Maybe Literature Really is Valuable!

Another very insightful essay by John Ryder

John and I spoke often in Malta about the insights of art, particularly the novel, on our understanding. It is another rich source of experience. Here he discusses two current issues about which we can well disagree. But, disagreement is a form of deep thought. It is a way to free ourselves from limitations of information and past experience. Disagreement, that is, as conversation and taking seriously points of view that we have all too casually filed away as beliefs.

I was struck today when I saw two articles dealing with aspects of contemporary American society that used as points of reference literary sources. One is an article in The Atlantic that begins with a quick account of the plot of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and returns to the book throughout the piece. The second is an article in Vanity Fair that has as its opening photo a group of protesters dressed up as handmaids, i.e., those from Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I heartily recommend both articles and the two books they draw on. I might also recommend a number of the film versions of Hawthorne’s book and Elizabeth Moss’s brilliant rendering of Atwood’s tale.

            The article from The Atlantic is about the growing number of cases around the country of professionals losing their jobs, careers, and sometimes reputations, as a result of accusations of bad behavior with respect, for the most part, to gender or race. The thrust of the article is that in too many cases people are suffering fairly extreme depredations simply on the basis of accusations, and often without proof. As the article tells it, in a number of cases people’s friends abandon them, the institutions where they work, or had worked, treat them as guilty of something without sufficient evidence, and in some cases launch additional investigations on the assumption that if they were accused of this, whatever “this” is, they’re quite possibly guilty of that and other transgressions as well. There is, the article argues, a growing number of instances in contemporary American society in which people are guilty simply by accusation, that there is a growing “group think” wherein people become afraid to associate with the accused, and afraid that they too may say or do something that will result in accusations being made against them. All of this, the author argues, is reminiscent of the closed mindedness, intolerance, and injustice that we associate, rightly or wrongly, with 17th century New England Puritanism. Leaving aside the reasonableness of the article’s position and arguments for it, the author turns to our literary heritage as an explanatory device. If we want to understand the sort of social situation to which he alludes, then The Scarlet Letter is an ideal resource. One might also point, though the article does not, to another literary source, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which has a similar theme, and was written during another period of closed mindedness and intolerance of a wider range of ideas, namely the McCarthyism and anti-communism of the late 40s and early 50s.

            The article in Vanity Fair that uses the image of protesting women dressed in the red clothes and white head covering of the handmaids in Atwood’s book concerns itself with the Texas (perversion of) law that was just winked at the other day by the Supreme Court. This law, and the Texas State legislature has outdone itself this time, which in their case is saying something, is bizarre in a number of ways, particularly in that it imposes an unreasonable burden on women. Equally bizarre, and from a formal point of view perhaps more so, is that, as I understand it, the law effectively deputizes anyone in the world to sue a woman for attempting to have an abortion, to sue anyone who helps her, who drives her to a clinic, and even at one point or another “intends” to help her. One TV commentator said in passing something like “welcome to Gilead,” yet another reference to Atwood’s book, and the protest in handmaids’ garb was clearly intended to suggest that with the Texas law American society was crossing a line into egregious injustice and oppression. The protesters in handmaid’s attire, the TV commentator who referred to Texas as Gilead, and the author of the article that discussed the law all had the same idea, which was that the most powerful way to make the point is to draw on this singular literary representation of religion gone mad and the oppression of women, The Handmaid’s Tale.

            I do not mean here to get into the details of the issues the articles discuss. In the spirit of open-mindedness that The Atlantic article urges on us, we ought to leave open the possibility that there are issues to discuss in both topics, and that reasonable people might disagree. That, at least, should be our point of departure, even if after the discussion we end up confident in our judgments. The point that interests me here, rather, is that our understanding of our own social circumstances can be, and in these cases is, enhanced and enriched, indeed enabled, by literary treatments of the relevant topics. Too often it is assumed that art is somehow divorced from the reality in which it is produced. In this case we are talking about literary art, but the point could be made about visual, plastic, and performing arts as well. The serious art with which we engage is not a distraction, or a pastime, or entertainment, but rather it is one of the ways that we understand our world, and the best of it affords insight into our world, our societies, ourselves and our lives, no less than the best psychology or physics or biology or sociology or history.

The Scarlet Letter, written in New England in the mid-19th century, and The Handmaid’s Tale, written in Canada in the mid-1980s, have something powerfully important to tell us about our current circumstances. They are able to do that because like all good art, they penetrate the surface of what we do and what may happen to us to reveal some of the complex and rich resources and possibilities that individually and collectively we draw on to handle the problems of our lives. Those possibilities were available hundreds of years ago, and for better or worse many of the same are available today. Hathorne and Atwood help us to make sense of lives, and we would do well, as the authors of these articles clearly understand, to attend to them.

John Ryder

Tucson, AZ

September 4, 2021