711 How Does Literature Handle Atrocities? (with Bruce Robbins) | My Last Book with Hemingway Expert Alex Vernon | Who Will Come to Jacke and Emma's Party?

Summary

Episode Summary: "How Does Literature Handle Atrocities?" (Episode 711) with Bruce Robbins

Release Date: June 26, 2025 | Host: Jacke Wilson | Guest: Bruce Robbins | Duration: Approximately 70 minutes

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Introduction

In Episode 711 of "The History of Literature", host Jacke Wilson engages in a profound discussion with Bruce Robbins, a humanities professor at Columbia University and author of "A Literary History". The episode delves into the intricate ways literature grapples with the theme of atrocities, exploring both the societal impacts of mass violence and the nuanced portrayals by various authors.

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Defining Atrocities in Literature

Bruce Robbins begins by establishing a working definition of "atrocity" within the literary context:

Bruce Robbins [18:23]: "Generally, what I mean is mass violence against non-combatants... it's kind of the paradigmatic atrocity for me."

He clarifies that his focus is on large-scale, systemic acts of violence rather than individual instances, highlighting the cruelty inflicted upon innocent civilians during conflicts.

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Genesis of Bruce Robbins' Interest

Robbins traces his interest in atrocities back to his experiences growing up during the Vietnam War era. The publication of Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" served as a pivotal moment for him:

Bruce Robbins [20:19]: "Slaughterhouse Five... it took the lessons of the Vietnam era, that we have done some really bad things... we did this."

The novel, which portrays the devastating bombing of Dresden, resonated deeply with Robbins, especially given his father's involvement as a bomber pilot in World War II. This personal connection fueled his desire to explore how literature addresses such dark aspects of human history.

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Influential Encounters: Meeting Alexander Kluge

A significant turning point in Robbins' exploration was his meeting with Alexander Kluge, a German philosopher and writer who survived the air raid on Halberstadt in 1945. Robbins recounts the coincidental alignment of their experiences:

Bruce Robbins [23:31]: "Alexander Kluge was doing a book tour... I ended up talking to him in his hotel... he was very, very kind and gentle."

Kluge's reflections on his traumatic past and his efforts to contextualize personal suffering within a broader historical framework inspired Robbins to pursue a deeper literary history, incorporating perspectives from ancient histories to modern narratives.

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Literature's Role in Addressing Atrocities

The conversation shifts to the unique capabilities of literature in handling themes of mass violence and atrocity. Robbins posits that literature offers a platform for:

1. Empathy and Moral Complexity: Unlike factual accounts, literature can embody the multifaceted emotions and ethical dilemmas surrounding atrocities.
2. Ambiguity and Reflection: Fictional narratives allow for the exploration of ambiguous motives and the blurring of lines between perpetrators and victims.

Robbins emphasizes the importance of literary works in fostering a deeper understanding of the human condition amidst horrific events.

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Literary Examples of Atrocities

Robbins cites several literary works that exemplify the handling of atrocities:

1. "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut: Depicts the bombing of Dresden through the lens of a war veteran, blending personal trauma with historical events.

   Bruce Robbins [22:33]: "Slaughterhouse Five... it takes the lessons of the Vietnam era, that we have done some really bad things."

2. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel García Márquez: Features the massacre of banana plantation workers, showcasing the blend of magical realism with political violence.

   Bruce Robbins [32:56]: "Garcia Marquez... has one of the great atrocity descriptions in all of literature."

3. "2666" by Roberto Bolaño: Explores the femicides in Ciudad Juarez, subverting traditional mystery novel tropes to emphasize the relentless nature of violence.

   Bruce Robbins [34:20]: "Roberto Bolaño's '2666'... you're not allowed to do this. You're supposed to be giving me some satisfaction here."

4. "The Embassy of Cambodia" by Zadie Smith: Uses humor to contrast with the gravity of historical atrocities, highlighting the human tendency to compartmentalize immense suffering.

   Bruce Robbins [48:17]: "Zadie Smith... a very funny story, which includes... killings... but it's a very funny story."

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Tone and Approach in Handling Atrocities

One of the standout points in the discussion is the varied tones authors adopt when depicting atrocities. Contrary to the expectation of pervasive gloom, Robbins observes that literature often incorporates humor and subtlety to convey the complexity of human responses to violence:

Bruce Robbins [47:04]: "Some of my favorite texts are kind of funny... it's grimmest of humor, you could say."

This blend of grim reality with moments of levity or irony serves to humanize characters and prevent literature from becoming a monolith of despair.

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Personal Reflections: Writing "A Literary History"

Robbins shares his personal journey in writing "A Literary History", expressing both inspiration and challenges:

1. Inspirational Outcomes:

   • Expanded Understanding: Engaging deeply with various texts enriched his comprehension of literature's role in societal healing and reflection.

     Bruce Robbins [59:43]: "I hope people will be inspired to do, including... Josephus... is an astonishing piece of writing."

2. Challenges and Regrets:

   • Feeling of Insufficiency: Despite the extensive research, Robbins felt he couldn't fully address the myriad atrocities or offer comprehensive guidance on their interpretation.

     Bruce Robbins [58:13]: "It left me feeling very dissatisfied with myself... there was so much more to say about that."

   • Embracing Ambiguity: While striving for depth, Robbins grappled with the inherent ambiguity in literary portrayals, recognizing that clear-cut resolutions are often elusive.

     Bruce Robbins [63:37]: "I'm very attracted to gray areas and bringing out gray where other people see black and white."

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Conclusion: Literature as a Reflection of Human Complexity

The episode culminates in an affirmation of literature's indispensable role in reflecting and processing the complexities of human atrocities. Through diverse narratives and tonal approaches, literature not only chronicles historical events but also invites readers to engage with the moral and emotional intricacies they entail.

Bruce Robbins' insights underscore the power of literary works to offer empathy, provoke reflection, and challenge simplistic dichotomies, thereby fostering a more nuanced understanding of humanity's darkest moments.

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Final Thoughts

Episode 711 of "The History of Literature" serves as a compelling exploration of how literature navigates the harrowing landscape of atrocities. Through Bruce Robbins' expertise and personal reflections, listeners gain a deeper appreciation for the complex intersection between narrative art and historical trauma.

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Notable Quotes:

• Bruce Robbins [18:23]: "Generally, what I mean is mass violence against non-combatants... it's kind of the paradigmatic atrocity for me."

• Bruce Robbins [20:19]: "Slaughterhouse Five... it took the lessons of the Vietnam era, that we have done some really bad things... we did this."

