Social Change: More on the Rise of Tribalism

I recently wrote a post on the rise of tribalism in the U.S.  Here's a bit more on that topic.

On Nov. 4, the New York Times published in its paper edition a piece by Ginia Bellafante entitled "Is it Safe to be Jewish in New York?"

The story related recent incidents of anti-Semitism and then went on to observe that for several years, expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment have made up the preponderance of hate crime complaints in the city. According to the NY police department, anti-Semitic incidents have accounted for half of all hate crimes this year, or four times as many as against blacks.

Where is this coming from?  Generally speaking, right-wing, non-Jewish whites sympathetic with Nazi policies tend to be the leading suspects based on the history of such incidents in the U.S. over many years.  But that doesn't seem to be the case in NY at present.

If anti-Semitism bypasses consideration as a serious problem in New York, it is to some extent because it refuses to conform to an easy narrative with a single ideological enemy, Belefante wrote.

"During the past 22 months, not one person caught or identified as the aggressor in an ant-Semitic hate crime has been associated with a far right-wing group, Mark Molinari, commanding officer of the Police Department's Hate Crimes task force, told me," the NYT writer said. "I almost wish it was more clear cut," he (Molinari) was quoted as saying. "It's every identity targeting every identity," he told Belefante.

Every identity targeting every identity is mark of increasing tribalism, one could argue.

The Invisible Woman (or Man)

Invisible people are generally associated in the world of fiction with ghost stories or tales making use of what is known as magical realism -- or outright magic.

But in truth, invisibility is common in everyday life and can be written about as part of the Importance of the Ordinary.

Good examples of this can be found in a recent New York Times article entitled "New Women's Groups Focus on Generational Mix."

The article opens with an anecdote about a woman lamenting the difficulties of aging. "She said she felt invisible … generally silenced. Unseen. As if she had nothing to contribute to the world." Other women were said to have then echoed the same feelings.

"These were all women who had college degrees, were married or had a significant other, were well traveled and led very nice lifestyles, but every one of them felt invisible. They didn't feel pretty any longer. No one was looking at them."

So reported Susan Good, a woman who has launched an initiative to combat the affliction.

Among other things, the article mentions a monthly reading series in various major cities where women from multiple generations read short stories and essays loosely centered around a theme. It was founded by novelist Georgia Clark after a conversation during which her mother spoke about "disappearing" in later life.

"She said that as she had gotten older people looked right through her," Ms. Clark told the NYT. "If we're walking down the street together, they'll just look at me, and if she's alone, it's as if she's not there."

This, by the way, is not unique to women.  Older men experience it as well, but they are perhaps more reluctant than women to admit it.

"The dominant culture tells you that when you reach a certain age, you can't be included any more," Devorah Bry, a dance and couples therapist in Nevada City, was quoted as saying.

In truth, advancing age is not the only reason people feel invisible. Marginalization, such as by virtue of mental illness or severe financial setbacks, is another.  That may be a factor behind recent, seemingly inexplicable mass shootings.  Those carrying them out are invisible no more, even if it is only on the way out.

Societal Change: The Rise of Tribalism in the U.S.

As per its title, this blog is focused on fiction, but with one or two exceptions, what I have had to say on that topic has attracted little interest.

This, one could argue, opens the door to other subjects, such as where we are in the wake of Donald Trump's election as President of the United States.

An important factor seems to be that as America's traditional white majority shrinks in size and various categories of non-whites demand seats at the country's various tables of power -- political, social and cultural -- tribalism is on the increase.

This Sunday, the New York Times magazine tackled the topic in its "First Words" column.

For most of the post-war period, and particularly in the wake of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that led to Southern conservatives switching from Democrat to Republican, the country has been pretty evenly divided between the two parties. And until recent years -- according to regular American National Election Studies surveys -- most people were not strikingly dissatisfied with the opposition party.  As a result, disputes were mainly based on policies and compromise was often possible.

More recently -- and particularly since Barack Obama was elected president -- there has been an important change: the percentage of survey respondents expressing extremely negative views of the opposition party has risen dramatically.

"In the post-war era, the coalitions that made up the Democratic and Republican Parties were haphazard and incongruous, bearing little resemblance to the tribes of today," the NYT article says.

More than any other politician -- and perhaps because he wasn't previously a seasoned politician conditioned by what went on  before -- Donald Trump has tapped into this apparent new reality. Among other things, he has clearly determined that his tribe -- very largely white -- wants everything associated with former president Obama overturned or erased. That's not so much because Obama's policies were too far left -- they weren't -- but because Obama's very ascension to the top elected office in the U.S. represented a major real or symbolic shift away from those who traditionally sat at American tables of power. Or at least that seems to be the way in which many who voted for Trump perceived it.

