Lenten Booknote 2: Reflections on the Psalms, "Introductory"

I have read very little of C. S. Lewis's apologetics. I should perhaps say that I have read none of his apologetics, since I doubt that The Great Divorce and The Four Loves count as apologetics. My interest in Lewis has been in his fiction, primarily because I don't often enjoy reading apologetics, having come to Lewis as an innocent and rejected him when I was quasi-agnostic, and having come to Catholicism after becoming disillusioned with Lewis (but that's another story). Lewis gets preachy enough in his fiction. I didn't particularly want to delve into his apologetics, which after all are used in very touchy-feely and Protestant contexts, and the touchy-feely Protestants drove me to quasi-agnosticism in the first place. Sort of. I'm representing my younger self here, but I still have limited interest in apologetics--particularly by Lewis. Sometimes his way of expressing things just nettles me. Other times, of course, it's quite lovely.

I'm enjoying Lewis's Reflections on the Psalms, though I wish he had included more of the actual psalm in the text when he's making general or particular observations. I need to have them by my side for quick reference, and yet I chose his reflections exactly because I didn't have a handy little volume of psalms, and didn't quite know where to find one. I also read on Kindle when I'm not researching, and while I do have a Bible on my Kindle, it is cumbersome to switch back and forth to search for a particular poem. These things aside, I am enjoying the read, and from the beginning I have made notes on what interests me.

#1 - "For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible."

Here, the context is helpful. In a two-paragraph sequence in which he discusses the parallelism which is, he contends, the psalms' most obvious poetic feature, one that is easily translated between languages and can therefore be seen as functioning purely didactically, Lewis chooses to stop and imagine the place of poetry in Creation:

"It seems to me appropriate, almost inevitable, that when that great Imagination which in the beginning, for Its own delight and for the delight of men and angels and (in their proper mode) of beasts, had invented and formed the whole world of Nature, submitted to express Itself in human speech, that speech should sometimes be poetry. For poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible." (p. 24)

Not only is the Word an incarnation (the Incarnation), Lewis says. Poetry is an incarnation. The manner of speech/communication is more or less embodied, tangible. The medium is, in fact, the message, and I'm feeling an undercurrent here of spoken vs. written language. And then we have the idea that the great Imagination is at work in the creation of poetry as a medium, and in the selection of poetry to be a part of the Word of God. A fascinating idea to think of God choosing a genre, and sometimes choosing poetry.

And then there's a sense in which that all of the explanation feels destructive, and I look back and revel a little in the beauty of the expression--"For poetry too is a little incarnation..." In this I hear almost an echo of Auden: "For poetry makes nothing happen..." I'm not entirely sure that the two are incompatible.

#2 - "A man can't always be defending truth; there must be a time to feed on it."

I admit that I was a little relieved to read, in Lewis's own words, that "this is not what is called an 'apologetic' work." I wonder, here, about his use of "apologetic," which seems to suggest "apologizing for," making an "apologetic" a "defense." That was certainly my first assumption about the meaning of the word, but as it was explained to me, "explanation" is a better approximation than "defense" or "apology." That's not the reason that this quote stood out to me, however.  Rather, I like the idea of having time to feed on it. Not even unpacking, which truly, is what Lewis is doing throughout the book. But feeding. Seeking nourishment, and also perhaps savoring. Though that's not in the quote, per se, I can't think of a man like Lewis eating without some kind of appreciation--not with what he's said about peas. Not "chewing on," either. "A time to feed on it." And that sounds particularly Lenten to me.

Books that Define You/Me

There's a meme on Facebook that circulates about once a year--and like all Facebook memes, there are several versions--that asks what the 10 books (authors, songs, albums) that most influenced you.  You're supposed to list these off the top of your head without thinking too much about it so that you can tag your friends and keep the ball rolling, or whatever memes do.  This is is not really practical for someone like me, who tends to overthink things--and who doesn't simply read books, but ingests them, internalizes them--lives them.  When I came up with the list, it looked something like this:

1. The Little House Books (mostly The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years) by Laura Ingalls Wilder
2. The Chronicles of Narnia (mostly The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Last Battle, and The Magician's Nephew)
3. The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
4. The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
5. The Odyssey by Homer
6. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri
7. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
8. Victorian People and Ideas by Richard Altick
9. Dreamers of Decadence by Philippe Jullian
10. Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong

My Facebook list looked a little different, as I had forgotten #4, and couldn't come up with another to take its place.  I had to scramble a little for #8, #9, and #10, which were all influential nonfiction.  But fiction was what defined me at various points in my life.