• Bruce Robbins [32:56]: "Garcia Marquez... has one of the great atrocity descriptions in all of literature."

• Bruce Robbins [47:04]: "Some of my favorite texts are kind of funny... it's grimmest of humor, you could say."

• Bruce Robbins [58:13]: "It left me feeling very dissatisfied with myself... there was so much more to say about that."

• Bruce Robbins [63:37]: "I'm very attracted to gray areas and bringing out gray where other people see black and white."

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For more insights and discussions, visit historyofliterature.com or follow the podcast on Facebook at facebook.com/historyofliterature. Support the show through patreon.com/literature or historyofliterature.com/donate. For inquiries, contact [e-mail].

Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hey there, travelers. Kaley Cuoco here. Sorry to interrupt your music great artist, BT Dubs, but wouldn't you rather be there to hear it live? With Priceline, you can get out of your dreams and into your dream concert. They've got millions of travel deals to get you to that festival, gig, rave, sound bath or sonic experience you've been dreaming of. Download the Priceline app today and you can save up to 60% off hotels, up to 50% off flights. So don't just dream about that trip. Book it with Priceline. Go to your happy price, Priceline. Hey, business owners, we know you know the importance of maximizing every dollar. With the Delta Sky Miles Reserve Business American Express card, you can make your expenses work just as hard as you. From afternoon coffee runs to stocking office supplies and even team dinners, you can earn miles on all your business expenses. Plus, you can earn 110,000 bonus miles for a limited time through July 16th. The Delta SkyMiles Reserve Business Card if you, you know, minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Offer in 7, 16, 25. Hello. Today on the podcast, we look at atrocities. Mass violence is one of the horrific aspects of humanity and history. What happens when a society realizes it has gone too far, when it has been horrible or evil? How do writers grapple with this topic? How do they write about it? And what do they say? What can literature do to assuage guilt, manage pain, rectify wrongs? And what is it like for an author to study atrocities and their literary treatment and then to write a book about them? We'll ask Bruce Robbins, plus we ask an expert in Hemingway to tell us his choice for the last book he will ever read. That's coming up today on the history of literature. Hello, everyone. I'm Jack Wilson, host of the show. I'm very glad you're here today. Who will come to my party? Was that line actually in literature? My wife and I have been saying that for years to each other, and I feel like we're quoting something like we also say, do I dare to eat a peach? Whenever we have peaches, it's Pavlovian with us at this point. If someone says, do you want peaches? Or hey, I bought peaches, or oh, you know what? I think there are still some peaches in the fridge. The other one in this married couple, this partnership I'm in, the other one will respond every single time. Do I dare to eat a peach? Well, I know where we got that one. You probably do, too. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. eliot. That's a direct quote. Do I dare to eat a peach? I've probably said that a thousand times in real life. A little strange around our house sometimes. Who will come to my party? We've been saying that one, too. 30. 30 years. 30 plus years. And I've been thinking that we're quoting Mrs. Dalloway, of course. The great party giver. Maybe the greatest party giver in all of literature. Although there's some characters in Proust. Probably give her a run for her money. Anyway, this is how it goes around our house. We'll say, oh, let's see if Rob and Laura can come over on Saturday night. And the other one will say, who? Who will come to our party? Is that line actually in Mrs. Dalloway? I've never confirmed it. I'm a little afraid. But guess what? I'm going to do it now. I'm going to pause recording and I'm going to look it up. Did we invent this line? It was Mrs. Dalloway, wasn't it? I've been imagining myself as a British woman saying this thing for 30 years. Who will come to my party? I hope it was. I hope it was Mrs. Dalloway. That would give it a nice pedigree if it came out of Virginia Woolf. Let me check. Wait right here. Okay, I'm back through the miracle of a pause button. I just did 20 minutes of research and no, the phrase who will come to my party? Does not appear in Mrs. Dalloway. Emma and I must have just come up with it. But it was definitely inspired by that book. My goodness. Clarissa Dalloway cares more about parties than anyone ever has, living or dead. It has to be so. You could make that the alternative title, Mrs. Dalloway or who will come to her freaking party? 58 times she mentions the word party. That's not even counting the plural form parties, which is there another 32 times. The party. 90 times in fewer than 300 pages. The party. The party. Remember the party. Why should I ask the dull women of London to my parties? What's the sense of your parties? These are all sentences from the book. I never go to parties. Clarissa's party. Why does she give them? That's how that book goes. So and so was terrified of parties and so on. Toward the end, it turns a little darker. Oh, thought Clarissa in the middle of my party. Here's death. The party is the central motif. I remembered that much about Mrs. Dalloway, of course. We're going to have a whole episode on Mrs. Dalloway coming up soon. We have an expert who's going to be joining us to tell us all about that novel and its history. Did I say we're going to have an episode? Maybe I should have said we're going to have a party. We'll be having a whole party devoted to Virginia Woolf and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, coming up soon. And you'll all be invited. Do I dare to eat a peach? And who will come to my party? Marriage is a funny thing. Speaking of parties. And who will come to them? We're going to have a traveling party, a magical mystery tour of sorts, and you can join us. We're taking our first party, our roadshow to England, the land of Dickens and Shakespeare and Jane Austen and so many other wonderful authors, where we will be visiting sites and having good literary conversations and traveling together and enjoying one another's company. What could be better? Emma and I will both be there on the trip to welcome our merry band of literary travelers, the pilgrims like you, who are partnering up with the travel agency and the tentative plans are to launch the itinerary and the sign up at the start of July. More details in the show notes and here on the podcast soon. Act quickly because there will be a limited number of spots, unfortunately, but that's how it's got to be. And if you want to just email me now to say, hey, I'm interested or I'd like to learn more or to ask questions about the plan, you can contact us@jack wilsonauthor mail.com that's J E C K E wilsonauthormail.com or by going to historyofliterature.com and contacting us there through our Contact Us link. If you're listening to this in July or later 2025, this trip is May 2026, by the way, next spring. But if you're listening to this episode later than June, we might already have news of the tour for you to look at, an itinerary with details and so on. You can learn all about the mechanics and the logistics. This is just a preview and much more information will follow. We really are looking forward to this and we hope it works out. We've got some past guests of the podcast who are planning to join us at stops along the way for some literary themed events. And of course we'll be going to some of the great author homes and other things to be inspired and to learn a little bit more about These great writers and to have some time with some meals and some other kinds of breaks where we can discuss everything. Who will come to our party? You hopefully, or one of your loved ones. That book loving relative of yours who could use a trip like this, nudge them our way. Maybe a harmless nudge, as Dr. Johnson might say. That's a pretty deep cut, harmless drudge if you know you're Dr. Johnson. That's a bonus track from Dr. Johnson. Okay, getting more serious now, because our topic today is fairly serious, I get presented with a lot of possible topics for the show. Sometimes they are so squarely on point for this podcast that it's a no brainer. A biography of Emile Zola. Yes, of course. A book on the friendship between Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes. Automatic. Yes. A new translation of Baudelaire. Come on in. A biography of Sylvia Plath. You don't even need to ring the bell. The door is unlocked. These are all the people on my list of authors to cover anyway. And now I get to talk to someone who spent time in the archives or reading all the letters or thinking about this person's life and works. I can learn from my guest who spent years reading about this area of literature that I would like to know more about. Samantha Rose Hill joined us to tell me more in 30 minutes about Hannah Arendt. And Samantha is such a good explainer. What a great guest she was. Hannah Arendt is not easy. Her output is vast. I knew a little. I wanted to know more. It's hard to know where exactly to begin. So yes, please, Samantha, join me for the conversation. I'd love to have you. That was a no brainer. And then there are topics that come my way that I have not considered before. Those are a little harder to respond to because I have to give them a bit of thought. Is that something that interests me? Is it something that I think might interest you? If I have an episode called Dostoyevsky, there isn't a single person in the world who would say Dostoevsky. Why are you talking about that topic? On the history of literature or Proust? What? On the history of literature? No, that doesn't happen. Nobody feels cheated or misinformed if they come to the History of Literature podcast and see an episode title like Leo Tolstoy doesn't happen. But if the topic is something like the Sex Life of Pirates, I might think, hmm. Much as that title is intriguing, is there enough of a hook there for literature? Is it too obscure, too disconnected? Sometimes I. Sometimes I go ahead and say, well, why not? We'll find out if there's a tie to literature or not. We'll cross our fingers and hope for the best. Because I do think that there are enough literature adjacent topics that it's fun to expand. If every single episode was about a single author that everyone's already heard of and read, well, we'd miss something. We'd miss those topics that cover an era or a movement or a range of topics. I did an episode once on the sonnet, just the sonnet form, looking at those across the ages, across the countries. That was interesting. Which brings me to the topic today. I don't think I've ever thought about atrocities in literature. Atrocities in general? Yes. Atrocities as they're covered by journalists or nonfiction authors? Probably yes, there as well. Atrocities on. As part of television documentaries. Yes, I read about them and feel the pain, feel the shock of what humans can do to another, can do to other humans. But atrocities as a category and then covered by. As they're dealt with by creative thinkers and writers, that had not occurred to me. Well, it occurred to our guest today, Bruce Robbins. And so my first thought was atrocities, huh? And then I learned more about his project and I thought, this does sound fascinating. And I don't have time to go out and read 30 or 50 or 100 books that deal with atrocities just so I can see what's in all of them. But I can read one book where Bruce has done that work for me. Because there are two things about Bruce's project that really interest me. One question is how a society deals with horrible things in its past. It's one thing if it's. You're writing about horrible things that are done to you and your people, I can see the link there a little more clearly because literature steps in to deal with that kind of pain. But when your friends and neighbors, and maybe you yourself, have participated in one of history's horrific events from the side of inflicting pain on others, another nation, another group, another set of individuals, what happens then? How do you reckon with that part of your past or your shared history or your legacy? Can you be honest about what happened? That's the first angle that interests me. It's so very human, such a very human thing to live in denial or doubt or. Or just to try to ignore what's happening or minimize it? What if you accept the truth, acknowledge it, and try to wrestle with it? And then the second angle, how well does literature do at that? Maybe it's not the place for fiction or poetry. Maybe you need cold, hard facts, cross examination, an inquest, straight reporting, an accumulation of objective and verifiable facts. My hope is that literature can come through. I believe in literature. I believe it can live on that knife edge of ambiguity, of mixed motives, of good people doing bad things or bad people being blameless victims, of grappling with questions of evil and banality. But. But I don't know, because the other sometimes maybe events don't need that ambiguity. Maybe the ambiguity waters down, the atrocity gets in the way. But then why need fiction? Why what? What good is fiction if it's not going to give you that, that thing that literature does so well? So I'm fascinated by this topic and I'd love to know, has literature actually come through and dealt with atrocities in a way that we think is meaningful? And if so, how? How have people done it? Those are the some of the questions we're going to ask of our guest, Bruce Robbins, after this. This message comes from Greenlight Ready to start talking to your kids about financial literacy? 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[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

