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The story goes that some learned medieval monks were debating the question of how many teeth horses had, a seemingly crucial issue, on which Aristotle was silent. Overhearing the debate, an illiterate lay brother suggested that he could go outside where a horse was tied up, and count its teeth. The monks naturally rebuked him for his effrontery. Similarly, English literature scholars have many debates about novels and whether it’s legitimate to connect them with their authors.
Fred Griffin is clearly not illiterate, and I’m not aware he’s ever been attacked for his efforts to provide answers to some of these literary debates, but, like the lay brother, he decided to investigate some of these questions empirically, “letting the authors speak for themselves,” rather than to treat theory reductionistically as a “Procrustean bed.” Griffin notes the “therapeutic potentials” of writing fiction, citing Virginia Woolf’s comment that writing To the Lighthouse helped her grieve her mother’s death. Griffin learned from personal experience that transforming painful experiences into fiction allows enough emotional distance to deepen one’s understanding of trauma. After writing of similar themes in the works of William Maxwell, Arnost Lustig, Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, and Colin Toibin, Griffin presents his fascinating interview with the novelist and short story writer Sheila Kohler.
In some ways, Christopher Miller’s entire essay persuasively glosses Malvolio’s final words in Twelfth Night, which bring the mirthful audience up short: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you.” Miller probes deeply into the play’s complexity, since Shakespeare never fully separates comic from darker, tragic themes in his dramas. Miller skillfully shows how we, the audience, implicitly collude in scapegoating Malvolio, as other characters in the play - whom Miller compares with “pack animals” - projectively identify some of their “despised elements” such as self-love onto him, and limit our empathy fo