for the inadequacy of signifiers, a frustrated struggle to escape the fabric of discourse.  Since, even with the substantial enhancements of rhetoric, signifier is always to some extent incongruent with signified, the writer is condemned to a kind of eternal failure, never quite able to embody his consciousness fully and precisely in words, unable to program every reader with precisely the desired algorithm. 

     Kleist’s letter dramatically articulates the Romantic elevation of art to a virtually religious significance while at the same time undercutting itself by describing the artist’s failure to communicate his mental concept to his friend and fellow poet.  He balances this ambivalence by an homage to Shakespeare’s success, implying that his own effusions have something at least in common with that author’s sublime genius than with mere earth-bound literary theory. 

      I have always considered that in literary theory (as in politics) he who acknowledges a partisan position is more reliable than one claiming objectivity, for such a claim means only that the critic either does not recognize or does not care to admit bias.  Kleist’s idea that art is above calculation and craft is less a critical principle than a rhetorical figure similar to the love poem that says “words cannot describe her beauty.”  Surely he was himself conscious of the labor and skill required to construct literary works.  Thus this letter has more in common with twentieth century literary manifestoes, meant to provoke and attract attention more than to set forth and defend a set of contentions about the aesthetic text.

      In “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Reden” (“On the Gradual Construction of Thoughts While Speaking”) Kleist explicitly recommends emptying the mind as a strategy not merely for the proper reception of poetry, but for problem-solving in general.  He says that simply to begin speaking on a topic, without prior plan, will produce new insights and solutions.  Troping on “l'appetit vient en mangeant,” he says, “l’idee vient en parlant.”

      These ideas are presented more artfully and suggestively in the better-known essay “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Marionette Theater”).  There the acting of the puppets is praised over that of humans specifically because a pesky human consciousness will cloud the waters by introducing “affectation” (“Ziererei”).  The fifteen-year-old whose beauty captured a stranger’s attention in the baths can no longer maintain his charm once he is aware he is being observed.  Self- consciousness is the curse of the exile from Eden.  Here Kleist explicitly claims that thought leads not to wisdom and beauty but to their loss.  Enlightenment can only arise in its absence. 

      Kleist here provides a specific quasi-scientific image to illustrate his vision. 

  

We can see how in the organic world as reflection lessens and darkens, grace emerges and comes to the fore more brightly.  It is just like passing through the intersection of two lines to come out on the other side of that point after passing through infinity or the image in a concave mirror which, after vanishing into the distance, suddenly appears again right in front of us.  In this same way grace emerges when understanding has passed through infinity.  Grace will appear most purely in a human form with either an infinite consciousness or none at all.  That is, either in the puppet or in the god. [1]

 

 Whether there is any topographical meaning to Kleist’s figure I cannot say, but the question seems moot since the meaning is clearly that bipolar oppositions are ultimately unified as the extreme of one is transformed into its contrary.  The use of similar structures is common in mystical and apocalyptic thought and familiar in such Christian concepts as the mortal deity, the virgin mother, leaving the father to join the father, and death made eternal life.

   The reader of Kleist’s letter might then assume that the heart’s truth the writer is so anxious to deliver is simply that the individual might ideally attain through poetry a position of sublime wisdom from which one can see that, in the last analysis, contraries are illusory and one may in contemplation unite with the cosmos.  In art such an alteration of consciousness does not follow from systematic reasoning.  On the contrary, it arrives when one forgets oneself.  The vanishing ego suddenly is succeeded by an oceanic feeling. [2]  Kleist’s examples from Shakespeare demonstrate that, far from arising from philosophic disputation, this enlightened state of mind may be inspired by the sympathetic experience of strong, even tragic experience which he says creates in the soul “great, sublime, cosmopolitan resonances.”

