Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (4)

 THE MAIN REASON I picked this up was to see how Jameson worked with more historical, more canonical writers—I think of him as a critic focused on the 20th and 21st centuries, and I don’t think I had til now read him on anybody who dated earlier than Balzac. So chapters 6, 7, and 8 on Spenser, Dante, and Goethe I read with particular interest.

    As with the chapter on Hamlet, I was impressed and a little in awe of how well Jameson knows this terrain. Taste this from the first paragraph of the Spenser chapter:

The two great traditions of medieval literature had both emerged in the twelfth century; on the one hand, in a mystico-erotic lyric that culminates in Dante’s unique epic; the second, in the more properly narrative “romans” of the epoch’s greatest “novelist,” Chrétien de Troyes. Intricate legends are spun from this last, which are dutifully developed for centuries (and fine true literary achievement in Italian “epic”) until they sink under their own weight in Spenser’s megallegory, thereafter only fitly remembered by the Romantics in Novalis […] and Wagner’s Parsifal (to which I suppose we need to add Tolkien and the effervescence of contemporary commercial fantasy literature).

God help me, does that not sound like Harold Bloom? The bravura sweep over centuries of Western Lit, the confidence about what counts as “true literary achievement,” the authoritative summing up? This sentence started me wondering: could Jameson do a Bloom, or something like Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve or Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, get a contract with Penguin and write one of those books that gets embraced by the Intelligent General Reader? I mean…why not? He has the prestige, he’s read everything, he can, as this passage shows, go big.

      Then again—near the beginning of the next chapter, on Dante, Jameson decides he has to clear some ground to talk about Dante and allegory by addressing Erich Auerbach’s famous argument that Dante found a way forward from the stiff symbolism of medieval literature, breaking out of allegory into a precursor of realism. Jameson writes:

At any rate, what I want to argue in the following pages is that Auerbach’s figura is a mediatory concept rather than a structural one, and this authority is not to be invoked against the revivals of allegory such as this one unless it is restaged in a contemporary semiotic arena in which questions of meaning and reference are measured against the philosophical problems of immanence and of representation in general.

Whew. Jameson’s gotta be Jameson, I guess. Penguin will have to keep looking for the next crossover literary critic. In that contemporary semiotic arena, the Intelligent General Reader would just be a Christian to Jameson’s lion.

Nonetheless, all three chapters are loaded with startlingly fresh ideas about these canonical figures. When Jameson talks about “Goethe’s Nietzschean side, the discovery of the life-giving powers of strong forgetting as a way of consigning guilt, the past, one’s own crimes and failures, to oblivion” and then a page later connects this capacity “to capitalism itself,” I thought, damn, he’s right.

Looking for Funny 3: Nell Zink, _Nicotine_

 LIKE THE WALLCREEPER and Mislaid, Nicotine is not sweetness and light, but it is funny. Our main character, Penny Baker, is the daughter of a celebrated anthropologist who adopted, in a way, then eventually married a young orphaned girl from a South American tribe he was studying. When her father dies, this dodgy situation reveals whole new and possibly even dodgier angles, so Penny decides she needs to get away for a while.

One of the questions that has come up after her father dies intestate is what to do with his childhood home, which the family still owns. Checking out the house, Penny discovers it is inhabited by a colorful group of squatters, who have named their community “Nicotine,” since they are all tobacco users.

Penny’s relationships with the community and certain of its members deepen intricately over the course of the novel, especially once her unscrupulous shark of an older half-brother conceives of a grand gentrification project around the house and becomes erotically obsessed with one of the members of Nicotine.

Does it all work out? I would say so. But the novel’s main treat is Nicotine. The only other novel I have read set among squatters is Paul Auster’s Sunset Park, and this one had a livelier representation of the world and culture—funnier, too, but also a shade more vraisemblable, perhaps.

Leslie Jamison, _Make It Scream, Make It Burn_

 THE EMPATHY EXAMS is a hard to act to follow, but I liked this one just as much. 

As with the earlier collection's essay on people who suffer (or believe they do) from Morgellons Disease, the first part of Make It Scream, Make It Burn gives us some intimate, empathetic glimpses at communities that share an unusual but powerful bond: "52 Blue" (about people fascinated by a particular whale), "We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live Again" (about parents convinced their son is the reincarnation of a WW II fighter pilot), "Sim Life" (about the online activity Second Life). 

