Sparring with the Past and Breaking Bread with the Dead
In his newest book, Alan Jacobs encourages us to give dead authors the time of day—neither judging them too harshly nor idealizing them too much to learn from what they have to say.
Review by Alexi Sargeant
Alan Jacobs craves our indulgence for dead authors. Yes, their customs might be uncouth and their manners barbaric. But when we pick up an old book, we aren’t inviting these strangers into our homes—we’re getting a privileged peek into theirs, and it is we, not they, who stand to benefit from the encounter.
This is the central argument of Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind. Jacobs marshals his teaching experience, his wide-ranging reading, and his winsome style to convince his readers to share a little fellowship at dead authors’ tables. “The dead, being dead, speak only at our invitation,” Jacobs reassures us. “Like that flock of shades who gather around Odysseus when he comes as a living man to the land of Hades: they remain silent until their tongues are touched with the blood of the living. What the dead we encounter in books demand is only the blood of our attention, which we are free to withhold.”
The book’s title comes from Auden (“art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead”) and its subtitle from Horace (Odes II.3, “Keep a Tranquil Mind”). Jacobs opens the book with a reflection on teaching Horace to college students, observing their fixation on phones that seem to bring them more anxiety than joy. He thinks they too desire the kind of escape the Roman poet mused over. “[W]e wanted to know exactly what Horace wanted to know, and for many of the same reasons. We wanted tranquil minds. We wanted to escape our addiction to the adrenaline rush of connectivity.”
How do we do that? By broadening our cultural and temporal horizons to cultivate a solidity that allows us to hold firm against fickle fads. “Personal density” is how Jacobs refers to this quality, echoing Pynchon’s oddball dictum “personal density is proportional to temporal bandwidth.” The experience of taking up a time-tested book provides a stark contrast to the ruthless “attentional triage” demanded by the information age. But an obstacle to listening to the dead is the “moral triage” of our day: the need for “straightforward binary decisions about whether we admire or despise a given person.” Many classic writers fall afoul of one or another moral commitment of modern readers (at least the readers who are liberal university students) and so are in danger of being consigned to the dustbin of history. Jacobs invites readers to pause and consider what they might learn even from authors with whom they don’t and won’t see eye-to-eye.
The other theme of these bouts is the possibility of something like love existing between writers and readers divided by vast gulfs of time and experience.
It might seem a modest thing Jacobs is asking, to give the dead the time of day, but his book is primarily addressing those most skeptical of the value of the so-called classics. To Jacobs’s credit, he never talks down to such readers or minimizes their concerns over the bigotries and blindnesses of dead authors. He is emphatically not asking that the dead be judged by “the standards of their time.” He asks rather that we judge as we’d want to be judged: in accord with truth, yes, but also with compassion and an interest in the “authentic kernel” beneath failings and foibles.
For those of us already sold on dead authors, Jacobs has a different caution: not to idealize the past or reshape it in our own image, but allow ourselves to encounter it in its strangeness. “Wisdom lies in discernment,” reminds Jacobs, “and utopianism and nostalgia alike are ways of abandoning discernment.” A balancing act, one might say, but Jacobs’s preferred metaphor is a wrestling match—specifically the biblical Jacob’s tussle with God and his subsequent demand that God bless him: “I will not let you go until you bless me” (Gen. 32:26). From this passage Jacobs concludes that struggle and demand are not incompatible with reverence. The classics, then, can be our sparring partners.
Jacobs highlights several of his favorite reader-wrestlers. He praises Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia, a work that grapples with the Aeneid by giving a voice to the heroine Virgil left wordless. He marvels at Frederick Douglass’s ability to both honor and critique the American Founders in his speech “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” He recounts Zadie Smith’s youthful encounter with the poetry of John Keats. In each case, the reader gains some insight or perspective from thoughtful contention with the words of the past. But the other theme of these bouts is the possibility of something like love existing between writers and readers divided by vast gulfs of time and experience. “There’s an important sense in which we cannot use the past to love ourselves unless we also learn to love our ancestors,” writes Jacobs. “We must see them not as others but as neighbors—and then ultimately, as kin, as members of our (very) extended family.”
We might be jarred or even scarred in the encounter, but there is a blessing worth winning from our sparring partner.
Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew comes up throughout the book, as an example of an old text that is particularly repugnant to a modern, feminist reader. Jacobs is impatient with directors who try to sanitize Shrew by “find[ing] a way to undermine Petruchio’s patriarchal assurance, most often by making sure that Katherine follows up her late subservient speech […] with broad winks to the audience or the other women on stage.” According to Jacobs, this is a foolish attempt to pluck the sting from a misogynist text.
We might grant the point for the sake of argument, and read on to see how Jacobs posits Shakespeare is still worth wrestling with despite his backwards views on gender. But as a Shakespeare fan, I have a quibble with Jacobs here. He claims, “There is absolutely no reason to believe that Shakespeare’s view of their conflict differs in any way from Petruchio’s.” No reason, perhaps, save the rest of Shakespeare’s plays! Directors aren’t wrong to notice the “taming” of Katharina sits uneasily alongside Shakespeare’s broader sympathy for women and wives, including against their controlling husbands. Witness the heroines of Much Ado About Nothing or The Winter’s Tale, unjustly accused by men who end up kneeling to ask their forgiveness. Seeking a redemptive reading of Kate and Petruchio’s marriage isn’t necessarily a sop to the contemporary zeitgeist—it may also stem from a wider engagement with Shakespeare as an author.
Shakespeare isn’t here to settle the matter, so Jacobs and I, like innumerable theatermakers, have to grapple as best we can with the text he’s left us. As in Jacobs’s recurring image of Jacob wrestling with an angel, we might be jarred or even scarred in the encounter, but there is a blessing worth winning from our sparring partner. If we seek to break bread with the dead, we might echo The Taming of the Shrew’s Tranio, and invite them to “strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.”
Alexi Sargeant is a writer and cultural critic who works in Catholic student ministry at Princeton University. His writing on Shakespeare, superheroes, and other topics at the intersection of philosophy and popular culture has appeared in First Things, the New Atlantis, and other venues.
Breaking Bread with the Dead was released on September 8, 2020, by Penguin Random House. Fare Forward thanks the publisher for providing our reviewer with an advance copy of this book. You can purchase a copy from the publisher’s website here.
