In Mass tonight, I was struck by something in the homily. It was nothing new, really. The deacon was mentioning a common theme of our pastor's--that everyone around us has their own crosses to bear. He went so far as to catalogue possible misfortunes or causes for suffering that one or another person there might have had to bear, or might currently be bearing. This strategy has a mixed effect on me. On the one hand, I recognize its truth, on the other hand, I find the suppositions--the anonymous attributions--to separate me further from the people around me rather than bringing me closer, simply because of the emphasis placed on the unknowability. It ends up registering a little bit existential.
But at one point, the deacon paused and said, "What people have a hard time with . . . . is that," and he turned to the large, centrally placed, intricately carved wooden crucifix that I have always considered a little too evocative, or graphic, or whatever, with its drawn face and jutting ribs. 'Lest it sound like his words and gesture bordered on irreverent, they were not. In fact, they were deeply reverent. When he continued, he elaborated his meaning: that people are puzzled by the role of suffering in redemption. The reference was to Peter's shocked denial that any of the horrible things Jesus said would happen to him would, in fact, happen. We don't want to believe that those things will happen to someone we care about, look up to, someone who is so real and present to us. But they can and they do. He did not mention directly that people question why, but it was implicit: that question people ask about why God allows suffering. I admit that I was turning inward, thinking not about why God allows suffering, which never seemed a question worth asking, really. Suffering is a part of life. We know this. Why God would see fit to end suffering might be a more valid question, and often in the midst of creating my own suffering, I ask tentatively, gratefully, and perhaps fearfully why I am allowed to have the existence that I take for granted. It is perhaps because the deacon mentioned our occasional moments of clarity that I had what I consider to be a moment of clarity. It is difficult to know which thought came first. I believe it was the idea that in suffering, we realize the full strength of our human potential--that there is a spark of the divine in our nobility in the face of suffering. And I thought of the beauty of art that focuses on human suffering--how does beauty come out of suffering? Why does beauty come out of suffering? Perhaps because in bearing our suffering, we are approximating the beauty of the Redemption, which also came out of suffering. "About suffering, they were never wrong, the Old Masters. . ."
But the second thought involved the Garden of Eden. And it occurred to me that in the story of the Garden of Eden, Man and Woman are in an ideal, sinless state, we see that peace does not prevent the human traits of jealousy and greed from emerging. Rather, in that ideal state we find a breeding-ground for competitive impulses and jealousy of God--it only required a seed. It may be a problematic conclusion, but human nature, once corrupted by the suggestion, could only descend into ignobility in that idyllic state. I do not mean that the idyllic state produced the greed and jealousy, only that in peace there was nothing to prevent the corrupting suggestion from inspiring rebellious thoughts and defiant actions. After the first disobedience, suffering entered the world. The story gives a basis for understanding the presence of suffering--and why God allows suffering to persist. Suffering, by this account, seems so intrinsic to the human condition--such a direct result of our natures--that it seems pointless to question it. However, if suffering is intrinsic to the human condition, so is the bearing of suffering with nobility one of the most admirable human traits. It is in adversity that we see what a person "is made of," as the saying goes. And in this, we tap into the Redemption through suffering, that suffering that leads to Redemption. And I suppose this is what is meant by "taking up the cross."
I have posted this on my Booknotes blog, first because it was too large a thought to commit to the obscurity of memory, and second because it relates back to The Power and the Glory, which all Catholic thoughts about suffering seem to do. I couldn't help thinking about the suffering of the priest in that novel, much of it self-inflicted, and I struggled to think of a setting or scene in which he is allowed relative peace, and relieved of suffering. I thought fairly quickly, though not at first, of the house/estate/town of Mr. Lehr, a protestant, who is kind, polite and tolerant of the religion that he does not understand. I thought of the routine quality of the priest's dealing with the people there--his dealings admit no empathy with the people, and he almost forgets his own pain in the comfort and the promise of peace. And he slips back into the wheedling to make certain the people are paying enough for their sacraments--in short, in peace, all that made his character ignoble, traits buried for most of the novel, resurfaces. Were he to die in this place, there would be no question of his being a saint. However, he does not die there. Rather, he is made by pity and by duty, and by the virtues bestowed by his office, to return into danger, to administer last rites to a dying criminal who would surely be damned without him, and it is in the pull of his sacramental duty--and the accompanying suffering--that he begins to appear noble to the reader. In Eden, we are pulled toward greed and jealousy; in suffering we are noble, and are redeemed.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Friday, August 21, 2009
Meaningful quote from a Facebook friend
"You arrive at enough certainty to be able to make your way, but it is making it in darkness. Don’t expect faith to clear things up for you. [Faith] is trust, not certainty." - Flannery O’ Connor
It seems related to my sacramental fiction ideas, mainly because of the reference to darkness.
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Triangulation, Participation, Sacramental Fiction
My reading took a more recreational turn as I tore through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to refresh my memory before the movie comes out later this month. I was struck by some distinct similarities to The Lord of the Rings, although I had been thinking that the books became less derivative as the series progressed. . . Mainly, the Inferii in the lake reminded me of the dead marshes, the link between Dumbledore and light and fire was conspicuous, and the last chapter, "The White Tomb" seemed reminiscent of a certain "white tower" and "white tree." I was a bit bothered, this read, by the seats all clustered around the "white table" on which Dumbledore's body was to be lain--it reminded me uncomfortably of an altar--and by Harry's being splattered with "water and blood" from his unintentional (almost) attack on Malfoy. Those scenes reminded me of certain charges of anti-Catholicism, though I wouldn't be prepared to go that far. I might attribute those examples to a misjudged appropriation of Christian imagery instead.
At the end of the book, I was struck by the blatant message of happiness and normalcy in the midst of fear and darkness, as well as the reminder that we should continually fight evil although there is no final defeat of evil--both themes of Lord of the Rings, rather more artfully communicated by Tolkien. The similarities led to the contrast--that Rowling seems much less trusting of her reader, and seeks to directly point to the meaning behind the events rather than letting readers ruminate on it. The only things we are left to speculate about are characters--specifics about the wizards and their world rather than the meanings communicated. Basically, when reading Harry Potter, one gets caught up in the characters and their world, the plot, the fantasy that is ordinary wizarding life. One does not get caught up in the great ideas, however many Rowling may have tried to sprinkle throughout the books. Contemplating big ideas--such as the nature of good and evil, and whether we are good or evil according to nature or according to the choices we make, for example--often leads to dead ends or uncomfortable conclusions in the Harry Potter books.
These dead ends stand in marked contrast to the other works I have been reading, notably the Graham Greene. His works are pointedly open--they create openings in theological questions to invite consideration of the nature of God and humanity, God's forgiveness and human frailty, understanding, and misunderstanding. I am rather obsessed with this idea of "opening up space" for contemplation of ideas, or for experience of spiritual crisis before renewal or despair. And this has a lot to do with the reader--the relationship that the author fosters between the reader, the work, and the subject matter of the work, in addition to how the author wishes the reader to act on the ideas transmitted by the work.
In an off-blog (on Facebook) follow-up discussion to my last Graham Greene post, Melanie (of the Wine Dark Sea blog) helped me toward a further development of this "Sacramental fiction" concept that I'm working through right now. Thinking about my analogy between the saint's "dark night of the soul" and the author's exploration of spiritual crisis, Melanie remarked that "the difference between the saint and the poet, I suppose is that the saint never despairs but even in the darkness is certain that there is light and grace. While the poet can get stuck in the dark and grace is more oblique." (Thank you, Melanie!!) This points in part to the nature of the different writers/personalities involved--the saint is heaven-bound, while the author is mucking around in this (human, secular) world. As one who has always enjoyed mucking around in the darkness--Existentialism, Symbolism, Decadence, Modernism--I couldn't help thinking about what it is in the darkness that I find so enlightening. As I remarked to Melanie, I think the interesting thing about getting stuck in the dark is that the reader has to search for the light and really contribute to making meaning by thinking his/her way through the darkness. Now, this is not true of all of the movements I mentioned--indeed, with Symbolism and Decadence, the whole point is to revel in the darkness and mock the light (been there, done that, grew up. . .) But thinking about the type of fiction (and poetry) I mentioned in my previous post, the kind that I find typified in Greene, T. S. Eliot, Tolkien, Auden, and Joyce, I'm led to think that the spiritual crisis--the darkness represented by authors who nevertheless leave some room for hope--is that the open-endedness of the fiction as well as the presentation of ideas about the nature of God and human nature make for a participatory model of fiction. And for a while, that's as far as I had gone with this idea.