 

 

1.  The passage is sufficiently opaque that I include here the original German and an alternative translation. 

Wir sehen, daß in dem Maße, als, in der organischen Welt, die Reflexion dunkler und schwächer wird, die Grazie darin immer strahlender und herrschender hervortritt. - Doch so, wie sich der Durchschnitt zweier Linien, auf der einen Seite eines Punkts, nach dem Durchgang durch das Unendliche, plötzlich wieder auf der andern Seite einfindet, oder das Bild des Hohlspiegels, nachdem es sich in das Unendliche entfernt hat, plötzlich wieder dicht vor uns tritt: so findet sich auch, wenn die Erkenntnis gleichsam durch ein Unendliches gegangen ist, die Grazie wieder ein; so, daß sie, zu gleicher Zeit, in demjenigen menschlichen Körperbau am reinsten erscheint, der entweder gar keins, oder ein unendliches Bewußtsein hat, d. h. in dem Gliedermann, oder in dem Gott.

This is the rendering of Idris Parry published in the Southern Cross Review #9: "We see that in the organic world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and decisively. But just as a section drawn through two lines suddenly reappears on the other side after passing through infinity, or as the image in a concave mirror turns up again right in front of us after dwindling into the distance, so grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god."

 

2.      Kleist is much closer to Romain Rolland’s original usage of the term than to Freud’s diminished meaning, though even for Freud this feeling fades as the separate ego develops at the end of breast-feeding. 

Not Quite a Jackpot: Erskine Caldwell's Short Stories

     Whatever else may be said of him, Erskine Caldwell was prodigiously productive and wildly popular. Though his best-known works were early -- Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre -- he was the author of several dozen novels, something like a hundred and fifty short stories, and a variety of other works. Attempts to censor at least two of his novels resulted in considerable notoriety and sizable sales. For the next twenty-five years he enjoyed best-seller status with his work widely available in inexpensive trade paperbacks offered in the racks in bus stations and drug stores with cover art and copy promising erotic fiction. The formula worked so well that he sold eventually something like a hundred million books.
     He received attention from the start as a regionalist at a time when the American South seemed almost as fertile a field for fiction as the Jewish Lower East Side, and he doubtless benefited from the vogue for the proletarian novel and perhaps from liberal indignation at the attempts to ban his work, yet his critical reputation never approached his enormous sales. Apart from his exceedingly successful career as an author of potboilers, his belief in the eugenics movement and his conviction that many of the “poor white trash” were irredeemably degenerate through some biological devolution eventually alienated many of his progressive supporters.
     The weighty volume of stories titled Jackpot, over seven hundred pages, seems at times like a collection of improvisations. The language is simple, direct, and transparent, but not in the exaggerated way associated with Hemingway. Each piece is very short, no longer than it might take a front porch lounger to deliver a bit of neighborhood news, satisfactorily heightened to make an impact.
     Some of Caldwell’s stories do sound like just such gossipy anecdotes, a few have the ring of regionalist tales like those of George Washington Harris. Stories like “Meddlesome Jack” and “It Happened Like This,” and “Hamrick’s Polar Bear” sound like anecdotes that might have been current in oral form. As much, though as Caldwell is identified as a close observer of poor and feckless white Southerners, he had little difficulty in switching to similar characters in rural Maine when he lived there.
     Caldwell was capable of social realism as protest as well, displayed in stories such as “Slow Death” and “Knife to Cut the Corn Bread With.” He pulls no punches in the depiction of vicious and violent racism as in “The End of Christy Tucker,” “Blue Boy,” and “The Negro in the Well.” A sort of mute, unthinking violence lurks always near the surface of his action, breaking out in stories like “The Growing Season,” “The First Autumn,” and “The Shooting.”
     He was, of course, best-known for sexual content, an appeal enhanced by paperback cover art by artists like James Avati and Hans Helweg. A good many of the stories in Jackpot describe the dawn of desire in adolescents who barely understand their feelings as in “The Strawberry Season” or “Indian Summer,” sometimes in a comic vein as in “A Day’s Wooing,” “Snacker,” or “Where the Girls Were Different.” Erotic desire may be mysteriously inexorable as in “Warm River,” “Crown-fire,” or “A Dream,” rudely imperative as in “Midsummer Passion,” or calculating as in “Maud Island.”
     These last two stories also illustrate the characteristic mixture of sex and violence typical of an author who presents virtually no examples of real and mutual love. In “Rachel” the theme of adolescent sexuality is combined with excruciating poverty. The narrator glimpses Rachel’s “sinuous beauty” at the moment she begins to die from ingesting rat poison. In “Martha Jean” another indigent young girl is raped, and in “The Lonely Day” Katherine is led to her death by an irresistible siren call of naked frolics.
     My copy of Jackpot, the 1943 Sun Dial Press edition, includes brief headnotes for each story in a bluff style presaging the author’s late career in men’s magazines with names like Gent, Cavalier, and Male. While stressing his identity as a writer, these regularly suggest the informal, almost chance character of his compositions and ridicule critics with authentic American anti-intellectual vitriol in terms like “bloated middleman.” Such critics, according to Caldwell, “make a profession of tearing flesh from bone” and, failing to understand a story, they may well ”set out to prove that the author was a jail-bird and a wife-beater.” Oddly, though his career was in fact launched by the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's who published and promoted him after he had been recommended by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Caldwell in these notes repeatedly ridicules a certain Prof. Perkins, making him the surrogate for all the pointy-headed critics who did not sufficiently praise his work.
     Perhaps the truest note of Caldwell’s sensibility is suggested by a story such as “The Automobile that Wouldn’t Run” whose protagonist prefers to avoid work if possible and to sit in an engineless car serenading a lady with his banjo. According to another of his prefatory notes his wise grandfather maintained that “storytelling was a bastard art because it had been created by tellers of tales for the sole purpose of making laziness respectable.” The same sage, he says, rated every story “either a hum-dinger” or else “god-awful.” Substitute a typewriter for a banjo and one might approach Caldwell’s idealized version of himself. This insouciant image of the artist may not be wholly a pose. Once Caldwell learned how to sell his work, he turned out appropriate product in sufficient quantity to support himself. When he says that he does not read his own work the reader may guess that that policy includes eschewing revision.

