January 20, 2023
Western literature begins with anger. The first word of Homer’s Iliad in the original Greek is the word for rage: “Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles.” If history begins in the wilderness after Adam and Eve have been cast out of the mythical timelessness of Eden, then Biblical history too begins with an act of violent anger, the killing of Abel by his brother Cain. All emotions are contagious, but anger seems particularly so, and today it seems to be sweeping across the United States like wildfire through the dry tinder of some Western state. The media are of course fanning the flames, because the more riled up people become, the more they click on things. But what is the original source of all this anger? It masquerades as righteous anger against injustice, but the kind of anger most typical today is really a childish temper tantrum. Back when Trump was first elected in 2016, some of us were willing to believe that the anger was provoked by economic injustice, that it was ignited by the frustration of working class people whose cause had no recognition in a political system dominated by highly educated elites, and I still think that that was the source of the first spark.
But seven years later economic issues have vanished: it is all culture wars now. It is the anger of those who hate African-Americans, hate gay, lesbian, and trans people, hate liberals, hate educated people, and, most of all, hate the government that restrains their temper tantrums, which they regard as an expression of individual freedom. From people who, during the pandemic, became abusive on planes when required to wear a mask to the latest Tweet-storm of Elon Musk, we have been witnessing behavior of those who claim to be high-minded but who in reality lack—or simply refuse—impulse control. My mom had a word for them: spoiled. It is puzzling and disheartening to those of us who remember the 60’s. There was anger then, too, plenty of it: but it was mostly on the left, and, regrettable as some expressions of it might have been, was largely motivated by real social injustice. Protests in the cause of civil rights, the rights of women and gay and lesbian people, protests against the Vietnam war: the anger was real, not merely narcissistic. What has our society become that “anger management,” as they say, has become a problem of a quarter or third of the population?
Anger is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and is punished in the fifth circle of Dante’s hell. There, Dante and Virgil witness the Wrathful battling and mutilating each other while wading through the slime of the swamplike river Styx, when Dante suddenly recognizes one of the slime-covered figures as a man named Filippo Argenti, about whom nothing is known. According to commentary by Mark Musa, the scene has never been adequately explained by Dante scholars, for, upon recognizing Argenti, Dante the character ironically loses his temper in the circle of the Wrathful. When Argenti says, “You see that I am one who weeps” (8.36), Dante snarls, “May you weep and wail, / stuck here in this place forever, you damned soul” (8.37-38). And for this Virgil puts his arms around Dante, kisses him, and says, “Indignant soul, / blessed is she in whose womb you were conceived” (8.44-45). This encourages Dante, who says, “Master, it certainly would make me happy / to see him dunked deep in this swamp just once / before we leave this lake—it truly would” (8.52-53). Dante gets his wish: a muddy mob of the Wrathful sets upon Argenti and mugs him so fiercely that he goes mad and bites himself. Musa tries to argue that Virgil is approving of Dante’s righteous anger over the sin of wrath, but it certainly does not come off that way. Dante is not hating the sin rather than the sinner—he clearly hates Filippo Argenti’s guts, and revels in the sight of him getting what’s coming to him. Three cantos earlier, in the circle of the Lustful, Dante had fainted with pity over the fate of Paolo and Francesca, clearly because on some level he feels implicated in their sin. Likewise, it would be a logical parallel here for Dante to become momentarily caught up in the sin he is witnessing. Virgil is not always a perfect guide, and it may be that he is giving Dante credit for a detachment he does not in fact possess.