For me, bringing the reader into the equation rather smacks of Reader Response Theory, which falls under the category of critical methodologies to avoid, since Reader Response Theory rather serves to deconstruct any idea of fixed meaning in a text, and I don't go there. Ever. Reader Response Theory is also rather a nightmare theory when considered from a teaching perspective since it rather feeds into students' assumptions that "anything goes" in terms of interpretation of texts. I spent the better part of the fall semester in a futile attempt to shake 33 or so education majors out of the assumption that literature is about the reader's impressions. I rather worry that a "participatory" mode of fiction might imply that the reader's participation in the meaning of the text creates the meaning itself, rendering meaning subjective. On the other hand, a well-articulated theory of "participatory" fiction might serve to bring the concept of the reader to the forefront in a way that validates the reader's role in fiction while contradicting the more subjective notion.
I'm not really sure where along the lines I became enamored of the reader, but it must have happened in the course of my investigation of representations of literacy in fiction, which followed on the heels of my interest in narrative theory, which theorizes the "implied" and "actual" reader. The implied reader is a textual construct; the real/actual reader can not be categorized, as the audience of a work of literature is shifting and unpredictable. Studying literacy theory, the literate individual (or, more often, the literate culture or society) is more often the subject than the piece of writing, and what I generally look for is the representation of the reader in the work of literature, to get an idea of what vision of "the reader" or "the literate individual" more generally is presented in the work of fiction. My overarching question is what theories about the uses of literacy do literary texts project? By extension, I might ask, what do we as readers learn about literacy from works of literature? -or- What are various consequences of reading and writing, according to literary texts from various time periods and authors? The goal, of course, is for the individual reader to better understand how reading operates on his/her own consciousness. Yeah, it's pretty much justification for being a bookworm and devoting one's life to studying literature.
So I find that my fascination with the reader has grown and expanded into different places, but still relates to the purpose of literature, and how literature acts on the consciousness of the individual. I think at root, that the acknowledgment that literature acts on the consciousness of the individual in abstract ways and concern with how it does so is very un-academic, at least in terms of literary study. At least, that is how I fear it will be perceived. I think my theories are very great-books-y, which I think is great, since I have always admired a great-books approach to liberal arts education, but that model is outdated and rejected by most universities these days. So much for that digression.
A few years ago now, I read the introduction to an anthology of contemporary Catholic poetry edited by a professor of mine. At the time, I was trying to understand, basically, various Catholic concepts related to the term "Sacrament." Not being raised Catholic, and having attended various Protestant churches, there was a lot for me to wrap my mind around! I had recently read Andrew Greeley's book The Catholic Imagination, the gist of which seems to have been, if you've been influenced by Catholicism culturally, you know about Catholicism indirectly--or all that you need to know. It was very much a divorcing of Catholic culture from the Catholic Church and the practice of the Catholic Faith, which is a common gesture in popular culture. But I think there must have been something theoretically interesting in the Greeley book, since it is linked in my mind to the anthology of poetry that I mentioned at the beginning of this meandering paragraph. If I'm remembering it correctly, the anthology's introduction discusses the idea that literature can be "sacramental," not "sacramental literature" as in "literature relating to the Sacraments," or literature used directly for prayer or lectio divina, but rather, literature that can act like a sacramental--a visible sign that reminds us of God and propels us toward Him. Again, not a very "academic" line of reasoning. But can it be?
I was reaching toward a concept of "Sacramental fiction" when I wrote my earlier Graham Greene post. But I want a theory that does not limit itself to Catholic authors writing determinedly Catholic works--such as Greene or Tolkien. Even in my previous discussion of Greene, I mention non-Catholic writers whom I feel participate in this mode of literature, and even Joyce, who was raised Catholic but repudiated it. Clearly, these are not writers who intend (bad, evil word for literary critics) to write Catholic literature. But can they nevertheless tap into something larger? A discourse, perhaps, on the nature of God that involves the reader directly? And if so, how do they do so?
So I turn from the abstract theorizing of audience, reader, and text, from the realm of theorizing the nature of literature that propels humanity toward God, to the very tangible realm of rhetorical theory, grounded in words and situations, about which I am presumed to know more than I actually do.
I think that the concepts I'm reaching toward--this authorial linking of audience with subject matter in a way that encourages "audience participation"--can be discussed in terms of "triangulation." This "triangulation" is a nautical metaphor used in rhetoric to describe authorial use of rhetorical appeals to align the reader's position with his/her own in relation to a subject of interest to both (Killingsworth, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric p. 3-4):
"The act of navigation . . . depends upon triangulation. Sailors navigate by the stars. The ship goes from launch to landing, but the direction is guided by the stars. Appeals go from author to audience but their success may well be determined by some association the author forms with a third entity, the metaphorical equivalent of the stars." (Killingsworth 3)
The importance of rhetorical theory, here, is that seeing the fictional work as a piece of rhetoric implies movement of author and audience from disparate positions to positions that are closer together--that is, there is the movement, not just of plot, but also of the reader, of whom the writer/text demands action. However, the plot is what inspires the movement in the case of fiction--makes the appeal to the reader, in rhetorical terms--and in the specific case that I'm considering, the spiritual crisis, the Dark Night of the Soul, is the appeal that the author makes to the reader, asking the reader to join in the journey to reach--somewhere else. In the case of the saint, the "somewhere else" would be God. For the character in the novel, the "somewhere else" might be death, despair, Salvation, but that is not where the author wants the audience/reader to go. Rather, the author wants the reader to enter into a deeper consideration of the questions that are raised by the action of the literary work.
The image of steering by the stars is very important in this construct. When the author is writing the work of fiction that will form the appeal to the reader, s/he navigates by a set of ideas or values--the "stars" in the navigation metaphor, or the "position of authority or value" in rhetorical terms (Killingsworth 3)--that leads to the destination. The vehicle by which the author steers is the plot itself. But considering the literary text is that vehicle (boat), and exists in different space for each reader than it does for the original author, it stands to reason that the geography in which the reader sails with the text as vehicle (to a destination analogous to--though not exactly the same as--that reached by the author) is different from the original geography--and so the stars that shine down on reader and text are different than those by which the author navigated. Here, rhetorical theory falters a bit, and Reader Response theory stands ready to pounce, because in fiction the appeals may be more oblique or ambiguous, metaphorical rather than literal, indirect rather than direct. And the geography in which the boat sails anew in the hands of each new reader--isn't that the collective experience of the reader that contributes to his/her subjective interpretation of the text?
Rhetoric assumes, at least in part, that the author and audience share some context, or works to foster that impression. Fiction does not assume a shared context, but asks the reader to enter into a setting and set of experiences on the author's terms. Not everything in the reader's experience can be left behind, of course, but more importantly, the reader does not necessarily bring with him/her the luggage that the trip requires. To stop mixing metaphors, the reader often starts from someplace completely different, and so the context from which the writer was working is lost. In a good work of literature, the author and reader do not need to share every context. The fact that the author has studied his Montaigne makes no difference to the reader, who may not catch every specific reference, but nevertheless gets the gist of the ideas involved. How specifically the reader is able to identify the author's context, however, is determined by the shared experience of author and reader. It's the difference between identifying the elves' lembas as "spiritually sustaining food" vs. "the Eucharist." All this goes to say that the extent to which literature is "Sacramental" depends on not only the stars by which the author steers, and the seaworthiness of the vehicle, but also on the geography from which the reader embarks, or, if you prefer, the luggage that accompanies him/her. The importance, then, is the ability of the work to propel the reader into consideration of common ideas--the nature of God, etc. The author starts the process--gets the reader to share a set of common questions (and that is the shared destination)--but the reader's geography determines in what direction the reader's questions tend, or even if s/he is interested in pursuing the questions.
