What
a short strange trip the last ten
days have been in America. Facebook and Twitter have been flooded with blue-state
blue-sky renewed optimism, as insightful commentators have been quick to observe,
including this brilliant piece by Michael Cohen which succinctly touches all
the important bases:
I
start from where Cohen leaves off---as my Subject Line suggests, I will add my
own literary gloss on Obama’s eulogy delivered in Charleston on Friday... http://tinyurl.com/nfef7h3 ...the amazing grace of which I hope and believe
will be long remembered, in part because of the verbal virtuosity of his sermon.
As @RoofBeamReader put it: "I've taught rhetoric for years & have
heard many beautiful speeches from all ages & places. President Obama's eulogy
today was transcendent."
Given
my Austen obsession, I was repeatedly struck, as I listened to the President,
by the remarkably Austenian deployment of irony and implication in the
President’s eulogy, and so I immediately went to a transcript to try to identify
what it was that reminded me so much of Jane Austen’s writing genius. And I
think I found it—see what you think.
Jane
Austen, in her euphoria upon the successful publication of Pride & Prejudice in January, 1813, famously wrote the
following about her “darling child” to her sister about a supposed flaw in her
writing detected by some of the novel’s first readers: "There are a few Typical errors – &
a “said he” or a “said she” would sometimes make the Dialogue more immediately
clear – but “I do not write for such dull Elves” “As have not a great deal of
Ingenuity themselves.”
I’ve
frequently observed that this was a massively ironic MOCK self-deprecation on
her part. What Austen was saying, in her topsy-turvy irony, was that she expected
her best readers to be sharp elves, who would understand that her frequent
ambiguities in pronoun usage in P&P were not errors at all, but instead intentionally
designed, so as to create pervasive ambiguity of reference. In this way, along
with a number of other literary techniques I collectively call “The Jane Austen
Code”, I’ve argued that she allowed for a flexible, alert reader to discern two
entirely alternative fictional realities in the same novel—so Austen could write
novels which appear conservative on the surface, but are radically subversive
beneath.
Well,
in his eulogy, I see Barack Obama doing his own version of that---if you read
through the transcript of his eulogy here….
…pay close
attention to how skillfully he moves back and forth in his references to “we”
and “us”. That will be the thrust of my analysis today.
When
he says, “No wonder one of his senate colleagues remembered Senator Pinckney as
"the most gentle of the 46 of US -- the best of the 46 of US." “, he
refers to the elected representatives of South Carolina. But then note how the reference shift when Pres.
Obama says, “As OUR brothers and sisters in the AME church know, WE don't make
those distinctions. ‘OUR calling, ’Clem once said, ‘is not just within the
walls of the congregation, but...the life and community in which OUR
congregation resides.’ He embodied the idea that our Christian faith demands
deeds and not just words…”
Now, “our”
and “we” literally refers to the
congregation at AME, and yet, the President knows very well that he’s speaking
not just to the live audience packed into the church, but also to tens or even
hundreds of millions of people worldwide who will eventually watch it during
the weeks and months that follow, because of the huge buzz that he knows he’s
going to create with this eulogy. So “our” and “we” also refers to all of US in
America, and all around the world, anyone who pays attention to what happens
here.
And
so when he then says, “…that to put OUR faith in action is more than individual
salvation, it's about OUR collective salvation; that to feed the hungry and
clothe the naked and house the homeless is not just a call for isolated charity
but the imperative of a just society….”, it is now “us”, all of us in our large
and diverse society, he is now speaking for.
And
that’s precisely when Obama shifts to the second person pronoun, as he speaks
about the martyred Revd. Pinckney. “What a good man. Sometimes I think that's
the best thing to hope for when YOU'RE eulogized -- after all the words and
recitations and resumes are read, to just say someone was a good man.” Subtly,
now the President is speaking out of two sides of his mouth, and both sides are
producing good righteous words. He is describing the good man who was murdered,
but he’s also implicitly prompting everyone listening who has a heart and a
soul to imagine the moment in the future when we each will OURSELVES be
eulogized, and to wonder whether we will also be called a “good” man or
woman.
And then
the President zeroes in on his listeners once again: “YOU don't have to be of
high station to be a good man….What a life Clementa Pinckney lived. What an
example HE set. What a model for HIS faith. And then to lose HIM at 41…” The
example set by Clementa Pinckney in life, is, in death, amplified a millionfold
by the bully pulpit at which only an American president with the ear of the
world can stand.
It
happens, by the way, that the world also lost Jane Austen at 41, nearly two
centuries ago—a woman who, in writing of six novels filled with characters of
startling psychological and emotional reality, set an example the world is
still following, as those novels have now been read by tens of millions of
readers in every country of the world. So that, physical death need not be the
end of a good person’s good example, it may actually be only the beginning of
it.
And
so when the President then says, “To the families of the fallen, the nation
shares in YOUR grief. OUR pain cuts that much deeper because it happened in a
church. The church is and always has been the center of African-American life
-- (applause) -- a place to call OUR own in a too often hostile world, a
sanctuary from so many hardships. “, he now his rhetorical cake, and eats it,
too. When he goes on to describe the numerous vital roles that the
African-American church has played in the survival of black people through
centuries of unspeakable horror at the hands of their white countrymen, he
doesn’t say “you” to the white Americans listening—especially those who have
defended flying the Confederate flag on statehouses---he says, “our nation”. He
challenges them to try to reconcile this irreconcilable contradiction.
At no
point does Obama ever mention the role of the white church in the South, and yet, as so often the case in Austen’s
writing, something can be so strongly implied that it need not ever be made
explicit. In fact, the meaning—the challenge--takes on extra weight because it
is never stated. No defensiveness is provoked by the word “you”, and yet, it is
there in the shadow of every word spoken.