It is tough for partisans to say that in a straight-forward manner.  "Racist" remains a very uncomfortable label. But many can quite comfortably vent their feelings or frustrations by being opposed to immigration, particularly since unlike the past, the vast majority of those seeking to enter the U.S. now do not look like them. With something like 20 million people living illegally in the U.S. already and the possibility of terrorism ever present, many can feel comfortable backing strict border controls and in so doing hopefully slow the country's increasing racial and cultural diversity.

That seems to be where U.S. socio/political realities stand at present.

Virginia Woolf on Fiction, and “Bleak House” in Particular

Man is a list-making animal.  Nothing, it seems, can be properly apprehended, digested, comprehended and then absorbed or rejected until it is first categorized in relation to its peers. 

Thus in her 1929 essay “Phases of Fiction,” Virginia Woolf divides the subject matter up into a list of six categories.  There are The Truth Tellers, The Romantics, The Character-Mongers and Comedians, The Psychologists, The Satirists and The Poets. 

By prevailing standards, this is a modest registry. “Writer’s Digest,” for instance, currently lists 21 genres of fiction. But let’s give Virginia the benefit of the doubt and say she was considering only what might be termed literature as opposed to, say, the broader realm of commercial fiction, the chief purpose of which is profitable entertainment. 

Significantly, in view of the three main books Bill has chosen for our seminar, Woolf focuses on “Bleak House” in the category of Character-Mongers and Comedians, eventually comparing and contrasting it with Jane Austin’s “Pride and Prejudice.” At the end of that section, George Eliot gets some consideration as well. 

The term “comedians” here does not mean authors whose aim is humor. Rather, it refers to authors who write books, in the English tradition, that have happy, or comedic (as opposed to tragic), endings. Such books generally conclude with successful marriages that often served to reinforce prevailing social norms after many trials and tribulations along the way. Woolf’s own second novel, “Night and Day” (her least highly regarded) easily fits within that category. 

But when one is in the mood for characters of extravagant force, one need look no further than “Bleak House,” Woolf maintains. “In Dickens, the character-making power is so prodigious that the very houses and streets and fields are strongly featured in sympathy with the people.” Thus, in “Bleak House,” one perceives a certain location as looking like or characterized by one thing or another because of the attributes of the character that inhabits it as opposed to the reverse. 

Thus, for instance, readers clearly see the chaotic conditions of the house in which poor Caddy Jellyby is brought up not because the place itself is much described, but because of the manner in which Dickens depicts Mrs. Jellyby’s preoccupation with the Borrioboola-Gha peoples of Africa at the expense of her family. 

Dickens works by way of exaggeration, Woolf says. “Who has met anyone who, whatever the day or the occasion, can be trusted to say the same phrase, to repeat the same action? This perpetual repetition has, of course, an enormous power to drive these characters home, to stabilize them.” 

Such characters, Woolf says, naming a few, serve as stationary points in the flow and confusion of the narrative and thereby firm up what she termed the extraordinary intricacy of the plot.

For me personally, the catatonic seizure-prone Mr. Smallweed, episodically shaken back into his senses by his granddaughter Judy, was one such character, albeit more significant to the plot than, say, the king of deportment, Mr. Turveydrop, who Woolf points to as one of the “gargoyles” of Dickens’ composition. 

There are times, Woolf says, when Dickens’ powers of character development pull readers away from his story because of the sentiments they generate.  She points in particular to Mademoiselle Hortense, dismissed from her presence by Lady Deadlock, walking shoeless through the wet grass. “She goes and leaves a strange wake of emotion behind her,” Woolf says. 

Similarly, in “Howards End,” Helen describes Ruth Wilcox walking off into the meadow. “Trail, trail, went her long dress over the sopping grass, and she came back with her hands full of the hay that was cut yesterday.” Another powerfully emotive image. 

But back to “Bleak House” where Woolf cites in the same context Mr. Tukinghorn’s friend (unnamed as I recall). “A man of the same mold and a lawyer, too, who lived the same kind of life until he was seventy-five years old, and then, suddenly conceiving (as it is supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold watch to his hairdresser one summer evening, and walked leisurely home to the Temple [an area between Fleet St. and the River Thames where lawyers lived and had their chambers], and hanged himself.” One can easily imagine Virginia pausing and dwelling on that depiction. 