An opinion that goes against the grain is often more engaging that a reinforcement of the general view of others. I am afraid I can only agree with the critics Caldwell feared. In the best moments as I read his stories, I was reminded of the unsparing though often comic portrayals of small towns in Huckleberry Finn where ignorance thrives and violence is never far off. The racial themes are reminiscent of Faulkner and the erotic ones of Nabokov, but simply mentioning these names emphasizes how far Caldwell fell short of the achievements of the American masters. Nonetheless, he has a place in the history of literature. These stories seem to me, however, less a jackpot than a modest trickling weekly allowance, dependable if never dazzling.

The Verbal Dance of the Blues

This is meant as the personal and theoretical introductory essay to a volume of analyses of blues lyrics. I had thought of using “The Poetry of the Blues” which focuses on W. C. Handy’s story of the genre’s origin in this place, but that has been rewritten to follow “The Verbal Dance of the Blues.” At present eighteen essays offering close readings of blues lyrics as poetry are already posted on this site.


     My familiarity with the blues began in childhood, though my home environment could hardly have been more distant from the country porches where the music was born. I grew up within a few miles of the dark and smoky Chicago barrooms where the leading exponents of electrified blues performed, but in a suburb, separated by race and class and culture from their music. I did have the advantage of a hip older brother who special-ordered 45s by John Lee Hooker and Clarence “Frogman” Henry and 33s by Robert Johnson and Robert Pete Williams at the little village record store. His taste may have surprised the clerks, but he was hardly unique. The folk music vogue was rising and, while some favored concert stylings of Anglo-American ballads or original topical material, I was one among many who found in the Mississippi Delta blues a beauty and a power unavailable elsewhere.
     When I was fifteen a slightly older friend and I drove east, stopping at coffee houses to hear what we could of acoustic blues live. I remember Fritz Richmond before he joined Jim Kweskin at the Gaslight and Skip James singing for a half dozen people at a little place within sight of Harvard Gate where a drunken student kept asking him to play “St. James Infirmary.” Back in Chicago my friends and I located live music venues that would not ask for i.d. such as the Club Alex on Roosevelt Road where Magic Sam led the house band. Now and then the Regal Theatre would host a “big blues extravaganza” featuring a solid lineup of now legendary musicians.
     Later as a student of literature and a writer myself I turned from impressionistic appreciation to critical analysis of the literary devices that allowed this music of the poor and oppressed to attain such sophistication and artistry. These essays arise from a lifetime of listening, but also from knowledge of poetry around the world and through the centuries. Perhaps my readings can make a modest contribution to the recognition of the place of American blues lyrics among the greatest achievements of twentieth century American poetry.
     In poetry as in language itself, complexity does not develop over time; it is present from the start. It is in fact an axiom in linguistics that the most complex grammatically languages, those richest in morphological possibilities, are the unwritten ones. With writing, standardization, and time languages seem to become simpler. Thus English has lost the three genders, the dual forms (meaning neither singular nor plural but two) as well as numerous sounds such as the fricative produced in the back of the throat and vestigially represented by the gh in words like light. Vowel sounds once distinct collapse toward a shwa, and dialectical variations fade.
     In the past folk song, like unwritten languages, was often considered “primitive,” rudimentary, and naïve. For the early advocates of such music the motive was often nationalistic as in the cases of Arnim and Brentano, Burns, and Dvořák. The texts of oral poetry were thought to be not so much the work of individual artists as a collective expression of the people as a whole. In the twentieth century folklorists like John Work, the Lomaxes and Harry Oster generally emphasized sociological rather than artistic implications of the material they collected.