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[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

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[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

I see you're on ikea.com ordering some college items.

[Bruce Robbins]

My daughter's room is pretty bare.

[Jack Wilson]

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[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

Wait, where are you going now?

[Bruce Robbins]

Got to show the ultimate Frisbee team.

[Jack Wilson]

How easy it is to order from ikea. Get Ikea whenever, wherever, however you want. Choose from thousands of pickup locations, affordable delivery options, and more. Okay. Joining me now is Bruce Robbins, who is a professor in the humanities at Columbia University. He's also the author of several books, including Criticism and Politics, A Polemical Introduction. He's here today to discuss his new book, A Literary History. Bruce Robbins, welcome to the History of Literature.

[Bruce Robbins]

Thank you so much for having me. And for doing something on the history of literature which people don't pay enough attention to.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh, I agree. So thank you for that. So let's start with the definition. What exactly do you mean when you say atrocity?

[Bruce Robbins]

Well, I'm not super, super precise in my sense of the definition here. Generally, what I mean is mass violence against non combatants. So that what that excludes, and it's controversial, is soldiers killing soldiers, simply because there's been an awful lot of that in history. And personally, I disapprove. I think there should be a lot less of it. But you could say that at least soldiers have a chance to defend themselves and they are in the business of killing other people, whereas non combatants. And one of my texts involves a 17th century German farmyard where troopers from the Thirty Years War just kind of march in and kill everybody in order to get all the stuff. They say an army marches on its stomach. Well, this is what it looks like for an army to be marching on its stomach back in the day of the Thirty Years War. So killing a family that in order to take their farm so that the army can eat, that's kind of the paradigmatic atrocity for me, I guess.

[Jack Wilson]

Mm. I'm interested. That mass is part of it. So this would exclude kind of an individual example of torture, for example.

[Bruce Robbins]

Yeah, yeah. You're making me feel a little uneasy about it. But yes, individual acts of violence don't get included.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, so what sparked your interest in this? Was there a particular text or author that first put this seedling in your mind?