The point, here, is that the reader is a participant. In a closed work of fiction, the author has wrapped plot and worldview in a neat package, and the reader is invited to accept the truth of what the work concludes--or not. I am thinking of the difference between the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. In a "closed" work, such as the former, there is no further action required of the reader other than to pick up the text and read, then to close the text and regard it as something experienced, perhaps, but a completed experience. It can be revisited, but it doesn't ask anything of the reader--the reader is not expected to act in any way in order to complete the reading process. It might be worth noting that my two "closed" examples--Narnia and Potter--were written explicitly for child audiences.
Here, I want to give a very different example--that of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star." Clarke's story of a Jesuit priest and scientist who travels with an expedition to a distant planet only to discover that the civilization that inhabited the planet was annihilated by the very star that illuminated the path for the magi to find Christ invites theological questioning. Indeed, only extreme intellectual laziness stands as an excuse for not turning the matter over in one's mind: What kind of God would allow such an event? The question implies criticism. According to Clarke's worldview, it should imply criticism and questioning--of God. But the very presence of a Jesuit priest begs the question--is the only possible conclusion the inhumanity of God? The reader is invited to contribute to the meaning of the story, but if the reader is starting from a position of faith rather than atheism or agnosticism, that faith may be able to reconcile the speculative scenario presented in the story. The point is not so much the conclusion reached, but the common questioning--that the reader participates in the meaning of the story--extends that meaning past the boundaries of the story--and moves toward some greater understanding of God (or the nature of the universe, if you prefer).
At the end of the book, I was struck by the blatant message of happiness and normalcy in the midst of fear and darkness, as well as the reminder that we should continually fight evil although there is no final defeat of evil--both themes of Lord of the Rings, rather more artfully communicated by Tolkien. The similarities led to the contrast--that Rowling seems much less trusting of her reader, and seeks to directly point to the meaning behind the events rather than letting readers ruminate on it. The only things we are left to speculate about are characters--specifics about the wizards and their world rather than the meanings communicated. Basically, when reading Harry Potter, one gets caught up in the characters and their world, the plot, the fantasy that is ordinary wizarding life. One does not get caught up in the great ideas, however many Rowling may have tried to sprinkle throughout the books. Contemplating big ideas--such as the nature of good and evil, and whether we are good or evil according to nature or according to the choices we make, for example--often leads to dead ends or uncomfortable conclusions in the Harry Potter books.
These dead ends stand in marked contrast to the other works I have been reading, notably the Graham Greene. His works are pointedly open--they create openings in theological questions to invite consideration of the nature of God and humanity, God's forgiveness and human frailty, understanding, and misunderstanding. I am rather obsessed with this idea of "opening up space" for contemplation of ideas, or for experience of spiritual crisis before renewal or despair. And this has a lot to do with the reader--the relationship that the author fosters between the reader, the work, and the subject matter of the work, in addition to how the author wishes the reader to act on the ideas transmitted by the work.
In an off-blog (on Facebook) follow-up discussion to my last Graham Greene post, Melanie (of the Wine Dark Sea blog) helped me toward a further development of this "Sacramental fiction" concept that I'm working through right now. Thinking about my analogy between the saint's "dark night of the soul" and the author's exploration of spiritual crisis, Melanie remarked that "the difference between the saint and the poet, I suppose is that the saint never despairs but even in the darkness is certain that there is light and grace. While the poet can get stuck in the dark and grace is more oblique." (Thank you, Melanie!!) This points in part to the nature of the different writers/personalities involved--the saint is heaven-bound, while the author is mucking around in this (human, secular) world. As one who has always enjoyed mucking around in the darkness--Existentialism, Symbolism, Decadence, Modernism--I couldn't help thinking about what it is in the darkness that I find so enlightening. As I remarked to Melanie, I think the interesting thing about getting stuck in the dark is that the reader has to search for the light and really contribute to making meaning by thinking his/her way through the darkness. Now, this is not true of all of the movements I mentioned--indeed, with Symbolism and Decadence, the whole point is to revel in the darkness and mock the light (been there, done that, grew up. . .) But thinking about the type of fiction (and poetry) I mentioned in my previous post, the kind that I find typified in Greene, T. S. Eliot, Tolkien, Auden, and Joyce, I'm led to think that the spiritual crisis--the darkness represented by authors who nevertheless leave some room for hope--is that the open-endedness of the fiction as well as the presentation of ideas about the nature of God and human nature make for a participatory model of fiction. And for a while, that's as far as I had gone with this idea.
For me, bringing the reader into the equation rather smacks of Reader Response Theory, which falls under the category of critical methodologies to avoid, since Reader Response Theory rather serves to deconstruct any idea of fixed meaning in a text, and I don't go there. Ever. Reader Response Theory is also rather a nightmare theory when considered from a teaching perspective since it rather feeds into students' assumptions that "anything goes" in terms of interpretation of texts. I spent the better part of the fall semester in a futile attempt to shake 33 or so education majors out of the assumption that literature is about the reader's impressions. I rather worry that a "participatory" mode of fiction might imply that the reader's participation in the meaning of the text creates the meaning itself, rendering meaning subjective. On the other hand, a well-articulated theory of "participatory" fiction might serve to bring the concept of the reader to the forefront in a way that validates the reader's role in fiction while contradicting the more subjective notion.
I'm not really sure where along the lines I became enamored of the reader, but it must have happened in the course of my investigation of representations of literacy in fiction, which followed on the heels of my interest in narrative theory, which theorizes the "implied" and "actual" reader. The implied reader is a textual construct; the real/actual reader can not be categorized, as the audience of a work of literature is shifting and unpredictable. Studying literacy theory, the literate individual (or, more often, the literate culture or society) is more often the subject than the piece of writing, and what I generally look for is the representation of the reader in the work of literature, to get an idea of what vision of "the reader" or "the literate individual" more generally is presented in the work of fiction. My overarching question is what theories about the uses of literacy do literary texts project? By extension, I might ask, what do we as readers learn about literacy from works of literature? -or- What are various consequences of reading and writing, according to literary texts from various time periods and authors? The goal, of course, is for the individual reader to better understand how reading operates on his/her own consciousness. Yeah, it's pretty much justification for being a bookworm and devoting one's life to studying literature.
So I find that my fascination with the reader has grown and expanded into different places, but still relates to the purpose of literature, and how literature acts on the consciousness of the individual. I think at root, that the acknowledgment that literature acts on the consciousness of the individual in abstract ways and concern with how it does so is very un-academic, at least in terms of literary study. At least, that is how I fear it will be perceived. I think my theories are very great-books-y, which I think is great, since I have always admired a great-books approach to liberal arts education, but that model is outdated and rejected by most universities these days. So much for that digression.
A few years ago now, I read the introduction to an anthology of contemporary Catholic poetry edited by a professor of mine. At the time, I was trying to understand, basically, various Catholic concepts related to the term "Sacrament." Not being raised Catholic, and having attended various Protestant churches, there was a lot for me to wrap my mind around! I had recently read Andrew Greeley's book The Catholic Imagination, the gist of which seems to have been, if you've been influenced by Catholicism culturally, you know about Catholicism indirectly--or all that you need to know. It was very much a divorcing of Catholic culture from the Catholic Church and the practice of the Catholic Faith, which is a common gesture in popular culture. But I think there must have been something theoretically interesting in the Greeley book, since it is linked in my mind to the anthology of poetry that I mentioned at the beginning of this meandering paragraph. If I'm remembering it correctly, the anthology's introduction discusses the idea that literature can be "sacramental," not "sacramental literature" as in "literature relating to the Sacraments," or literature used directly for prayer or lectio divina, but rather, literature that can act like a sacramental--a visible sign that reminds us of God and propels us toward Him. Again, not a very "academic" line of reasoning. But can it be?