For anger provokes anger in response. That is exactly the plot of the Iliad. In book 1, Agamemnon and Achilles get into an argument over a captive woman who is a “war prize.” It quickly turns into a grand and glorious shouting match, well captured by Robert Fagles’ gutsy translation:
No, you colossal, shameless—we all followed you, to please you, to fight for you, to win your honor back from the Trojans—Menelaus and you, you dog-face (1.86-88)
When I ask students their first impressions of Agamemnon and Achilles, the response is invariably that, for epic heroes, these two seem a lot like a couple of children fighting over a toy on the playground. I go to great effort to get them to factor into their judgment the fact that both men are trapped in a male code of “honor” that will not allow either to back down: any attempt at reasonable compromise would be regarded as weak and shameful. Still, not every hero in the Iliad is as difficult as these two men. Competitive male status systems breed big egos, then and now, and while Achilles and Agamemnon are trapped by the heroic code of honor, they are also playing uproar, as my first wife’s family used to put it. And the conflagration spreads everywhere: by the end of book 1 it has reached the top of Mt. Olympus and produced a marital quarrel between Zeus and Hera, who take different sides of the conflict down below.
What causes some people to be even-tempered and others to be temperamental? As with just about any human behavior, there are two possibilities, nature and nurture. It is unfashionable these days to say that any human traits are innate, but any parent knows that some babies are placid and some are difficult. The same is true of animals to those who really pay attention to animal behavior.
Dozens of deer visit my yard at all seasons of the year, and most of the does are what does are expected to be, shy and gentle. But every so often I come up against a pisser, with whom I end up in an Agamemnon-vs.-Achilles kind of contest. Most of the deer simply ignore the raccoons who try to get at some of the food on the ground—there is plenty for all. But the ornery deer tries to stamp on them, so, afraid of injury, I go out and yell at her and chase her away. But she may come back, and, seeing me through the window, stamp her foot on the ground in anger, and go after the raccoons again. The same is true of tame animals: some dogs and cats—especially cats—are simply ill-tempered, for no apparent reason. Likewise for human beings. The naïve social constructionism that holds that we are blank slates, that there is no innate human nature, does not hold up to common inspection. There may be no universal traits, but there is a range of human characteristics for which “born this way” seems an inevitable description.
The Renaissance had its theory of the four humours to explain common differences of human temperament. The biochemical explanation is all wrong, but the four temperaments—sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic—are easily recognizable, both in common life and in the history of literature. They seem to fall into matched pairs of opposites: the sanguine or cheerful with the brooding melancholic; the short-fuse choleric with the cold-fish phlegmatic. The choleric type was supposed to be caused by a preponderance of yellow bile—metaphorically apt, if unscientific. Cartoons are a good place to find character types, and the most famous animated choleric type is Donald Duck, though there are plenty of others, including Yosemite Sam. Both these characters go ballistic, as we say, at the slightest provocation.
The fascination of the Western epic tradition is that it is the vehicle for a meditation that goes down the line, that progressively recreates the heroic tradition rather than merely repeating it. All the tragedy in the Iliad is brought about by unrestrained anger. Achilles’ anger causes him to refuse to fight, which leads to the death of his best friend Patroclus, which kindles a far more dangerous anger and causes him to go like a mad dog after Patroclus’ killer, Hector. He works himself up into such a rage that, temporarily, he is no longer human. When Hector, dying, makes a last request that his body be returned to his family, Achilles replies:
“Beg no more, you fawning dog—begging me by my parents! Would to god my rage, my fury, would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw… (22. 407-09)
The fire has become too white-hot to be put out, and Achilles is trapped for a good while in a state of barely contained rage, releasing some of it by trying to mutilate Hector’s corpse, drilling holes in its ankles and dragging it behind his chariot. He is only released from it in book 24 by realizing that the real cause of his anger is systemic. Agamemnon is not the problem; Hector is not the problem. The true source of human grief is fate and the arbitrary whims of the gods, especially Zeus, who has two jars, one full of good fortune and the other of bad, which he distributes completely at random. We cannot fight these blind forces, and must learn to resign ourselves to their workings, or so Achilles comes to believe.