[Bruce Robbins]

Well, I think there was a kind of historical urge in that direction. I'm of the Vietnam War generation, though. I grew up on stories of, especially the suppression of stories and then those stories coming out anyway of atrocities committed by the American troops in Vietnam.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Bruce Robbins]

And more generally, you know, things that were being perpetrated around the world by military dictatorships that were supported by the U.S. so this, as a kid, you don't have a very. I mean, I didn't have a very well developed idea of politics at that point. It just didn't seem right. And it seemed particularly awful that we were to blame for it. So I became kind of interested in the question of people sort of being able to recognize that their side was doing terrible things that I assumed, and I think correctly, that it's a lot easier to point the finger at people who are doing terrible things to you than it is to point the finger at terrible things that you're doing because you, after all, you're on that side and you think it should win and so on and so forth. So there was a certain amount of that if I had to point at a certain book. The book for my generation, for a lot of people, was Slaughterhouse Five, the Vonnegut novel, which was about the bombing, the Allied bombing of Dread Dresden and the firestorm, which amazingly Vonnegut actually sort of got to experience because he was an Allied prisoner of war. He had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge and survived only because he was put below ground in this, the slaughterhouse. And the bomb started falling. Then he came out and then Dresden was kind of gone. Yeah. And he had to say to himself, we did this, you know, and look at all the people around me, you know, they're not soldiers. So that book was very popular. I think it was taken and probably properly so as a Vietnam era book. It wasn't just about World War II, but in a way you could say it took the lessons of the Vietnam era, that we have done some really bad things. They're not just bad things that have been done to us and applied it to World War II, where none of us, I think, were used to thinking of it. I mean, maybe about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but otherwise, you know, fighting Nazism was, I don't know, clearly being on the side of the angels.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Bruce Robbins]

So, yeah, that book and that period like that came out in 1969, middle of the Vietnam War. It really seemed to mark a spot for me. I. I don't want to preempt a question that you may maybe moving to, but since my father was a bomber pilot during World War II and was actually on his list of missions, one of the cities mentioned was Dresden. It turned out not to be that raid on Dresden, not the firebombing, but that was something, you know, very up close and personal that as I grew up, I found myself thinking more about. So it made it something more than just an academic question.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And maybe here you could tell us about your meeting with Alexander. I'm not sure how to pronounce his last name. Is it Kluge?

[Bruce Robbins]

Kluge?

[Jack Wilson]

Kluge. Kluge.

[Bruce Robbins]

I mean, not that my German is so great, but, yeah, I think it's Kluge. Yeah, I tell the story in the book. I was preparing to teach a seminar on world literature, and a friend had told me that there was this really good book by this German guy, and it was called Air Raid. So I got it and I started to read on the living room gouge, where I tend to do a lot of my reading and napping. And I open it up and on the COVID it's Air Raid, but inside there's a fuller title, and it says, the Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945. And very weirdly, some kind of bell goes off in me. Halberstadt, 8 April 1945. Why does that not just sound like a random series of information? And I go into my office where I have my father's list of missions on the Wall, and there it is. Halberstadt, 8 April 1945. So when Alexander Kluge, the philosopher, to be 13 years old, was trying with his family to survive having his his city obliterated by B17s, my dad, as squadron commander, was flying over and dropping the bombs. That was just weird and left me completely inarticulate. I did not know how to feel about this. And I suppose the book comes out of the very complicated feelings that I felt that day. Anyway, by coincidence, it turned out that Alexander Kluge was doing a book tour not too long after that in New York. He was doing an event one night with Ben Lerner, the young American writer. And I emailed back when I got this announcement, and I said, could you give me his email? My father bombed him. And they wrote back and they said, no, we can't give out his email, but we can send your email to him. And one thing led to another, and I ended up talking to him in his hotel. And there was something philosophically interesting about. He was very, very kind and gentle and smiling and, I mean, I think this is probably the single most important, most most formative event in his life that's been said about him. Yeah, that being bombed when he was 13 was a lot. A lot came out of that. But as I understand it, like a lot of Germans of his generation, he was thinking, I can't just blame the people who dropped the bombs, because look what Germany has been doing and was doing before this. And that led him to think back through literary history and just history to the whole history of terrible things that people have been doing to each other for a long time. And Trying to insert what he went through that day into a much larger history. For him, it was, what he mentioned to me is pogroms in Czechoslovakia and 18th century against the Jews. And you know, maybe that was an indirect way of saying, you know, that's one of the things that we Germans did anyway. And I was, I was taken both by his, his tone, the kind of distance from his own suffering and the, the death of his neighbors that he was taking, and also the need that he felt to go very, very far back in history and tell a big story. I mean, I felt he was going back at least as far as the Crusades and that somehow, you know, you would actually have to think about the Crusades if, you know, you were going to know what to make of that day when the B17s came over Halberstadt and demolished it.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Bruce Robbins]

And that helped me figure out that there was a project for me to educate myself in a deep literary history that I had not been trained in. A lot of things that I had never, never read, certainly never been, never talked about in a classroom like Thucydides in ancient Greece or Josephus or the historians of the Crusades, all sorts of stuff that, you know, I like. I read Charles Dickens. I was a kind of 19th century person when I was in school, in college. And there was so much of literary history that I suddenly felt I needed to know that Alexander Kluge was telling me I needed to know. And I decided to try to find out about it and ask some questions that would help me make sense of the terrible things that were much more recent.

[Jack Wilson]

And Kluge had developed the view, I think it can be summarized or the way you kind of summarized it that made sense to me was that factory workers aren't responsible for the decisions of what to make in the factory. That, that people like your father weren't any more responsible, just as he as a 13 year old boy wasn't necessarily responsible for what Germany had done. But this was part of kind of a larger geopolitical or that it's the leaders of the country that bear the responsibility for this. Did you find that satisfying? Do you subscribe to that as well?

[Bruce Robbins]

I was very struck by it for sure. He said, you know, the people who flew those planes didn't have any more control over where they dropped the bombs and on whom they dropped the bombs than workers in a factory have control over what they produce. Yeah. So yes, that really struck me. Of course, 13 year old has had nothing to do with, with Hitler. Right. I mean, just too Young, you can worry a little bit that idea, because after all, who elects the leaders?

[Jack Wilson]

Right?

