Over-analyzing Arrested Development in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow is one of the worst books I have read to completion, so the essay that follows should not be taken as a recommendation so much as a deconstructive cheat sheet for anyone who is considering or being coerced to read it.  With any luck, this will be the last so-called close-reading I have to do in, like, ever.

The protagonist of Seize the Day by Saul Bellow is 44 years old, married, and a father, but continuously exhibits tendencies that suggest he’s trapped in some kind of arrested development. Themes of adolescence, adulthood, and masculinity to a lesser extent all pervade Seize the Day, and Bellow traces most of Wilhelm’s psychological malaise back to a lack of sympathy from his father, Dr. Adler. Instead of giving in to pity, Adler’s apathetic attitude towards his beleaguered son compounds with Wilhelm’s problems, engendering a cycle of passive behavior and unfulfilled dependency on paternal affirmation. The further Wilhelm drifts from his father and his father’s approval, the harder he finds it to attain fulfillment as a grown man, and the more entrenched he gets in a prodigal son inertia of his own making. The final scene depicts the culmination of all Wilhelm’s varied reversions to childhood, rendering Seize the Day an essentially deterministic novel.

Although Wilhelm thinks, “Dad never was a pal to my when I was young,” the son’s first major act of straying from his detached father is abandoning his education to chase after a highly dubious career in acting. Wilhelm bears disdain towards academic pursuits, personified by his cousin Artie, an intelligent professor whom his mother casually brings up to avail him against leaving for Los Angeles. Artie is competent in multiple languages, and Wilhelm dislikes him for that very fact, thinking him “boring” or, worse, cynical.

How could anyone bear to know so many languages… Did Artie love his languages, and live for them, or was he also, in his heart, cynical? So many people nowadays were. No one seemed satisfied, and Wilhelm was especially horrified by the cynicism of successful people.

As a child might, Wilhelm strains to see the value of learning in and of itself, and looks down on the elitism he observes in people like Artie or Adler, whom he deems a “vain man”, albeit a respected and medically knowledgeable one. Moreover, he condenses the nearly two years of college he did experience into a set of memories with no educational aspect, and prides himself on eventually taking a different course.

Sometimes he told people, “I was too mature for college. I was a big boy, you see. Well, I thought, when do you start to become a man?” After he had driven a painted flivver and had worn a yellow slicker with slogans on it, and played illegal poker, and gone out on Coke dates, he had had college.

Here, and also later in the book when Margaret admits that college “seemed practical”, Bellow gives a window into Wilhelm’s prevailing, reactionary mindset, and leaves little room to wonder why he finds Tamkin’s carpe diem speech so enticing. Because of his overwhelming inadequacies relative to his father’s accomplishments, Wilhelm reassures himself by diminishing these accomplishments as empty or somehow injurious to him. In the paragraph describing Wilhelm’s fear of Artie’s cynicism, Bellow goes on to write, “Whenever at the end of the day he was unnaturally fatigued he attributed it to cynicism. Too much of the world’s business done.” Wilhelm’s default recourse in his extended adolescence tends to lie in distancing himself as much as possible from the antiquated success models of his parents, hence his “bid for liberty” in choosing the actor name Tommy. As the only person in his family not to complete higher education, he retains a scornful distaste for those who do adhere to that tradition, calling them cynical or selfish, and he mentally justifies his less prudent alternative as more independent or adult. “But Wilhelm had been eager for life to start. College was merely another delay.”

Nonetheless, for one reason or another, Wilhelm chooses to lie about his educational history, perhaps for fear of being rebuked, perhaps because he knows subconsciously he was wrong and doesn’t want to admit it. “Wilhelm respected the truth, but he could lie and one of the things he lied often about was his education, [saying] he was an alumnus of Penn State.” In fact, the son lies constantly, even to himself sometimes, and when he isn’t lying, he happens to be drawn to habitual liars, viz. Tamkin and Venice. First he lies about his prospects of actually making it in Hollywood, massively inflating the credibility of Venice’s offer when “the scout had never made him a definite offer of a studio connection”. Once his trust in Venice starts to disintegrate, he lies to his parents yet again, saying the scout fully believes in his acting talents. Then he lies to his father about the pills he’s taking and the woman he has been seeing in Roxbury.

On top of these dishonesties, the son willfully indulges Tamkin’s clearly fabricated claims simply because the man makes him feel better than his own father. When Adler ridicules one of the “psychological poet’s” conceptual inventions, Wilhelm excuses it as “just his kind of fantasy”, and later he ponders to himself, “I must be a real jerk to sit and listen to such impossible stories. I guess I am a sucker for people who talk about the deeper things of life, even the way he does.”

Wilhelm’s predilection to telling and tolerating lies is closely related to his childlike ego, which is always excusing itself from responsibility and avoiding commitment. As has already been mentioned, “he used to pretend that it [Hollywood] had all been the doing of a certain talent scout,” even though the idea to drop out of college originated with him. In response to his dad reprimanding him over his messy room – another youthful quality –, he places the room’s condition squarely on his wife, or lack thereof. Wilhelm’s conviction of his own helplessness manifests most clearly in his thoughts after meeting with his father. “And not only is death on his mind but through money he forces me to think about it, too. It gives him power over me. He forces me that way, he himself, and then he’s sore.” Wilhelm cannot help but see himself as a victim of others’ cruelty: his company’s, his wife’s, and his father’s. His future in his view is so laid out before him that he is basically enslaved. “The Emancipation Proclamation was only for colored people,” he mopes. “A husband like me is a slave, with an iron collar.”

In puerile fashion, he refuses to take responsibility whenever he is in the wrong, up until the very end, when he tells his pale father, “I should have listened to you,” but not before checking to see if the masseur is paying attention to them. Even after this humble admission, though, he backpedals and hides behind “bad luck”, the perennial cause of his woes. Just so, he reels at the thought of groveling before his former employees and begging them to take him back. “I can’t get on my knees to them,” he exclaims. “Rojax take me back? I’d have to crawl back.” His character is completely passive and determined by his social climate, borne along by forces he dares not oppose. This fact elucidates the meaning of one of the final scenes, in which he walks along Broadway with a great crowd, “in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence – I labor, I spend, I strive…” (111) In such a crowd, the motiveless Wilhelm must stand out.

The protagonist also balks at opportunities to promote himself, letting his father do that work for him. Multiple times Adler is described as a salesman, boasting of his son and daughter to business associates, but Wilhelm considers this inappropriate. “Now God alone can tell me why I have to lay my whole life bare to this blasted herring here. I’m sure nobody else does it.” Repelled by the success of his father, he generally shies from asserting himself in any threatening capacity or even from contradicting other people. Like a typical millennial critic who’s afraid of drawing harsh words from others, he peppers his speech with weasel phrases that downplay his own observations as subjective and undermine the purpose of argument altogether. Bellow writes, “When he was forced to differ he would declare, ‘Well, I’m not sure. I don’t really see it that way. I’m of two minds about it.’ He would never willingly hurt any man’s feelings.” He won’t venture even to criticize his sister Catherine’s art, waving away any misgivings he has with it as a matter of personal taste.