I was reaching toward a concept of "Sacramental fiction" when I wrote my earlier Graham Greene post. But I want a theory that does not limit itself to Catholic authors writing determinedly Catholic works--such as Greene or Tolkien. Even in my previous discussion of Greene, I mention non-Catholic writers whom I feel participate in this mode of literature, and even Joyce, who was raised Catholic but repudiated it. Clearly, these are not writers who intend (bad, evil word for literary critics) to write Catholic literature. But can they nevertheless tap into something larger? A discourse, perhaps, on the nature of God that involves the reader directly? And if so, how do they do so?
So I turn from the abstract theorizing of audience, reader, and text, from the realm of theorizing the nature of literature that propels humanity toward God, to the very tangible realm of rhetorical theory, grounded in words and situations, about which I am presumed to know more than I actually do.
I think that the concepts I'm reaching toward--this authorial linking of audience with subject matter in a way that encourages "audience participation"--can be discussed in terms of "triangulation." This "triangulation" is a nautical metaphor used in rhetoric to describe authorial use of rhetorical appeals to align the reader's position with his/her own in relation to a subject of interest to both (Killingsworth, Appeals in Modern Rhetoric p. 3-4):
"The act of navigation . . . depends upon triangulation. Sailors navigate by the stars. The ship goes from launch to landing, but the direction is guided by the stars. Appeals go from author to audience but their success may well be determined by some association the author forms with a third entity, the metaphorical equivalent of the stars." (Killingsworth 3)
The importance of rhetorical theory, here, is that seeing the fictional work as a piece of rhetoric implies movement of author and audience from disparate positions to positions that are closer together--that is, there is the movement, not just of plot, but also of the reader, of whom the writer/text demands action. However, the plot is what inspires the movement in the case of fiction--makes the appeal to the reader, in rhetorical terms--and in the specific case that I'm considering, the spiritual crisis, the Dark Night of the Soul, is the appeal that the author makes to the reader, asking the reader to join in the journey to reach--somewhere else. In the case of the saint, the "somewhere else" would be God. For the character in the novel, the "somewhere else" might be death, despair, Salvation, but that is not where the author wants the audience/reader to go. Rather, the author wants the reader to enter into a deeper consideration of the questions that are raised by the action of the literary work.
The image of steering by the stars is very important in this construct. When the author is writing the work of fiction that will form the appeal to the reader, s/he navigates by a set of ideas or values--the "stars" in the navigation metaphor, or the "position of authority or value" in rhetorical terms (Killingsworth 3)--that leads to the destination. The vehicle by which the author steers is the plot itself. But considering the literary text is that vehicle (boat), and exists in different space for each reader than it does for the original author, it stands to reason that the geography in which the reader sails with the text as vehicle (to a destination analogous to--though not exactly the same as--that reached by the author) is different from the original geography--and so the stars that shine down on reader and text are different than those by which the author navigated. Here, rhetorical theory falters a bit, and Reader Response theory stands ready to pounce, because in fiction the appeals may be more oblique or ambiguous, metaphorical rather than literal, indirect rather than direct. And the geography in which the boat sails anew in the hands of each new reader--isn't that the collective experience of the reader that contributes to his/her subjective interpretation of the text?
Rhetoric assumes, at least in part, that the author and audience share some context, or works to foster that impression. Fiction does not assume a shared context, but asks the reader to enter into a setting and set of experiences on the author's terms. Not everything in the reader's experience can be left behind, of course, but more importantly, the reader does not necessarily bring with him/her the luggage that the trip requires. To stop mixing metaphors, the reader often starts from someplace completely different, and so the context from which the writer was working is lost. In a good work of literature, the author and reader do not need to share every context. The fact that the author has studied his Montaigne makes no difference to the reader, who may not catch every specific reference, but nevertheless gets the gist of the ideas involved. How specifically the reader is able to identify the author's context, however, is determined by the shared experience of author and reader. It's the difference between identifying the elves' lembas as "spiritually sustaining food" vs. "the Eucharist." All this goes to say that the extent to which literature is "Sacramental" depends on not only the stars by which the author steers, and the seaworthiness of the vehicle, but also on the geography from which the reader embarks, or, if you prefer, the luggage that accompanies him/her. The importance, then, is the ability of the work to propel the reader into consideration of common ideas--the nature of God, etc. The author starts the process--gets the reader to share a set of common questions (and that is the shared destination)--but the reader's geography determines in what direction the reader's questions tend, or even if s/he is interested in pursuing the questions.
The point, here, is that the reader is a participant. In a closed work of fiction, the author has wrapped plot and worldview in a neat package, and the reader is invited to accept the truth of what the work concludes--or not. I am thinking of the difference between the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. In a "closed" work, such as the former, there is no further action required of the reader other than to pick up the text and read, then to close the text and regard it as something experienced, perhaps, but a completed experience. It can be revisited, but it doesn't ask anything of the reader--the reader is not expected to act in any way in order to complete the reading process. It might be worth noting that my two "closed" examples--Narnia and Potter--were written explicitly for child audiences.
Here, I want to give a very different example--that of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star." Clarke's story of a Jesuit priest and scientist who travels with an expedition to a distant planet only to discover that the civilization that inhabited the planet was annihilated by the very star that illuminated the path for the magi to find Christ invites theological questioning. Indeed, only extreme intellectual laziness stands as an excuse for not turning the matter over in one's mind: What kind of God would allow such an event? The question implies criticism. According to Clarke's worldview, it should imply criticism and questioning--of God. But the very presence of a Jesuit priest begs the question--is the only possible conclusion the inhumanity of God? The reader is invited to contribute to the meaning of the story, but if the reader is starting from a position of faith rather than atheism or agnosticism, that faith may be able to reconcile the speculative scenario presented in the story. The point is not so much the conclusion reached, but the common questioning--that the reader participates in the meaning of the story--extends that meaning past the boundaries of the story--and moves toward some greater understanding of God (or the nature of the universe, if you prefer).
Monday, June 29, 2009
Note on W. Somerset Maugham
From the introduction to the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics version of The Razor's Edge by Anthony Curtis, in reference to "a stage-play that was neither performed nor published called The Road Uphill":
. . . [T]he young man, Joseph Sheridon, has had the same experience as Larry in The Razor's Edge. He is a former aviator who formed a close friendship with a fellow fighter-pilot. During a dogfight in the air, his friend risked his own life to beat off an attacker from Joe's aircraft, and as a result of a hit sustained during the encounter he dies on landing, in full sight of Joe. The spectacle of his dead friend gives the young man so unforgettable a trauma that it causes him on his release from the air force to give up all chances of a business career in order to spend every hour of the day reading and studying to try to make sense of what has happened to him. He becomes wholly possessed by the task of trying to discover, through the received wisdom of mankind, if human life really does have a meaning." (xi)
. . . [T]he young man, Joseph Sheridon, has had the same experience as Larry in The Razor's Edge. He is a former aviator who formed a close friendship with a fellow fighter-pilot. During a dogfight in the air, his friend risked his own life to beat off an attacker from Joe's aircraft, and as a result of a hit sustained during the encounter he dies on landing, in full sight of Joe. The spectacle of his dead friend gives the young man so unforgettable a trauma that it causes him on his release from the air force to give up all chances of a business career in order to spend every hour of the day reading and studying to try to make sense of what has happened to him. He becomes wholly possessed by the task of trying to discover, through the received wisdom of mankind, if human life really does have a meaning." (xi)
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Graham Greene, Catholic Discourse, and the Dark Night of the Soul
The above title is what I would title the article if I were writing one. Unfortunately, the ideas that I get in the shower or bath never seem as unified once I get back to my computer. My husband suggested that the humidity in the air might influence the way the oxygen gets to the brain. If so, that might explain why I feel smarter in New Orleans than in Texas.