[Bruce Robbins]

And I do worry it, and I can't say that, you know, I feel the rest of us are totally absolved of responsibility for violence that's decided on by our government. We elect them. And that's certainly something that takes me back to the Vietnam generation. I mean, the Vietnam War was presented as a crusade against communism. And on the whole, the majority, at least in the beginning, the majority of American voters, seem to think that that's fine. Communism is evil, and we have to fight it and we may have to sacrifice for it and so on and so forth. And, you know, maybe there are a couple of million Vietnamese who sacrificed their lives to that idea, that fiction. So, yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of responsibility to go around, right? So I. I don't think probably Kluge would disagree. There's a beautiful passage in this book, Air Raid, where a woman who has been trying to protect her children in a very, very exposed spot, and he says at this point, there were no good decisions for her to make. All she's thinking about is how she can stop her children from being killed, and she's lying on top of one of them and pulling the others into her body. And it's an astonishing book, Eric. I strongly recommend it. But what he says is she's a teacher. He says in order for her not to be in this situation where she had no good choices, what would have had to have happened was that teachers like her, thousands and thousands of them, would have had to teach hard every year since 1917. And then maybe she wouldn't be in a position where she has no good choices to protect her children. So, I mean, he puts it in this sort of strange tense where, no, she. Right now, she doesn't have any choices.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Bruce Robbins]

This is what would have had to happen. But teaching would have made a difference. Obviously, for teachers like me, this is an incentive to teach hard, to take our jobs seriously because we do have the chance to stop this kind of thing from happening in the future.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. It reminds me of Socrates when he was facing being put to death and saying, well, maybe this is an unjust decision, but I have lived in this society, and if. If the society was capable of producing injustice, that's partly on me for not having fixed the society up until this point.

[Bruce Robbins]

He was a smart guy. Socrates. Let me be the first to say it.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay? So is there a reason why or is. I mean, this is a literary history. You could also have Done this by just examining different events and different wars and so on. But is there a particular reason why the literature is rich? Is it because authors bring more empathy or because there are more examples of authors willing to criticize their own side or examine motives, or why literature and not just walking through the history?

[Bruce Robbins]

Yeah, that's a great question. I take it upon myself to understand literary in a broad sense. So I talk about the Bible, I talk about Thucydides's history of the Peloponnesian War. I talk about Josephus history of what they call the Jewish War when he was, you know, writing on behalf of the Roman Empire. So, you know, that's not literature in the narrowest sense. I was inspired by literature in a very, very literary sense. Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I was kind of assigned to teach when I first arrived at Columbia in 2001. And, yeah, that. Actually, now that I think about it, that's probably another reason for starting to think I would think about atrocity. I gave my first lecture at Columbia on the 12th of September, 2001, and as you will now quickly calculate, that is the day after September, September 11, 2001, which will count certainly as an atrocity. And I found myself talking about literature, including 100 Years of Solitude, which has one of the great atrocity descriptions in all of literature in it. So it, you know, it's almost as if it was sort of faded that I would, you know, think on, think about these subjects. So 100 years of solitude, I don't know if your readers are familiar with it, is. Is a very, very beautifully written, very popular book which, as I say, has one of the great atrocities, one of the most influential atrocity descriptions in modern literature of the world. Many, many people have imitated its atrocity description. Salman Rushdie is one of them. Eugenides is another. Really just tipping that cap to. I'm going to do an atrocity. And thanks to. Thanks to Garcia Marquez and how he does the massacre of the striking banana plantation workers in Hundred Years of Solitude, because he does it in a very interesting literary way. I'm not going to go into detail, but it's very literary. It's not just trying to make you as indignant as it can possibly make you. It's doing a lot more things. So, yeah, there was an incentive that was particularly literary that came out of some passages like that. And when I went further, like, I don't know, again, if your readers know Roberto Bologna's novel 2666, which is an incredible book, but Also has an incredible chapter in it which is about what we call the femicides in Ciudad Juarez. The. The systematic killing of women workers in the maquiladoras on the Texas Mexico border, which does literary things like kind of exploding the premises of the mystery novel, which are just amazing, which I had never seen anywhere else. A body is discovered. There's a kind of forensic description of it. Detectives are on the scene. They're noting all the details, you know, so that they can start figuring out who might have done this. And then another body is discovered, and there's another description. And then another body is discovered, and then there's another description. And you're starting to say, wait, wait, wait, wait. This is a detective novel. You should start investigating these things. We should start feeling like, okay, we're finding out how they happen. And instead of that, he systematically frustrates your desire for, I don't know, a redemptive arc, Some kind of plot, any arc. Instead, you just get more bodies and more bodies, and you want to throw the book across the room. It's like, you're not allowed to do this. You're supposed to be giving me some satisfaction here. Instead, you're just giving me more dead bodies. Anyway, it was a literary effect, which I. I found very effective.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Bruce Robbins]

And I. You know, I was happy. And happy is maybe not the word there, but to discover literary writers who did very interesting things with all the dead bodies.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. You know, the thing that comes to mind there. A couple of things come to mind, but one is that I'm reminded of descriptions that writers who had gone from comedy shows like Saturday Night Live or sitcoms and then went to work on the Simpsons first felt. And they said it took them a while to kind of realize we have total freedom here. We're not bound by sets or character. You know, physical human actors we can really explore. We could have a. A quick reference to. We could have a flashback that's in a completely different world and just have six seconds. We could have a joke that's six seconds and refers to some movie, or we can travel through space. We could do all of these different things because of the power of animation. And it kind of unlocked a whole new set of tropes for them and potential jokes and all these different things. And it sounds like fiction writers will have at their disposal a lot of tools and different. You mentioned genre and playing with that and different ways of setting readers up and different ways of setting up their expectations and using that in order to try to convey the kinds of things that they want to convey. So it does seem like I hadn't really thought of that. But literature offers writers an expanded set of tools to use in trying to come at these atrocities in different ways.

[Bruce Robbins]

Yeah, I'm very grateful for the thought. It's not at all the way I have been thinking about this. I've been thinking about writers as very constrained because a terrible thing happened and you want to bear witness to it. And that feels like it really doesn't give you a whole lot of options. But I've been positively struck by the amount of creativity that people nevertheless manage to put in this, which is partly. I don't just want to make you feel unbearable feelings of indignation. It's not just about that. And that is just something I really appreciate.

[Jack Wilson]

The other thing I thought when you were talking about, when we think of this question of why fiction or why literature is that you had mentioned when we were talking about Vietnam, that people had bought into the fiction of some of the justifications for the war and so on. And I'm kind of used to the idea now that fiction can have a way of carrying a lot of truth that so called true accounts or historical or factual accounts sometimes miss. And in particular, fiction is really good at letting multiple ideas that may be even contradictory with one another, but letting them live together at once, making the reader feel the kind of unease of, well, here's your father who's fighting against Nazis. We believe that that's the right thing to do, that his cause is justified. And yet at the same time there are going to be aspects of that that didn't need to happen or that there should be something, there's something we want to condemn about the things that happened. And certainly the Vonnegut view that there can be things that happen by the good guys or by the right side that are wrong.