Driving home his pessimistic determinism, Wilhelm also has a habit of hugely overstating and dramatizing the plights in which he finds himself, bringing everything back to his literal suffocation and murder. “It would kill me to go back to school now,” he tells Venice at one point. Later in the book, he actually starts choking himself in front of his father to demonstrate his wife’s animosity towards him, and on the phone with her he yet again brings up the topic of her choking him. “You must realize you’re killing me,” he says. “You can’t be as blind as all that. Thou shalt not kill! Don’t you remember that?” When Tamkin elaborately compares money-making to the art of killing, Wilhelm listens, ill at ease, possibly because he connects it to his own life. All these references to or mock enactments of violence serve two purposes: first to emphasize the childish mentality of Wilhelm, second to show how powerless he feels to change his fortunes.

Bellow insinuates the son’s immaturity, and the immaturity of modern society broadly, in many other ways both subtle and patently obvious.  As an example of the former, there is Wilhelm’s heavy reliance on Coca Cola, which Mr. Perls disapprovingly notices him drinking for breakfast.  As for the latter, the point that Wilhelm’s job at Rojax Manufacturing involved selling “kiddie’s furniture” can hardly be dismissed as mere coincidence.  Extended adolescence applies to women too in the world of Seize the Day: inside the cafeteria, Wilhelm observes a crowd of elderly ladies who are heavily made-up and acting in a manner he thinks unbecoming of their age.  “Were there no longer any respectable old ladies who knitted and cooked and looked after their grandchildren?”  At the same time, the sight of the ostentatious women stirs in him a memory of how his grandmother treated him as a small child, implying that he is still mired to some extent in the stage of youth.  In his argument with Margaret on the phone, the wife expresses dedication to her traditional role as mother, saying, “Growing boys need parental authority and a home,” but even this exchange harkens back to the theme of Wilhelm’s arrested development.  Margaret says she has cannot afford to get a job if it means having a couple kids running loose, to which Wilhelm replies, “They’re not babies.  Tommy is fourteen.  Pauline is going to be ten.”  In this aspect, Seize the Day has become even more pertinent with age.  50 years ago, a man might have been shamed and frowned upon for suckling off his parents after college, or even after high school; now, under Obamacare, young Americans can continue to reap some of childhood’s perks until they turn 26.

Wilhelm’s objection to Margaret’s babying of his kids reflects his ongoing struggle to reconcile his true age with his emotional need for validation from his father. At least twice in the book he crosses himself for acting like a little kid with respect to Adler, and characters often reinforce that impression in his mind, Adler scolding him for speaking “nonsense and kid’s talk” and Tamkin arguing with him “dryly, as though he were dealing with a child”. Bellow seems to make the case that Wilhelm’s firmest claim upon adulthood is his ability to regulate his emotional vulnerability in public, viz. by suppressing the urge to cry. In his protracted conversation with Wilhelm, he feels tears welling up at one point but does not let them out. Later, in the brokerage office, he fights the temptation even harder.

His need to cry, like someone in a crowd, pushed and jostled and abused him from behind, and Wilhelm did not dare turn. He said to himself, I will not cry in front of these people. I’ll be damned if I’ll break down in front of them like a kid, even though I never expect to see them again. No! No! And yet his unshed tears rose and rose and he looked like a man about to drown.

By the protagonist’s correlation of crying with his own latent childishness, the last scene of Seize of the Day signifies more than just the “consummation of his heart’s ultimate need”. It also shows that Wilhelm has given up on attaining the one thing, his father’s approval, that would make him feel like a mature man, implying also that he’s given up trying to determine his own fate.

Dharma Relativity Theorem in the Ramayana

The following was written for a catch-all class on Asian great books, philosophy, and calligraphy which kicked off with a reading of the Good Parts Version of the Ramayana.  The paper won’t make much sense to the uninitiated, firstly because I wrote it for a professor reasonably familiar with the Ramayana, secondly because the Ramayana itself just doesn’t make much sense.  It’s still a pretty good entry point to Eastern literature, as it feels like the best Michael Bay movie Hollywood hasn’t yet had the good sense to green-light and offensively recast with non-blue people of European descent.  Where the Ramayana falls apart as religious epic – or stands tall depending on your spiritual persuasion – is in its confused, progressive, and relativistic presentation of the moral code of dharma.

The essay is way too long and rephrases the same idea over and over because I was being graded on a page count and because a pretty big chunk of it was written overnight.  Teachers in other fields may take this as a cautionary paper.

The concept of dharma in the Ramayana takes a multitude of forms, encompassing such meanings as natural calling, social obligation, and right behavior more broadly.  Pretty much every character in the epic lays claim to knowing and walking in the way of dharma, even those whose aims are diametrically opposed to one another’s.  As such it’s often hard to discern what the author of the Ramayana believes real dharma to be.  The contradictions within the moral order and its manifold interpretations are most easily reconciled when one sees dharma not as a concrete, immutable, absolute code but as a personal excuse pleaded by fallible, selfish characters in justification of their actions.  In the grand scheme of the epic, fate plays a much larger role in Rama finishing his exile and reclaiming Sita than does his inconsistent, continually revised commitment to dharma.

The author commonly refers to Rama as a perfect incarnation of dharma, Avatara of the deva Vishnu.  The introduction to Rama at the beginning of Book Two describes him as a human in whom “all the virtues that Brahma ever created were gathered as the galaxies are within the universe”.  When held up to scrutiny, though, Rama often falters from the very principles he describes as dharma, succumbing to fits of wrath and needless outbreaks of violence. In one chapter he lectures Lakshmana on the foolishness of violent resorts, saying, “Violence is never dharma and you must not give in to your anger.”  But throughout the Ramayana, Rama not only engages in violent acts but veritably relishes the opportunity for them.  When the “hideous” and pitiful rakshasa Surpanka enters their encampment, Rama recognizes her for what she is, but instead of attempting to defuse the situation quickly and peacefully, he entertains her seductive behavior and toys with her by recommending his brother in his stead.  Aiming to capitalize on the brothers’ pretense of flirting, Surpanka aggressively moves to devour Princess Sita, and Rama responds by brutally disfiguring the demon with the aid of his brother.  Rather than lamenting this unfortunate defensive act, necessary to protect the wife who gave up everything to enter the wilderness with him, Rama celebrates the maiming of Surpanka, for as the text reads, “The brothers dissolved in mirth.”