The most interesting character in “Bleak House” for Woolf is Inspector Bucket. Rather than being static and extreme, he “is made up of contrasts and discrepancies,” she says. 

While at times bombastic, but very able in his official capacity, Bucket is also conscientious and even compassionate, Woolf says. “All these qualities are displayed by turns in the astonishingly vivid account of the drive through the night and the storm, in pursuit of Esther’s mother.” 

Dickens “uses this clear-cut, many-faced figure to sharpen his final scenes and then, letting Inspector Bucket of the detective force disappear, gathers the loose folds of the story into one prodigious armful and makes an end,” Woolf says. 

But while she clearly admires Dickens’ abilities (and, I suspect, greatly enjoyed “Bleak House”) Woolf also finds her literary predecessor lacking in an important respect.  His characters are unconvincing when it comes to intimacy with each other, she says, and thus fail to “interlock.” This, she argues, may be because Dickens’ own heart burned far more with indignation for public wrongs than for private relationships. 

“So it is that we begin to want something smaller, more intense, more intricate,” Woolf says, pointing to Jane Austin and in particular, to “Pride and Prejudice.” 

But back to lists and categories. 

In a previous post, I wrote about Virginia Woolf’s take on “Howards End,” material extracted from an essay in which she discusses all of Forster’s novels except for “Maurice,” which, dealing with homosexuality, was only published after first Woolf and then Forster had died. 

“We look, then as time goes by, for signs that Mr. Forster is committing himself; that he is allying himself to one of the two great camps into which most novelists belong,” Woolf said. 

She identified the two camps as “the preachers and teachers” headed by Tolstoy and Dickens on one hand, and “the pure artists” headed by Austin and Turgenev on the other.

Two categories this time, rather than six. 

Forster, Woolf says, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once and that may be one reason he is an author about whom “there is considerably disagreement” and whose gifts are “evasive.” 

He falls into the “pure artist” camp when it comes to “an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, (and) a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own.”  But at the same time, Woolf continues, “he is highly conscious of a message” and that tends to put him in with “the preachers and teachers.” 

Her own message: if a writer can’t be properly categorized, he or she can be hard to understand and digest. 

Well, how about Woolf herself?  That’s potentially a big topic since she experimented with different styles, but let’s keep it simple and stick with what Forster had to say about her. 

In his view, there are two categories as well – “The Temple of Art,” a rarified atmosphere within which beauty is pursued for the sake of itself, on one hand, and the real world on the other. 

Woolf’s writing, in Forster’s view, comes perilously close to the former, but in the end thankfully escapes, and in so doing, remains relevant. 

“She has all of the aesthete’s characteristics: selects and manipulates her impressions; is not a great creator of character; enforces patterns on her books; has no great cause at heart. So how did she avoid her appropriate pitfall and remain up in the fresh air where we can hear the sound of the stable boy’s boots, or boats bumping, or Big Ben; where we can taste really new bread, and touch real dahlias?”  

Because, Forster maintains, Woolf liked writing for fun and “in the midst of writing seriously, this other delight would spurt through.” 

“For you cannot enter the Palace of Art, therein to dwell, if you are tempted from time to time to play the fool,” he says.  It is by mixing and managing these two impulses – the serious and mischievousness – in masterly fashion that Woolf succeeds as few other writers can, Forster says. 

This aspect of her gifts is clearly evident, I believe, in “Mrs. Dalloway,” when, for instance she slyly pokes fun at the classes of society represented by Hugh Whitbread and Lady Bruton (that name alone says it all) on one hand, and Doris Kilman on the other. 

If, however, we return to Woolf’s six categories and ask Forster to place her in one of those, it would clearly be the last: The Poets. 

“She was a poet who wanted to write novels,” he says, pointing in particular to “The Waves” a novel often said to be her greatest work if not her most satisfying. “To the Lighthouse” is generally awarded that prize and I would certainly argue that “Mrs. Dalloway” is a very close second.

The Importance of the Ordinary

The Whitney Museum of American Art is about to open a major retrospective on the art of Andy Warhol, probably the world's most well-known practitioner of Pop Art and a man who perhaps most notably brought to life the beauty and aesthetic integrity of the ordinary. Cans of soup, boxes of cleaning pads.