I finished reading a second book by Graham Greene last night, The Heart of the Matter. It was an interesting read, but not what I would call riveting all the way through--unlike The Power and the Glory. It picked up momentum at the end, though. An interesting thing about this book is that it didn't begin as a Catholic novel, but it became one, and certainly ended that way. It presents a number of particularly Catholic dilemmas, asks theological questions, and only begins to hint at any possible answers. As the protagonist is British in West Africa, his fellow countrymen are not Catholic, which becomes a subject of comment and contrast as the book progresses, and his fellow Catholics (other than the priests, who do not enter into the story much) are separate from him by station, skin color, culture, and language. His wife is separated from him both because of the human dilemma of what it means, what it costs, and whether it is possible to understand another person, and also because she wishes to leave the place they are living, and he arranges for her passage to a more hospitable part of the coast while he remains to perform his police duties. So the concept of the Church as "One Body" is only present in its insistent absence. There is nothing in the text to indicate that that was a concept stressed in Greene's time in the way it is now.
Indeed, there is a real conflict in The Heart of the Matter, as in The Power and the Glory, between duty to one's own soul and duty to others. In The Power and the Glory, the conflict arises because the unnamed priest, whom critics call the "whiskey priest," a derogatory term used in the novel which the character nevertheless transcends, has an unconfessed mortal sin, but still must preside over Masses when he arrives in villages (including consuming the Body of Christ himself), administer the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and finally, instead of crossing the border into a relatively "safe" zone for Catholics, who were being persecuted throughout Mexico during the revolution, he is called to give the Last Rites to a dying criminal. So his choice is to face almost certain capture and execution in order to perform his priestly duty, or to tend to his own soul by going into safety, where he can easily confess the sin he has carried with him since before the time frame of the novel. The person of the priest and his office, though sometimes conflated in the reflections of the character on his own actions, are distinct from each other in the eyes of the reader, who realizes that the priest does not fail (though he does falter) in his vocational duties, and so judges him lightly both for his unworthy reception of the Body of Christ, and for his sin and inability to Confess. Throughout both novels, the characters repeat (and in The Power and the Glory it takes the tone of a mantra), that an individual's first duty is the salvation of his own soul.
In The Heart of the Matter, the conflict between personal salvation and attention to others' needs is more ambiguous, as the duties to others are secular, perceived needs based on social and self-imposed obligations. Interestingly, though he has spent his life attending to others' needs at the expense of his own peace, it is duty to God that causes the central character, Scobie, to lose hope. That in itself is a strange concept, that while the main character doubts his faith in God, and resolves himself to mortal sin because he can not find the motivation to stop or to confess, he nevertheless is moved to the unforgivable sin--suicide--by his knowledge that to receive God in his state of mortal sin is desecration, like inflicting wounds on an already suffering Christ. His desire not to wound anyone, and least of all God, leads him to inflict wound after wound on his own soul, descending finally into despair and rationally calculated damnation. Greene leads us to question the notion that any sin--including suicide, final abandonment to despair, the final rejection of the redeeming and healing power of God--is truly unforgivable, even indicating in one scene that God, who is capable of anything and can break His own rules, can certainly break this one, and allow for redemption. Greene suggests at the end that Scobie calls upon God in something that might be seen as repentance, but is too brief. But it is essential that Scobie does not believe that there will be an exception for himself. Had he killed himself with the notion that he could be forgiven, the act would not have held the pathos or illustrated the despair that it does otherwise.
I read a review of The Power and the Glory by a user of an application that I access through Facebook--I forget the name of the app--that says that "only Catholicism can find beauty in spiritual rot." This was intended as a backhanded comment--a critique, insult, what have you. I had to read further to determine this for myself, though, as my instinctive reaction was "YES! YES!!" But truly, there is a tradition in Catholic fiction, nonfiction and poetry that acknowledges the dark times of faith--the Dark Night of the Soul tradition that St. John of the Cross so poignantly displays in his poetry, that Dante chronicles before meeting Virgil in the Commedia, that Santa Theresa de Avila experiences as well as Mother Theresa. It is, in fact, a mark of great faith to have experienced such spiritual darkness. It is also a mark of great twentieth-century Christian writers of the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic traditions that they see in the darkness of humanity something of beauty, as if by acknowledging the darkness we are reaching out to forces larger than ourselves, acknowledging their power and our smallness in the face of such things. I think, here, of Eliot in The Four Quartets, or Auden in many of his poems, but especially "Musée des Beaux Arts": "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters. . . ." In a sense, there is redemption in despair for these writers. In the writings of the saints, they struggle not to succumb to despair, and in the performance of everyday tasks, as in the sustenance of the Eucharist, they are able to continue, though the blackness might continue also. In the writings of Tolkien, the inexorable sense of loss that permeates even victory against evil suggests a final defeat of humanity, and a light that transcends that defeat. Even Joyce partakes of this to a degree in Dubliners, most notably in "The Dead."
In the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the congregation and priest pray "protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ." There is much less of "joyful hope" in the works of the writers I have mentioned than there is of "anxiety." And if we are supposed to wait "in joyful hope," why do we find beauty in works that emphasize the darkness? Certainly, in his portrayal of spiritual darkness in The Heart of the Matter, Greene shows how descent into despair leads to an acknowledgment of need for God. It even opens up the possibility of a dialogue with God, which may lead to personal spiritual redemption. This dialogue with God is dramatized in the final pages of The Heart of the Matter. But there is an even earlier precedent that dramatizes the power of spiritual darkness that leads to dialogue with God--the Agony of Christ in the Garden. And it is perhaps His spiritual darkness that is poignantly evoked, that makes us feel the power and beauty of the questioning and striving against the darkness, and makes the most skillfully executed accounts reach out to something larger rather than staying within the meanness of human experience. It is what makes Father Rake declare in the end that Scobie perhaps loved God more than anything at all: that his despair, though he was finally unable to conquer it, was larger than the despair of human existence.
"Le Mont des oliviers," a French Romantic poem by Alfred de Vigny transforms the Agony in the Garden into a dialogue of the Son with the Father. Though Vigny lived during the Revolution in France, at a time when the Church was challenged, rejected, and even demonized, and participated in a literary and artistic movement that sought to glorify the "energy" of evil (as in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and redeem Satan (as in one of Vigny's own poems), he taps into the Dark Night of the Soul in all of its poignancy, power, loneliness, and near despair in "Le Mont des oliviers"--"The Mount of Olives"--which I translated (in part) when I was an undergraduate: Then it was night, and Jesus walked alone/ Clothed in white, like one who is already dead/ the disciples slept at the foot of the hill,/ Towards the olives, a sinister wind blew. . . A few lines later: He fell to his knees, his chest against the earth;/ Then looking at the sky, called, "Oh My Father!"/ -But the sky was black, and God did not respond.
The conclusion of the poem is to reject the divinity by whom we are rejected--a truly existential moment in French Romantic poetry. And given that the twentieth century saw the advent of existential philosophy as such, one might expect that Greene would come to similar conclusions. While he is able to condemn humanity to the judgment of God, Greene is unable to condemn humanity to God's indifference.
Here, I have lost a reference I believed I read in The Power and the Glory to Christ's Agony in the Garden--one of those pieces that would have tied everything together for me and created beautiful symmetry in my discussion. There are many references to the sacrifice of Christ in The Heart of the Matter--more obvious references than in The Power and the Glory, though it too has many New Testament references. But this brings me to the Liturgy of the Eucharist again. In the Liturgy, one finds represented the Last Supper ("On the night He was betrayed, He took bread and gave You thanks and praise. . .") and the Crucifixion. However, apart from the Triduum, the Church does not reenact the Agony in the Garden during the Sacrifice of the Mass. (The Agony in the Garden is memorialized in the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, however.) In rhetorical terms, we might conclude that that absence in the regular liturgy of reference to the Christ's Agony creates a kind of discursive space which is filled by the experiences of the faithful, the writings of the saints, and the moments of spiritual darkness that emerge in Catholic Sacramental literature.
