Stories

Probably the last time I had read Richard II was in 1967 in Dr. Wise’s Shakespeare class. I was a college student then majoring in English. I have been advised that I ought to describe my academic focus as English literature to differentiate it from studies of English as a Second Language, but in fact my major included significant courses in American literature as well and some literature in translation. But I am certain that the department in which I studied was known as “English,” and I announce myself to whoever asked as an English major. In Dr. Wise’s class we read sixteen plays. And yesterday under the stimulus of an episode of the Netflix series The Crown in which Charles (later to be Charles III) plays King Richard, I read again Shakespeare’s play, and I enjoyed a very pleasant though very warm day (outside the temperature topped 100 degrees!) engaged in the history play.
            The moment in the play to which I now refer occurs in Act III scene ii. Richard is under siege from Bolingbroke, soon to be Henry IV, who has returned from Richard’s banishment and has organized a rebellion against the King to recover the lands and wealth Richard has appropriated in Henry’s absence. Henry has gathered a mass of other disaffected nobles and commoners to battle Richard and the campaign has succeeded. Richard, aware that his throne and kingdom have been lost, speaks to those who have remained loyal and who now accompany him, “For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground/And tell sad stories of the death of kings.” Richard is then chastised by one of his loyal followers for his willingness to sit and tell stories rather than to act. But I suppose the time for action has passed and now Richard would rather tell stories. A Chasidic teaching suggests, “All of us are asleep. By telling stories we are awakened,” and Richard’s stories augur a passiveness that approaches sleep.
            I think a lot about stories. Walter Benjamin distinguishes between oral stories and written ones, as in novels, but I don’t discriminate between the two. I have heard and I have read a great number of stories and I have even told not a few, some of which might have even possessed some truth. And thus, I have some sympathy with Richard’s desire to sit and tell stories, in his case of the death of kings. These days the idea of stories govern our social world. I have noted that newspapers no longer report the news: rather, they write stories about it. As for me, I would rather read the news in my newspapers and not in them be told stories. Information has value only in the moment. Perhaps Richard’s stories of the death of kings might serve as the offering for his pity-party but for him there seems to be in them little of what Walter Benjamin refers to as ‘counsel,’ an invitation to continue the story. Richard’s stories have little resonance. Counsel offers something useful: it invites question. Richard’s stories seem a dead end; they possess no wisdom to affect his present condition. 
            Stories can be powerful. Here is one: when the Baal Shem Tov had a difficult task to fulfill he would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire, prayer and then he became able to perform the task. Years later, the wise man of Mezrich, too, found he had a difficult task to fulfill, and he went to the same place but he had forgotten how to light the fire. But he prayed the same prayers and then he was able to complete the task. Many years later Rabbi Moshe Lev found he was troubled by a difficult task he had to perform. He went to the same place in the forest but he had forgotten how to light the fire and the prayers he was to say. But he did know the place and that would have to suffice. Finally, many years later, Rabbi Salanter was called upon to complete a similar task. But the rabbi had forgotten the place in the woods, he did not recall how to light a fire and he had forgotten the prayers. He said, “I cannot light the fire. I cannot speak the prayers. I do not know the place in the forest. But we can tell the story of how it was once done and that must be sufficient.” And so it was. Stories throw the world open to possibility; stories are open questions that demand responses; stories are the place for endless answers.
            Stories sustain me. They are sufficient though, of course, they are not all I need: I do keep a ready supply of ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. Nonetheless, even those other things I say I need are actually part of the story I would tell. Richard’s stories were a replacement for action. They would not suffice. I know that sometimes engagement with stories is a means to preclude possibility and avoid action as it was for Richard II. My more recent engagement with Shakespeare’s Richard II was an exercise in study, and study requires active participation and therefore, commitment to it opposes passivity. Study is the place, the fire and the prayer. So might be story telling. 
            