This
unspoken contrast reminds all of us of the Far Right’s constant attempts to
impose the ideology of their perversely anti-Christian “Christianity” on all of
the rest of us. Most of all, Obama makes us think on our own about the
centuries’ long tradition of the white Christian churches justifying the
unspeakable horrors of slavery—not just justifying it, but (via the treating of
the Confederate flag as if it were a holy relic, like the Shroud of Turin) celebrating it.
And
now listen to the President deliver his subtle punch line via his pronouns:
“WE
may not have earned it, this grace, with our rancor and complacency, and
short-sightedness and fear of each other -- but WE got it all the same. He gave
it to US anyway. He's once more given US grace. But it is up to US now to make
the most of it, to receive it with gratitude, and to prove OURSELVES worthy of
this gift.
For
too long, WE were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too
many of OUR citizens. It's true, a flag did not cause these murders. But as
people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge --
including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of
praise -- as WE all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more
than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder
of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. WE see that NOW.”
The
truth is that all black Americans (except maybe Clarence Thomas) have never
been blind to that pain, nor have many white Americans—but the President is
addressing the better part of those of “us” who have been blind, but who self-identify
as “good people”. His inclusive “us” gives them a door to walk through —with Governor
Haley as a subtly ironic example of the blind being politically maneuvered into
into leading the other blind folk out of blindness--- and that, we hope, will
lead to a collective doing good.
I
could go on, but I hope that the above sampler will encourage you to go through
the President’s speech on your own with this in mind. Test his rhetoric, and I
promise you, you will emerge with an even greater respect for his skill in
delivering so perfectly the message that our country so desperately needs to
hear.
What
I’d like to do in the remainder of this post, is to draw one more parallel
between the eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, and Jane Austen’s most overtly
religious novel, Mansfield Park, published
in 1814.
For
those not familiar with Jane Austen’s writing, my Subject Line is derived from the
following words spoken by the soul-deadened but subversive heir to a slavery
fortune, Tom Bertram, in Mansfield Park,
to the self-satisfied, gluttonous clergyman Dr. Grant: "A strange business this in America,
Dr. Grant! What is your opinion? I always come to you to know what I am to
think of public matters."
Austen
scholars have long debated whether this dialog, published in 1814, was meant to
refer to the War of 1812, or to the recent banning of the slave trade supplying
that terrible human cargo to the English Caribbean colonies, or to some other large-scale
event. Whatever she meant, we certainly know what the President was talking
about on Friday. But I find an uncanny parallelism between the way President
Obama quietly and subtly exposed the hypocrisies and banal evil of the residue of
white racism in the United States two centuries after those words were written
by Jane Austen, and the way that she quietly but powerfully dissected and
shredded the hypocrisy of the English colonial slavery system. Sir Thomas Bertram, the patriarch of the
novel, is never overtly called a hypocrite, a moral monster, or a greedy
sexually abusive oppressive father and slaveowner-and yet I and many other
Janeites, including Patricia Rozema, writer and director of the controversial
1999 film adaptation of Mansfield Park,
read between the lines, and see Jane Austen condemning Sir Thomas.
As a
woman writing novels in the super-sexist England she lived her whole life in,
Jane Austen rode a knife’s edge of subtle irony, so she couldn’t just say what
she meant. And in a way, sadly, so does President Obama, even today in 2015. Indeed,
he has since the day he rose into public fame over a decade ago, and still as
the first black man (because in America, biracial is still “black” for many)
sitting in the Oval Office of the till-then universally aptly named White
House, he has had to live with the impossible Catch 22 of saying enough about
race to try to make things better, while facing the constant threat of being
accused of playing “the race card” every time he does speak forcefully. So, if
he plays a subtle rhetorical games “we”, “us”, and “you”, it is perfectly
understandable that he has to do so.
I
will conclude by invoking a final example of Austenian genius, the debate
between the earnest, pious Fanny Price and the worldly-wise Mary Crawford on the
subject of sermonizing and its effect on those speaking and hearing it.
Fanny
argues that “[a] man—a sensible man like Dr. Grant, cannot be in the habit of
teaching others their duty every week, cannot go to church twice every Sunday,
and preach such very good sermons in so good a manner as he does, without being
the better for it himself. It must make him think; and I have no doubt that he
oftener endeavours to restrain himself than he would if he had been anything
but a clergyman."
To
which Mary wittily and tellingly replies, "We cannot prove to the
contrary, to be sure; but I wish you a better fate, Miss Price, than to be the
wife of a man whose amiableness depends upon his own sermons; for though he may
preach himself into a good-humour every Sunday, it will be bad enough to have
him quarrelling about green geese from Monday morning till Saturday
night."
At
which point Edmund (whom Fanny secretly loves, but who is strongly attracted to
Mary) avoids directly rebutting Mary, but instead takes a page out of Jesus’s “Render
unto Caesar” playbook, and also makes Fanny’s heart leap, with this touching and
brilliant bit of wit:
"I
think the man who could often quarrel with Fanny," said Edmund
affectionately, "must be beyond the reach of any sermons."
Fanny
turned farther into the window…”
I
think that the American who could often quarrel with President Obama about the
stirring message he delivered to all of us on Friday must also be beyond the
reach of any sermons…..but I hope there are more of US in the U.S. who are not
beyond the reach of the amazingly graceful amazing grace of President Obama’s
eulogy to Clementa Pinckney. R.I.P.
Cheers,
ARNIE
@JaneAustenCode
on Twitter
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