Here, I'm afraid I must end abruptly, as this is the beginning of something rather than something complete and unified. Without being too abrupt in this transition, I want to finish with the observation that both of Greene's novels, as well as The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham, strike me as mature works--not pointing to the maturity of the novelist as a practitioner of his craft, but rather his representation of the life of the individual. In The Heart of the Matter, there is great emphasis on responsibility, and on the consequences of one's actions. The Power and the Glory could not have been written without the sense of responsibility that is greater than oneself. But that responsibility is not something that the characters rebel against--they recognize that it would not remove the responsibility to rebel. I have been fond of saying lately that the Romantics are the adolescents of English literature while Modernism is its mid-life crisis. Which would leave mature adulthood for the Victorians? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I have found myself disillusioned with the Romantics and the Modernists both because well, that's not where I am in life right now. And admittedly, the Greene novels and Maugham novels do not portray characters that I can relate to, but they engage me with ideas that I find compelling from where I am in life, and actions that do not disgust me with their triviality.
I finished reading a second book by Graham Greene last night, The Heart of the Matter. It was an interesting read, but not what I would call riveting all the way through--unlike The Power and the Glory. It picked up momentum at the end, though. An interesting thing about this book is that it didn't begin as a Catholic novel, but it became one, and certainly ended that way. It presents a number of particularly Catholic dilemmas, asks theological questions, and only begins to hint at any possible answers. As the protagonist is British in West Africa, his fellow countrymen are not Catholic, which becomes a subject of comment and contrast as the book progresses, and his fellow Catholics (other than the priests, who do not enter into the story much) are separate from him by station, skin color, culture, and language. His wife is separated from him both because of the human dilemma of what it means, what it costs, and whether it is possible to understand another person, and also because she wishes to leave the place they are living, and he arranges for her passage to a more hospitable part of the coast while he remains to perform his police duties. So the concept of the Church as "One Body" is only present in its insistent absence. There is nothing in the text to indicate that that was a concept stressed in Greene's time in the way it is now.
Indeed, there is a real conflict in The Heart of the Matter, as in The Power and the Glory, between duty to one's own soul and duty to others. In The Power and the Glory, the conflict arises because the unnamed priest, whom critics call the "whiskey priest," a derogatory term used in the novel which the character nevertheless transcends, has an unconfessed mortal sin, but still must preside over Masses when he arrives in villages (including consuming the Body of Christ himself), administer the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and finally, instead of crossing the border into a relatively "safe" zone for Catholics, who were being persecuted throughout Mexico during the revolution, he is called to give the Last Rites to a dying criminal. So his choice is to face almost certain capture and execution in order to perform his priestly duty, or to tend to his own soul by going into safety, where he can easily confess the sin he has carried with him since before the time frame of the novel. The person of the priest and his office, though sometimes conflated in the reflections of the character on his own actions, are distinct from each other in the eyes of the reader, who realizes that the priest does not fail (though he does falter) in his vocational duties, and so judges him lightly both for his unworthy reception of the Body of Christ, and for his sin and inability to Confess. Throughout both novels, the characters repeat (and in The Power and the Glory it takes the tone of a mantra), that an individual's first duty is the salvation of his own soul.
In The Heart of the Matter, the conflict between personal salvation and attention to others' needs is more ambiguous, as the duties to others are secular, perceived needs based on social and self-imposed obligations. Interestingly, though he has spent his life attending to others' needs at the expense of his own peace, it is duty to God that causes the central character, Scobie, to lose hope. That in itself is a strange concept, that while the main character doubts his faith in God, and resolves himself to mortal sin because he can not find the motivation to stop or to confess, he nevertheless is moved to the unforgivable sin--suicide--by his knowledge that to receive God in his state of mortal sin is desecration, like inflicting wounds on an already suffering Christ. His desire not to wound anyone, and least of all God, leads him to inflict wound after wound on his own soul, descending finally into despair and rationally calculated damnation. Greene leads us to question the notion that any sin--including suicide, final abandonment to despair, the final rejection of the redeeming and healing power of God--is truly unforgivable, even indicating in one scene that God, who is capable of anything and can break His own rules, can certainly break this one, and allow for redemption. Greene suggests at the end that Scobie calls upon God in something that might be seen as repentance, but is too brief. But it is essential that Scobie does not believe that there will be an exception for himself. Had he killed himself with the notion that he could be forgiven, the act would not have held the pathos or illustrated the despair that it does otherwise.
I read a review of The Power and the Glory by a user of an application that I access through Facebook--I forget the name of the app--that says that "only Catholicism can find beauty in spiritual rot." This was intended as a backhanded comment--a critique, insult, what have you. I had to read further to determine this for myself, though, as my instinctive reaction was "YES! YES!!" But truly, there is a tradition in Catholic fiction, nonfiction and poetry that acknowledges the dark times of faith--the Dark Night of the Soul tradition that St. John of the Cross so poignantly displays in his poetry, that Dante chronicles before meeting Virgil in the Commedia, that Santa Theresa de Avila experiences as well as Mother Theresa. It is, in fact, a mark of great faith to have experienced such spiritual darkness. It is also a mark of great twentieth-century Christian writers of the Catholic and Anglo-Catholic traditions that they see in the darkness of humanity something of beauty, as if by acknowledging the darkness we are reaching out to forces larger than ourselves, acknowledging their power and our smallness in the face of such things. I think, here, of Eliot in The Four Quartets, or Auden in many of his poems, but especially "Musée des Beaux Arts": "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters. . . ." In a sense, there is redemption in despair for these writers. In the writings of the saints, they struggle not to succumb to despair, and in the performance of everyday tasks, as in the sustenance of the Eucharist, they are able to continue, though the blackness might continue also. In the writings of Tolkien, the inexorable sense of loss that permeates even victory against evil suggests a final defeat of humanity, and a light that transcends that defeat. Even Joyce partakes of this to a degree in Dubliners, most notably in "The Dead."
In the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the congregation and priest pray "protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ." There is much less of "joyful hope" in the works of the writers I have mentioned than there is of "anxiety." And if we are supposed to wait "in joyful hope," why do we find beauty in works that emphasize the darkness? Certainly, in his portrayal of spiritual darkness in The Heart of the Matter, Greene shows how descent into despair leads to an acknowledgment of need for God. It even opens up the possibility of a dialogue with God, which may lead to personal spiritual redemption. This dialogue with God is dramatized in the final pages of The Heart of the Matter. But there is an even earlier precedent that dramatizes the power of spiritual darkness that leads to dialogue with God--the Agony of Christ in the Garden. And it is perhaps His spiritual darkness that is poignantly evoked, that makes us feel the power and beauty of the questioning and striving against the darkness, and makes the most skillfully executed accounts reach out to something larger rather than staying within the meanness of human experience. It is what makes Father Rake declare in the end that Scobie perhaps loved God more than anything at all: that his despair, though he was finally unable to conquer it, was larger than the despair of human existence.
"Le Mont des oliviers," a French Romantic poem by Alfred de Vigny transforms the Agony in the Garden into a dialogue of the Son with the Father. Though Vigny lived during the Revolution in France, at a time when the Church was challenged, rejected, and even demonized, and participated in a literary and artistic movement that sought to glorify the "energy" of evil (as in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell) and redeem Satan (as in one of Vigny's own poems), he taps into the Dark Night of the Soul in all of its poignancy, power, loneliness, and near despair in "Le Mont des oliviers"--"The Mount of Olives"--which I translated (in part) when I was an undergraduate: Then it was night, and Jesus walked alone/ Clothed in white, like one who is already dead/ the disciples slept at the foot of the hill,/ Towards the olives, a sinister wind blew. . . A few lines later: He fell to his knees, his chest against the earth;/ Then looking at the sky, called, "Oh My Father!"/ -But the sky was black, and God did not respond.
