Sometimes – quite often, actually - what I’m teaching kind of rhymes with what’s going on in the world. It has been a long time since I taught The Scarlet Letter, but back when it was a significant part of my repertoire, it seemed that every time I took a class through that book coincided with some celebrity moralist being exposed as a fraud. It was as though in merely writing the word "Dimmesdale" I had set in motion the unmasking of William Bennett as a high stakes gambler.
It has happened again, though in different form. Not that my reading list is having some kind of butterfly effect on current events, but another kind of accidental connection: in the past month, the events of Holy Week have been bubbling up in the texts we’ve been studying.
1. “Then one of the twelve, called Judas Iscariot, went unto the chief priests and said unto them, ‘What will ye give me, and I will deliver him unto you?’ And they covenanted with him for thirty pieces of silver” (Matthew 26:14-15).
In a well-known scene from Raisin in the Sun, Karl Lindner (of the euphemistically named Clybourne Park Improvement Association) has come to a run down Southside apartment to make his organization’s official offer to buy back the house that Lena Younger has purchased, in order to prevent a black family from moving in to his all white neighborhood. Before Lindner names the figure, Beneatha Younger says – without missing a beat – “Thirty pieces and not a coin less.” In an earlier scene this same Beneatha professed her atheism, but the Gospels remain enough of a frame for viewing the world for her that when she needs a truly appalling example of selling out, Judas is at hand. It's automatic, instinctual, and there's no mistaking (even for Lindner) what Beneatha means with this reference: for the Youngers to take his offer would amount to betraying sacred commitments - in this case, to ancestral sacrifices and to the principle of equality - along the same lines as a Biblical character whose name has become synonymous with betrayal.
2. “And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, 'Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit': and having said thus, he gave up the ghost” (Luke 23:46).
Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s 1961 novel Weep Not, Child is a fictional account of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya. In one horrific scene, British colonial soldiers, desperate to find and punish guerrilla fighters, accost a harmless group of religious pilgrims making their way through the forest. One of their number, whom we have earlier seen delivering a dark sermon (rooted in Matthew 24) on the tribulation that must occur before the coming of God's Kingdom, suffers what amounts to a crucifixion:
Isaka squatted and calmly watched the scene. He had no documents. When the white soldier shouted at him, Isaka answered in a calm, almost resigned tone. Where had he left the documents? Satan had made him forget them at home. But the white soldier knew better. Isaka was a Mau Mau. Again Isaka replied that Jesus had saved him and he could not exchange Jesus with Mau Mau. The officer looked at him with reddening eyes. Yet he did not touch him. Njoroge wondered if he was afraid of Isaka. There was something strange in the teacher’s calm. When the others were allowed to go, Isaka was made to remain. He did not protest.
‘Come this way and we’ll see what Jesus will do for you.’ He was led into the thick dark wood. Before the others had gone very far, they heard one horrible scream that rang across the forest. They dared not turn their heads. Njoroge tried to hold his breath so that his stomach was taut. They went a few more steps. Suddenly there was one other scream which was swallowed by a deafening report of machine guns. Then silence.
‘They have killed him,’ one of the men said sometime after the report.
I haven't yet read much Ngugi, but I can tell already that of his many grievances with the entire colonial enterprise, one of the strongest is the colonizers' brutal infidelity to the moral imperatives of the faith whose propagation they had used as moral cover to take over Africa.
3. “Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20:27).
In the concluding scene of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, we see what amounts to a resurrection, a return to life by one believed dead. Twins Viola and Sebastian, shipwreck victims, have separately come ashore in the alien land of Illyria, each believing the other is dead. Twelfth Night is mostly a comedy of romantic love, but there’s a particular production I’m fond of (the 1998 Lincoln Center version) that emphasizes – more than any other production I’ve seen - the intensity of family love, and the pain of loss of a beloved sibling. This aspect of the play puts me in mind of Stephen Colbert, who at ten years old lost his father and two of his brothers in a plane crash. In a portion of an interview about his Catholic faith, Colbert speaks of a period of his life, in his twenties, when he was an atheist, and how difficult that was for him: “I didn’t want to not have a god. If for no other reason than I really wanted to see my father and my brothers again. Which is the most understandable, but in some ways kind of the most selfish reason to have a God. But that was real, that was a promise given to me that I would see them again.” Shakespeare's Viola, as played by Helen Hunt at Lincoln Center in 1998, could relate. In one scene, disguised for her own safety as a boy, she disputes with her master Orsino (with whom to she is secretly in love) about men and women and love, and when he asks her about the fate of a family member, she replies, “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too.” See how Helen Hunt reads that line (1:10:45) – heartbroken, remembering that her dear brother Sebastian is gone forever (or so she thinks). When the siblings are reunited at last in Act V, each believes at first that they have seen a ghost, and then - like a pair of doubting Thomases - they exchange identify-affirming details, and before long they experience an explosively joyous triumph over death. It is not a genuine resurrection, of course, but it feels like one, like the jubilation of the empty tomb. For this reader, Sebastian's exultant cry of "Thrice-welcome, drowned Viola!" beats any of the romantic schlock that follows. For those who feel they have been left stranded alone here by the death of a loved one, that scene depicts the gratification of a familiar ungratifiable longing.
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