[Bruce Robbins]

Yeah, well, your idea of literature is very much like my idea of literature. I am very drawn to, by its capacity to give a much more complex idea of whatever is going on than you're likely to get in other places, especially in newspapers, but obviously in political ideology. And that was kind of a happy, a happy discovery for me in pursuing this. I mean, it's true that I went into it with all the ambivalence that would be predicted from someone who idolized his war hero father. Growing up, he didn't go to college. He said, my writing letters home to the families of the people in my squadron who were killed. That was my college. So you know that that's, that's A hard one to carry around. You go to college.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, right.

[Bruce Robbins]

But. So I went into it with ambivalence, and I guess I was primed to appreciate ambivalence when I found it in literary places, which I did. So I give an example, which I. I give in the book the Jalianwala Bag, the Amritsar massacre in 1919, which is the single worst atrocity associated with British colonialism. Actually, that. That might not be true Anyway, in the 20th century, where unarmed protesters were just massacred by British soldiers. It's in the film Gandhi. It's. It's all over the place when Salman Rushdie does that in his novel Midnight as Children and with a bow to Garcia Marquez also, it's told through the eyes of the hero's grandfather. And it just looks like nobody's going to survive this. But he sort of trips and falls onto his doctor bag, and Rushdie says it left a bruise on his chest that would not fade until years later he died on the hill of. So this tells us, oh, he's not gonna die now. That's great, you know, because we don't want him to. And then he tells us two names of the hill, and you realize, you know, one of them is a Hindu name and one of them is a Muslim name. So in. In the middle of this description of a massacre, he is reminding us, really, it's seemingly unnecessarily, of the rift between Hindus and Muslims, which is going to be a very important factor in Indian history after the British are gone and when colonialism is just a memory.

[Jack Wilson]

Mm.

[Bruce Robbins]

And he's doing this in the middle of a description in which there are colonizer bad guys and colonized victims, and everything seems as clear as clear could be.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Bruce Robbins]

So this is like a literary touch, if you see what I mean.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Yep.

[Bruce Robbins]

Something that he didn't have to do. It's subtle. I mean, he's not saying, forget about the British. You know, it's. But don't forget about our division between Hindus and Muslims. And that's ours. It's not a legacy of colonialism. So, you know, that's a kind of a moment of literary complexity that I appreciate, and I guess I was, as I say, primed for coming into the whole project with a certain ambivalence.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. As a child of the Cold War era, like me, it's something I think about a lot because it feels, you know, this is often remarked upon, and people foresaw this. Writers saw this happening of, well, things might be fine in America while we have this common external enemy. But once that's gone, you have to figure out how to live together because people will be trying to divide you by turning you on one another. And sometimes it feels like we kind of walked right into that trap.

[Bruce Robbins]

Yeah, that sounds very right to me.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Bruce Robbie.

[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

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[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

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[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

Savor every last drop of summer with Starbucks. From bold refreshers to rich cold brews, the sunniest season only gets better with a handcrafted ice beverage in your hand. Available for a limited time. Your summer favorites are ready at Starbucks Foreign. Okay, we're back. So, Bruce, is there a. I mean, you went through all of these texts and we've talked about a few of them, but there are a lot more. Is there a common tone? Are these grim books to read? Did you find yourself, you know, you mentioned that authors had seemed kind of constrained. Was there a sort of sobriety or other approach that you found to be common in the authors that were considering these atrocities?

[Bruce Robbins]

It certainly seems as if you'd have reason to worry about that, but it's not exactly what I found. And it seems ridiculous that there should be anything kind of humorous or comic, but it's a human way of dealing with stuff which is very hard to deal with. Some of my favorite texts are kind of funny. This Grimmelshausen novel from 1648. Yeah, it came out later. It was about the Thirty Years War. I mean, it's kind of funny. It's the grimmest of humor, you could say. So maybe the protagonist is a little bit simple minded, as the title Simplest Hitsumus suggests. A very simple, simple minded kid. But, you know, the troopers ride into his, his family farmyard and they do terrible things to find out where the goodies are, are hidden. And he says, what they did to my mother, I don't know because they wouldn't let me watch. Now that's, you know, it's kind of, it, it's kind of funny in Its awful way.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Bruce Robbins]

You know, like suggesting he would have wanted to watch. There is a story which I come back to obsessively by Zadie Smith called the Embassy of Cambodia, where a young woman who's kind of an au pair in London working for a South Asian family, she just suddenly becomes very, very curious about all the different atrocities she's heard about in history and trying to sort of grade the suffering. And she has these very funny conversations with a friend of hers in which Hiroshima is compared with Rwanda is compared with what the title suggests, what happened in Cambodia. And it's a very funny story, and it's partly a funny story, which includes, I suppose, the distance that many of us feel that these are things that happened somewhere else a long time ago. I don't actually find that a grim sensibility is so pervasive, or even as pervasive as you might feel would be inevitable. There are very, very different tones. It's probably also worth saying that often what I'm talking about is a single scene in a book that really. About other things. So you kind of get through that scene and you go on to other stuff.

[Jack Wilson]

Right.

[Bruce Robbins]

Because a lot of times the books, the whole book is not really organized around this thing that I'm picking out as interesting to me. I mean, so one book I talk about, which, yes, is pretty grim, is, again, it's a memoir, it's not a novel by this French woman, Charlotte Delbeau, D E L, B O, who was a member of the French Resistance and was caught. And she and her husband were both members of the Resistance. The husband was shot and she was put on a train to Auschwitz. Not Jewish, just French Resistance and female. The entire train was made up of women who had been captured by the Nazis and sent Auschwitz. It's really not fun what they live through, those of them who do live, which is a minority. But it's also really inspiring in the sense that they stick together with each other. They're willing to do anything to protect each other, to keep each other alive. And in that sense, it is an incredibly inspiring story. You know, a kind of survival against the odds story and, you know, just a story of political solidarity. I mean, they knew why they were there. They hadn't just been rounded up kind of at random. They were members of the Resistance and they were kind of still fighting in their way just to survive. Yeah. So it's a book I strongly recommend. I don't. Don't think a lot of people know it. I teach it together with Primo Levi, which is A much better known book about the time in Auschwitz. And inspiring in its way, but not inspiring in the same way.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. It makes me think there is a distinction to be drawn between the atrocity itself, which might not be humorous in any way, but then there are humans who are living through it and who are observing it and who are a part of it. And our humanity doesn't disappear just because an atrocity is going on around us. And part of humanity is there are things that are unusual or striking or even humorous that happen to us. Even anybody who's been to a funeral knows that there are things that happen where you say, objectively speaking, I don't feel like laughing right now, but objectively speaking, that was a funny thing to have happened today or at this moment, and. And it. It feels out of place here, but it. It did happen.

