6.05: Negotiating for Space: Compromise and Flag-Planting

And Yet

Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature⁠—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance⁠—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”

“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.

I’ll say this: it’s a helluva question. And from Dostoevsky’s view, in this conclusion from last week’s passage from The Brother Karamazov–you can listen to the full argument which leads to this moment in last week’s episode—from Dostoevsky’s view, how could anyone consent? And yet, this–for Ivan who makes the argument–is just the principle God uses in forming the world: do not worry about the suffering of innocents, for the world will find salvation an untold number of years later. 

Yes, Dostoevsky and then a few years later William James and then, as we’ll see, about a century after that, Ursula K. Le Guin, pose the challenge of The Suffering Child. And while we could spend a few years debating the principles for God’s Creation, you and I will instead bring the question down to a smaller if no less difficult question: could we ourselves do it, allow a child to suffer so that the rest of the community could live a better life? We sound ghastly answering anything but “No!”; saying yes to this hideous bargain is a condemnation of human compassion at the least.

And yet . . . 

And yet . . . 

 

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and I can’t decide what flag to plant or where. . . . 

 

And Yet We Know, Too, . . . 

It’s been rough, so far, I know, our strenuous wrestling with nature and gardens and oppositions and Latin and bargains and paintings and privilege. And I just go and throw a bunch of Dostoevsky on the whole mess. Nice job, Steve.

So let’s see if we can sort some and maybe find some where the real challenges are. So far, we’ve noted a few major ideas:

• The “garden” has long served as a metaphor for retreat, for a nature-endowed space of quiet contemplation and personal enlightenment, though this space is a constructed one, physically and conceptually. That is, it is the illusion of the natural world, a hyper-separated space.
• We call our personal retreats otium, as the Romans did, and we mark them in opposition to negotium, the civic spaces for public exchange and work. But we’ve noted these two terms are not in fact opposites, merely constructed by us to be in opposition. We value our retreat/otium time and often resent our work time as being unrewarding.
• We’ve noted, too, that the entire concept of a binary opposition, the pitting of two terms at opposite ends of a line, is a simplificationHere, Waywords most often uses this term as a form of false ... More of reality. 
• Finally, we’ve made a point that a good number of writers and artists and the rest of us are willing to defend these constructions, anyway. Our Gainsborough painting of the Andrews family was a first example. Andrew Marvell and his own “Garden” is another. And Le Guin herself in her story “Vaster Than Empires” suggests that at the very least a genuine encounter with Nature or the Other must be met with compassion and communication on very different terms. 

And we might see, too, from all of this, that the act of building, of creating a narrative or a way of thinking about the world, is itself a walling off from reality some. If I fool myself into thinking that gardens are nature, I may be just as likely to ignore the people who I paid to maintain that garden for my enjoyment; I may be just as likely to demand others stay out of my garden in order for me to keep it pure for that spiritual communion with the butterflies. After all, the worst thing about national parks is that when you visit there are other people in them. “Look, I paid my money. Just let me park my RV in here so I can breathe the fumes of nature.”

Maybe I’m being too harsh. I should appreciate our parks for what they are: spaces for us to retreat from the work world into a kind of paved and boardwalked otium. Sure, they’re not perfect, I become irritated when the trails aren’t maintained . . . And sure, not everyone has access to them, because travel is expensive. But it’s a . . . a compromise.

And sure, a suffering child is terrible—no question about it—but, you know, at least it’s not two children or two hundred, right? It’s a . . . a compromise, a small-er price to pay for the conveniences of what we call otium.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan says that he cannot compromise, that he is returning his ticket. To quote exactly:

“And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.”

By this, he means his ticket to Paradise, the harmony we will find perhaps in the Second Coming. For Ivan, no compromise seems possible, for the “unexpiated” tears of the child cannot be allowed. Importantly, Ivan is not rejecting this ideal world, this eternal harmony, on the dismissive argument that God does not exist or that the promise of Paradise is a lie. Ivan points out that he accepts God: he understands, believes, has faith in God’s existence and the conditions for His love that have been preached in the churches that his brother Aloysha will devote himself to. Accepting the rules of the world under the condition of God, it is then that he returns the ticket. He says to Aloysha:

“I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity I don’t want it. I would rather be left with the unavenged suffering. I would rather remain with my unavenged suffering and unsatisfied indignation, even if I were wrong.” 

In this way, Ivan declares that his love and compassion for humanity is so great that he cannot abide injustice to it. Indirectly, he does not say (at least here) that his compassion is greater than God’s. Ivan would rather suffer with the knowledge and despair of injustice than find eternal joy and harmony with that knowledge. 