As with the earlier collection's deeply affecting personal pieces ("The Empathy Exams," "Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain"), the newer book's concluding section has deeply poignant essays on Jamison's relationships with her husband and daughter (although she and her husband divorced last year, I learn from Wikipedia).

Make It Scream, Make It Burn sagged a bit in the middle for me, though, in the extended pieces on James Agee and Annie Appel. The question of how a writer or photographer or any other artist might document the lives of people in much more straitened circumstances than they are in themselves is an interesting one--how does one manage a humane impulse, maybe even a moral imperative, that is so streaked with potential for callousness and exploitation? I'm not sure Jamison had anything particularly illuminating to offer on this question, though.

On the whole, though, there's enough here to keep Jamison in the front rank of American essayists under 40, I would say. 

Ange Mlinko and Adrienne Rich

 QUITE A WHILE BACK--February 2013, going by the print edition date--Ange Mlinko published in The Nation a review of Adrienne Rich's final collection (Rich had died the previous March) and suggested that Rich's standing among younger poets had fallen and was likely to fall further.

JANUARY 30, 2013

Diagram This: On Adrienne Rich

A new collection of Adrienne Rich’s poems does not show her at her best.

ANGE MLINKO

It seemed to me that Mlinko was right (see Loads of Learned Lumber for 3/16/2013), so I was struck by Mlinko beginning a recent review in London Review of Books of a new biography of Rich and a new edition of Of Woman Born by saying "Adrienne Rich's poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist [...] that's is astounding to realize they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago [...]".  The discourses of the Occupy, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter movements are all close to Rich's wavelength, Mlinko notes. "Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from," she writes.

This got my attention. Has Mlinko changed her mind about Adrienne Rich?

The word "argot" made me suspect that Mlinko had not really changed her mind. Rich may have been right on any number of issues, but she was better at being right than she was at making poems--at least I think that is where Mlinko is coming down. "But one doesn't doesn't read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort--unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal," Mlinko writes.

It has long seemed to me that Rich is a good poet for people who do not otherwise like poetry much. If you do like poetry, her poems do not provide the kind of pleasures you have come to expect. They do take up important topics, though, and take a forward-leaning progressive stance. It did not seem to me or (I guess) Ange Mlinko in 2013 that those choices boded well for Rich's future reputation, but at this point, her reputation may be doing fine.

Alice Quinn, ed., _Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America's Poets Respond to the Pandemic_

THIS MAKES SEVEN posts on seven poetry collections in seven days, and yes, I am feeling a little pleased with myself.

Here we have 100+ poems, seemingly mainly from spring 2020, doing basically what the volume's subtitle indicates. 

A lot of really good poems from some really good poets here, but the book has mainly served to remind me of the relief I felt when Alice Quinn stepped down as New Yorker poetry editor.

Given the stylistic spectrum of American poetry, the anthology occupies a rather narrow range, one familiar to anyone who read the poetry in the New Yorker during the Quinn era. These are well-educated, well-behaved poems, mainly in conversational syntax, bundles of ingenuity in the figurative language but rhythmically subdued, quite a few loosely-handled closed forms, lots of poems ending with a little fwip like a Tupperware container for which the right lid has been found.

It's not that I cannot or do not enjoy that sort of thing--but when ninety out of a hundred poems in an anthology are all executing the same set of compulsory exercises (so to speak), they start to blur into each other. I was grateful for the occasional Eileen Myles, Shane McCrae, or Claudia Rankine poem that changed things up a bit.

Not that some of the milder-mannered poems were not excellent. I really enjoyed Susan Kinsolving's "My Heart Cannot Accept It All," for instance. Hats off also to Joshua Bennet, Traci Brimhall, Erin Belieu, Aleksander Hemon, Ada Limón, Matthew Zapruder. 

But I found myself wishing Quinn had worked with a co-editor, Cole Swenson perhaps, Jericho Brown, someone who might have wandered farther off the path once in a while.