Was it dharma for the exile to break his former testimony against bloodshed, in such a sadistic and excessive manner none the less?  Did the dharma of defending his wife overrule the dharma of nonviolence he’d spoken of earlier?  The key implication of this scene is not that Rama has somehow violated dharma, considering that his personal “dharma” is ever changing to suit his current circumstances, but that fate or destiny is using him in unpredictable, seemingly ungodly ways to fulfill his ultimate purpose of toppling the tyranny of Ravana.  As the abducted Sita says in her encounter with Hanuman, “Ravana is part of our destiny and destiny must take its course.  Rama must come to Lanka and kill Ravana... Then dharma will be established on earth… Let there be a war, a dharma yuddha, as is honorable.”  The humiliation of Surpanka only leads to Rama’s decimation of Khara’s rakshasa – another sweeping reversal of his prior counsel –, which leads to her inflaming Ravana with jealousy over Sita, which leads to the beautiful woman’s separation from Rama and his ensuing, predetermined quest to regain her by any means.

Rama, Lakshmana, and Jatayu hunt rakshasas in a notoriously unsuccessful 2009 adaptation.

© 2007 Twentieth Century Fox

Rama again resorts to gratuitous, ill-informed brutality when he unhesitatingly offers to assassinate Sugriva’s brother, the monkey king Vali, for reasons not entirely clear on a very one-sided account.  “It is plain that only Vali’s death will bring you peace,” he tells his new ally, “And I swear to you, he will die.”  These don’t sound like the words of a man who “shuns violence wherever he can”, nor do they make much sense given his address to the dying Vali, whom he reasons he can justly kill within his dharma because the vanaras are wild animals that have been hunted through the ages by his ancestors.  Since Rama isn’t beholden to the same rules when dealing with the punishment of animals, one can only wonder why he treats so solemnly the suffering of one like Sugriva, who has simply fallen short in the natural world’s battle of the fittest.

In any case, the prince of Ayodhya breaks his initial tenets of dharma in several ways, by needlessly killing a creature instead of negotiating a peaceful resolution, by shooting him from hiding like a coward – an insult frequently levied at Ravana for stealing Sita in the night –, and by subjecting his reason and concern for justice to his emotion.  “You are the worst kind of sinner: the one who pretends to be dharma itself… You have not even heard both sides of our story,” accuses Vali in his dying throes, but even now Rama tries to rationalize his execution of the monkey as an act of dharma, saying he’s called to judge and punish the sinful.  Whatever choice he makes resolving any given conflict Rama passes off as dharma, whether or not it clashes with the precedents of dharma he’s set in the past.

Rama’s unwavering adherence to a rigid dharma, if it existed, would probably be an impediment to his destiny more than anything.  The more pragmatic, impulsive Lakshmana expresses as much after he’s been deceived into thinking that Sita’s died by the hand of Indrajit.  “My brother has been a savior to the munis of the forests… But his dharma has not saved him from evil.  Gentleness and dharma are of no use in this world.”  In fact, “real dharma”, or honorable action, often seems like it would counteract destiny, which depends on people acting in accordance with their baser natures and desires, i.e. with their personal, contextualized sense of dharma.  All the events that set in motion the eventual destruction of Ravana and his kingdom are motivated by transient adharma so that a different, generalized kind of dharma can prevail at the end of the ancient war.

Hanuman smashes Aksha while razing Lanka to the ground in Peter Jackson’s dumbed-down crowdpleaser.

© Universal Pictures

One example of this pattern is Ravana’s disagreement with Vibheeshana, who urges him to follow “the way of dharma” and return Sita to her husband, “the perfect man”, so as to avoid innumerable casualties in a catastrophic war with the vanaras.  Yet for Ravana to do this would not only contradict his own dharma as a demon, but further undermine the whole pretext for Rama dethroning Ravana in the first place.  Here the author introduces the theory of dharma as a natural, rather than a spiritual obligation, for Ravana repeatedly emphasizes the importance of what he’s doing to his role as a king and a rakshasa.  “You say it was dishonorable for me to abduct you, but you forget I am a rakshasa.  It is natural, and so entirely honorable, for me to take another man’s wife if I want her... That is a rakshasa’s nature, and his dharma.”  The dharma of a rakshasa, who’s given over to animalistic rage and orgies, differs starkly from the dharma of a human or a vanara, whom Rama judges must never take another man for his wife lest he be worthy of death. According to Ravana, who may be speaking falsely to get his way but nonetheless points out the relativity of dharma, even Sita violates her own calling as his prisoner by resisting his advances.  “You are denying your own nature, Sita.  Other woman have been brought here as spoils of war, as frightened as you… But when they knew me, none of them resisted me for more than a week.”

So too does the dharma of a king, who has to exercise aggressive, ruthless, often stubborn dominance to sustain his power, differ vastly from the dharma of everybody else, as both Vali and Ravana observe at various points.  “Let Rama come not with an army of monkeys but with the host of heaven, and I will not give Sita up to him,” objects Ravana to his wisest advisor Vibheeshana.  “Your counsel is the way of cowardice.  How can a king like me heed such advice?”  The disparity in dharma arises because each character, being in pursuit of different interests, reveres a different, private dharma that condones their actions specifically.  For Rama, that dharma is the divine authority of his judgment passed on other souls, and for Ravana it is the natural course of things when people follow their most essential, ravenous tendencies.

Where they overlap is in their confidence that everything they do is directly working out for fate.  “Sita, fate is all-powerful.  You and I were created for each other.  Why else would you have come to me at all, by the long and winding way that you did… Don’t resist the will of God.”  Ravana, for once, speaks truth without fully realizing it, because it is the will of Brahma that Sita and the Lord of Lanka be together for a while, just as it is Brahma’s will that Dasaratha banish Rama for 14 years and that Rama fulfill his inborn purpose of killing Ravana and inheriting the kingship.  Sita echoes this sentiment: when she defies her captor: “Now that I have seen how evil you are, I think fate conspired to make you abduct me.  So Rama would come to kill you.”  Whether or not the characters reach the final point by “dharma” is an insignificant detail, because destiny is the only constant in their lives and destiny dictates that dharma will ultimately triumph over adharma.  The path to this victory is paved with sin and violence, but sometimes it’s necessary for people to bend or pervert their sense of dharma in order to satisfy the will of the gods.

Another place one sees the relativity of dharma is in the prevalence of suicide threats from almost every grief-ridden character, including Rama and Sita themselves.  Hanuman briefly comments on the depravity of suicide in his scouting trip to Lanka: “But they say it is a grievous sin to kill oneself, worse than murder.”  This shows that most of Rama’s family are either ambivalent to their dharma concerning suicide, not understanding its consequences, or think that other forms of dharma – sharing the fate of one’s spouse, loyalty to one’s brother, motherly love – outweigh the bad karma they’d inherit by taking their own lives in violence.