The Aeneid is, yes, a pro-imperialist poem, but the reason that Virgil supported the newly founded Roman Empire of Augustus was hope that it might restrain the violent impulses of people like Achilles and Agamemnon, who erupt in anger when their desires are thwarted, leading to endless exercises in futility like the Trojan War. Virgil clearly hoped the Roman Empire would model itself on the virtues of his hero Aeneas, whose hero is restrained and self-sacrificing to the point of repression. Centuries later, the British Empire, at least in theory, modeled itself on the Roman ideals of stoic discipline, devotion to duty, and a stiff upper lip. Everyone who gives Aeneas grief has the same flaw, Virgil’s version of original sin: a narcissistic lack of impulse control leading to outbreaks of violent anger when their will is thwarted. Thus Virgil transvalues Homer: the antagonists of the Aeneid resemble Homer’s volatile hero, and the resemblance is clearly deliberate.
In the first half of the poem, the example is Aeneas’s lover Dido, who is supposed to be a queen but who abandons her people to their fate and instead becomes a “drama queen” when Aeneas, true to his duty, abandons her to found Rome. In their final encounter, she is every man’s nightmare, a ranting, raving near-psychotic who screams at Aeneas that she could mince up his son and serve him to Aeneas at a feast. But, powerless to extract another kind of revenge, Dido instead commits suicide—there, that’ll show him. With a lover like this, who needs enemies? There is in fact a mirror symmetry in the second half of the poem when Aeneas’s arch-enemy Turnus turns out to have a male version of the same kind of impulsive personality, and Turnus is egged on by Queen Amata, angry because her daughter Lavinia is given to Aeneas—ironically, to keep the peace—instead of to her favorite Turnus. (She too will commit suicide eventually as a kind of ultimate temper tantrum). These troublemakers are all driven by the same kind of false individualism that we see in the would-be insurrectionists of the present moment. Achilles, Agamemnon, Dido, Amata, Turnus: such people are all choleric types, and it only takes a few of them to sabotage the peace and security of civilization, partly by obstructionism and partly by contagion: on the last page of the Aeneid, even the almost neurotically repressed Aeneas catches the virus. When he realizes that Turnus has killed a young man named Pallas, he snaps and sinks his blade into a wounded, helpless Turnus in uncontrolled fury—and the poem ends on that dark note.
Shakespeare’s representative hothead, nicknamed Hotspur, is not billed as a humour character because he appears in the histories rather than in a comedy, but he is a classic choleric type nonetheless, irritable, impatient, rash, hyperactive. Indeed, in his second tetralogy of history plays, Shakespeare appears to be probing the role of temperament in the political arena. Hotspur’s opposite number is the phlegmatic Prince Hal, whose companion is the sanguine Falstaff. Completing the pattern, the melancholic is the king who is deposed and killed in the first play, Richard II, but Richard is a kind of trial run for the greatest melancholic of them all, Hamlet. Shakespeare was deeply influenced throughout his career by Virgil’s Aeneid, and I am convinced that Hotspur is modeled on Aeneas’s arch-foe, Turnus, who is equally hot-tempered and rash, and equally doomed to die at the hands of an enemy who is his temperamental opposite.
Insofar as anger is socially created rather than innate, its earliest source is the pressure cooker of the family. Angry wives and mothers were known as shrews: Shakespeare’s play about the taming of one of them makes uncomfortable reading in this day and age. However, shrews browbeating henpecked husbands have been a source of humor for hundreds of years, and they are often flawed but still sympathetic characters, as is Shakespeare’s Kate. In the famous comic strip Bringing Up Father, by George McManus, Maggie is physically abusive, perpetually hurling crockery and rolling pins at her husband Jiggs, yet she is too vulnerable and insecure to be truly unlikeable. The real angry women are something else, and scare men to death, from Medea to Fatal Attraction. Angry wives and mothers are held to be unnatural; angry fathers, on the other hand, are practically the patriarchal norm. And angry fathers raise angry sons. Oedipus killed his own father in a fit of road rage and went on later to curse his own sons, who turned against each other and, as angry men do, started a war, the Seven against Thebes. Shakespeare’s King Lear is a profound psychological study of the kind of tyrannical father who is a tantrum-throwing baby, one who breaks down into madness when the world, and specifically his daughters, will not grant his every wish. He tries to out-howl the storm on the heath, only to discover that the storm is not interested in the recitation of the injustices against him. Later patriarchal tyrants, such as the father in August Wilson’s Fences, use the pressures of being a man as an excuse for their frightening, unpredictable explosions of anger. Robert Hayden, in his poem about his father, “Those Winter Sundays,” speaks of getting out of a warm bed on a cold morning as a boy, “fearing the chronic angers of that house.”