     A more sophisticated view of unwritten songs developed with the understanding of oral literature that came with the work of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry and Lord provided ample proof that each oral text is unique, the work of a specific singer, some gifted poets and others with lesser skills. They demonstrated that the use of conventions and formulaic phrases do not vitiate meaning and, in the use of a master, may increase a poem’s semantic density and subtlety.
     Poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha encouraged the treatment of traditional oral texts as works of art, provocatively suggesting that they share techniques with modern avant-gardists and vastly multiplying the readership of poems recorded by anthropologists most of whom (Dennis Tedlock was an early exception) thought of the contents of their field notebooks as scientific data rather than aesthetic objects.
     Such developments have laid a theoretical base for a literary treatment of the blues songs of the Mississippi Delta, a corpus preserved on commercial recordings as well as by folklorists and appreciated by generations of listeners far from life in the Jim Crow rural South. Expressions of enthusiasm such as “Blues are my religion!” while all very well convey nothing of the artistry of the songs themselves. The highly developed conventions and shared allusive language that links song to song resemble those of Greek epigrams, Troubadour cansos, and Elizabethan sonnets, producing a marvelously expressive verbal medium capable of producing beauty as striking and themes as profound as any poetry in American literature.
     In spite of the rarity of direct social comment in the blues, their vision reflects American racism in DuBoisian “double consciousness,” providing a natural “hip” insight to question and enrich each singer’s descriptions. In this it surely reflects a phenomenon evident as well in jazz and rap and more broadly in the musical prominence of the Gnaoui in the Maghreb who were likewise descended from slaves, as well as the Roma, musicians to all classes of Eastern Europe for centuries, though too often otherwise despised. How else has it come that so many important American writers have been Jews and so many contemporary authors like Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Arundhati Roy are bicultural?
     Blues songs address the strongest human passion of eros. Many directly confront mortality, sometimes with Christian apologetics, sometimes without the aid of revelation. A good many might be said to be philosophical expressing existential Angst or ebullient joy. Thus the blues lyrics engage with the most ambitious themes of world literature -- love death and god – no less than Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare.
     Though the blues have long had intellectual appreciators who never experienced, they have rarely received the sort of appreciative explication given writers in the accepted canon. Their manipulation of listener expectations through the use of conventions and set phrases means that these lyrics require close as well as appreciative reading.
     I present here close readings of some of the masterpieces of the Delta blues by which I hope to demonstrate the beauty, expressiveness, and efficiency of the form. Behind these interpretations is the dynamo of my love for the music, unchanged since I first heard these recordings as a schoolboy. Marooned as I felt in suburbia, singers like Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson opened my vision every bit as much as Homer and Goethe. Several of these essays concern image clusters or points of blues history rather than stanza by stanza explication, but the thrust of my entire project is to make a case for this body of great American poetry.

On the Intrusion of Non-aesthetic Criteria in Value Judgements about Art

For thousands of years most people have believed a proposition that seems to me absurd on its face: the idea that art should inculcate good behavior, that good literature teaches morality, often accompanied by the fear that exposure to bad art can encourage unethical actions. This belief is widespread in spite of the fact that artists have no greater access to truth than others and lack even training in philosophy or religion. Few, I think, would suspect that poets, painters, or professors of literature have any more orderly lives than philistines, yet the idea of the value of art as moral instruction has persisted through the centuries. The fact is that poets are distinguished by their ability to manipulate words, visual artists for their facility with form, composers with patterns of sound, and for nothing else at all. Creativity has no correlation with morality.