If the subjectivity of dharma can be summarized in a single passage, it would be in Rama’s preparations to depart from Rama, when he tries to comfort his anguished mother and temper the furious Lakshmana.  “All this is fate working toward her own inscrutable ends.  Not even the rishis who are masters of their sense are beyond fate; even they fall prey to the passions of destiny… It is not that mother Kaikeyi is evil… only that destiny uses her, even against her own nature.”  Such is true of all the adversaries the hero faces on the path to Lanka, of Surpanka and Khara and Vali and Maricha and the dark lord Ravana himself.  Though Rama encounters much resistance and deception and constantly adapts or qualifies his dharma to meet the challenges he faces, fate in the Ramayana is always utilizing dharma and adharma, righteous deeds and sin alike to advance the final will of the Devas, and that which seems immoral or contrary to dharma in the present is just one of many instruments used by the divines in a greater plan.

On a side note, the Ramesh Menon adaptation/condensation of the colossal poem is hilarious and makes for a great read even if you have no interest in Hinduism or Indian folklore.  The Good Parts Version of his translation had me bursting into laughter almost as frequently as Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and I would gladly have finished it if I wasn’t enrolled in 18 units and it wasn’t practically impossible.  Here are some of the more riotous or just plain interesting passages:

“One moment, the rakshasa rushed at Rama with his claws outstretched to seize his throat; the next, he screamed as the astra struck him and his flesh fell away from his skeleton in anxiety to escape the intolerable pain of that missile.  His heart exploded, then his giant head, and nothing was left of Khara but patches of blood, skin, and a heap of bones on the ground.”

“‘Have you seen her?” he cried to the kadamba and the tilaka, the asoka, the karnikar and the kritamala.  But they stood mute, on the eloquent verge of speech.”

“Playfully, he cut off her nose and her ears, so black blood spurted from her face.”  [One of at least two nose & ear removals in the Ramayana.]

“Hanuman thought, ‘By her beauty she must be Sita.  But how does she sleep so contentedly in Ravana’s bedchamber, with a smile curving her perfect lips?’  He slapped himself again, across his cheek this time, as monkeys do.”

“Rama seemed undecided what he wanted to do first: look for Sita or consume the world.”

And those are just the ones I feel secure in sharing on this blog.

Why Does(n’t) Everybody Hate John Green?

The following invective is based loosely on an unpublished letter to the prestigious Beatissima Garbage. It’s also the last invective the Author plans on writing for some time because they’re really quite taxing to prepare and it seems like every other post on these Files is an invective of some public idiot whose moral squalor should be abundantly clear to anybody with a brain.

There was a new movie in town this last weekend that you may have heard of if not for a news story about some guy shooting some people at a showing of the new Amy Schumer comedy.  The shooting in question should never have happened, firstly because private citizens have no business owning guns unless they’re part of The Militia and secondly because the theater had an explicit policy forbidding guns on its premises, but somehow the gunman managed to bring a gun into the theater and use it on people who didn’t have guns while racist white killer cops rushed to stop the violence.  The media saw an opportunity to bring up old, emotional attacks on gun rights while simultaneously pimping Amy Schumer for yet another week, and so Paper Towns was condemned, as all of its author’s works, to smolder in the fires of neglect and obscurity and effective censorship due to… lack of free support from American press and schools.

And that’s a real shame, because according to John Green, it would seem like the whole world has it out to suppress and mock and ban his manifold artistic masterpieces, which he claims at the same time have spoken deeply to millions of readers.  From Looking Alaska to The Fault In Our Stars to his latest movie starring a lesbian supermodel and some dreamy Nice Guy, Green has faced staggering adversity and bumps in the road to becoming a multi-millionaire YA writer, teenage idol, and internet celebrity, so much so that the incessant barrage of hate and ignorance has forced him to rethink his activities on social media and officially declare he’s neither a pornographer nor a pedophile.  He’s such a poor guy, okay?  Okay? Okay?  Okay?  Okay???

Where do I even start to document the torrent of cyberbullying and misdirected parental fury that’s been levied towards the downtrodden rebel visionary Mr. Green?  I could look at the incredulous reaction of Depew High School parents in 2008 to the news that Green’s Looking For Alaska would be “taught” to 11th graders in the government school’s English curriculum.  Certain of these religious fascists objected to the explicit descriptions of oral sex and foul language contained in Green’s novel, particularly in light of the school’s (probably 100% symbolic) prohibition on students using obscenities. I too would sympathize with these parents, not because I think 16-year-olds shouldn’t read about sex or swear words under any circumstances, but because I think there’s something incredibly depressing about a taxpayer-funded, supposedly educational institution willfully, knowingly presenting twaddle to teenagers as great literature.*  I agree with their petition even more in light of the petty hissy fit Green subsequently threw on his Youtube channel (more on that later), excoriating the parents for trying to tell other kids what they can read (for school credit), which, in point of fact, no one was trying to do.  By Green’s purely libertarian, freedom-minded reasoning, the very state of being on the mandatory reading list at one time not only grants him an entitlement to stay on and consequently profit from that reading list for the rest of his career, but also irrevocably establishes his work as an incontrovertible, great American novel that all kids must be exposed to for their literary benefit.

I could look at John Green’s snippy, melodramatic swipe at the Riverside school district for deciding to remove The Fault In Our Stars from middle-school libraries.

People who don’t listen to Rush Limbaugh or Donald Trump often believe that Rush and Trump are arrogant and dismissive of their rivals in the business, but many of these same people would adore and lean on the word of a man who unironically boasted that teens would never learn of death or grieving without entering the golden gateway of knowledge that is his weepy fiction aimed at fragile teenagers.  Green essentially laid claim to charting thematic territory that’s never been covered in three thousand years of literature, and no one batted an eye at his arrogance.  Does he know that the school which judiciously removed his bestseller (unavoidable in bookstores and public libraries everywhere) carries scads of other, eminently better books also dealing with death, including The Giver, Bridge to Terabithia, and Tuck Everlasting?

Does John Green even care to read any books not written by John Green, and is that why he holds such an inflated view of his own importance to the social, moral, and mental development of teenagers?  Green has repeatedly derided overprotective parents for “condescending to teens” and wrongly assuming they lack the means of reading critically, but how much more condescending is it to suggest that young adults should only read books tailor-written for their age group and can’t extend their search for truth into works that were actually written for grown-ups by grown-ups who didn’t bother with leading fan clubs or forming shallow connections with their readers?  Are high-schoolers so stupid that they can only be pressured to think about the world through government schools prodding them to read John Green, Twilight, Divergent, and so on?  Have their mental faculties deteriorated so much that the only literature they can handle is such that one could compress the entire book into a cutesy Buzzfeed listical of “19 profound John Green quotes that will inspire you”?