Bei Dao, _The Rose of Time: New and Selected Poems_, ed. Eliot Weinberger

 SINCE I OFTEN mention how much I admire James Joyce, I am occasionally asked whether I have read Finnegans Wake. I don’t know whether I have, actually. I looked at every word on every page in serial left-to-right, top-to-bottom order, which means I “read” the book in some narrow sense…but did I take it in, grasp it, comprehend it, have some flickering glimmer of what was being narrated? Well, no, not so much. So I have both read and not read Finnegans Wake.

I feel that I have also both read and not read The Rose of Time. Most of the time, I would read the poem’s three or four stanzas, read it again, and read it again, and still draw a blank.

this sky unexceptional at chess

watches the sea change color

a ladder goes deep into the mirror

fingers in a school for the blind

touch the extinction of birds

     (“Another”)

Bei Dao (pen name of Zhao Zhenkai) was one of a group of poets attacked by the state as “menglong,” sometimes translated “misty,” essentially meaning “obscure,” with dismissive connotation. Nonetheless, he was embraced by a broad readership in the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of generational spokesman figure. He was abroad  when Tiananmen Square happened and decided to stay abroad, but he remains widely read and revered in China.

All of which makes sense for me, I have to say, because Bob Dylan means a lot to me, and the Dylan songs that most affected me, that shaped my sensibility I would even say, are almost perfectly opaque. “Visions of Johanna” may be my favorite song; it seems to put its finger precisely on the spot. And yet do I have any idea why lines like “the back of the fish truck that loads while my conscience explodes” or “harmonicas play skeleton keys in the rain” seem so meaningful? I do not.

“Bei Dao” and “Bob Dylan” even have the same initials, in our writing system.

So I loved the book even though I did not understand much of it, since I could read “keyword my shadow /  hammers dreamworld iron / stepping to that rhythm / a lone wolf walks into” and imagine thousands in China thinking, “Damn, he nailed it again.”

 

Jane Wong, _Overpour_

 I COULD SAY this is a debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family…and that would be accurate…but it would fail to convey how remarkable this book is. 

When I say, “ debut poetry collection that reflects a second-generation youth and adolescence in an immigrant family,” do you think of a gothic hallucinatory trip streaked with black humor and populated with raccoons? Probably not. The book’s Amy Tan dimension is overshadowed by its Shirley-Jackson-on-mushrooms dimension.

It may just be due to the Action Books connection, but I sometimes thought of Lara Glenum, or early Ariana Reines.

The book’s most audacious gesture, I’d say, are the five poems, interspersed throughout the volume, in the voice of the poet’s mother at different ages (24, 30, 29, 43, 25). Amy Tan channeling Plath? 

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, _Lies_

 TWENTY-NINE OF Ní Ghríofa’s Irish poems, translated by herself. The poems have been selected from three different collections of her Irish poetry, and I wish someone had thought to add a note on which poems came from which collections, but oh, well.

Almost all of the poetry translated from Irish I have read was written centuries ago, so it is a bit of a kick just to see Irish language poems that mention selfies (féin-phic) or dishwashers (miasniteoir). But even the poems furnished with contemporary details tend to have lines with  a whiff of the traditional about them, like “My shoulders were those of a stranger” (“Dos Conejos”) or this from “Cusp of Autumn”:

The beech tree watching from above

forgets herself and drops a handful 

of leaves—golden, green—

sending them scattering into the stream.

Or “When I open / my mouth, my tongue flies away” from the opening poem, “First Date on Azul Street”.

 How did the rest of that first date go, I wonder? That is actually the reason I wish I knew which poem came from which collection. Some hearken back to flaming youth (“rave,” “Tattoo Removal”), others speak of pregnancy and motherhood. I imagine Ní Ghríofa had these phases in the usual sequence, but who knows?

I recently picked up her prose book, A Ghost in the Throat, but I’m glad I read this first. Curious about her English language poetry, too—how different is it from her Irish-into-English poetry?

John Murillo, _Up Jump the Boogie_

 I WAS SO taken with Murillo’s “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Gunfire,” a sonnet sequence that appeared in Best American Poetry 2020, that I went online to look for his books. All I could find at the moment was this—since it was published in 2020, I figured it had to include the sequence. Turns out, though, this is a 2020 reprint of his first book, published in 2009. No harm done, though—this book turned out to be brilliant. 