[Bruce Robbins]

I would say it even more strongly than that. I mean, I agree with you. I think people at a funeral need to laugh. And you'll notice that one of the things that speakers at funerals will do is that they will find a way of helping people to do what they want to do.

[Jack Wilson]

Giving permission.

[Bruce Robbins]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Giving permission. I mean, I think good speakers just know that, and there's no contradiction between that and the feelings of love and care and so on for the person who's died. On the contrary, somehow I can't give you the psychology of it. I just. I've been to enough funerals. So it just seems to me empirically true that people at funerals need a speaker or two or three to do some version of that.

[Jack Wilson]

Do the authors on your list give in to despair? I mean, do they look at these events and say, humanity is unredeemable?

[Bruce Robbins]

Yeah, yeah. That's a great question. The way I phrase this to myself, and I did ask myself over and over and over again versions of that question. The way I phrased it to myself is, do they give in to fatalism? Like, okay, it's terrible, but there's nothing to be done about it, so let's just go on about our business. Take for granted that terrible things like this happen and that there's nothing to be done about those things.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. And try to be as happy as you can or try to get your own while you're here, because you. It's. It's futile to try to resist or try to help other people.

[Bruce Robbins]

Something like that. This really struck me when I was reading John Hersey's journalistic piece. I'd have to call it Hiroshima. I mean, it's very Popular. I'm sure it gets taught in schools a lot.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Bruce Robbins]

It has never been out of print since, what, 1946, when it came out, Occupying an entire issue of the New Yorker. And at the end of that, he asks the survivors, how do you feel about the Americans dropping this bomb on you? And of course, some of them, you know, say, well, they should be. They're war criminals and they shouldn't have been allowed to do it. They should be held accountable. The majority, it seems to me, don't say anything like that. It was war. What did you expect? We would have gladly sacrificed ourselves for the emperor. We do it again, basically some version of. Of fatalism. I don't blame anybody. Let's just go about our business. There is a lot of that, and it's a kind of survival strategy. It's a survival strategy, I want to say, of people who have not had a lot of power in their lives, over their lives, and therefore are maybe a little bit too quick to think. It would be crazy of me ever to think I could have any power over, any control over the big things in life like this. So again, that goes back to Vonnegut, because the single most famous sentence from Slaughterhouse 5 is so it goes. So pretty much every time a death is referred to in Slaughterhouse 5, it's followed by this. This formula, so it goes, which is supposedly something that the. The main character has learned from the aliens that he is space aliens that he's spent time among because they have no expectations that anything could be different. So what they say when somebody dies is so it goes. And when I was 20 or so, a lot of people went around saying, so it goes. Yeah, and we thought. I don't know what we thought we were doing. We were doing. But it sounded right, you know, it sounded like, yep, this is the way you describe the feelings proper to a situation in which you don't control, in which it's other people in control. And that's pretty much what you ought to expect. I don't think that that novel is the fatalistic novel, and I don't think that so It Goes is its motto in that sense. Partly because I think, and I know that Vonnegut was outraged by the bombing of civilians in Vietnam. And he would not have said, so it goes about that he wanted it to stop, and I take it that way. But not to get too political here. I think that people have got to start feeling that they can achieve more control over their lives than they have achieved up to now than their parents achieved. Or grandparents achieved in order to be less fatalistic, in order for fatalism to seem, you know, the less eligible choice, philosophically speaking. So, I mean, I. I don't think it's a matter of just philosophical choices in the abstract. People have got to feel in their lives that there are things that they have realized they can control in order to feel less fatalistic in the presence of atrocity.

[Jack Wilson]

Right. Okay. My last question for you is a two part question. How did you feel after the process of immersing yourself in all of these accounts and doing the research and doing the writing? I mean, did you feel exhausted? Did you feel inspired? Did you feel like there was more that you left on the table? Did you feel like you were or completely spent? I'm interested in what the experience of reading about all of these and writing about them did for you. And then the second part of the question is, what do you want readers to feel after they've finished your book?

[Bruce Robbins]

Ah, okay. Well, maybe I start with the second one.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay.

[Bruce Robbins]

I think that, I mean, I realize that people who listen to you and your podcast are probably. They don't need talking into where reading books. Right, right. Is concerned. They're already there. But there are a lot of really interesting things out there that people might not know because they haven't been taught, because atrocity is not an extremely attractive subject. So, for example, people know that Tolstoy is a really good writer, and maybe they've read War and Peace or Anna Karenina, but there's a much shorter Tolstoy, which is the last thing he published, called Haji Murat, which is a genius story.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Bruce Robbins]

And what can I say? You won't be sorry if you read it. When he was a very young man, he was with the Russian army when it was basically conquering the Caucasus and burning villages and burning fields and killing the. The indigenous people of the Caucasus. And he didn't feel good about it, but he also didn't know what to do with it until he was an old man. And he wrote this last piece of fiction which was so incendiary that he couldn't even. He with account, couldn't get it fully published in his lifetime. Haji Murat, a brilliant piece of piece of writing.

[Jack Wilson]

Mm.

[Bruce Robbins]

But, you know, I also think there are people who get read, they just don't get read from this angle. Like Arundhati Roy, her last novel is astonishing from this point of view. There's a lot of good reading, really high quality reading that I hope people will be inspired to do, including, you know, old Stuff that you may all always have heard about and just never thought be fun for me to read, like Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. It's an amazing book. I always knew it was there. But if you're taking. Taking a course on the Victorian novel, they're not going to give you Thucydides or Josephus. Josephus was. Is amazing. His account of the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple is an astonishing piece of writing in itself.

[Jack Wilson]

All right, so that takes care of the readers. Yeah.