Animal anger is a survival trait. When your dog shows his teeth and growls when you try to take his bone away, you know he is reacting instinctively. Anger pumps the body with adrenalin, wipes away fear, and kicks both animals and human beings into fighting mode, whether against enemies or rivals for dominance in a herd or tribe. But civilization tends not to approve of anger: the first thing we teach children in socializing them is not to hit their siblings or playmates. Temper tantrums get a time out. Civilization’s model is uptight Aeneas: when Bruce Banner gets angry, he turns into the Hulk and trashes the neighborhood, and civilization cannot allow that. Rather, the civilized person cultivates Olympian detachment, or Stoic indifference. These are unnatural virtues, learned behaviors, humanity trying to remodel its evolutionary heritage. Should we be trying to eliminate anger from the spectrum of human emotions, at least as much as possible? Is it merely an atavistic survival? Would a truly civilized person be beyond anger?
I do not think so, although we may work at eliminating the wrong kinds of anger. In the first place, I do not think it is a merely extrinsic component of human nature that can be deleted like an app. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a favorite book of many great writers, including Keats, is an encyclopedic treatment of all human life as seen through the lens of melancholy: what we have said so far suggests that someone could write a corresponding Anatomy of Anger. It seems to be a part of who we are. But there is good and bad anger, and what a progressive vision might set as its utopian goal is the elimination of the wrong kind of anger from the world, and from our hearts. We notice in the previous examples that the kind of anger we repudiate, that we are ashamed of when we indulge in it, is selfish. The inflated ego wants to be a god, owning and controlling everything, and becomes furious when even the slightest whim is not granted. This is not anger as a survival trait; it is the anger of those who are…well, my mom had it right all along. They are spoiled. Our society has encouraged such selfishness in the name of “individualism” and “freedom” and “rights,” not to mention “masculinity,” and now we are reaping the whirlwind.
Moreover, there is such a thing as righteous anger, kindled by evil and injustice rather than by the denial of our selfish wishes. Some people might contend that we ought to oppose evil and injustice dispassionately, with the detachment of a judge sitting on the bench. Anger clouds our judgment, and anyway anger is unseemly, undignified: the angrier we get, the more we risk becoming a self-parody, red-faced and screaming. The interesting thing is that the God of the Bible does not seem to care about his dignity in that way. The God of the Old Testament is no impersonal order figure: he has a personal bond with his people, the Covenant, and when his people are unfaithful to it and to his laws, he rages at them through the voice of his prophets. We hear at least as much about the wrath of God as we do about his love and mercy, and it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God, both for individuals and entire kingdoms. Indeed, for the whole human race: the Book of Revelation prophesies how at the end of time God’s wrath, fully and finally unleashed, will destroy the heavens and the earth in a rampage that makes the incredible Hulk look tame. Nor will that wrath cool in eternity: it burns forever as the fires of hell.
Christianity is sometimes said to be an alternative to the religion of wrathful justice. Jesus said to love your enemies and turn the other cheek, and lived up to his own ideals by asking his Father to forgive those who crucified him, for they knew not what they did. But the same Jesus lost his temper and went after the moneychangers in the Temple with a whip—an episode that disturbed yet delighted me as a kid. He also cursed the barren fig tree, which dismayed me, for the tree was not malicious and could not help its barrenness. Perhaps Jesus, being human, could not always live up to his own ideal of perfection. There is something potentially comforting about that. Parenting books say never punish your children in anger, but I am not sure I agree. Kids need to learn that parents are human too, and have their emotional limits. When my usually equable mom on rare occasions lost her temper, I knew that I had pushed too far, and learned how human beings respond to you when you go too far. Parents who punish with high-minded detachment are all too often passive-aggressive sadists in disguise, like Murdstone in Dickens’s David Copperfield. Children know that “This hurts me more than it hurts you” is hypocrisy, and may react with an outrage that leads in later life to a hatred of all authority.