            

 

Night and at the end of a road

I came late to the streaming series The Crown on Netflix. And I am right now in the middle of Season 3. It is 1969, and Charles has been sent to Wales to learn the Welsh language. This has been deemed a politically correct gesture. Charles is scheduled to receive investiture as Prince of Wales and the government believes that his attendance at the University of Wales for a semester to learn Welsh will palliate the Welsh nationalist population who are advocating vocally for sovereignty. Charles’ enrollment in the university is thought to be a politically move to palliate the Welsh. He has been used such before: in a previous episode he had been send to Gordonstoun School where his father had been educated and had suffered cruelly and acutely. Charles has called his time there “a nightmare” and “hell,” but Philip had insisted his son follow in his father’s footsteps. Charles’ own wishes are dismissed, disregarded, and deemed irrelevant. When sent to Wales he was contentedly enrolled at Cambridge and happily active in theater.
            When I began viewing the series I had felt a great deal of sympathy for Lillebet who would become Elizabeth II. Neither her father, George VI, nor she had any wish to assume the crown, but circumstances proved their destinies otherwise. Edward VIII had abdicated the throne in 1936 thrusting his brother onto the throne. George’s death in 1953 then left the throne vacant and his eldest daughter, Lizebet was thrust onto the role as monarch. It was a position she neither sought nor desired; she says later that she would have preferred to spend all her time breeding and racing her horses. But when the circumstances fell upon her, she had no option but to assume the throne. Having assumed the throne, she had a great deal to learn in the fulfillment of her duties. She essentially had become a head of state but one who possessed no power: England was a constitutional monarchy and Elizabeth discovered that her position obligated her but to maintain the monarchy. Her role, it was said, was to be elegant and to leave to the government to be efficient. But Elizabeth became overwhelmed by the position and role of crown. As monarch she felt obliged to subsume her personality: she lost Lillebet and became The Crown. Nothing but what protected the monarchy mattered in her actions, and her own wishes and desires were repressed, I would suspect, at great pain, distress and loss. Certainly, her relationship with her husband and children suffered. 
            Now, Charles’ time in Wales confronted him with the oppressive history of the British subjugation and occupation of the country, and that knowledge surprised and alarmed him. He had not ever been apprised of this ignoble past. At his investiture he was required to give a speech and at the time he was handed a speech that had been written by politicians and court officials. Studying the speech he had been given, Charles remarks that the speech had nothing to do with him nor does it represent anything of his character. Certainly, it did not reflect anything of what he had learned about Wales though the speech would be spoken in Welsh. And so, to the text presented to him he adds his own comments to the prepared talk. Speaking at the investiture he acknowledged the injustices the Crown for centuries had inflicted on Wales; he expressed sympathy and concern for the oppression the country has suffered at the hands of the British. His speech was warmly received by the Welsh and by his tutor, Mr. Millward, who at the outset had been hostile to Charles and the requirement that he teach him Welsh. Millward congratulated Charles on his learning and on his courage to speak from his own heart. But when the speech is translated for the Queen, who interestingly does not speak Welsh, she is angered by Charles’ comments. As she scolds him, he has “too much of a voice to my liking. Not having a voice is what we all have to live with. We have all made sacrifices and suppressed who we are. Some portion of ourselves is always lost.” And Charles answers, “That is a choice.” When he says, “I have a voice,” she responds “No one wants to hear it.”
            I have been intrigued by a statement in Jose Saramajo’s novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis: “What will you be when you discover it is night and find yourself at the end of the road.” I believe that the sentiment here refers to the end of some effort and when the day is finally done. For Elizabeth that effort has been to say nothing and to be nothing but The Crown. She had been trapped and lost in the role. At night and at the end of the road she is only the crown. The narrator says, “Man must always make an effort, so that he may deserve to be called man, but he is much less master of his own person and destiny than he imagines. Time, not his time, will make him prosper or decline, sometimes for different merits, or because they are judged differently.” For Elizabeth she has succumbed to the role and the effort she has made has required her to say nothing; she is known not as human but as The Crown. 
            We might be less in control of our destinies than we consider; it might be that context makes our attempts succeed or not; that we might not be judged as we might wish. Though at the start I felt sympathy for Lillebet, I have come to dislike Elizabeth: at the end of her day I find Elizabeth and The Crown rather unpleasant and even ugly.
             I do not think I have arrived at night, nor do I feel that I am at the end of any road. The question I daily consider is how I think of myself when it is night and the present road has ended. This consideration need not be the end of my life. It might be, indeed, at any night or day or year.
            

