Thinking Things Through
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which draw upon European thought, only to recreate it in our own image) and
above all, in our literature, where the very things that animate Steeves are
central concerns: the struggle for freedom, for identity, for justice, for selfrespect, for love, for reciprocity, for compassion, for an end to brutality,
oppression, racism, greed, exploitation, hunger, and fear, and for the simple yet
elusive recognition of shared humanity, the sort of thing Shylock wondered,
when he asked “hath not a Jew eyes?” Or that Caliban meant, when he damned
Prospero’s profit in teaching him to curse like a thing possessed, or a weird
sister, with an all too human tongue.
Yes, the play’s the thing—its antic semantics, ontic historionics, and
subliminal dialogue portray us as who and what we are, on stage and off.
Steeves often quotes Shakespeare to good effect. (Every section of Chap. II, 1747, has an epigram from the Bard of bards). But he could’ve added several
names to his list of epigrammatic allies: Baldwin, Ellison, Wright, and
Morrison; Faulkner, Momaday, and Silko; Melville, Twain and Hawthorne; Dos
Passos, Dreiser and Didion; Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Cather; Mari Sandoz,
Mary Austin, and Wallace Stegner; Whitman, Dickinson, Ginsberg, Sandburg,
Frost, Williams, both Cranes (Hart and Stephen), Frank Norris, Sherwood
Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jack London, Robert Penn
Warren, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Sinclair Lewis, Thornton Wilder, and
others who have examined the things themselves, fathomed the unfathomable,
just to forge a lasting bond between words {logos) and the world. Then there is
Lincoln—but he is a universe unto himself, which is why he is a symbol of
freedom, as well as of our doubts and hopes and fears, in the everlasting crisis of
our fragile Union. Who understood the primacy of the body politic, its fevered
lusts and its tacit imperatives, better than he? Surely we can find solace in his
words, if not in his and our unfinished tasks, and intemipted deeds.
Amidst all these voices, some speak louder or more clearly than any
others. They’re the muffled voices behind everything Steeves says, what I hear
or discern in his words, and what runs through all them like a refrain. There’s a
warm, maternal voice, calm yet firm, like Mrs. Moore in E.M. Forster’s A
Passage to I n d i a , accepting all the paradoxes, rank absurdities and plain
contradictions of life: like the Vegas Strip (183), whose carnivalesque facades
the architect Robert Venturi deconstructed in Learning from Las V e g a s ,the
mythical Ganges is “a terrible river. . . a wonderfiil river,”'"^ later in the novel,
Mrs. Moore dies and is buried at sea, which fiilfills her own prophecies. Truth is
the incarnation of Shiva, a Bacchanalian revel, a coincidence of opposites, as
ennobling and exalting as it is humbling and terrifying. It is the voice of the
author of Genesis: “dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return” (Genesis
3:19), of Vico’s ‘"corso e ricorso,"' of Hegelian dialectic before the advent of
H e g e l , o r James Joyce’s last words in Finnegan's Wake (London, 1939), the
unfinished single sentence, the end that is beginning, and the beginning that
entails the end. There’s the wry humorous sound of Thomas Carlyle: when told
that Margaret Fuller had at last (albeit grudgingly) “accepted the universe,” he