That came to mind when I was reading "The Pastons and Chaucer," the first chapter of Virginia Woolf's collection of essays known as "The Common Reader." About Chaucer, she had the following to say:

"For among writers, there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the layman who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelly are among the priests; they give us text after text to be hung up on the wall, saying after saying to be laid up on the heart like an amulet against disaster --

                   Farewell, farewell, the heart that lives alone

                          He prayeth best that loveth best
                          All things both great and small

-- such lines of exhortation and command spring to memory instantly.  But Chaucer lets us go our ways doing the ordinary things with the ordinary people. His morality lies in the way men and women behave to each other."

And, further:

" … the pleasure he gives us is different from the pleasure that other poets give us, because it is more closely connected with what we have ourselves felt or observed. Eating, drinking and fine weather, the May, cocks and hens, millers, old peasant women, flowers -- there is a special stimulus in seeing all these common things …"

Moreover, Woolf says, Chaucer goes on "to mock the pomp and ceremonies of life."

If Chaucer put great stock in ordinary life, so did Woolf, herself.  With the exception of "Orlando," a transgender, time-wharp phantasy said to be a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, all of her novels deal with ordinary people living ordinary lives. So, too, does the vast majority of the writing of James Joyce.

E.M. Forster on Virginia Woolf and Vice Versa

E.M. Forster was a peripheral member of the Bloomsbury group and a friend of Virginia Woolf although not a particularly close one. But they had a lot in common being not just novelists but critics of other writing.  So it is interesting to read what they had to say about each other. Each greatly admired the other, but not without qualifications. 

For instance, in a lecture on Woolf delivered on May 29, 1941, at Cambridge, two months after her death, Forster said that in her writings, Woolf “has no great cause at heart.”  Her works, he argued, are not “about something.”  Rather, as largely a form of poetry, they “are something” and when the poetry is absent, such as is the case with her second novel Night and Day and her penultimate novel The Years, her efforts fail, Forster said. 

Woolf wrote an essay entitled “The Novels of E.M. Forster” that was first published by her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1942. Virginia may have been reluctant to release it herself,  observing in the first couple of sentences that there are many reasons for hesitating to criticize one’s contemporaries including “the fear of hurting feelings” and “the difficulty of being just.” 

Whereas Forster felt Woolf had “no great cause at heart,” Virginia felt the opposite about him. She depicted Forster as “highly conscious of a message” and said “he believes that a novel must take sides in the human conflict.” 

 “Behind the rainbow of wit and sensibility there is a vision which he is determined we shall see,” she said. But she wasn’t convinced he was successful in getting it across, describing his message as “elusive in nature.”  Forester fails, she argues, to successfully connect his very satisfying depiction of actual things with the larger message he evidently wants them to convey. “We feel something has failed us at the critical moment,” Woolf said. 

Why, Woolf wondered, when Howards End was such a “highly skillful book” and she wanted to declare it a success did she feel it was instead a failure? While elaboration, skill, wisdom, penetration and beauty are all present in the book, “they lack fusion, they lack cohesion, they lack force,” Woolf declared. 

That’s a fairly damning critique for a work often described as Forster’s masterpiece and especially if one is supposed to come away from it with a message. 

But one can view Forster as equally disparaging of Woolf. 

Early in the afore mentioned lecture, Forster depicted Woolf “is not a great creator of character.” And later, he elaborated on that. As a modernist novelist, Woolf strays from the fictional norm in various ways.  Among them, “she does not tell a story or weave a plot, and can she create character?  That is her problem’s center.” 

While her characters worked on the page and seldom seemed unreal, “life eternal she could seldom give; she could seldom so portray a character that it was remembered afterwards on its own account,” Forster said, pointing to Jane Austin’s “Emma” and George Eliot’s “Dorothea Casaubon” as successes on that score. 

Were there any exceptions? “Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay do remain with the reader afterwards, and so perhaps do Rachel from The Voyage Out, and Clarissa Dalloway. For the rest [and there are many], it is impossible to maintain that here is an immortal portrait gallery,” Forster said. 

When one largely dispenses with story and plot, isn’t character what supposedly remains?

Same-Sex Attraction in "Mrs. Dalloway"

Attraction between women was of great interest to Woolf for more than one reason.

“Chloe liked Olivia.”  [What a concept!] 

“Do not start, do not blush, let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women,” Woof says in the fifth section of her landmark essay A Room of One’s Own.

Where did “Chloe liked Olivia” come from?  Woolf tells readers she encountered that astonishing phrase in a book called “Life’s Adventure, or some such title, by Mary Carmichael.” It was a book she at first hadn’t thought much of, based in part on Ms Carmichael’s terse and short-winded writing style, but that she was obliged to reconsider. Why? “For if Chloe likes Olivia and Mary Carmichael knows how to express it, she will light a torch in that vast chamber where nobody has yet been,” Woolf said.

