Safety First: The Inherent Uncontroversy of American Literature
Welcome to Feuilleton Friday!
The Anglosphere is a world of pretensions. One is pretension to a sense of overinflated controversy that hardly even exists except as a product of the Anglosphere’s own insular imagination. Arguably, one can say that all controversy fits this description. After all, offense can be given and taken; that is why the “I’m offended” debate of today is inherently absurd. Isn’t it all the same when someone gets angry about something?
It is not. But because the progress religion dictates that all perceived “progress” is welcomed and celebrated, it has gotten to the point where even mild criticism of something has been labeled “controversy.” This isn’t all that unusual, really: other terms - like antisemitism, to use a popularly discussed term nowadays - have been regarded as expanding umbrellas that have taken in more definitions than originally intended. For this reason, it is necessary to engage in a roots revival and revisit what controversy - pure, intellectual, challenging controversy - actually means.
There is controversy and there is controversy. I will set it apart into different “schools” with two new literary terms of my own design: Stowe controversy and Miller controversy. The latter refers to Henry Miller. The former to Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Both of these writers couldn’t be more different from each other: one was a deeply religious woman with puritan sensibilities living in the heartland of America, particularly the North; the other was an expat whose writing was the exact opposite of puritan sensibilities. There has never been a more family woman in American literature than Stowe; Miller, in contrast, is thoroughly un-family-like.
Stowe and Miller have one important thing in common, however: they are the two controversial authors of American fiction.
While other American writers have stoked controversy - Arthur Miller, for instance; or John Steinbeck with Grapes of Wrath - both Stowe and Miller stand apart as being not just authors of controversial books, but controversial as authors. This is not true of John Steinbeck, who was (and still is) loved by the American people. And while Arthur Miller’s art is not shallow, he was - as far as the art of controversy goes - a reactionary who could not escape his stance as a reactionary. One could argue that Ernest Hemingway was controversial, but this had more to do with his self-image as Papa: his literature was and still is admired for reasons deep and profound but unrelated to controversy. Then there are the common culprits: Huckleberry Finn using nigger, for instance, or The Catcher in the Rye offending sensibilities because toward the end it says “fuck you.” (Or whatever the real reason is) Both of which are only controversial insofar as teaching them in school is concerned; outside of that discussion, neither novel is actually controversial. (I don’t include novels solely controversial to certain ethnic groups, like Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Sholem Asch’s New Testament figure novels whose offense was restricted to the Jewish and/or the Yiddish-speaking community)
Circling back to Anglosphere pretensions - which America shares despite its cultural differences from other Anglo countries - all of this relates to one of the greatest pretensions of American literature: the view by Americans that their literature is not only regularly controversial, but defined by controversy. This pretension has done much to mislead authors who, when they should be creating art, choose instead to stoke controversy and equivocate it with art. Amiri Baraka’s 2-D play Dutchman - a play that would ordinarily be forgotten if Americans weren’t pathologically aroused by the concept of race even (or especially) when they claim to be anti-racists - is one such example of controversy for controversy’s sake. The fact that Dutchman is a play is almost beside the point.
Art can be controversial; but controversy by itself is not art. The American pretension that American literature is defined by controversy is one of the biggest lies ever told in the history of American arts. It is a lot more accurate to say that after Canadian, Australian and New Zealand literature - which, from my limited observation, is almost never concerned with controversy - American literature is the tamest literature in the entirety of the West. The difference is that unlike the aforementioned countries that don’t try to present a contrary image of themselves to the world, Americans pretend they are more controversial than they actually are.
Ironically, a lot of this is Henry Miller’s fault, though by influence and not by choice. But before I explain that, it is necessary to elaborate on the distinctions between Stowe controversy and Miller controversy.
The Stowe Controversy
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is, without question, the most controversial novel in all American history.
Originally championed by the Yankee North in the service of the abolition of slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was immediately reviled in the South. From what I hear, it remains unpopular in the South to this day. Since then, however, the character of Uncle Tom - who, in turn, is American literature’s most controversial character - has caused many in the former North to be averse to it. “Yankee” Whites feel that it was racist of Stowe to create a character who was loyal to his slave master; why wasn’t he more like Harriet Tubman?