Oh, and that nice compromise I offered earlier about one child suffering? Of course, Ivan realizes and argues that it will never be a single child; the injustices done to the innocent have happened in floods of pain across history and seemingly will continue to. And even here, Ivan says, the undeserved cruelty and pain in the world are far greater: he has reduced his argument to children to clarify his position. No, Ivan sees no compromise possible.

His young brother Aloysha says to him, “That’s rebellion.”  For in fact it is, isn’t it? Ivan chooses to resist the rule of the world, the assemblage of the world, its very construction on these terms. There doesn’t seem to be another Creation the next neighborhood over, and so—trapped in this world and this humanity and with this God’s rules—what he says must be a rebellion against the power that built this universe.

A Plethora of Principles

When I was teaching in public schools, I met hundreds and hundreds of students, and as the years passed they would forward their causes, their principles, their ideals: veganism, a defense of indie grunge rock, our local River Rouge cleanup, the struggling figure skating team, rainforest protection, animal cruelty campaigns, exploited children in Thailand, AIDS awareness, anti-racism, boycotts against Smith & Wesson, Firestone, Starbucks, Nestle, and Gorton Foods; recycling, the war in Iraq, feminine product availability in our school bathrooms, Joseph Kony’s child soldiers, age discrimination in a local theater, Farm Aid, gun violence, LGBTQIA+ rights. . . . as many political fights and causes as there were weeks. And rarely would I challenge their fervor: they were engaged, planting flags of political protest, fomenting revolutions where they stood. And they would ask me, too: when would I join them?

And I admit, I often did. But at the same time, I also knew that I could not spend the time to keep Red Dye 40 out of my diet, keep track of where salmonella was this week, and also maintain energy for the weekend school shooting protest, my vegetarian diet, and letter-writing about our foreign policy with Libya. And what was I to do about the threat of Posadism, that quiet group of Trotskyites that believe a nuclear war could finally end capitalism and that we will be saved in the post-apocalyptic rebuilding by UFOs? All, of course, while maintaining my home, my work and salary, and monitoring my retirement savings and credit card interest rates. Something had to give.

Or, to put it more baldly: somewhere, I had to choose which child I would let suffer.

Perhaps this, too, is part of Ivan’s unspoken argument, as he reduces his sole plea to Aloysha down to children: the world is full of grief and grievance. It is not for the compassion of children alone that Ivan rebels. He says at the beginning:

“Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its center, I will say nothing.”

And to be honest, I struggle quite a bit with this, knowing clearly that such personal conflicts are not in the least comparable to the pain suffered from those beneath the weight of every cause I ignore or engage. If it were one child only that I must protest, only the one that James suggests is sufficient for our moral outrage, this is a problem at least I can grasp, I can rally to with some conviction.

But not so easy when I must do all of it, must somehow virtue signal on social media my support for every algorithmic resistance stream I witness—more, must take more decisive action to protest and reverse injustice at every level. We are inundated; and I am not at all mollified to know that Dostoevsky and James felt the same way 150 years ago; that Le Guin felt the same way 50 years ago. 

What I did–in my classroom, as a teacher, as someone ceaselessly inundated by causes and the heavy demands of the career—is choose. And I would tell many young people who ask that we are finite beings, that our time and energy and health are resources to preserve for our fights for justice, resources to direct to best advantage. That it not so vital that we assess where each other choose to spend these resources but that we each choose where to spend our own. 

I confess, I was not in the least responsible for any effort it required to initiate or maintain Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign, though here again many of my students were involved. And though an international citizens campaign, perhaps the effort was not the best vehicle for addressing child soldiers and fighting the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. As of this recording, though the LRA is still around and led probably by Joseph Kony, several rounds of ground force attacks have driven them to various new hideouts across central Africa. Is Kony still recruiting child soldiers? I don’t know, but probably not. But, you know, someone else is. And I confess I’m doing nothing about that, either.

And how do I live with myself, knowing that child soldiers, child slaves, child sweatshop workers, child sex workers, and child torture and killing continue in numbers Dostoevsky and Ivan could not imagine? Kony told reporters, “We don’t have any children. We only have combatants.” Hmm. I wonder. This is one of Kony’s defenses against an international criminal indictment. Not ‘children’ at all. Is one way to reconcile my conscience a matter of language?

A Different Hideous Bargain

When Aloysha challenges Ivan briefly on the creation of the devil or God in our own human image, Ivan responds:

“ ‘It’s wonderful how you can turn words,’ as Polonius says in Hamlet,” laughed Ivan. “You turn my words against me. Well, I am glad.”