As in the sonnet sequence that pulled me in, Up Jump the Boogie combines deft handling of traditional forms—this book has three sestinas, and a refashioning of Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”—with you-can-almost-taste-it evocations of the streets where and the culture in which Murillo grew up: Eazy E, George Clinton, the Leonard-Durán fight, kung fu movies, basketball on cement courts with chain-link nets. The perfect example of the book’s unique blend: a ghazal titled “Hustle.”

Up Jump the Boogie has a sequence of its own, “Flowers for Etheridge,” a tribute to a poetic father, Etheridge Knight, that includes parallel tributes to Murillo’s mentor, Larry Levis, to Levis’s tutelary figure John Keats, and to Murillo’s literal father. The whole sequence demonstrates what you sense throughout the book, that Murillo has mastered the tradition without being assimilated by it.

By the way, “Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” is in Murillo’s actual most recent book, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, which I ordered before I even finished this one.

Bernadette Mayer, _Midwinter Day_

CAN SHE REALLY, as is said, have written this in a day? I can just barely imagine writing a 120-page poem on a day on which one had absolutely nothing else to do, but on a day on which one was minding two children, one in diapers, running to the post office, making the coffee, getting food on the table, and so on?

I have no idea how she did it, but somehow she did, creating a high-water mark for the art of making literature out of the dailiness of the day, 56 years after the grandparent of them all, Ulysses, and 41 years before a subsequent high-water mark, Lucy Ellmann's Ducks, Newburyport. (Let's throw in Knausgaard for good measure).

As with Joyce, Ellmann, and Knausgaard, memory provides an important dimension. Whatever is occurring in the moment occurs in the context of remembering, the here and now resonating with the there and then--a there and then that in Mayer's case intersects with a notable place and time in American poetry once you realize that the Ted, Alice, Clark, and Joe whose names keep popping up are surnamed Berrigan, Notley, Coolidge, and Brainard. The dimension of time turns routine into a universe.

I can't imagine anyone getting as far as Part Two and not falling in love with this book. 

Jana Prikryl, _No Matter_

 THIS IS SO unlike The After Party that I would not have guessed it was by the same writer. It’s not better, not worse, but definitely different.

The After Party was cosmopolitan, with poems set in many different places; apart from a couple or so poems set in Dublin, No Matter sticks closely to New York City. The After Party ranged widely through history, but the poems in No Matter more often describe someone or something the poet seemed to have seen that day. 

The After Party foregrounded erudition and technique, poems about reading Barthes, ekphrastic poems, an ambitious long closing poem. There is a lot of craft in No Matter What, if you look closely, but on first impression the poems often have the quick-take immediacy of O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. 

Nor is there anything in The After Party quite like the tart elegy for Robert Silvers, “Bob”:

Listen, he would start

when driven once again

to issue a rebuke,

listen, I’d stiffen,

listen—

First book though it was, The After Party seemed so much the end of a long line of development, so matured a voice, that I was thinking of it as one of those debut volumes in which a poet seems to have already achieved their distinctive style, like Stevens’s Harmonium or Moore’s Observations. But she had another voice up her sleeve the whole time. What next? 

Fredric Jameson, _Allegory and Ideology_ (3)

 CHAPTERS 4 AND 5 were a long haul--98 pages--and wandered off into the weeds a bit, I thought.

Chapter 4 switches things up, as it is devoted Mahler's 6th Symphony. But since allegories (as we usually think of them) are pictorial or narrative, can music, neither pictorial nor narrative, be allegorical? Jameson spends a fair amount of space on this before actually getting to Mahler. The answer--if I followed the argument correctly--is that narratives occur in time, that what we are hearing now we put into relationship with what we have heard so far and with what we will hear a little later, and that music also occurs in time, that what we are hearing now we put into relationship with what we have heard so far and with what we will hear a little later, so there is "narrative" in music even when it is not strictly speaking programmatic. Fair enough. 

So the allegories within the narrative of Mahler's Sixth have to do with its looking back to the European art music tradition but also looking ahead to modernism ("the end of sonata form and of tonality"), with the story of the Mahlers' marriage, and with the coming of the crisis of the First World War. All of which sounds persuasive to me. All art aspires to the condition of allegory, I suppose.

Chapter 5 reprints an article Jameson published in 1986 and adds a detailed commentary. The article, which appeared in Social Text, argues that in many Third World texts the main character allegorically represents the situation of the nation, as a kind of Everyman; key examples are Lu Xun's Tale of Ah Q and Ousmane Sembène's Xala. 