Righteous anger has its uses. Most far-right behavior of the trigger-the-libs variety these days is an attempt to break through the liberal façade of cool, tolerant high-mindedness. It is a power game: the reactionaries want to make the liberals angry because liberal anger is just helpless hand-wringing, prevented by its own principles from lashing back. That is not always true, however. There are true populist uprisings in the cause of social justice, and they are usually kindled, not by philosophical principles but when people have simply been pushed too far. The primary example of this in Western history is the French Revolution, in which the Rights of Man were a bridle that could not begin to control a maddened and rampaging horse. Such outbreaks are rarely productive in the long run, and usually run a tragic course, often ending in a crackdown more vicious than the original tyranny. But they are a warning. Carlyle’s terrifying descriptions in The French Revolution of rioting mobs driven to nihilistic frenzy made a deep impression on Dickens, who wrote A Tale of Two Cities to impress upon England that “it could happen here.”
The Old Testament prophets never tired of warning that someday there will be a reckoning, the “day of the lord.” The most famous imagery of that reckoning occurs in Isaiah 63, of an angry God trampling people like grapes in a winepress: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my raiment” (AV 63:3). It is from here that the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe derived the lyrics of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored….
Not “Well, we should try to understand how they feel.” Instead:
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel: “As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”
And in turn it was from Howe’s lyrics that John Steinbeck’s novel about the abused and downtrodden Okies takes its title.
I am not beyond anger and know that I never will be. People are supposed to mellow in old age, but in fact I seem to be getting angrier, although to me it seems that there is simply more to be angry about. “Old age should burn and rave at close of day,” says Dylan Thomas, and it is clear that I am in no danger of going gentle into that good night. I thought I was a melancholic, but perhaps in the end it will turn out that I have always been a choleric. The anger is not personal—I have no particular right to complain on my own account. While I have my petty irritations when things do not go my way, that is inconsequential, though the people who have had to live with me may disagree. Rather, I am furious at the unspeakable suffering of good and innocent people in this world. I am angry at the human instruments who perpetrate that suffering, especially those who self-righteously rationalize it by saying that those who suffer deserve it. For the first time in my life I can understand what drove Dante to write the Inferno, even if Dante’s moral categories don’t always make sense: why is gluttony worthy of eternal damnation for instance? The answer seems to be only because the scheme of the Seven Deadly Sins was devised by the ascetic desert fathers, not because gluttons ever harmed anyone—except maybe themselves, by dying of cholesterol. But I share Dante’s anger against the selfish, malicious people in this world. It is supposed to be an immature attitude, but I am unapologetic. So was Isaiah, not to mention Isaiah’s God. The superhero films usually do not handle this attitude honestly. The supervillain outraged by the inhumanity of the human race invariably tries to enact some scheme of revenge that would kill many innocent people, and that is supposed to prove that anger never pays.