Black authors, in turn, have understandably found the novel to…not be their cup of tea, let’s say. This in public, anyway: behind the scenes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin has had an unusual impact on Black fiction. And though - as Paul Johnson explained in Intellectuals - James Baldwin became known for his disparagement of the novel he did not hold this view in his earlier, less politicized years when he wrote his masterpiece, Go Tell It On The Mountain. While I can’t comment much more beyond this, it is clear that perspectives of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Black authors at least were not simply “omg that’s racist.” It obviously struck a much deeper chord.
In my opinion, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the most remarkable novel in American history. I use the word “remarkable” objectively in the sense that there’s no novel quite like it. At least not in the American tradition. In a country whose literature was designed to celebrate the American experience - and, ideally, do so while adhering to the happy directive - Uncle Tom’s Cabin does the exact opposite (though not at its expense); with a spear not unlike that of the Roman centurion piercing Jesus Christ’s chest on Golgotha, the novel unveils weaknesses other American classics (with the possible exception of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter) either refuse to explore, or only do so in pursuit of ideological agendas. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is unique in that apart from existing in a world of Christian values, it is not ideological. But neither is it pure realism, given that it was written in the Romantic era. To readers today, Uncle Tom’s Cabin occupies a kind of weird spot between romantic epic and real history that entertains as thoroughly as it probes. Its place as one of American literature’s most formidable bestsellers worldwide is not a fluke.
To this day, we Americans do not know how to fully reckon with Uncle Tom’s Cabin because we are not accustomed to handling complications of its sort. It does, however, have counterparts elsewhere in world literature. It is, for instance, the closest novel we have to the Czech popular classic The Good Soldier Svejk. Both are similar in that they are literary and popular. But also in base resemblances between Uncle Tom and Svejk. They are both timeless characters. They are both seemingly immune to the forces of history. And they both provoke comparisons with the national character of their respective countries: to this day, Czechs continue to debate whether Svejk is the true embodiment of the Czech character, a debate that is not always positive. Written in the period when Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris was serialized and also globally popular, there is a similar ethos in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
(The Mysteries of Paris, incidentally, was “progressive” in that it featured a positively depicted Black doctor; another note beyond coincidence was Karl Marx’s deep hatred of the novel for being “unscientific;” a worldview that informs the contemporary hatred of Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
I would argue, however, that contrary to many claims Uncle Tom’s Cabin is not controversial because of slavery. Merely that the inability of Americans to process the novel means that Americans, intellectually inhibited by a lack of experience with such literature, can only make sense of it vis-a-vis the obsession with slavery enabled by raciopaths (those infected with race pathology). Not unlike how Americans can only understand Stanislaw Lem insofar as he happens to be a science fiction author as well as much more.
The dark secret about slavery is that it isn’t controversial to Americans as an historical fact: or, should I say, it’s not controversial enough. A movie like Twelve Years a Slave was not controversial: on the contrary, it was celebrated despite its reported depictions of brutality. Sure, it was celebrated as an artistic feat; at least on the surface. But behind the veneer of explosive celebration was a negative reaction I caught word of by Snoop Dogg that, I felt, represented a lot of Black people’s views of this kind of thing: that watching a Black slave get their ass whooped by Massa all the time isn’t healthy for Black people when movies should be encouraging Black accomplishments and achievement. Point being: Twelve Years a Slave - intentionally or otherwise - became a celebration of slavery by virtue of its uncritical adulation. I know that’s not something some people want to hear. But unless this is pointed out, getting at the heart of why Uncle Tom’s Cabin is controversial is difficult, if not outright impossible.
As noted, the South’s reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was instant rejection and dismissal: without a doubt the most straightforward reaction to the novel. At the time, undoubtedly Southerners didn’t take kindly to its criticism of what was, at the time, a cherished albeit far from simple institution and means of preserving wealth.1 But on the whole, there is little to be found about Stowe’s depiction of the South that is flattering. Even the tolerant slave owner of Uncle Tom who, with a heavy heart, must sell Uncle Tom to pay off debt, comes off as unsavory for that very reason: is his love of Uncle Tom, his slave, sincere if he is also just a vessel of wealth?2 Is that Christian piety we see here? In any case, the novel is not designed to be flattering to the South; meaning that even the most proud yet anti-slavery Southerners can find nothing to cling onto and savor. Except, ironically, a contemporary agreement with Black people that the novel is something to be disliked.