We don't say "Third World" these days--it was a way of referring to those places on the earth that were neither the USA and its close allies (First World) nor the Soviet Union and its close allies (Second World), i.e., most of the globe.

The commentary responds to a variety of the critiques the article received over the next several years (there were quite a few), but for me the most interesting development was Jameson using the figure of "multidimensional chess" to describe how levels of allegory co-exist. In multi-dimensional chess, "a number of distinct chessboards coexist simultaneously with distinct configurations of forces on each, so that a move on any one of these boards has distinct but unforeseeable consequences for the configuration and relative power-relations on the others" (191). So, we might say, the Lacanian reading is its own game, and the Marxist reading is also its own game, but they also affect each other with "distinct but unforeseeable consequences."

That's what I thought the point was, at least. He goes on to talk quite a bit about professional soccer, the outbreak of World War I, and contemporary China's foreign relations. 

Looking for Funny 2: Patricia Lockwood, _No One Is Talking about This_

 GIVEN THAT I laughed at some point in almost every page of Priestdaddy, Lockwood's new novel (her first) seemed a likely candidate to be funny, but the second half took a very serious (and moving) turn. 

Could we call this autofiction? Lockwood has become a go-to panelist and lecturer on the topic of social media and internet culture, and the first person narrator of No One Is Talking about This likewise gets invited all over the world to talk about social media, thanks to her question "Can a dog be twins?" going viral. The first half of the book is in the whipcrack, quick-take style of Lockwood's essay on social media, "The Communal Mind" (London Review of Books, 21 Feb. 2019), and is often hilarious. The narrator's husband and parents feel very continuous with the husband and parents of Priestdaddy. In short, even though Priestdaddy is a memoir and this new one a novel, the novel feels like a sequel.

The autofiction question emerges more sharply in the second half, as the narrator's niece is born with Proteus Syndrome (which may be what Joseph Merrick, "the Elephant Man," had) and dies having lived just a bit longer than six months. Not many laughs here. Delight, joy, wonder, and gratitude all surface, as well as grief and sorrow, but you wouldn't call it funny...you might well call it extraordinarily moving and heartbreakingly real, though. 

And it turns out that Lockwood's own sister did have a daughter with Proteus Syndrome, so the portrait of a family in these circumstances is intimate, close to the bone. In that respect, it put me in mind of Miriam Toews's All My Puny Sorrows, another fiction based on a closely-observed. family tragedy.

No One Is Talking about This was not quite what I was expecting, then, but wound up exceeding my expectations. Another brilliant prose turn by Lockwood. I hope she hasn't abandoned poetry, though.

Christian Wiman, _Once in the West_

 HAVING ENJOYED WIMAN'S anthology Joy, I felt inspired to catch up on his own poetry. This is not his most recent collection, as he published one last year, but rather the successor to Every Riven Thing (see my post from August 12, 2014).

Once again we get dollops of Hopkins in the sound of the poems ("big-boned Joe Sloane shrivelcrippled / tight as tumbleweed") and in their sense (wonder streaked with anguish), but I suspect the crucial influence here is Dante. Once in the West strikes me as a miniature Divina Commedia.

Part One, "Sungone Noon," mainly recalls Wiman's childhood and youth in west Texas, but feels more infernal than Wordsworthian, heat-blasted, desperate, scoured of anything that feels like meaning or hope.

Part Two, "My Stop is Grand," is a little like Purgatory--mainly work and moving in seemingly endless circles, but with little explosions of grace punctuating the grayness, like the "grace of sparks" seen on the Chicago El train in the poem that lends its title to the section, mentioned again in the section's concluding "Poem for Edward Thomas."

So Part Three, "More Like the Stars," should be paradise, but paradisos are not easy to pull off my friends...not easy at all. The title certainly points towards Paradiso--"stelle," "stars," is the final word of all three parts of The Divine Comedy. But what we get as the conclusion to Wiman's small-scale Divine Comedy is an even smaller scale Divine Comedy, a three-part poem. It begins in a hospital (a good stand-in for hell, I think), proceeds through the faith-under-strain section that opens with the lines "What rest in faith / wrested / from grief," then concludes with Wiman at Shedd Aquarium with his family, which actually makes a convincing heaven.