But the evil people in the world are instruments of a power that stands behind them, for ultimately evil is not personal but systemic, and our deepest anger should be reserved for the creator of the system. Yes, that means God, or at least the common conception of God. I am not angry at God because he punishes the evildoers but because he torments the innocent, or allows them to be tormented. His apologists claim this is part of a long-range plan, but no one knows what it is. In Words with Power, Northrop Frye calls this revolt against the divine order itself by the name of Titanism, and the greatest of the Titans was Prometheus, who, like Christ, was crucified for aiding the human race, defying rather than obeying the king of the gods. Melville’s Ahab understands that the white whale who bit off his leg is but a mask for a higher power, a malevolent and sadistic power whose “right worship is defiance,” as he says. “Strike through the mask,” he counsels, but thereby makes himself into one of the supervillains, for Moby Dick is merely an animal trying to survive, lashing back at someone who is trying to kill him. Christians say that the evil figure who is lord of this world is Satan, not God, but God has made a bet with Satan—it says so in the Book of Job—and allows Satan to create and rule the System and all the human minions that run the System, the system that includes the death camps, that includes the power-mad politicians, that includes the greedy rich people and financiers, that allows children to be abused and people to die of cancer because they cannot afford treatment. Bet or no bet, it is God who allows all this to happen, and there is no good trying to pawn the responsibility off on demonic evil or human free will. If demons and bad people cause the innocent suffering, nevertheless God allows it to continue. God says to Job, well, you’re too miniscule to understand my ways. When I was a teenager, pushed too far, I said to hell with that kind of God, and I have not changed my opinion.
In the Expanding Eyes podcast I am presently finishing a discussion of Milton’s tragic drama Samson Agonistes. There is a great gospel blues song about Samson. The original version is by Blind Willie Johnson, a later, expanded version by the Rev. Gary Davis. I first heard Peter, Paul, and Mary’s version of it when I was thirteen. Maybe it marked me somehow, especially because I was growing up in the revolutionary 60’s:
If I had my way If I had my way If I had my way in this wicked world If I had my way I would tear this building down.
As for the power that erected the building, or at least commissioned the architect, he cannot be fought directly, for he is too powerful. No Ahab or Achilles can touch him. In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s recreation of the myth, Prometheus deposes Jupiter not by defying him but by recalling his curse against him. The only weapon we have against the System’s creator is the imagination, for he cannot be defeated, only reimagined. Reimagined as what? As a human being nailed in agony to two pieces of wood. Say what you will of Christianity, what other religion had the audacity to take as its central symbol an image of innocent suffering, rather than the high and mighty power that decreed that suffering? If there is a God who is more than a blustering Wizard of Oz, it has to be a God who is a power, wisdom, and love lying within suffering humanity, suffering with it, trying to break free, to resurrect. If it could do so, it would become a spiritual form that is both God and man. Another name for such a God is the imagination.
One of the great, overlooked poems of the 20th century is “The Truant,” by Canadian poet E.J. Pratt, written in the dark hours of World War II ("The Truant"). Northrop Frye calls it the greatest Canadian poem. In his introduction to Pratt’s collected poems, Frye says,
“The Truant” presents us with the figure of a “Great Panjandrum,” a prince of the power of the air, who talks as though he were God, who obviously thinks he is God, but who is no more God than Blake’s Urizen, Shelley’s Jupiter, Byron’s Arimanes, or Hardy’s President of the Immortals….What he has to accuse man of is his mortality. As far as we can see, everything man does, however heroic, vanishes and leaves not a wrack behind.
But the “genus homo” figure on trial before the Panjandrum taunts him by saying that the tyrant totally lacks one power: the power to create—and recreate—reality by naming it:
“Your ignorance so thick, You did not know your own arithmetic. We flung the graphs about your flying feet…. Before we came You had no name. You did not know direction or your pace.
What are the limits of this power? Can it possibly prevail against death? Yeats says, “Man knows death to the bone. / Man has created death.” Death is a fact, but what of resurrection, which is not the reanimation of a corpse but a re-imagination of both self and reality? To the Panjandrum’s accusation that death is final and any belief to the contrary mere wish-fulfilment, the “genus homo” replies, in the angry, unforgettable last line of the poem:
“No! by the Rood, we will not join your ballet.”
This angry defiance is the only faith I have, the only faith I feel I understand, as I rage against the dying of the light.
References
Dante, Dante: The Divine Comedy, vol. 1, Inferno. Translated by Mark Musa. Penguin Classics, 1984.
Homer, The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1990.
Pratt, E.J. “The Truant.” The Collected Poems of E.J. Pratt, 2nd Edition. Edited by Northrop Frye. Macmillan of Canada, 1962. 100-05.