It is no surprise that such non-aesthetic criteria are advanced by governments and churches, institutions that know nothing of beauty, but they also appear in critics who should know better. In fact the theoretical association between art and ethics descends from archaic times. Oral cultures transmit their myths and mores through song, drama, sculpture, and story which often embody largely unquestioned “truths” about prudential or god-pleasing behavior. Poetry for such people is the most effective coding of all sorts of knowledge including moral judgements and political theory. Early writers saw teaching people how to behave as one of their most important functions. Plato’s doubts about the moral reliability of poetry led him to advocate censorship (he was blind to the similar unreliability of philosophy). The didactic role of literature was eventually enshrined in a dictum so influential it has been called “the Horatian platitude”: poetry should “teach and delight.” [1] This notion was then maintained by Augustine’s tempered acceptance of poetry as a possible aid toward salvation. Sidney continued the notion that poets work “to delight and teach, and delight to move men to take that goodness in hand, which without delight they would fly as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodness whereunto they are moved.” Shelley, too, thought “the greatest poets have been men of the most spotless virtue” (though some of his contemporaries would have been skeptical of his right to that description).

This assumption persisted until the age of Romanticism when an exalted view of imagination allowed beauty to displace truth altogether in the old formula. Strengthened by the proponents of “art for art’s sake” in the late Victorian era, by the mid-twentieth century, one of the most prominent critics could flatly declare “Art is neither good nor bad, but a clairvoyant vision of the nature of both, and any attempt to align it with morality is intolerably vulgar.” Many critics would now agree that “Our very idea of art precludes adherence” to the association of poetry with morality. [2] Yet a considerable revanchment has occurred as well, primarily associated with feminism and soi-disant progressivism and associated with the critical schools labeled new historicism, cultural criticism, gender studies, and the like which too often fired with self-righteous indignation employ the crudest instruments of Marxism to reduce art to mere social data. In practice the moral responsibility of art has been extended to the maker as well. An immoral poet has been thought to produce necessarily unworthy work, while, by the same erroneous principle, the virtues of an upright writer may seem to enhance the value of what he writes. The entire framework is repeated in the realm of social, not personal, morality, which is to say politics. An ethically motivated critics would find a defender of slavery, say, sinful and therefore capable of producing only flawed poetry, while a progressive or revolutionary writer is likely to be celebrated.

These days we hear little about people being led astray by licentious literature, but this was the cry of philistines and bluenoses for centuries. Socrates, after all, was executed for corrupting the youth. Those who closed the theaters (not just in the U. K. in 1642, and in the United States at the time of its birth in 1774 and 1778) regularly maintained that attending plays fosters licentious behavior. In recent American culture the same impulse is evident in censorship of Joyce, Henry Miller [3], and Allen Ginsberg.

Sometimes the political and personal are so mingled they can hardly be separated. When NEA and NEH funding was drastically cut in the nineties, the assault was led by Jesse Helms, whose political career was founded in racist bigotry. One of the chief targets of the philistines was Andre Serrano’s “Piss Christ.” It became perhaps the most popular objet d’art among evangelical Christians in modern times -- reproductions of it appeared in right-wing Christian publications for years afterwards. Needless to say, Mr. Helms had probably not set foot in a gallery or museum in his entire adult life, and the same may be safely assumed of the outraged Christians. The very same silly drama was reenacted around Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” made in part of elephant dung, but also, since one must always up the ante, with cutouts of pudenda from pornographic materials. (Such controversy has always been good for business. Ofili’s “Mary” resold in 2015 for just short of three million pounds.)

More recently, in a development disturbing to progressive aesthetes, those claiming to oppose racism and other oppression have turned against the easier opponent of art. Thus would-be critics in a popular and influential critical edition of Jane Austen’s Emma criticize the author for her “failure to envisage a female community across social barriers.” and for her refusal to admit that “impoverished middle-class women are victims of a capitalist system.” [4] Only a singularly obtuse reader would use such irrelevant and anachronistic language to speak of the novel.