Some John Green profundities.  Left & right drawings by Christina Luna for Buzzfeed.

To be fair, Green’s not the only one to blame for this debacle; he’s just a symptom of a larger failure on the part of educators to focus on the truly excellent in favor of popular material (cough Kendrick cough) that “engages” reluctant readers and doesn’t require much thoughtful commentary from the teacher.  The state of public education notwithstanding, though, the only one condescending to teenagers is John Green, who says he doesn’t foresee himself writing any adult-oriented novels because they wouldn’t be as “useful” as the YA garbage he’s cranking out.*  So too does Green condescend to taxpayers by pretending that access to his products is a vital societal need that must be subsidized under some made-up “right to read”. How many copies of Fault does the author deem the library must purchase in order to avert his accusations of censoring beloved material?  If half the school’s students want to read his novel and the library only has enough copies to accommodate a quarter of the body, are administrators suppressing Green’s ‘ideas’ by forcing children to go to another public library or – heaven forbid – fork over $10 at a bookseller for their own paperback copy?  Does the school have a compelling obligation to make any book available for anybody at any time, let alone a book as prevalent and ingrained in contemporary pop culture as A Fault In Our Stars? Wouldn’t the school’s funds be better spent acquiring texts that have been reviewed and studied for longer than two years and have outlasted transient, media-manufactured hype?

Instead of dedicating his intellect – given that he possesses one – to penning genuinely worthy art, John Green wastes countless hours tweeting, instagramming, and building a vapid, intelligence-numbing social media empire on such high-brow creative outlets as Youtube and Tumblr.  If you don’t know what Tumblr is, you can watch the amusing illustrated video below, but it’s essentially a blogging-Facebook hybrid with hastag functionality optimized for emotionally distraught social justice warriors who are too lazy to make a real blog, a la The Author’s Files.

One could argue that Green’s rigid attachment to every one of these networks is highly unusual, even childish behavior when practiced by a 37-year-old married author.  In fact, some anonymous and completely irrelevant person did argue just that about a month ago, using the very online outlet embraced by Green to ridicule him for his systematic takeover of the internet.  Quoth the eloquent tumblrer:

Nothing in this little rant was factually incorrect or unjustified, as John Green has in fact made a business of pandering to teenage girls and has cultivated a following that is undeniably similar to, if not indicative of a cult.  Green’s army of self-professed nerdfighters, united under the banner of nerdfighteria, have their own hip vocabulary (decreasing worldsuck), study their own holy texts, celebrate their own (probably well-intentioned) holiday, think they’re “made entirely out of awesome”, and revere their leaders John and Hank, who made a gimmick of addressing Youtube video-logs (think Avatar) to each other so as to give people the impression that they knew the brothers on a personal level.  The extent to which Green goes to convince girls that he’s their friend and fellow nerd-in-fighting can definitely be seen as creepy or unfitting of a grown-up father, and he shows no signs of relenting from that habit in the future.

Instead of acting like an adult and facing up to the reality that the internet will always facilitate rude and negative comments about celebrities (especially ones who are vastly overexposed), John Green immediately set out to prove the tumblr writer’s point, taking to the internet to complain about how painful and difficult it is being a multi-millionaire author who gets bullied and misportrayed by hate-filled meanies on the web.

But John Green was never accused of sexual abuse or pedophilia, i.e. attraction to prepubescent kids, who clearly aren’t the audience for Green’s books or video series.  In most areas of the world and many American states, the kind of girls Green sucks up to are fair game legally, but that doesn’t mean his obsession with pleasing them is healthy or right, which is all the internet person was trying to say through an obviously sarcastic, hyperbolic post.  We don’t arrest people for being creepy, but being creepy has never been a really honorable character trait.  Still, Green’s too pathetic and insecure to suffer a joke at his expense, so he resorts to inventing straw man allegations which makes him look like much more of a victim than he really is.  He goes on to sermonize about the “complicated dopamine rush” that fuels his detractors and squeeze some false humility into his defense (“my various shortcomings, which are legion”) before vaguely pouting about how the bully has made him unable to continue blogging in the same way he has been for the last four years.

“I just need some distance for my well-being,” he closes.  One does not get any more pitiful than this. Green has essentially embodied America’s 21st-century entitlement state, loudly and impishly tattle-telling on anyone who hurts his delicate nerdfeels.  Whether he’s appealing to the defenders of Free Speech or to the defenders of Humanizing, Social Justice Language – that is, Not Free Speech – depends only on whoever’s pissing him off on any given day.

This is an official poster tagline.

Do I think that Mr. Green is unintelligent, nay, an imbecilic jackass?  Maybe.  He once compared capitalism to a pizza, says that protecting religious liberty means women will no longer be able to buy cars, and smugly perpetuates the delusion that Islam is a religious of peace… because Muslims sects spend so much time fighting each other and no one interprets the Koran quite the same way.  But in so far as John Green’s goal in life is to make money and feel like he’s filling an important role in people’s lives, he’s very good at manipulating young skulls full of mush into loving him.  He gives shout-outs to his “hardcore badass feminist mom”, consistently speaks the language of his fans, comically rubs his forehead like a cartoon character whenever he gets upset, says sex before marriage is cool, and even uses one of his characters to lecture to progressive, conscious readers on why they should never call anybody a faggot (far be it from me to speculate why he hates that word particularly, even though I just did).

Green does an excellent job overall of appearing to stand for everything that nerdfighteria stands for while actually standing for nothing.  He calls himself a Christian to mollify Christian readers, except when being a Christian means standing by convictions that Millennials find “discriminatory”.  He considers himself a capitalist, except when being a capitalist means opposing the minimum wage, nationalized health care, or carbon taxes to reduce nonexistent Global Warming.  He peppers his teens’ dialogue with the word “retarded” out of realism, until someone tells him that is ugly and wrong, at which point he has a radical change of heart and apologizes for his “dehumanizing language”.  I don’t think Harper Lee ever apologized for using the n-word in To Kill A Mockingbird because it hurt the feelings of some bozo who doesn’t understand the concept of a book.  Harper Lee, ironically, had more balls as an author than misunderstood pajama boy John Green ever had.  The latter’s greatest condescension to his readership is giving them exactly what they want to hear and nothing else, then having the gall to label himself a martyr for the status quo.

Ever the philosopher, John Green can be credited for at least one profundity.  “Some infinities are bigger than other infinities,” quips Hazel Whatever in A Fault In Our Stars.  If John Green’s infatuation with his uselessness counts as an infinity, then that must make him the biggest infinity of them all.

*Here’s an interesting piece on the dilemma of grown adults gobbling up books written for kids.

