The indifferent are not enemies of literature. They don’t value
literature highly enough to do violence to it. The true enemy of
literature is passionate about literature; he or she works with and
within literature and uses literature as a weapon in some
extraliterary quarrel. The literary polemicist seeks to subordinate
literature to a Cause and slashes or treasures literary works based on
how well they serve that Cause. The Cause is frequently Marxism,
feminism, or “post-colonial” rancor. In the case of Christopher
Hitchens, the Cause was atheism.
In God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Hitchens
described literature’s role in his new brotherhood of the unbelievers.
We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books. Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and—since there is no other metaphor—also the soul.
Of course: the novelists and playwrights with their casts of
characters, their sweeping stories of real men and real women. A rich,
this-worldly frame of reference that offers a more nuanced view of
human behavior than Commandment-style imperatives.
Look more closely at that list. Notice how there is no name before the
19th century except Shakespeare. Notice, also, the Russians. Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky—enlisted as secular scriptures, in opposition to the
Bible? It took a grave lack of insight to enlist these two
Christianity-obsessed writers in the Cause. Had Hitchens not read any
of Tolstoy’s letters, any of Dostoevsky’s journals? This was the same
Dostoevsky who stood hours in front of Holbein’s Dead Christ in the
Tomb. And the same Tolstoy who, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina,
underwent a period of despair that ended only with his emergence as
the late, intensely Christian Tolstoy. (The story of Tolstoy’s despair
and conversion is, if anything, a kind of parable about the emptiness
of a purely worldly focus.) It doesn’t take much of a leap to guess
what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky themselves would have thought of their
novels’ being used as a substitute for scriptural authority.
But authorial intent isn’t even the issue. Hitchens’s uncompromising
world-view obligated him to engage in the most superficial possible
reading of these writers. A purely “humanist” reading of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky utterly diminishes their oeuvres. For these immense Russian
novelists, Hitchens the polemicist had a use. It resembled the use the
fanatical early Christians had for Virgil, whom they scoured for hints
of Messianic prophecy. Medieval Europe revered Virgil for his Fourth
Eclogue, written in honor of a male child’s birth.
It isn’t just the Russians. Schiller’s most famous poem, the text for
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” calls Joy a “beautiful spark of the Gods, /
Daughter of Elysium.” More claptrap from those mythical morality tales
spread by lying Greeks. Speaking of the Greeks, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
aren’t the only ones who must be diminished when literature is forced
into the role of atheist scripture. Other writers must be dumped
entirely, their erroneous world-views showing too clearly on the
surface. Later in Hitchens’s polemic, Dante’s portrayal of Mohammed in
hell comes in for a disgusted reference—the whole Commedia diminished
to an example of monotheistic intolerance. The works of Sophocles and
Homer feature starring roles for the supernatural. If religion is a
poison, John Milton was the sinister apothecary of English literature.
What place does Milton have in the new canon? A smaller one than
George Eliot, certainly, who was wise enough to stick to a mill on the
floss. Greek myth and Biblical scripture are crucial to our
understanding of modernists like Joyce and T. S. Eliot as well. It is
not enough to recognize the names, symbols, and mythological
references, which Hitchens certainly would have. One must believe—as
these writers themselves believed—that, independent of their
factuality, these “mythological morality tales” possess beauty and—say
it—truth.
In the days since his passing, political thinkers have pointed out
Hitchens’s brutality as a political thinker; religious thinkers have
pointed out Hitchens’s lack of subtlety as a religious thinker. Let me
complete the triad by pointing out his treason against literature. As
soon as we broaden our gaze beyond his cherished Larkin, back into the
benighted past, the limitations of Hitchens the man of letters become
obvious. Some of his literary friends have called him a “literary
critic,” but he was, at his best, little more than a book-reviewer. At
his worst, when he was writing as Hitchens the polemicist, he
destroyed more than he preserved—and preserved what he preserved by
diminishing it. This is the downside to cluster-bombing all myths and
all scriptures: The collateral damage, which is all of literature.
Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist and an award-winning poet whose work has been featured in The Best American Poetry 2007, The New Yorker, The Kenyon Review, and Poetry magazine. His first poetry collection, 0°, 0°, was published by Northwestern University Press in 2009, and a novella, Azazel, was serialized in The Kenyon Review. Partitions, a novel about the India/Pakistan border, came out in 2011 from Metropolitan Books. A second book of poems, Heaven and Earth, was published by Story Line Press in 2011.