As many a critic of Stowe has pointed out - Marxists in particular - Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a response to the Fugitive Slave Act, which Stowe saw as implicating freedom-loving northerners in the institution of slavery. Stowe has been criticized for being a hypocrite in this respet who only hated slavery because it suddenly became personal. I don’t think such a criticism is necessary since we’re only human. But the timing of the novel has a lot to do with why Uncle Tom’s Cabin has become controversial for “Yankees” as well. Caught up as we are today in hubris, we expect people to do everything right in history irrespective of the conditions of their time. Which is totally unrealistic.
As has been observed time and again (I know John Steinbeck made that observation at one point) there are two types of racism in America: the “asshole-style” that uses nigger a lot and is associated with the South, the Ku Klux Klan and so on; and what, when I was a teenager, was called “maternal racism,” a kind of patronizing attitude that perceives Black people as children who need (Yankee) White saviors to rescue them. This “racism” originated in the North where a lack of Black people allowed Northerners to develop very romantic notions. The former racism therefore comes off as a kind of “realism,” while the latter is a fantastical affair. Perhaps the Southern reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is as much a reaction to its Romantic character from those for whom Black people - for better or for worse - were real as much as its anti-South character.
The “maternal racists” - or the shang mu’s, to use a Chinese term for such people that literally translates into “holy mother” - won the Civil War, as we all know. Because the victors write the history books, the Southern, “asshole” racism became the bad racism while the “maternal racism” became in vogue and was normalized. It helped that while the “asshole racism” was ugly in character and led to violence, the Yankee “maternal racism” was more sinister and easy to portray as an act of love. It didn’t take long before much of America agreed that the only racism out there was “asshole” racism. Its association with the South made it even easier to accept: if American history from 1865 to today can be summarized in one way, it is as an era devoted to eternally punishing the South for having had slaves.
As long as no one suspected that, no one could suspect Uncle Tom’s Cabin of being a testament not only to that perspective’s good intentions but everything that is wrong about that condescending character trait of Yankee America. For much as I confess to liking Uncle Tom as a character - social connotations aside he’s a nice, God-fearing fellow, is he not? - the Yankee response to slavery was to create a protagonist who liked being in slavery and was loyal to Massa. For Americans who (however imperfectly) love freedom, this goes against our grain. But so too is accepting that Yankee racists are as bad - if not sometimes worse - than Southern “asshole racists.” After all, we were heroes right? We won the Civil War. It sullies that victory just as being honest about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact sullies the fairy tale we tell ourselves about WWII where, together with “that Joe Stalin who’s such a good guy,” we vanquished Hitler, and evil with him. Just as being honest about Poland’s Holocaust experience sullies the postwar collective memory of the West by having the audacity to suggest that the “dumb Polaks” sacrificed more to save their Jewish neighbors than any other Western power. (Which is true, by the way)
This, of course, brings up the other controversy: Uncle Tom as a symbol of slaves who accepted slavery as their world and even desired it. One of the most politically incorrect topics any American can talk about, history nonetheless is a witness: as Harriet Tubman once said (I quote roughly), “I freed many slaves, and would have freed many more if only they understood they were slaves.” I think I will take the word of the acclaimed conductress of the Underground Railroad over Woke White virtue signallers any day: sadly, many slaves at the least became accustomed to, and even liked, the slave experience. The emotional relationship of the slave to the plantation was not a simple matter. The fact that Southerners hate a novel that expresses this suggests that perhaps Southerners should be given more of the benefit of the doubt than the unadulterated hatred they’ve received unendingly since 1865.
At least relative to the Yankee shang mu’s who, to this day, continue to express this view. As a Yale study recently showed, Democrats (the current inheritors of the Northern perspective) are much more likely to dumb down their speech when talking to Black people than Republicans. This reflects an inherent view that Black people are stupid and that in order to communicate with them their speech must be dumbed down to their level. Where “asshole racism” is ameliorated incrementally by its straightforward honesty, Yankee “maternal racism” is expressed by people who believe they’re fighting racism. For this reason, you’ll never find those who claim to hate racism ever reject their antebellum inheritance. It is also for this reason that we’ll probably continue to be bombarded with “racism exists everywhere all the time” arguments; while they think they’re talking about “asshole racism” expressed ostensibly by conservatives, they are in fact describing themselves.