In fact, #1, #2, #3, #4, and #7 were all on the list because I read them more times than I know--and the list is in rough chronological order.  I read Little House on the Prairie in 3rd grade, and perhaps the following year, I got the boxed set of books, and read them voraciously for the next several years.  I remember specifically brining the books to school each day in 4th, 5th and 6th grades, and reading one of the books in a single day.  The Long Winter and These Happy Golden Years became worn from being read over and over, more than the rest--the former because it was an amazing tale of endurance, the latter because it was a portrait of growing up.

When I was in 6th grade, I attended a Christian school for part of the year because my mother had a job there, and at one point, the librarian, impressed with my appetite for books, and recognizing my resistance to "girl books" like Sweet Valley High and The Babysitters Club, or books about animals, directed me to the Chronicles of Narnia.  I was in love.  I read all but The Magician's Nephew while I was at the school--repeatedly.  When I returned to my public elementary school that same year, I bought The Magician's Nephew from Scholastic.  Years later, when I was 15, I worked as a camp counselor of sorts at Camp-of-the-Woods in Upstate New York, and I was able to buy my own set from their bookstore.  They fell apart almost immediately, and I wrote HarperCollins for a refund of the $40+ that they had cost.  The following year, it began to click for me that they were not simply fantasy, but Christian allegory--and so began my disillusionment wiht the Chronicles, and in a way, with Christianity (a symptom, also, of the particular type of Christianity I encountered at Camp-of-the-Woods, the superficiality, the compulsory nature of faith, and the loneliness....)  The books remained with me for a long time, as I learned more about Lewis, wrestled with his Christian identity, his adpotion by the evangelicals who made me feel alienated from Christianity, and his curious and often disturbing biography....  But even so, they stayed close as the more I read, the more I understood Lewis's influences, allusions, and techniques.  By the time I entered my M.A. program, I wanted to "redeem" The Chronicles of Narnia from those who would dismiss them on the basis of their Christianity.  My first graduate paper, my first abstract, and, consequently, my first article and my M.A. thesis came from that impulse.  From rereading, I was able to see exactly how to make a complex argument about how to read the books.  I squeezed another conference paper out of the Chronicles as well.  And this is what books should do--stay with us, grow with us, and lend themselves in some way to our intellectual or spiritual development.  My daughter has started reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, though she might be a little young to get through it on her own.  Someday, I'm sure I will reread them again.

The first non-children's lit--although it might justifiably be called"adult"--novel on the list is The Mists of Avalon--I credit--or blame--a high school English teacher for introducing it.  It's about a million pages long--longer than any of the Outlander books, for certain.  And sort of a poisonous, intoxicating book for a young woman/girl, disenchanted with Christianity, and sexually curious.  I read it probably ten times over the years, and fashioned myself into Morgaine--Bradley's version of Morgan le Fay.  For me, it epitomizes a "dangerous book"--I might say more about that one day soon, as I am currently rereading it--20 years later--to find out what my younger self found so captivating.  And really?  It is still captivating.  And I have found that the little bit of serious fiction I have written is heavily influenced by Marion Zimmer Bradley's tale, but perhaps I'll return to that in another post.

I may or may not have read The Vampire Lestat before The Mists of Avalon.  Or it might have been the same time.  It is the second of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles.  At the time, she had written up to The Queen of the Damned, and by the time The Tale of the Body Thief was written, I was disenchanted.  I read them out of order, so I worshipped Lestat and hated Louis--narrator of Interview with a Vampire--which is not what is supposed to happen.  Rice's vampires showed me an agnostic vision, at best, and a homoerotic one, and I dwelt there for a while, idealizing something I could never know.

I would think it odd that I did not find another book that I could reread and live in for many years, but as an undergraduate, I was a poet.  Then, as a new mother at 20, and in graduate school, I simply didn't have the time.  The Odyssey was influential intellectually as my introduction to Orality-Literacy theory, while the Inferno started tipping me toward Catholicism.  The next on the list was Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and in a very short time, I read it as many times as some of the others.  As the first book I "lived in" as an adult, and a new Catholic, I found a lot of ways to work out ideas in The Lord of the Rings.  It refreshed my spirit, much like the story Lucy read in the magician's house in Voyage of the Dawn Treader--and I was able to share it with my husband as well.

So as I'm rereading--and reliving--The Mists of Avalon, and wondering what thoughts it will yield about books, about my former self, and about ideas that I could not have seen in the novel 20 years ago--I want to ask you--and consider it a tag:  what books have defined you?  What books have you read again and again, and lived in, so that they shaped the person you were, or who you would become?  Because a book can do that--it's the beauty of books, and also what makes them feared (the missing narrative of banned books week, present in dystopian literature).

Comment, blog about your books, and if you would, link back and leave a comment!  Happy reading.

Dragonfly: Where is God in Time Travel?