 

Woke

I read that Oppenheimer during his persecution had read and was deeply affected by Henry James’s novella, “The Beast in the Jungle.” I decided I would read the story. It is not that Henry James was foreign to me: I had studied most of the major novels, even The Golden Bowl, and had even recently reread and was thoroughly enthralled with The Portrait of a Lady. I do not recall having read “The Beast in the Jungle,” but there were annotations in my handwriting in the text’s margins, so obviously sometime in my reading past I had studied this James’s work. The text I owned was in a collection titled The Short Fiction of Henry James. I am not sure to what “short” refers here because a novella is certainly meant to be longer than a short story but considerably shorter than a novel. Anyway, I was wondering what there might be about Oppenheimer’s interest in the novella that had provoked my present curiosity in the text. I wondered if in my reading of “The Beast in the Jungle” I attempting to be J. Robert Oppenheimer, or did I want to know what Oppenheimer knew(minus the theoretical physics and quantum mechanics that I had tried to understand more than once and could not do so). According to the biography, American Prometheus Oppenheimer was deeply affected by James’s story. Or did I in the reading hope to gain some insight into the man by reading what he had read. I had long been interested in Oppenheimer, and even had taught at Great Neck North High School the play, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by the German dramatist Heinar Kipphardt to the class.
            There are various theories concerning the identity and/or nature of the beast in the jungle. May Bartram, the woman with whom John Marcher had maintained a strictly platonic relationship and whom after years he meets again, reminds him that he once told her that he had experienced “from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.” I think it was this identity that Oppenheimer experienced as his persecution by the Kangaroo court investigation probed unmercifully into his loyalty and character. The result did not go well for Oppenheimer, and he was ruined by this inquisition. I think in his reading of “The Beast in the Jungle” that Oppenheimer might have identified with the persecutory character of the beast. It would destroy him, as if the beast had entered into him and was not identical with him. But it might also be true that the beast was inseparable from him and was essential to his sense of self and world. And like for Marcher it could be known as Oppenheimer’s egotism, his aloofness and perfunctory attention to too many others with whom he came in professional and academic contact.
            I have thought that for Marcher the beast in the jungle was his failure to actually engage in life, to experience a great passion. The narrator says, “No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived, maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?” Marcher had not lived because he had not allowed himself to experience passion; so it was that in the end when he visited May’s grave Marcher observes another visitor whose visit to a grave and in whose face he views Marcher recognizes “the raw glare of his grief.’ Marcher wonders “what wrong what wound it expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man had, to make him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?” Whatever it was, Marcher understands that he had never had it, and he falls prostrate onto the grave of May Bartram who might have loved him. Marcher, recognizing his emotional death-in-life, lies on a grave. He had never thought of May Bartram outside of his own egotism and an awareness of how she might be used for his benefit. This fatal flaw was the beast in the jungle and the awareness of it changes forever Marcher’s life.
            That beast, acknowledges Marcher would be something he would have had to “meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaved me to the consequences however they shape themselves.”  Awareness of the beast was a revelation, an insight, a knowledge of something. Marcher is horror-stricken at this revelation. He had awakened and it had terrified him. “The horror of waking—this was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze.” It is this waking, the awareness to learn things one had avoided or dismissed, that appalled Marcher. But at least Marcher comes tragically to realize his beast as perhaps did Oppenheimer. But I realized that this reference to “waking” had application today, to the hordes promoting the anti-woke movements that are attempting to tear down our democracy. They are kept safe in their ignorance and protected in their somnolence. The decision to eliminate those who offer another perspective; the decision to eliminate every reference to diversity; to deny to libraries books that offer positive images of alternative lives; to deny to classrooms voices that had been silenced and lives that had been disappeared is to choose ignorance over awakeness, to remain safe from the beast in the jungle but be in bondage to it. And I think now that the anti-woke crowds that continue to support proto-fascists such as Trump and DeSantis and Taylor Greene and McCarthy are governed by this fear of waking, of having to acknowledge their hateful behaviors as evidence of their willed ignorances.
            I think that perhaps what attracted Oppenheimer to The Beast in the Jungle was the recognition of how his own personal demons and failures had been ultimately a source of his troubles. And Marcher’s realization provoked Oppenheimer’s own self-understanding.