[Bruce Robbins]

Now, how it left me feeling. Well, it certainly left me feeling very dissatisfied with myself, partly because this is a very. A very topical question, as everyone has been telling me, you know. Oh, your book is coming out. It's about atrocity. Well, that's a subject that hasn't gone out of style. And what I feel is that there's much too little wisdom to be applied to the atrocities that are in the news, that I wish I had somehow written it aimed at instructing people, imparting some kind of wisdom about how people should feel about the things that they're. They're encountering. I mean, I talk about the. The bombing of Gaza a certain amount right at the end, but there was so much more to say about that. And so I feel the insufficiency of what I said myself then. I also feel, you know, that there was so much stuff that I could have written about that I didn't. I mean, I touched on what to me was fascinating, that Christian historians of the Crusades actually sound a lot like Muslim historians of the Crusade. They're on opposite sides, but in some ways they're not just spending all their time accusing each other. And that, for me, was absolutely fascinating. Anyway, I feel like a much more educated person than I am. Would have had a field day with a lot of the materials that I do talk about a little and that I, you know, the ones also that I don't talk about at all.

[Jack Wilson]

I wonder if that's true, because it almost seems like what you're lamenting is that you didn't have more of a. To be able to apply it to certain situations would almost suggest that coming out of your project should be some black and white rules or some instructions or some ways of. Of thinking about things that might kind of be at odds with what we've been talking about, which is that these writers often map the gray areas and that this is, you know, sometimes the issue here is keeping alive that there is all of this ambiguity and that we have to feel conflicted about that and uncertain because it's not clear that stories of the good guys and the villains are necessarily accurate and true. And so it kind of makes me wonder if what you're perceiving as an inability to do something better is actually more consistent with the project than it might feel to you.

[Bruce Robbins]

Ouch. That really hits home. Can we just end this right now? Because that, that I finding it really hard to answer what you just said. I mean, unfortunately, it sounds, it sounds right. It sounds like. It sounds just. And, you know, it doesn't necessarily leave me feeling great, though, because I, I don't know, like a lot of people, I, I, I would like access to a kind of operative indignation that would help. Fewer of these things happen. And at the same time, you're totally right that I'm very attracted to gray areas and bringing out gray where other people see black and white. I'm afraid that's just true. So thanks a lot for telling me something about myself.

[Jack Wilson]

Well, after doing this, for closing in on 700 episodes, I guess I've given the guests the last word for 699 of them. I can take the last word for myself in one. So the book is.

[Bruce Robbins]

Sorry.

[Jack Wilson]

Oh, go ahead.

[Bruce Robbins]

No, no, obviously. Sorry. I'm tossing you a flower. You've gotten very good at this.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, thank you. Well, the book is called A Literary History. Bruce Robbins, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.

[Bruce Robbins]

Thank you very much for.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, and finally, today we ask an expert in Ernest Hemingway and his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, in particular, Alex Vernon, to select a book that would serve as the last one he'll ever read. Will he choose For Whom the Bell Tolls or something else by Hemingway? Let's find out.

[Bruce Robbins]

Foreign.

[Jack Wilson]

We're joined now by Alex Vernon, professor of English and the author of Reading Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Alex, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.

[Bruce Robbins]

That is such a great question. Especially the older I get. I think I'll have two answers. One answer is more like the occasion of it, in the sense that I have two daughters. And as I sort of imagine the reading occasion of my last book, I would like it to be them reading to me. Whatever, whatever book they choose, I don't care. I just want to hear their sweet voices reading to me separate from that, like actual Book, I think. And again, I don't have a specific book in mind, but I think something that celebrates the wonders and glories of the natural world. This creation we are all entering, that I would be presumably leaving shortly thereafter. Just the wonders of the world and the natural processes that I'm about to re. Become a part of, that, to me would be a kind of consolation, I think.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you think you would find it in fiction or poetry or philosophy or where do you think you'd be most likely to find what you were looking for there?

[Bruce Robbins]

In that case, I think nonfiction I want to hear about. You know, my six year old the other day said, dad, did you know that tigers are orange and black? But that's because most animals are colorblind and they don't see the orange. So it's actually a camouflage thing. Like, I want to learn, I want to sort of be immersed in again the kind of wonder. Wonder that is. That is the natural creation that we inhabit this earth. I think that would be kind of a fascinating way to just appreciate this place. Nonfictionally, I think. Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

I heard once that. That John Cheever was reading new fiction by younger writers and, you know, so full of. Of dialogue and events and conflicts and, you know, I'm sure romances coming together, falling apart and everything. And he said, you know, he just kept thinking, what color is the sky? You know, where is the. Like, I just wanted it to open up and include something other than just the human. The turmoil that we create and we inflict on one another. But to have people who were walking through the grass and who were, you know, visiting a field and just all of the. All of the things that we sometimes overlook in life, but we maybe do appreciate a little more as we get older.

[Bruce Robbins]

Sure. And especially, you know, if. I mean, who knows? But. But if this last book that I'm encountering, I am stuck inside. Right. Because of an infirm or something, I would like to have somebody read to me in a way that I can close my eyes and I can smell the grass and I can sort of transport myself out of myself in a sense, and into the world.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah. Well, you didn't mention a Hemingway book, but he's certainly a writer who could maybe give you that, whether it's in fiction or nonfiction.

[Bruce Robbins]

That's absolutely true. Yeah.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay. Alex Vernon, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[Bruce Robbins]

Thank you so much.

[Jack Wilson]

Okay, there we go. The Natural world read by his daughters. That's beautiful. I thought that would be a nice way to pick things up. After hearing about those atrocities. So that's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. My thanks to Bruce Robbins for joining me and to Alex Vernon for that cameo appearance. Remember to send us an email if you're curious about the idea of traveling with me and some of your fellow podcast listeners on a magical mystery tour through literary England. I think we will have a good time, at least as good as Clarissa Dalloway's Parte, and probably better. That's the goal. Anyway, I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[Bruce Robbins]

Sam did you know not all organic food is created equal? While we trust the organic label to mean soil grown, pasture raised, and ethical.

[Jack Wilson]

Industrial agriculture is quietly rewriting the rules.

[Bruce Robbins]

That's why the Real Organic Podcast, produced.

[Jack Wilson]

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[Bruce Robbins]

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[Jack Wilson]

Protect organic standards in the US without corporate shortcuts or industrial loopholes. Follow the Real Organic Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Lee C. Camp here. If you've been enjoying this show, I think you might enjoy my podcast, no Small Endeavor. Produced by Great Feeling Studios and prx, no Small Endeavor explores what it means to live a good life. We sit down with courageous, impassioned people like actor Martin Sheen or civil rights hero James Lawson to ask what it means to live a life worth living. Follow no Small Endeavor wherever you get your podcasts. Living a good life is no small endeavor and we would love to help.