For Black people, the controversy is Uncle Tom himself. Here, comparisons with Svejk become especially pertinent: how much does Uncle Tom attest to the Black character in relation to that most formative historical event, namely slavery? And what does that say about Black people and their relations to White people? Is this how they must be in order to be liked and appreciated? While I won’t insist on knowing the answers to these questions, the questions themselves are universal to everyone who has a conscious identity.
While I’m sure all the Stowe biographers have ascertained this factoid ages ago, it is always curious to wonder: why Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a title? The novel, after all, is not set at his actual cabin for all that long.
Those parts of the book that are set at his cabin are some of the homeliest depictions of life to be found in American literature, though many affected by the controversy would no doubt deny it because of the association of a Black “uncle” with homeliness. However much of a fluke the novel is in the American literary tradition, Stowe knew what she was doing as an author. She understood that much of the best literature comes in the form of a journey. J.R.R. Tolkien might have popularized the phrase “there and back again” in a literary context, but he was by no means the first author to understand its function in storytelling. The title’s professed ambition is to bring Uncle Tom home. So that a slave - especially a God-fearing, kind and, frankly, human slave like Uncle Tom - can share in the comforts of the good life as we do.
The other thorny part involving his cabin has to do with the happy directive. Stowe keeps it in balance, but it’s never truly lost; in fact, every character - including Uncle Tom - pursues the happy directive. For Uncle Tom, he has God which makes his condition as a slave uncontroversial to him. But the slave catchers also pursue the happy directive: they relish the capturing of slaves. For Eliza, it is reaching Canada. And for the north, it is adhering to the Fugitive Slave Act.
The subtitle of the book is Life Among The Lowly. Explicitly it is a reference to Uncle Tom’s piety among those who have forsaken their humanity - especially by forgoing Christian values - by keeping the institution of slavery alive. But understanding as we do the specific nature of Stowe’s outrage at the Fugitive Slave Act as well as the secondary story of Eliza fleeing the South to go North to Canada, the lowly are not only those in the South. At the time abolitionists would have welcomed this self-criticism of the North, especially as the criticism comes off as secondary to those who abduct Uncle Tom. But at a time like now when the achievements of the abolitionists are downplayed so as to criticize the North for the perceived crime of tolerating the South’s existence for longer than a day, Uncle Tom’s Cabin becomes awkward. It reminds the North that it was not on the right side of history. Something that ruffles the feathers of every Yankee pearl clutcher.
I could go on. But I will end on this note: as long as the race pathology Americans embrace with the entirety of their hearts ensures that slavery remains a controversial issue, Uncle Tom’s Cabin will remain the most controversial American novel in history. But much as it might offend some to say so, it will remain controversial for the right reasons. Nationally, we Americans are cowards for not having done more to rise to its heights and sink to its depths. But of course I understand why we haven’t.
The Miller Controversy
As is known, Henry Miller published Tropic of Cancer in 1934. Though not a simplistic work, the nature of its controversy is simpler to summarize. Miller, one of America’s foremost individualists, took American individualism to its logical conclusion more effectively than any other author.
But like slavery in Stowe’s case, this is NOT why Miller is controversial, though the attack on individuality today might change that. That, in fact, is why Miller is admirable.
Miller is controversial because he does what the Anglosphere generally finds difficult, if not impossible, to do (including Americans): Miller frees himself completely from pretense. And in Paris, of all cities; that powerful symbol of well-mannered, proprietary Europe.
While I only share the present-day revival of Henry Miller adoration to a certain degree - perhaps I should have read him ten years ago, instead of two years ago - this lack of pretense is one of the most important things to ever happen not just in American literature, but Anglosphere literature in general. It had a formative impact on George Orwell, who in the 1930s struggled to find his place in both proper Britain in general and among leftist circles. (Orwell overwhelmingly criticized leftists and rarely criticized conservatives or the right) Orwell corresponded for a time with Miller, who advised him to avoid British equivalents of the inclinations Miller rejected. This, no doubt, had an impact: not only did Orwell rediscover his patriotism, traditionalism and love of country during the war. Both Animal Farm and 1984 are British novels that also lack a lot of pretense. For all our need of pretense, this continues to make these novels immensely accessible to the very people who would otherwise criticize someone like Miller.
As is known, Tropic of Cancer was banned following its 1934 publication. The last great literary battle of the 20th century - even later than the obscenity trial of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl - was Grove Press’ challenging of the ban in a trial that led to its “acquittal” in 1964. But Tropic of Cancer was more than just a forbidden fruit in the eyes of the authorities, who were more than content with wielding what I call the “weapon of mass destruction” - the legal system - both domestically and internationally against those involved in smuggling copies into the US. This included bookseller Jacob Brussel, who got a three-year prison sentence for selling illegal copies.