There are definitely questions about which I'm not interested in speculating. These are mostly questions that resolve themselves within the novels, or questions that do not resonate outside of the novels.  They are interesting, but there is no need to elaborate.  One such question asserts itself in Dragonfly in Amber, in the chapters titled "Untimely Resurrection" and "The Royal Stud": the question of Jamie's vengeance upon Jack Randall, and whether Claire is right to make him postpone that vengeance.  It could be that I think Claire is more wrong about preventing Jamie from killing Jack Randall on this particular occasion than she is to make him betray his country and kin to prevent the Battle (and devastation) of Culloden.  I'll never tell.  But it's also true that Gabaldon brings the matter around very neatly, giving Jamie the ability to reclaim some of his own by determining his own reason for postponing vengeance (and getting in some nice foreshadowing as well).  It's a lovely narrative card that she plays, and well worth giving a nod.  (See pp. 401-403 in the small, Dell paperback version with the orange cover.)  But--it is part of the narrative, and in terms of Jamie's justification, what he does or does not owe Claire, the question of conscience, or anything involving their feelings about other characters, it works itself out, and doesn't really require speculation or further analysis of motivations.  I like to leave the characters to themselves, and allow their motivations to emerge through the action of the story rather than through my own suppositions and psychoanalysis.  It's why criticism is (or should be) sort of the anti-fan-fiction.  (Just for fun, check out Diana Gabaldon's Fan Fiction Policy.)

What is interesting in the maneuverings of Claire to prevent Jamie from killing Jack Randall too soon is (first) that the question is never the morality of the vengeance.  That is taken for granted, and I'm glad.  Moralistic posturing would do no one any good in this case.  Claire's conscience is evoked, rather neatly, to turn the guilt of preventing Frank's birth (indirectly, by the death of Jack Randall) to Claire's decision to abandon Frank for Jamie--at least, that is how Jamie casts Claire's decision not to pass again through the stones: "it's one thing to abandon a man, and another to condemn him to death" (401).  Non-birth/prevention of conception is not quite death, but we'll let that go for the moment.  Jamie's conscience is never an issue, except insofar as killing always leaves a mark:  "I remember the face of every man I've killed, and always will" (400).  And that's just fine.

But the deeper implications of the maneuverings leave some room for consideration.  If this novel is instrumental to the series, it may well be--first and foremost--the working out of what a time traveler can and can't accomplish with reference to history that gives it it's highest value in the big picture.  (I have other considerations of time travel here and here.)  The reason I drag God into it in my title is because the question of conscience was right in front of me in the narrative.  Brother Anselm and his theology, the moral implications of preventing someone from being born.  But a larger question emerges:  could anything Jamie and Claire have done prevent the beginning of the bloodline that eventually produces Frank Randall, Claire's husband in the year 1943?

It's something like the question my son asked of his 4th grade teacher at the fourth-rate Catholic school that he went to for most of that year:  if Adam and Eve hadn't sinned, would any of us exist?  Need I say that the teacher didn't know how to answer the question?  I consulted a deacon friend of mine, and came up with the response that our existence in God's plan didn't depend on sin.  We simply don't know how things would have worked out without it.  There is something tangentially related to this question happening in Perelandra, the second book of C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy.  An alien world is experiencing its own Creation, and Lewis's Ransom is a spectator and intercessor, preventing the successful temptation of the newly-Created female of the alien species so that the world might emerge without the taint of Original Sin.  The idea is--Sin or no Sin, our existence as individuals is part of God's plan.

So is this worldview somehow reflected in Gabaldon's novel?  At first glance it may seem not to be.  Clearly, it is absent from the Back to the Future movie trilogy--things change, people disappear.  But there's nothing about God in those films.  Religion is simply not part of the picture(s).  By contrast, there's Catholicism all over the place in the Outlander series.  You can't get around it, the novels have a Catholic consciousness, whatever their orthodoxy.  You might say that it proceeds from what has been called "the Catholic imagination," though I wouldn't quote Andrew Greeley for orthodoxy's sake...

Without saying how, I will say that Frank's bloodline works itself out.  It works itself out with Jack Randall alive, but it does so in a way that his survival has precious little to do with the birth.  Clever.  So does that mean Predestination?  I'm not sure.  Although there is implied argument between Predestination and Free Will in the novels (especially with reference to Roger Wakefield in some of the later books), there seems to be quite a bit of room for Free Will--or really, would readers enjoy the books so much?  But characters' Free Will seems to feed directly into what they know to have been going to happen.  (I'm absolutely playing with verb tense there.  Too bad I'm not writing in a romance language!)  In other words, the characters end up proving their own instrumentality to the events that will unfold--or have unfolded--or will have unfolded.  Everything fits neatly into place.  Some would consider this as evidence for God in the Outlander worldview--or in its representation of time travel.  I think there's evidence, at least, that the man who was Frank Randall was "meant" to exist--which does, in fact, suggest some greater intentionality beyond the machinations of Claire and Jamie.