Stuff I missed the first time through

* John Green saying that his made-up cancer-stricken lovebirds parallel Anne Frank because she too “just died of illness like most people.”

* John Green ‘accidentally’ appropriating a 13-year-old Tumblr user’s adorable, deep quote, passing it off as a line from Paper Towns, and selling a crapton of merchandise based on the words to gullible nerd fighters.

* John Green denouncing the philosophy of Objectivism as “repugnant” and extolling his noncommercial, “idea-sharing, consciousness-expanding, storytelling business” as a ”persistent and direct opposition to the ideas put forth in Atlas Shrugged”.  “We must strike down the insidious lie that a book is the creation of an individual soul laboring in isolation.  We must strike it down because it threatens the overall quality and breadth of American literature… so f*** Ayn Rand and f*** any company that profits from peddling the lie of mere individualism.  We built this together and we're going to keep building it together.”

No, John Green.  &#^! you and your You Didn’t Build That mentality.

We "Study" Rap Music In Public School Now. America!

Brian Mooney is an “English Arts Teacher” at High Tech, New Jersey who claims to “explore the intersections of hip-hop, spoken word, literacy, and urban education”.  One of those things, of course, has nothing to do with the others, but Brian Mooney has never been in the business of speaking truths.  He’s Christie’s fool.  Under ordinary circumstances we would simply pass this guy off as another miniscule, relatively powerless symptom of declining educational rigor in facilities run by the state, but Mooney’s rising celebrity status makes him a special case.  As the foremost champion of a burgeoning alternative to actual learning called “hip-hop education”, Mooney has swept up gushing praise from The New York Slimes, The Rolling Stoned, and other disreputable clickbaiters for developing socially conscious “English” studies that are funner, cooler and somehow more literary for incorporating contemporary rap songs by “poets” like Kendrick Lamar.  (We’re making an editorial decision to dispense with the sarcasm quotation marks around education-related words from this point onward because they’d get really annoying really fast.)

In the words of Rush Limbaugh, this is the kind of joke we would have laughed at twenty years ago, thinking it would never happen in a nation with at least a modicum of sanity, but now we’ve waded into such a quagmire of literary and intellectual malaise that the stupid, mostly childless masses believe teaching rap music alongside the Great Books is actually a serious proposal.  Progressives like Mooney rationalize the induction of To Pimp A Butterfly into classrooms by saying rap music “engages [students] in a pivotal conversation on race”, opens eyes to “internalized oppression”, and recognizes the “diversity” of increasingly stratified student bodies, but none of them are able to articulate a cogent theory for its literary value without reverting to non-literary pleas for extra blackness in the schools’ reading curriculum.

Of course, if anybody really cared about spotlighting strong black voices that students haven’t been exposed to on their own, Kendrick’s latest record would rank very low on the scales of historical significance and excellence in English.  As Mooney points out many times in a blog post that’s hilariously riddled with logical contradictions, “hip-hop has become a worldwide phenomenon, reaching every corner of the globe and shaping the identities of a whole generation of young people”, to the point that “demonizing” the music genre – or culture, as he often labels it with no cynicism – would be a grave and “symbolically violent” insult to the hipster groupie lowlifes who consider Kendrick Lamar’s dope beats to be an integral “part of their identity”.  Assuming as our apologetic white poet-teacher does that high-school students are already committed to hip-hop and worship Kendrick, J. Cole, and Lupe Fiasco as political and musical idols, what educational value does one derive from pimping their albums over infinitely more distinguished and eloquent writers students haven’t yet encountered?

Only in Mooney’s warped and fickle view of “cultural relevancy” does contemporary rap music deserve a higher pedestal of “literate-ness”, beauty, and nobility than the texts of Fredrick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, Thomas Sowell, and a host of actual poets I read in high-school and willfully forgot about soon after because of my deep-set disdain for poetry.  One certainly doesn’t need to cheapen standards of good literature in order to analyze black authors, but the truth is that Progressive reformers like Mooney don’t really give a damn about analyzing or understanding the work of black Americans; they only care about the work of black Americans who seem to sponsor their political agenda.  Even granting that increasing representation of African-American art always fulfills a noble, compelling educational purpose (it doesn’t), hip-hop “education” has nothing to do with illuminating alternate perspectives, urban strife, or evolving style in the written word, and footage from the High Tech school proves that Mooney’s favorite rappers were already bona-fide superstars among Gen-Zers without the advertising bonus of a class applauding their artistic genius.  At its core, hip-hop education is just another poorly masked excuse to spread alternate-history versions of the Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin shootings while brainwashing kids into denying every blessing implied by the American Dream.

This is why the media orgasms over a famous Compton rapper’s visit to a school of future voters, not because Mr. Mooney and Kendrick Lamar are teaching teenagers how to think for themselves, but because they’re teaching teenagers what to think ‘for themselves’ and doing so through an ostensibly educational framework that’s highly manipulative and entertaining and probably never feels like real work to students involved.  By supplanting true classics of fiction with A-list talent and platinum-selling albums, Mooney hopes to sell a dated, largely fraudulent form of racism under the guise of spearheading a socially conscious, holistic look at protest writing from the 60s up to now.  And if the responses by his students and supporters are any sign, he’s been doing a pretty bang-up job.

Some of Mooney's students on To Pimp A Butterfly.

The customary defense of hip-hop education usually boils down to a smear campaign, ridiculing anyone who disputes the material’s educational merit as close-minded, prudish, or somehow fearful of black people, whom Mooney perhaps erroneously presumes have a monopoly on the hip-hop “art form”.  Have you heard of Eminem, Mr. Mooney?  Beastie Boys?  The Dirty Heads, Pitbull, Everlast and House of Pain, Marky Mark Wahlberg, Kid Rock, Riff Raff, Iggy, Die Antwoord?  Even freaking Sublime to some extent? You may argue that a lot of these performers are terrible, but then again the majority of rap music is pretty objectively terrible. You yourself acknowledge this when you write that “commercial hip-hop is often sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, and violent”.  Four paragraphs later, you say that we should include “[this kind] of rap music in our classrooms if we want to have really meaningful, well-rounded discussions.” What I’m trying to ask is: what the hell is wrong with you?

Further, why do you assume that people who don’t like rap music don’t like “black music” or people in general, as if rap music is the very greatest and very blackest accomplishment from their heritage?  Have you ever listened to Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, or Michael Jackson?  Are those artists not “black” or intelligent or literate enough for you, and do you really suspect that Kendrick’s music will outlast any of theirs?  Are black voices the only ones who are qualified enough to speak about the highs and lows of being a black American?  Must we disregard The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, To Kill A Mockingbird, etc. etc. just because their authors were all “privileged” white people? Why are cultural and historical ignoramuses like you paid to steward the youth of this country?