It is a curious thing that James Joyce’s Ulysses gets all the banned book attention. To be sure, Joyce did not have an easy time dealing with the banning of Ulysses in both Britain and the US. But in the mid-1930s, the bans were overcome in both Britain and the US; only Ireland, which technically did not ban the book but found a different way to prevent it from entering the country, remained at odds with Ulysses all the way into the 1970s.
Not so with Tropic of Cancer. It - along with Black Spring, Tropic of Capricorn, the Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy comprised of Sexus, Plexus and Nexus and pretty much everything else he’d written - were consciously and vigilantly banned for a much longer period of time. With respect to Joyce, Ulysses - though also genuinely controversial - was popular society’s “safe” banned book. Not only was it banned in the US and unavailable in Britain; it was also banned in Canada until the 1960s, Australia until the 1970s and Finland, outside the Anglosphere, until the 1960s.
Putting aside the curious exception of Finland, it wasn’t just the US that rejected Tropic of Cancer’s dropping of pretense. It was the entire Anglosphere. While I can’t speak for Britain and the Commonwealth, American literature has not had a novel this controversial since that time.
Conclusion
As far as literature is concerned, we are currently living in one of the least controversial times in history. This is because literature has become one of the least controversial expressions of culture due to the environment of political correctness, its “tenancy” in the halls of Woke academia and the transformation of the writer from artist to creative writing program automaton in an office job suit. The desire to be controversial remains because the history of literature - and, indeed, the arts in general - has been framed in such a way that artistic sublimity and originality is synonymous with controversy and - to use that ever so cliche and cringy phrase - “breaking down barriers.” There is some truth to this. But it is not the entire truth. Not every literary masterpiece was crazily controversial. Not even those associated with controversy are great because of the controversy. The “controversy-makes-sublimity” argument is nothing more than a shallow, popular projection upon the history of literature.
If we remove foreign authors like the British and the Irish for a moment, a lot of controversy in American literature is connected in some way or another to these two authors. No work of fiction with race as its theme escapes Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Similarly, no work of sexual vulgarity escapes Tropic of Cancer’s latitudinal shadow. These authors are, however, reaching the wrong lessons from these novels; at least as far as the nature of controversy is concerned. Sexual references and vulgarity are low-common-denominator controversies. They are not controversial deep down because deep down, they are simply not controversial. They are surface-level and empty as literary devices when not done right; “obscenity” back then was as much a matter of objective literary taste as it was a moral issue. Even today, 50 Shades of Grey is more of an offense to the literary community than a controversy. Miller’s novel is sexual and subversive not because of the sex: but because of the honesty with which he expresses his sexual appetites as well as the interrelation of these with the greater story and its manifestation as a work of art. A vision he shared with his earlier British counterpart, D.H. Lawrence.
Miller, for this reason, will most probably go down in history as a one-off author. Which isn’t an insult; rather, a compliment to his originality. Kind of like how Hemingway imitators just can’t figure out the real thing, those who imitate Miller and sex don’t appear to understand that the sex itself is only one ingredient in a greater chemistry of individual artistry. Maybe AI could replicate it. But a human being will most probably not succeed. Not only are these “traditional” expressions of controversy becoming tired and overused; they were never truly controversial to begin with. The same with all the protest literature that credits Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an early inspiration. Protests aren’t controversial anymore unless they violate a certain present-day taboo, like calling for the death of the Jews. Almost everything most Americans think of as controversial nowadays are not; at most we are breathing the fumes of disheveled proprietariness, nothing more.
With two exceptions: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Tropic of Cancer. It is only by aspiring to these novelists’ deep yet heady heights that literature stands a chance of ever becoming meaningful to people again. By engaging with the deepest depths of the human soul as it once did long ago, in a galaxy far far away.
For that is what is truly controversial about literature.
As Bhu Srinivasan explains in his excellent book Americana, slaves had so much value and were so numerous the Federal Government couldn’t have bought every slave their freedom as Britain did unless it had the ability to spend more than twice its annual GDP.
Stowe proved that Christians don’t require Marxism or Das Kapital to understand the relationship between commodities and market value.