Ah, we’ve seen this before, an allusion. And I’ve made a point before that allusions are not merely cool references but speak to the larger ideas implicit in the work they mark. Here, Ivan gives us character and work, Polonius in the Shakespeare play Hamlet. So it’s merely a matter of checking to see what Ivan is referring to here, where that line occurs and what we can uncover from it.

Except, wait. I’ve taught that play more than a few times, and Polonius says a great deal in it. But he never says anything about “turning words” or anything like it at all. Ivan’s wrong. He’s wrong, or he’s making it up. What’s going on here?

And it’s true: words are being turned. Let’s look at the larger context of the passage. It begins with Ivan drawing one of his first conclusions about the capacity of humans for evil. He says:

“I think if the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

“Just as he did God, then?” observed Alyosha.

“ ‘It’s wonderful how you can turn words,’ as Polonius says in Hamlet,” laughed Ivan. “You turn my words against me. Well, I am glad. Yours must be a fine God, if man created Him in his image and likeness. You asked just now what I was driving at. You see, I am fond of collecting certain facts, …”

Aloysha scores a valid point, and one that Ivan does not really address. Instead, he changes the subject to his collecting of facts. Later, Ivan will say that he is not an unbeliever. He accepts God. But here, earlier, he supposes that the devil exists as a created image of mankind. In other words, humans are wicked and have created a devil to transfer blame. Aloysha’s parry about God then intimates that humans must also have good in them–that is, if man created Him. Ivan simply offers an incorrect allusion, a sarcastic rejoinder about how “fine” God must be, and shifts subject. Ivan laughs off the argument against his conclusion, also turning the words rhetorically back to his own position.

But Ivan’s allusion is wrong. We might argue that, Oh, it’s a simple mistake; he can’t recall every piece of literature he’s read, and the essence of the quote still works. And that isn’t wrong, exactly, but as I am fond of saying, it’s only, say, 27% right. Ivan may have made a mistake, but Dostoevsky certainly did not. He had plenty of time to decide what Ivan would say and what this might mean. 

And to cut to it: We’ve already seen how Andrew Marvell’s speaker in the poem “To His Coy Mistress” is himself ‘full of it,’ that his failure of logic is the very key to unlocking the distinction between author and speaker, revealing that the speaker is a cad and villain and that Marvell thinks so, too. Is that what is going on here?

Let’s see. Why attribute this to Polonius of all people? Without spending a lot of time reviewing Hamlet here, this is the guy who among other things gives his departing son a laundry list of advice including “neither a borrower nor a lender be” and “to thine own self be true.” Much of this advice is contradictory, especially since Polonius himself is a deceiver and manipulator of politics in Hamlet’s castle. He makes long–winded speeches (like Ivan, check), manipulates his children with his position and words (like Ivan does his younger brother Aloysha, check), and is known for his clever wordplay (Ivan a master of words, check again). In Shakespeare, Polonius ends up dead behind a curtain in the Queen’s bedroom by the point of Hamlet’s sword. Well, if you haven’t read the novel, I won’t tell you Ivan’s fate here, but it is not so clean and decisive as that of the fair Polonius. 

But we have some real hints at what Dostoevsky is doing. By having Ivan incorrectly give the quote to Polonius, he underlines the nonsense that Aloysha has also pointed out. Ivan is long-winded and impressive with his words, but is likely working as hard to deceive and manipulate his brother Aloysha as he is honestly wrestling with his own conscience. Again, to spare us an analysis of the entire Dostoevsky novel right now, Ivan is not a simple character, and does in fact have very serious spiritual struggles with his avowed atheism, but these don’t appear much in the passage we’re looking at. In this scene, Dostoevsky has Ivan ironically draw a condemnation of himself. Aloysha points out a mistake in his reasoning, Ivan squirms out of it with laughter, makes the error with Polonius which underscores the problems in his argument, and simultaneously alludes to a character who behaves much like himself, in any event.

And all on this premise: the turning of words. Ivan’s argument, despite all of his appeals of the suffering child, sincere as they are, is also that if we can position our language strategically, we can reason ourselves into or out of anything, perhaps even our moral conscience. 

Now all this is in part what William James referred to when he saw those who would permit a child to suffer as callously indifferent. James believes we would all rise up against the Hideous Bargain—whether it is the child suffering, the BP oil disaster, or the production of veal—in what he describes as a “strenuous mood.” For James, this mood is characterized by some of our quote “wilder passions … big fears, loves, and indignations.” James calls this a quote “affective and independent” moral response, a “purely inward force” that is quote “revolutionary.” Revolutionary. And Dostoevsky titles his chapter “Rebellion,” the crime Aloysha finally accuses Ivan of committing.