The conclusion of the poem is to reject the divinity by whom we are rejected--a truly existential moment in French Romantic poetry. And given that the twentieth century saw the advent of existential philosophy as such, one might expect that Greene would come to similar conclusions. While he is able to condemn humanity to the judgment of God, Greene is unable to condemn humanity to God's indifference.
Here, I have lost a reference I believed I read in The Power and the Glory to Christ's Agony in the Garden--one of those pieces that would have tied everything together for me and created beautiful symmetry in my discussion. There are many references to the sacrifice of Christ in The Heart of the Matter--more obvious references than in The Power and the Glory, though it too has many New Testament references. But this brings me to the Liturgy of the Eucharist again. In the Liturgy, one finds represented the Last Supper ("On the night He was betrayed, He took bread and gave You thanks and praise. . .") and the Crucifixion. However, apart from the Triduum, the Church does not reenact the Agony in the Garden during the Sacrifice of the Mass. (The Agony in the Garden is memorialized in the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, however.) In rhetorical terms, we might conclude that that absence in the regular liturgy of reference to the Christ's Agony creates a kind of discursive space which is filled by the experiences of the faithful, the writings of the saints, and the moments of spiritual darkness that emerge in Catholic Sacramental literature.
Here, I'm afraid I must end abruptly, as this is the beginning of something rather than something complete and unified. Without being too abrupt in this transition, I want to finish with the observation that both of Greene's novels, as well as The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham, strike me as mature works--not pointing to the maturity of the novelist as a practitioner of his craft, but rather his representation of the life of the individual. In The Heart of the Matter, there is great emphasis on responsibility, and on the consequences of one's actions. The Power and the Glory could not have been written without the sense of responsibility that is greater than oneself. But that responsibility is not something that the characters rebel against--they recognize that it would not remove the responsibility to rebel. I have been fond of saying lately that the Romantics are the adolescents of English literature while Modernism is its mid-life crisis. Which would leave mature adulthood for the Victorians? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I have found myself disillusioned with the Romantics and the Modernists both because well, that's not where I am in life right now. And admittedly, the Greene novels and Maugham novels do not portray characters that I can relate to, but they engage me with ideas that I find compelling from where I am in life, and actions that do not disgust me with their triviality.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Summer Reading
Cross-posted on Words, Words.
I have actually been motivated to read more in the past few weeks/months, which has its good points and bad--good, because I have been feeling that I should read more (or at all), bad because when I read, other things are pushed aside. It started with the campus visit. On the trip, I brought as reading material the student essays and creative writing that the school had provided for me, and also Bernard Schlink's The Reader. The appeal should be obvious: as I tell my students (sometimes, when I feel like mentioning my scholarly interests will help the rapport), when a novel portrays someone reading or writing, that's when I become interested. And there were so many other interesting things going on. I became interested in the book when I saw a commercial on TV for the film--which I saw afterwards (watched it on DVD with my mom), and was vastly disappointed. The book, however, is brilliantly complex and suggests some interesting ideas about literacy that I plan to form into a new chapter of my (conceptually) evolving (finished) dissertation. I have yet to read the other contemporary work that I plan to pair it with but Oprah would be proud (unfortunately, I think both books are Oprah Book Club selections, though for the life of me, I can't understand why she liked The Reader, unless she misread it or someone else selected it).
After that, my reading didn't pick up the way I wanted it to for one reason or another. I think the primary reason may have been a lack of direction--I have been feeling it for a while. So much is out there that I'm just not sure where to turn next. One writer in particular has kept creeping into my peripheral vision, however. Many of you have read him, I'm sure--Graham Greene, England's premier twentieth century Catholic novelist (well, I guess G. K. Chesterton could contend for that position from the opposite end of the political spectrum!). I didn't quite know what to read by him, and had no particular motivation to seek him out, except that the position I desperately wanted (yes, there was ONE that I knew I wanted) that was cancelled (hopefully to be reopened) was a position to teach 20th Century Catholic writers, and Greene was one specifically named. But he kept coming up. So when I accidently found myself reading an article about his file with the Vatican, I made up my mind to read The Power and the Glory, and did so during the drive to New Orleans. It is nothing short of brilliant. It captures with poignancy the struggle of the believer who recognizes his/her sinfulness, but even more than that, it captures the coexistence of hope and despair, and the contrast between the office of the priesthood and the fallible humans who are ordained to that office. I find it hard to consider it a work of British literature, since it is set in Mexico and focuses on Mexicans rather than the foreigners who live there, but even in that there is a curious Englishness, and I may be inclined to investigate in the future the strange draw that English writers have to Mexico, or more interestingly (to me), to Catholic culture(s). I am eager to read more of Greene, but I do not find that any of his novels sound as compelling as The Power and the Glory. I checked out a couple, though--Monsignor Quixote and The Heart of the Matter--so they're on the "to read" list.
A few days ago, I was in a local book/media store looking for more Graham Greene, and in the classics section I stumbled across a work by W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil. The summary sounded intriguing, and it occurred to me that Maugham is in my time period, but another whose works I had never read. So when I went to the library to get the aforementioned Greene, I also grabbed The Painted Veil and another by Maugham, The Magician. On the way out, as I was thinking that I should look up some Walker Percy (another name on the list of Catholic authors desired by that coveted Assistant Professor position), I glanced to the side and found--the Walker Percy shelves! It was uncanny. So I have The Thanatos Syndrome and Love in the Ruins to read also.
I am currently reading The Magician by Maugham, and it is turning out to be your basic fin de siècle novel, and would pair nicely with The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Walter Pater and Baudelaire. I have yet to see that it does anything incredibly interesting, and some of its invocation of the occult is disturbing. There is a passage that evokes artworks and artists with which (and whom) I was previously unacquainted: this one by Juan Valdés de Leal, who seems rather generally extraordinary, Jusepe (or José) de Ribera, whose "dwarfs" don't seem to be well represented online (I only found this one), and a Pygmalion by Bronzino, which is the only one that seems to fit Maugham's description. Maugham's works and Greene's seem to suffer from a lack of footnotes that I attribute to a more general lack of critical attention--and yet, both names are well-known.
The Painted Veil is intriguing, and I may require it in the course I am teaching in the fall. It raises some interesting questions about depictions of women, includes some elements of the society novel that would not be out of place in Henry James or Edith Wharton, depicts the sexual act in a way that that would have seemed bold for Lawrence (who was generally more subtle), and contains lots & lots of colonialism. Of particular interest to me is Maugham's depiction of a convent of French missionary nuns in China, situated literally in the middle of a cholera epidemic. The nuns are easily the most noble characters in the novel, both in terms of bloodline and lineage (the Mother Superior is descended from nobility) and in terms of their bearing, serenity, closeness to the divine (though this is not quite how the characters in the novel or the narrator articulate it). It is interesting here to see the contrast between how the English speak of clergy of the Church of England, or how dismissive the characters are of the Anglican Church, and how the French nuns are portrayed. I'm not sure I have much to say about it beyond that, but I'm collecting data! ;)
So I am engaged in filling in a few less-than-apparent gaps in my reading of early- to mid-20th-century British fiction, asking along the way why I have not encountered these authors before, and whether it will matter at all, after I have read them, that I have read them--matter professionally, that is. I am already glad that I am reading them, and still believe in the inherent value of the act of reading--yes, I really do.
I have actually been motivated to read more in the past few weeks/months, which has its good points and bad--good, because I have been feeling that I should read more (or at all), bad because when I read, other things are pushed aside. It started with the campus visit. On the trip, I brought as reading material the student essays and creative writing that the school had provided for me, and also Bernard Schlink's The Reader. The appeal should be obvious: as I tell my students (sometimes, when I feel like mentioning my scholarly interests will help the rapport), when a novel portrays someone reading or writing, that's when I become interested. And there were so many other interesting things going on. I became interested in the book when I saw a commercial on TV for the film--which I saw afterwards (watched it on DVD with my mom), and was vastly disappointed. The book, however, is brilliantly complex and suggests some interesting ideas about literacy that I plan to form into a new chapter of my (conceptually) evolving (finished) dissertation. I have yet to read the other contemporary work that I plan to pair it with but Oprah would be proud (unfortunately, I think both books are Oprah Book Club selections, though for the life of me, I can't understand why she liked The Reader, unless she misread it or someone else selected it).