That chamber was in 1928 the life of a woman “unlit by the capricious and colored light of the other sex.”  In other words, a woman defined in her own terms and not in relationship to a man as Woolf believed had been almost exclusively the case in English literature.

Well, Mary Carmichael was a figment of Virginia’s always fertile imagination and as for Chloe and Olivia, about all we are told of them is that they shared a laboratory where they minced liver, apparently for use as a cure for anemia, and that one of them was married with two small children. Woolf may have seen them as no more than friends, but that didn’t matter. This little invention – a woman being viewed independently of a man -- gave her the springboard she needed to examine at considerable length the impoverishment of women in literature.

The situation was so bad, she maintained, that in order to accurately depict what happens when a woman goes into a room, “whole flights of words” would have to be added to the English language.

[What would the English language look like now if James Joyce had been a woman, one wonders?]

But “Chloe liked Olivia” could certainly have implications other than just friendship and that brings me to Mrs. Dalloway.

Early in the book, after Clarissa is back from her morning walk, she climbs up to the little attic bedroom where her husband, Richard, has insisted she sleep undisturbed after her recent illness. This gets her thinking of Richard and how she has disappointed him sexually –initially “on the river beneath the woods at Clieveden” and later at Constantinople, “and again and again.”

In contrast, she has had a tendency to fall in love with women -- first and foremost with Sally Seton when Clarissa was 18 years old and “knew nothing about sex.” Encountering Sally at a party, Clarissa couldn’t take her eyes off her and then, when Sally unexpectedly arrived penniless at the Parry’s door and was somewhat reluctantly taken in, the two very different young women became almost inseparable, talking for hours about how they were going to reform the world – all Sally’s ideas, one is told.

Finally, out on the terrace one evening at Clarissa’s childhood home, Burton, “came the most exquisite moment in her whole life.” Alone with Sally – the others had gone on ahead – Sally picked a flower and kissed Clarissa on the lips. “The whole world might have turned upside down!” But then who should appear to ruin things but Peter Walsh, and her moment of happiness was embittered.

Readers aren’t told whether Sally and Clarissa took matters any further on a subsequent occasion, but from everything one learns about what Clarissa was like at 18, it seems unlikely. And in later years, when Sally married a rich Manchester industrialist, Clarissa wanted nothing to do with her, turning down invitations to visit.

Woolf contrasts this idyllically romantic, same-sex moment (the “laughing girls in their transparent muslins” Clarissa saw on her morning walk may have helped bring to her mind the “white frock” she was wearing when Sally kissed her) with a far darker example of possible same-sex attraction later in the book.

Whereas Clarissa was pursued by the vivacious, free-spirted Sally Seton who, among other things, ran down the hall naked on one occasion at Burton, Clarissa herself and possibly the Dalloway’s 17-year-old daughter Elizabeth, stimulates barely controllable desires within the rather distressing Doris Kilman, who, like a flasher lurking among trees in a public park, dresses in a green mackintosh no matter what the weather.

Miss Kilman, originally engaged by Richard Dalloway to teach his daughter history, in due course brings Elizabeth under her relatively recently acquired religious sway, much to the distress of Clarissa who wonders at one point if her daughter is falling in love with Doris.

Matters come to a head, when Miss Kilman, laughed at by the far more attractive Clarissa, is consumed by jealously and perhaps also lust.

“It is the flesh” she keeps muttering as she takes Elizabeth to a local department store, loses control of herself, buys of all things a petticoat (what was she thinking, Elizabeth wonders as the sales girl thinks Kilman “mad”) and gorges herself on sweets over tea as a possible substitute for another form of physical pleasure. Increasingly uncomfortable, Elizabeth finds her white gloves (as powerful a symbol as Clarissa’s flowers) and flees. Doris implores her in a quivering voice not to forget her, but she knows that Elizabeth, “so beautiful,” is gone.

Woolf, in an especially powerful passage, depicts Elizabeth, obliged out of politeness to have tea with Miss Kilman, as being “like some dumb creature who has been brought up to a gate for an unknown purpose, and stands there longing to gallop away.”  And so she finally did.  “Right away to the end of the field the dumb creature galloped in terror.”

The down side of possible same-sex attraction doesn’t get any darker than that. But the self-possessed Elizabeth, perhaps lucky to be relatively clueless over exactly what was happening, pulls herself together and appears at Clarissa’s party in a pink dress. Yet another powerful symbol, I think.