I digress.  Let the record show that Mr. Mooney vastly overstates everything he knows about his favorite subject and likes to roundly dismiss skeptics of that subject as stupid or uninformed or racist, even though, in the case of Kendrick Lamar, those skeptic’s doubts are 100% affirmed.  Mooney says that “hip-hop is still the subject of intense, misdirected hatred and discrimination in schools” by “parents that object to profanity, even when it’s being used for a noble, just, and artistic cause”, and that he “finds it problematic [along with much else surely] to call an album like this ‘dirty’”.  But To Pimp a Butterfly is gloriously, unapologetically dirty, and was never intended to be consumed or exhaustively deconstructed by high-school freshmen.  Trying to filter the numerous f-bombs, n____ers, and sexual references out of the album for interpretation by a class of 15-year-olds just validates the distaste that a lot of these repressive, bigoted parents have for rap music, especially rap music foisted upon their children in a sham of an English class supported by Uncle Sam himself.  If it wasn’t profane or potentially offensive, then there wouldn’t be a need to edit it.  That the album is profane and controversial doesn’t automatically make it bad (or good), but it does shift the burden of proof onto Mooney to demonstrate it has a worthy purpose in a school curriculum, let alone a class purporting to study the finest, most significant works of writing craft.

But Mooney isn’t able to justify it any way other than repeating the pressing need for blacker, more diverse study lists and the social “importance” of music that sticks it to the white man for “murdering” Trayvon, Mike Brown, and the Pound Sign I Can’t Breathe guy.  Education isn’t about telling kids what to think politically, nor is it about ensuring the equal appreciation of different races’ commercial products.  Mooney whines about “Eurocentric” schools that classify “white” novels like Slaugherhouse-Five as “high art”, assigning Vonnegut as summer reading while branding “black” hip-hop with a stigma of vulgarity and baseness.  The problem with this outrage is that Slaughterhouse (soon to be reviewed at these Files) is actually a book that people are meant to read, whereas hip-hop is a musical genre mostly created by uneducated slackers who are too lazy or stupid to write or read a book, let alone their own “art”, which is usually slapped together by an army of co-songwriters and producers.  Celebrating To Pimp A Butterfly in the same category as classic literature is an insult not only to the “old, dead, white men” Mooney derides but also to the slaves and civil rights leaders who used their great minds to become moving essayists, authors, and orators.

For those who’ve read this far, I’ll just throw it out there that I quite enjoy Kendrick Lamar’s music, particularly Section.80 and much of Butterfly, which is to say that all the wisearse, tolerant rap music fans who are silently ridiculing me for my ignorance really have no moral superiority for thinking Kendrick should be taught in government schools.  As opposed to many acts, Kendrick’s beats actually incorporate live instrumentation, and his lyrics on “Keisha’s Song” (about a prostitute in despair who’s raped and murdered in the street) or “These Walls” combine with dark, sonic atmospheres to reveal an artist who actually cares about storytelling and isn’t simply settling for making a catchy tune.  But education isn’t about exposing me to art or ideas I already like.  If the only writing, or rapping in this case, I ever had to study was stuff I already liked, I wouldn’t be learning much of anything, and education traditionally used to be all about learning things – things that show one how to live and how to live in accordance with beauty and virtue.

It’s also true that Kendrick is one of the most overrated and absurdly idolized figures in American musical culture.  He wields racial slurs liberally whether or not the narrative or character he’s portraying calls for it, and the song from Butterfly he specifically chose to perform for High Tech revolves around a vapid hook that just repeats, “Nigger, we’re gonna be alright” over and over for no reason.  No one, not even Pitchfork’s staff, listens to Kendrick for his ornate or literary language; they listen to him because he unites a dream team of producers and is very good at venting anger on issues that make others really angry.  Indeed, the media’s unanimous infatuation with “the incredible Kendrick Lamar” as “a poet, lyrical genius, and positive icon” (this is Ellen Degenerate speaking) has begotten a series of running gay jokes in my own Beatissima dorm hinging on the latent desire of Kendrick fanatics, who have no frame of musical reference and consequently glorify the current fad as a masterwork, to orally pleasure the Grammy-winning man, the myth, the legend. Even The Daily Beast has picked up on this phenomenon, describing it as a “critical circle jerk” – a mutual admiration society that Mooney has ironically hijacked to teach kids… the value of thinking for oneself and forming independent, critical views of media.  Forcibly cramming Kendrick or any working musician into a classroom at the peak of his career is the total opposite of encouraging independent truth-seeking.  Instead of that, Mooney is merely condoning hero-worship while perpetuating the mythology that Kendrick, like Pixar, Apple, Netflix, Starbucks, and any other cult establishment, can do no wrong, when in fact his latest music video is just a slickly produced screed against the white-skinned po-lice that prioritizes style over substance.

A screenshot from Kendrick's latest PSA.

If there’s any hope to be found in this embarrassing debacle, it’s that students are probably wasting a lot less time talking about The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, a powerful rape simulator concerning a black girl who goes to the movies and wishes to look more like a white movie star, which incidentally is the same thing white girls do when they go to the movies or read a magazine.  I personally find it deeply sobering and humbling knowing I never had to put up with this nonsense as a homeschooler.  Without the Brian Mooneys of the world – educators, scholars, and poets who don’t even know what the word “ironic” means – how could we truly appreciate the great teachers who’ve mentored us personally and professionally?

So thank you, Mr. Perry, for trying your darndest to make a bunch of reluctant teenagers care about the Venerable Bede, Dante Alighieri, and a lot of college-level, Eurocentric Inklings texts we could barely understand.  Thank you, Dr. McM, for working through the multi-layered symbolism of Moby Dick with me even though I moaped and groaned about it being the dullest, most insufferable novel I’d ever read. Thank you, Dr. Gose, for leading your pupils in the dialectic instead of in the “cypher” and for challenging me to write an academic paper though I had no idea what the hell that was.  I must confess I never read the Funeral Games, but I’m sure the Prince of Darkness already figured that much out.  Thank you, Mrs. Justiniano, for never scheduling a field trip to Knotts Berry Farm or Disneyland under the pretense of observing science.  Thank you, Professor Larry, for being honest enough to tell me that you’re professing things instead of teaching them.  Thank you, Mrs. Weitz, for teaching me how to write and to distinguish beauty from dreck.  Thank you all for not asking me to “close-read/listen to King Kunta”, or to make a poetry anthology, or to write a reflection paper on some rapper guy’s visit to my school, or to answer either of these essay prompts.

Thank you for having the decency not to treat my education like a giant joke.

Now to write about America’s homosexual Supreme Court and homosexual corporations.