After that, my reading didn't pick up the way I wanted it to for one reason or another. I think the primary reason may have been a lack of direction--I have been feeling it for a while. So much is out there that I'm just not sure where to turn next. One writer in particular has kept creeping into my peripheral vision, however. Many of you have read him, I'm sure--Graham Greene, England's premier twentieth century Catholic novelist (well, I guess G. K. Chesterton could contend for that position from the opposite end of the political spectrum!). I didn't quite know what to read by him, and had no particular motivation to seek him out, except that the position I desperately wanted (yes, there was ONE that I knew I wanted) that was cancelled (hopefully to be reopened) was a position to teach 20th Century Catholic writers, and Greene was one specifically named. But he kept coming up. So when I accidently found myself reading an article about his file with the Vatican, I made up my mind to read The Power and the Glory, and did so during the drive to New Orleans. It is nothing short of brilliant. It captures with poignancy the struggle of the believer who recognizes his/her sinfulness, but even more than that, it captures the coexistence of hope and despair, and the contrast between the office of the priesthood and the fallible humans who are ordained to that office. I find it hard to consider it a work of British literature, since it is set in Mexico and focuses on Mexicans rather than the foreigners who live there, but even in that there is a curious Englishness, and I may be inclined to investigate in the future the strange draw that English writers have to Mexico, or more interestingly (to me), to Catholic culture(s). I am eager to read more of Greene, but I do not find that any of his novels sound as compelling as The Power and the Glory. I checked out a couple, though--Monsignor Quixote and The Heart of the Matter--so they're on the "to read" list.
A few days ago, I was in a local book/media store looking for more Graham Greene, and in the classics section I stumbled across a work by W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil. The summary sounded intriguing, and it occurred to me that Maugham is in my time period, but another whose works I had never read. So when I went to the library to get the aforementioned Greene, I also grabbed The Painted Veil and another by Maugham, The Magician. On the way out, as I was thinking that I should look up some Walker Percy (another name on the list of Catholic authors desired by that coveted Assistant Professor position), I glanced to the side and found--the Walker Percy shelves! It was uncanny. So I have The Thanatos Syndrome and Love in the Ruins to read also.
I am currently reading The Magician by Maugham, and it is turning out to be your basic fin de siècle novel, and would pair nicely with The Picture of Dorian Grey and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Walter Pater and Baudelaire. I have yet to see that it does anything incredibly interesting, and some of its invocation of the occult is disturbing. There is a passage that evokes artworks and artists with which (and whom) I was previously unacquainted: this one by Juan Valdés de Leal, who seems rather generally extraordinary, Jusepe (or José) de Ribera, whose "dwarfs" don't seem to be well represented online (I only found this one), and a Pygmalion by Bronzino, which is the only one that seems to fit Maugham's description. Maugham's works and Greene's seem to suffer from a lack of footnotes that I attribute to a more general lack of critical attention--and yet, both names are well-known.
The Painted Veil is intriguing, and I may require it in the course I am teaching in the fall. It raises some interesting questions about depictions of women, includes some elements of the society novel that would not be out of place in Henry James or Edith Wharton, depicts the sexual act in a way that that would have seemed bold for Lawrence (who was generally more subtle), and contains lots & lots of colonialism. Of particular interest to me is Maugham's depiction of a convent of French missionary nuns in China, situated literally in the middle of a cholera epidemic. The nuns are easily the most noble characters in the novel, both in terms of bloodline and lineage (the Mother Superior is descended from nobility) and in terms of their bearing, serenity, closeness to the divine (though this is not quite how the characters in the novel or the narrator articulate it). It is interesting here to see the contrast between how the English speak of clergy of the Church of England, or how dismissive the characters are of the Anglican Church, and how the French nuns are portrayed. I'm not sure I have much to say about it beyond that, but I'm collecting data! ;)
So I am engaged in filling in a few less-than-apparent gaps in my reading of early- to mid-20th-century British fiction, asking along the way why I have not encountered these authors before, and whether it will matter at all, after I have read them, that I have read them--matter professionally, that is. I am already glad that I am reading them, and still believe in the inherent value of the act of reading--yes, I really do.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Literacy & Children's Fiction: A Running List
I have discovered some more books for my running list of children's lit books about literacy. It may be an overly ambitious or redundant project, since of course children's literature is concerned with conceptions of reading. But I do at least see different emphasis in some of the books. Is literacy primarily a social concern, or an individual concern--of primary use to individuals? That does seem to be something that different authors represent differently. I haven't managed to find a thematic list of children's fiction that includes literacy as I'm defining it, so my main question at this point is how to find books that relate to my topic?
But anyway, here are some:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge
Voices (Annals of the Western Shore) by Ursula Le Guin
Exchange by Paul Magrs
The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh
The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff (An overt statement about censorship--dealing with it directly by portraying a battle with parents who want to ban Huck Finn. Yawn. But very representative of why this is an issue in children's lit in the first place.)
Some of the themes will no doubt make good comparisons with 1984 and Brave New World.
But anyway, here are some:
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Fly By Night by Frances Hardinge
Voices (Annals of the Western Shore) by Ursula Le Guin
Exchange by Paul Magrs
The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh
The Day They Came to Arrest the Book by Nat Hentoff (An overt statement about censorship--dealing with it directly by portraying a battle with parents who want to ban Huck Finn. Yawn. But very representative of why this is an issue in children's lit in the first place.)
Some of the themes will no doubt make good comparisons with 1984 and Brave New World.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Recommended by Sister Mary Martha
(On her blog)
I would love to read Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America. That's all I wanted to say for now. Here is what she says (brief anecdote):
Here's a good read, by the way, to get a grip on seeing a job that needs doing and doing it. The book is called, "Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America" and is an amazing trip from Europe to America by young women who were sent alone into the wilderness (when it really was wilderness) to build schools and hospitals and orphanages from nothing. There is a very entertaining story about a nun who befriended Billy the Kid because she was the only person who would give medical attention to one of his buddies who had been shot. She saved the man's life. Billy the Kid visited her whenever he was in town and had his horse do tricks for her.
This reminds me of a book I do not particularly want to read, Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns, in part because it reeks of a smear-campaign against the Church initiated by bitter people, and who wants to read that? But I keep seeing it, and something in me wants to know what they are talking about, if only to disagree. So I am curious to know what an actual, orthodox nun thinks of the book, or the phenomenon--real or imagined--that it depicts. If only Sister Mary Martha would stop by & visit. . .
I would love to read Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America. That's all I wanted to say for now. Here is what she says (brief anecdote):
Here's a good read, by the way, to get a grip on seeing a job that needs doing and doing it. The book is called, "Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America" and is an amazing trip from Europe to America by young women who were sent alone into the wilderness (when it really was wilderness) to build schools and hospitals and orphanages from nothing. There is a very entertaining story about a nun who befriended Billy the Kid because she was the only person who would give medical attention to one of his buddies who had been shot. She saved the man's life. Billy the Kid visited her whenever he was in town and had his horse do tricks for her.
This reminds me of a book I do not particularly want to read, Double Crossed: Uncovering the Catholic Church's Betrayal of American Nuns, in part because it reeks of a smear-campaign against the Church initiated by bitter people, and who wants to read that? But I keep seeing it, and something in me wants to know what they are talking about, if only to disagree. So I am curious to know what an actual, orthodox nun thinks of the book, or the phenomenon--real or imagined--that it depicts. If only Sister Mary Martha would stop by & visit. . .
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