I ordered the new collection, Survival Is a Style, and hope to get to it sooner than six years from now.

Julian Barnes, _The Only Story_

 STRUCTURALLY, A DEAD ringer for Barnes’s previous novel, The Sense of an Ending. The narrator in old age recalls decisions and actions of his youth that seemed sufficiently justified at the time, even righteous, but that look shockingly and shamefully different in the light of later experience and information.

Paul, 19, enters a mixed doubles tournament at the tennis club his parents belong to. He is randomly paired with Mrs. Susan Macleod, 29 years his senior. They fall in love. Paul’s parents are horrified, as are Susan’s three adult daughters and of course Mr. Macleod, who it turns out is alcoholic and abusive. With the world against them, they bet their lives on love and run off to London to live together.

And live happily ever after.

Ha!

No, in fact, they enter a doom spiral not long after moving to London. Things end badly. Very badly.

Barnes pulls off a remarkable trick with pronouns. In Part One, the falling-in-love part, Paul naturally refers to himself in the first person, “I” and “me.” In Part Two, set in London, he drifts into referring to himself in the second person,, “you,” as one does when trying to present one’s own perhaps questionable behavior as what any normal person might do, e.g., “It’s like when you lose that month’s rent money at poker,” or, to quote from the novel, “You don’t, at bottom, think of alcoholism as a physical disease. You might have heard that it is, but you aren’t really convinced.”

And then, in Part Three, the grim aftermath, Paul becomes “he”: “But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.” 

Yet this catastrophe remains the one time in Paul’s life that he was unmistakably in love. Does that redeem  his story? Is it better to have loved and gone down in a flaming doom spiral than never to have loved at all? The novel doesn’t answer that question, but it’s a good question. And this is another final novel from the best English novelist of his generation.

John Ferling, _Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800_

THIS HAD BEEN sitting on my shelf for few years (published 2004) before I decided to read it, along about May, mainly wondering whether the 2020 presidential election was truly the bitterest, most contested, most vicious in U. S. history, or just seemed that way. Having read this book, I'm thinking, yes, it may have been. But at least we were spared having the election thrown into the House of Representatives.

1800 was the fourth presidential election under the new (as of 1787) Constitution, and the first seriously contested one. Incumbent John Adams, of the Federalist Party, had had a bumpy first term, thanks to conflict with France (having its own bumpy days under the Directoire, then Napoleon after the 18th Brumaire). Thomas Jefferson, of the Republican Party (or Democrat-Republicans), wanted peace with France, an expanded electorate, protection of the Bill of Rights (the Adams administration had brought in the infamous Alien & Sedition Acts), and dismantling of the national financing created by Alexander Hamilton.

Both parties saw themselves as inheritors and defenders of the sacred principles of the Revolution, and thought the republic would be doomed if the other party won. So feelings were high, occasionally violent. Very like 2020.

On the other hand, both Adams and Jefferson were actual statesmen who had contributed significantly to the creation of the state, and both were capable of governing. No Trump-esque charlatans in this election.

Jefferson won, as you know, which could be seen as a victory for the progress of democracy, except that his edge in electoral votes was due to three-fifths of the enslaved populations in the southern states counting towards the size of their Congressional delegation. Adams was anti-slavery, at least.

As in 2020, there were stirrings among the defeated, looking for ways to flip the results--nothing came of them. There was nonetheless another dramatic episode. Due to the peculiarities of how the Electoral College worked in those days, Jefferson's main rival in the House election was his own running mate, Aaron Burr. Burr was more appealing than Jefferson to a lot of Federalist Congressmen, and he was advancing himself as a compromise candidate. Hamilton (who had a lot of clout with the Federalists) hated Burr even worse than he hated Jefferson, though, and used his influence against him. Burr wound up as vice-president, but one even more sidelined than usual.

Adams skipped Jefferson's inauguration, becoming the first of the three (so far) presidents who have chosen not to be present for their successor's inaugural. Adams's son John Quincy Adams, who absented himself from Andrew Jackson's inaugural, was the second, and DJT the third.

So...tumultuous, yes--bitter, violent, ugly--but 2020 may be the champ. Unless 1860 was...2020 has not led to a civil war. Yet.