Harping On

The first thought that’ll cross any reasonable, well informed person’s mind upon picking up a book entitled Davita’s Harp ought to be something like (can you call it?)… “Why would you hang a stupid, ugly harp on your door instead of a violin?  It’s not as though there are any famous, talented, beautiful harpists it would remind you of, and the violin is also adaptable to a much broader variety of music than the harp, which is literally Old Testament stuff.”  The second thought to cross said person’s mind is a rather suitable answer to the first: “This book is Socialist.”

Or so it seems on its face, being a novel about unapologetic socialists throwing socialist parties, writing socialist stories, advocating the global advancement of socialism, and doing all such things that befit a practicing socialist.  In reality, though, Jewish author Chaim Potok was far more intent on analyzing the correlations between one’s politics and one’s religion than he was with promoting any political or theological philosophy in particular; and yet still he managed to fill his book with Jewish traditions, texts, and tenets that I’m not remotely familiar with as a Christian, being less than optimally observant of Christianity’s own recommended traditions concerning regular church attendance and Bible reading.  It would appear that I was penetrating uncharted territory, a somewhat non-religious individual looking into a novel that was decidedly religious in subject matter.  As it turned out, Davita’s Harp is actually an exhortation for readers to consider what makes a person truly “religious”, beckoning them to juxtapose faith with fellowship, belief with acts, and to thoughtfully contemplate the reasons why people gravitate towards or fall away from any god.

Ilana Davita Chandal is the offspring of two seemingly dichotomous heritages circumstantially united by a common loathing of landlords, fascists, and capitalist exploiters of the proletariat.  Her mother Channah is a non-believing Jew, her father Michael a “non-believing Christian”, which doesn’t that make much sense, but together they form a secular couple of raving Communist Party members raising their only daughter in and around Manhattan.  If the book has any distracting flaw, it’d be that the dialogue sometimes borders on clichés: the parents habitually talk like villains plucked from a less than subtle Ayn Rand novel, and the speech of Ilana’s devoutly Christian Aunt Sarah is also excessively flowered with references to “Almighty God or to the Heavenly Father or Merciful God or Most Loving God or to our Savior Jesus Christ or Jesus Christ or Lord” or verily all other derivatives, though these touches may very implausibly be intentional devices by the author to emphasize the narrator’s imperfect memory.  Whatever the case, Ilana is steeped in politics from the age of six, breathlessly following the Spanish Civil War in articles her father writes for a left-wing paper and rarely hesitating at school to voice her resentment of the Fascists Hitler and Franco in Europe.  Unlike the vast body of WWII-period fiction, Davita’s Harp offers a unique perspective on this era by depicting the adversities of Jews who were safely withdrawn from Nazi Germany’s conquests but passed every day knowing that friends or relatives were threatened in more savage parts of the world.  Here it is not the action of war but the reaction to it that propels Potok’s story, which largely eschews the trappings of clear framework, direction, and closure in favor of portraying realistic characters who are gradually shaped by seemingly disconnected scenes and international conflicts.

Potok’s narrative structure and authorial voice are also distinctive in his method of showing images rather than telling them, feeding readers often fragmented and confusing glimpses of conversations neither fully understood nor fully conveyed by the young girl witnessing them.  The 1st-person presentation is deeply internalized and reflective of the protagonist’s naiveté, ever focused on external signs and usually incapable of discerning the underlying implications suggested by words or, conversely, by silence.  These implications are left for the reader to interpret on his own, just as are the many symbols woven prominently throughout the novel, from the obvious door harp of the title that Ilana imagines as sheltering two birds, one from her storytelling Uncle Jakob Daw and one from the devastating massacre of Guernica, to the picture overhanging her bed of three stallions galloping across a red-sand beach.  Ilana, and Potok by extension, never plainly explains what significance these things pose to herself other than to affirm that they are significant, perhaps as a reminder of those she has lost, perhaps as spiritual props for her skeptic’s mind.

The irreligious person’s paradoxical search for religious identity and the tendency of Atheists to make idols out of their ideals are two of several recurring themes broached in Davita’s Harp.  Ilana’s parents have given themselves over to such an obsessive form of political activism that they’ve turned “the beginning of the end of capitalism” into a kind of religious obligation, for the fulfillment of which they frequent party rallies as others would church congregations, host study groups for the works of Marx and Engels, and view their agenda as the world’s only salvation from the cruelties of fascism.  Ilana’s missionary aunt decries the hypocrisy of this lifestyle in a letter written after the Chandals suffer a tragic loss from the German bombing run:

“I know such faith is for you a chimera, an illusion cast upon us by those in power so as to make existence bearable and their power impregnable.  But, my dear Anne, isn’t what you call an illusion simply someone else’s dream with which you disagree?  And what of your workers’ revolution, your classless society, your dream of an early end to social strife, economic scarcity, individual degradation, and misery?  If faith in god is merely an illusion, then why not faith in man too?… The rivers of blood that now soak the soil of Spain are a testament to the unredemptive savagery of mankind.”

Even secular leftists, with their false faith in human government’s power to cure poverty and other human ailments, occasionally look up to a higher being when dealing with personal anguish.  Ilana eventually comes to join her aunt in prayer because she longs for love and company.  “There was a comfort in the kneeling and a sense of my exhausted self yielding to the embrace of a presence I could not understand but felt all about me as I did the wind and the sea.”  In the same manner she begins to visit synagogue and participate in traditional Jewish ceremonies, not so much out of reverence for God as out of a desire for brotherhood with her neighbors, a cause espoused by her own mother, who airily postulates that “it’s important to be with people”.  She attracts a lot of ire within the synagogue for joining the men in reciting a prayer of mourning called Kabbish, though again she does so not because she believes the prayer’s words but because she believes she owes such an honor to the one who passed.  As Ilana is drawn to religion by personal friendships and emotional thirsts, so too we gradually learn that her mother had been repelled from religion by equally powerful personal grievances.  In many cases, the novel quietly asserts, the affinity or revulsion that people bears towards any faith or religious community is not inspired by its actual teachings but by single events which profoundly affect their ability to rationalize their belief or disbelief.  Potok stated that he wrote Davita’s story as “a confrontation between two fundamentalisms… the secular fundamentalism represented by Marxism, Stalinism, and communism, and the religious fundamentalism of the extreme right in [his] own tradition”, and while the book certainly discusses that to some degree, it’s also a challenging examination of how personal experience affects one’s beliefs and how those beliefs are or aren’t always mirrored in one’s deeds.

Much like the characteristically ambiguous and depressing animal parables that Uncle Jakob imparts to Ilana, Davita’s Harp seems to wind down rather abruptly, whisking through three years in the last hundred pages where the first 250 pages covered only one, and it ultimately ends without an ending, but by then the author has already provided us a wealth of ideas to mull over, not just about his characters but also about ourselves and the relationships we share with God.