Now I’ve just spent the past few minutes describing some of the challenges we have to accepting Ivan’s arguments, but dang it if James’s righteous “strenuous mood” is not exactly what we see from Ivan here. James is counting on humanity to respond this way, that the moral foundation to resist suffering and injustice comes exactly contrary to any utilitarian bean-counting, Eichmann’s “banality of evil,” or language games like “collateral damage.” If James is right, the Hideous Bargain should be viscerally unbearable. Some compromises are simply morally unacceptable, regardless of the perceived greater good.

Rebellion, Revolution, Reconciliation

So which is it? Is Dostoevsky telling us that we must, like Ivan, rebel against a universe which produces such evil? (Ivan, remember, says that he would stand by his position to reject such a universe quote “even if I were wrong.”) Or is he showing us that Ivan is wrong and that there is another path out there for us? Yes, and Yes, and . . . 

Are we to engage ultra-processed and chemically-treated foods and the Cuban Five and the petition to repair the broken sidewalk outside the elementary school while raising a family and paying off that mortgage while worrying about that dripping sound from the basement? Or can we set some of these aside in confidence that we are doing well and doing good?

Or worse, am I even recognizing and facing the moral problems that I should be? Or have I cleverly languaged them out of my present priorities, out of existence? After all, what can I do about Myanmar or East Timor or buffy-headed marmoset of Brazil, especially if I don’t even know their names? 

And here we are again at an impasse. There are no simple, concrete final answers. We have instead ways to observe and understand the questions. This is how art and literature work. 

If I just retreat from the questions, step aside, choose otium as a place for personal comfort, I shirk all of these questions, perhaps. I can reject the world and its complex evils and suffering. I can build that Andrews estate and have an old school friend paint a picture of me and my new wife on quiet fields that I never worked. And, of course, in so doing, I may not be creating God in my own image, or the devil in my own image, but definitely crafting nature in that ego-centered abandonment of the human world. 

To do so, says Le Guin, is to deepen the treason. Now we are getting closer to what Le Guin imagines is the obligatory goal of the artist and that treason. To engage the questions, to pursue and explore them, to lead us to moments of choice, that is the engagement with the world that the artist must pursue. To write unironically of flowers and werewolf romance adventures and self-centered peace–to abandon our compassion and engagement with the difficult world–is treason.

We must choose, and then choose again; define ourselves, then re-define when we look again; hold ourselves accountable and reject ignorance. We must plant today’s flags; then review our strategies anew. Flag-planting is actively choosing to confront difficult questions.

We can reject this position, say, “Oh, Steve, you’re over-stating this or over-thinking it.” But of course, it isn’t me anyone really has to answer to. At the least, we must face only our own consciences. And, humbly, I might point out that our delay in engagement–that we might choose to delay at all–is itself a place of privilege: that we have the time and space to do so; or that we have found ourselves so paralyzed by indecision or “the rest of life” that we ourselves are victims to the constructed rules of the world. We will have to address that question soon enough.

Almost a century ago, a poet named Langston Hughes caught our attention in his artistic engagements with these very questions in the US from his little corner of Harlem, New York City. But one of his poems for me today seems most appropriate to note. 

Let me read it for you first.

Langston Hughes: “Let American Be American Again”

Let America Be America Again (1935)
By Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one’s own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That’s made America the land it has become.
O, I’m the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I’m the one who left dark Ireland’s shore,
And Poland’s plain, and England’s grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa’s strand I came
To build a “homeland of the free.”

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we’ve dreamed
And all the songs we’ve sung
And all the hopes we’ve held
And all the flags we’ve hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that’s almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be—the land whereeveryman is free.
The land that’s mine—the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people’s lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

 

Closing Words

Perhaps a little more potent and open with its anger than most of the Hughes poems you know? That’s true. This is not a poem of beauty and resilience, of sentiment or softened plea. Maybe you heard it back around 20 years ago when Democrat John Kerry used the title for his presidential campaign slogan. 

But there might be a reason this poem is seldom if ever anthologized in our schoolbooks. 

But Hughes has planted his flag. James his. Dostoevsky’s flag sits on far less steady ground, but the appeal remains. And LeGuin is ahead.

I should ask, I guess, after such powerful writers like Dostoevsky and James and Hughes, what point could a mere fantasy writer possibly add to our questions? And of course, my loaded question pre-supposes a prejudice against genre, against fantasy.

Next week we’ll begin to take a look at some of these issues, these questions about genre and the role of fantasy literature. Once we understand where Le Guin is coming from, we will be better prepared to address her famous short story. 

There’s a lot of hills out there to place a few flags, no matter how big or small, permanently or for the moment. Choose a hill, a cause, an idea, something you know less about than you should, read about it. But whatever you do,

Go read something.

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.