Rulers wreak more havoc than obtuse critics, though, when they conflate of art and morality. Apart from its centrality in literary theory until recent times this confusion in its political form has, not surprisingly, been an assumption of authoritarian regimes of all sorts. The very same erroneous standards appeared in the hunt for heretics by the medieval and Renaissance Catholic Church, Nazi condemnation of “degenerate” and Jewish art, the Stalinist imposition of a radically reductive “socialist realism” in 1932, and fundamentalist Islam’s disapproval of images and music. Each of these represents an attempt by the rulers to restrict art to a simple-minded statement of the most basic socially approved values. Such misguided and reductive judgements take place in somewhat democratic societies as well. Last year San Francisco was asked to remove the WPA murals by Communist painter Victor Arnautoff in George Washington High School with the excuse that they should be replaced by “more positive” images. These pictures were targeted specifically because they did include representation of the genocidal attacks of native people and the viciousness of slavery.

All such critics cannot be condemned as know-nothing yahoos. The sensitive have questioned the stature of authors with fascist sympathies, such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline or Ezra Pound. Thoughtful people have expressed reservations about appreciating the films of Roman Polanski and Woody Allen, not because of any shortcomings in the work itself, but rather what they view as unpardonable acts by the artists.

Should the work of a poet or painter lose stature because its creator beats his wife? No more than one would refuse the attendance of a celebrated surgeon if one found he supported Generalissimo Trump. Clearly a person may excel in one arena of life, in a profession, for example, while misbehaving badly in others. Skill does not excuse a vicious person, but neither does the creator’s immoral behavior invalidate or weaken the work.

Of course, ethics and politics have an important role to play in making human life livable, even sometimes civilized. I by no means discount the importance of morality in evaluating societies and individual character, but these have nothing to do with aesthetic value. Government and non-profit agencies may naturally make social betterment a goal, but they should not then pretend that their decisions are determined by artistic considerations. Without exception, every one of the most recent recipients of NEA grants, announced in January of 2020, was associated with a social group identified as oppressed or underserved. [5] Just as in higher education admissions and hiring, diversity is a worthy goal which might be well-served by affirmative action, but academic or artistic strength must remain the primary criterion for judgement.

In evaluating art, politics and morality are irrelevant, popularity should play no role, nor should historical influence. An author’s colorful notoriety or exemplary propriety should never lead the reader either toward or away from his work. Each poem, song, or picture must earn attention through its beauty, broadly understood as reflecting elements of both form and content. Questions of ethics are most assuredly central to our shared humanity, and there are better and worse systems of government and virtuous and vicious forms of behavior, but that is because our political and social practices impact on our well-being. In general, an immoral person is one who causes suffering to others while a moral one displays benevolence. An exploitative social system likewise increases human pain and a more just one relieves it. These effects are evident in lived experience. In contrast, the effects of art occur in the consciousness of the consumer and the unique reward art may offer is beauty, a quality which would be wholly amoral were it not that some acts are attractive and some repellent. A few words in the air, a curving line, a succession of musical tones, how could these be morally good or bad? A work of art can do no more than to offer amusement and distraction and glimpses of beauty. If a work fails, we will not be so harsh as to call tiresomeness a sin.



1. The Epistula ad Pisonem (or Ars Poetica) repeats the idea in several forms: "Aut prodesse uolunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere uitae" (The poet aims to benefit or delight, or to be both pleasing and serviceable in life at once), "miscuit utile dulci" (a mix of useful and sweet), and "delectando pariterque monendo" (delighting and warning).

2. The first quotation is from Fearful Symmetry A Study of William Blake (p. 121) and the next from Tzvetan Todorov and John Anzalone, “Poetry and Morality,” Salmagundi, No. 111 (Summer 1996).

3. Tropic of Cancer was not legally published in the United States until 1964.

4. See the devastating and detailed critique in James Seaton’s Literary Criticism from Plato to Postmodernism: the Humanistic Alternative, p. 63-4. 5. The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues.

5.  The list consisted of awards for black universities, for Alaskan native dance, for fashion design for the disabled, for teaching girls metalworking, in support of an opera festival by women composers, for “Latinx” events, for youth in “juvenile detention centers,” and for school programs about the Negro baseball leagues.