I Don't Understand Flannery O'Connor. Help!

I was asked by someone in the Memoria Press office recently to help a lady who asked if there was a study guide on Flannery O'Connor's works. My response:

As far as I know, no such thing exists. However, there are still some resources that can help a reader appreciate her and understand what she is doing. The book Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-haunted South by Ralph Wood is excellent in that regard. Also, I would highly recommend watching the episode of PBS's American Masters on O'Connor. It is excellent and instructive. I also recommend reading at least some of her correspondence in The Habit of Being, a collection of her letters. It will help a person "get" O'Connor. Her biography is also included in the book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (taken from the title of one of her short stories), by Paul Elie. Hers is one of the four biographies in the book, which also covers the lives of Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and Walker Percy.

Why Books are Important

From my "Letter from the Editor" in the most recent issue of The Classical Teacher:

In 1929, children’s book author Anne Parrish was visiting Paris. She left her husband at a cafe to visit one of the city’s many bookstores. There she found a copy of Helen Wood’s Jack Frost and Other Stories, a favorite of hers from childhood. She returned to the cafe, sat down, and showed her husband what she had found. He opened the book, turned a couple of pages, and paused. He handed it back to her, opened to the flyleaf. There, in the hand of a child, she read, “Anne Parrish, 209 North Weber Street, Colorado Springs, Colorado. 

The book she had found half a world away turned out to be her very own childhood copy. It was as if she had found a long-lost friend 

A book is just a physical object. And yet, as every book lover knows, it is something more than that...

Read more here.

Why We Like Monsters: A Halloween Meditation

Get a link to my newest post on why our popular culture is so fascinated with the dark and the demonic here.

C. S. Lewis' List of Great Books

The blog A Pilgrim in Narnia has published a list of the books C. S. Lewis refers to in his book, Experiment in Criticism, a book about how to read books. The list tracks pretty well the books that a person concerned with preserving our culture ought to read (or aspire to read):

See the list here.

Is the magic in fairy tales and fantasy books a problem for Christians?

Someone wrote me recently about being admonished by a friend for recommending that her friend’s daughter read the fantasy books of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. The books contained magic and witchcraft and her friend felt that this would only encourage an interest in such things.

I told her about a man who came up to me at our exhibit booth at a conference and asked me if I knew of any good educational computer programs that taught certain subjects. He clearly thought that education technology was a good thing. Near the end of our discussion, he looked down and saw that we carried The Hobbit. “Oh,” he said, “I would never use that book with Christian students.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it has magic in it,” he said.

“But you approve of technology?”

“Of course.”

“Well, books like The Hobbit have what I call ‘fairy tale magic’ in them, which is just using some process, the exact nature of which is a mystery to you, to manipulate nature. What’s the difference between magic in this sense and technology?”

Fairy tale magic is the fanciful kind of thing that happens in many fairy tales. When the pumpkin and the rats in Cinderella are turned into a coach and horse, and six lizards into footmen; when the prince kisses Sleeping Beauty and she awakens from her deathly sleep; when Jack plants his magic beans and they grow into a giant bean plant that reaches the clouds; when Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold.

It is this kind of “magic” that Chesterton declares—in his great essay, “The Ethics of Elfland”—if imbibed as a child, helps to inoculate us against the scientific materialism of our age because it helps us to see that what lies behind the world is not a “law” (as the scientific materialist would say), but a Will.

Arthur C. Clarke once famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” What he meant was that advanced technology does the very same thing that fairy tale magic does: manipulate nature using a process which you do not understand.

The man I was talking to said something about the fact that even though technology may be a mystery to us, it is not a mystery to scientists who have a natural explanation for it. I responded that that does not change the fact for those of us who are not scientists who use technology: It’s still magic to us.

And besides, even scientific explanations are not explanations, but descriptions―descriptions which themselves appeal to an order which even to scientists is still a mystery. Using an incantation to open a door in a fairy tale is no more magical than using copper to conduct electricity in the real world. And to say that copper conducts electricity because its outer electrons are not localized just begs more questions, since we have only explained one mysterious procedure in terms of another (Why do materials whose electrons are not localized conduct electricity?)

In other words, not only is any advanced technological process magic for us, but ultimately it is magic even to the people to whom we appeal to explain their magic. In the final analysis, it’s even magic to them.

So one way of responding to this objection to fantasy literature is to ask the person if they have a microwave oven in their home or a cell phone in their pocket. If there is a problem with fairy tale magic, then there is a problem with technology. But there is no problem with technology, therefore there is no problem with fairy tale magic (the logical rule of Modus Tollens).

In addition, the kind of “magic” you find in fairy tales―and in fantasy literature like that of Lewis and Tolkien―is not the kind of magic that is prohibited in Scripture. What is prohibited in Scripture is necromancy in particular and fortune-telling in general. It is the consort with specifically demonic forces that is prohibited, as when, at the behest of King Saul, the Witch of Endor calls forth the spirit of Samuel from the dead in the First Book of Samuel.

Again, if you interpret demonic forces too broadly (the occultic), you indict technology. Any definitional net with holes small enough to capture fortune-telling and demonology and large enough to let technology through will also be large enough to allow fairy tale magic through.

Tolkien’s wizard Gandalf does not have dealings with evil spirits, nor does Lewis’ Aslan.

The holes in the net are going to have to be so small as to capture fortune-telling and necromancy, but large enough to let through Joseph’s interpretation of dreams and Daniel’s prophecies. All of which is to say that the problem is not the manipulation of natural things, but the demonic itself. And there is nothing demonic about fairy tale magic of the kind that you find in Lewis and Tolkien. They are simply not calling upon evil spirits to do what they are doing.

And, in fact, it is clear that necromancy is portrayed as evil in The Lord of the Rings, as evidenced by the references to the evil character Sauron as “The Necromancer.” Tolkien certainly seems to recognize this distinction.

The problem is that the people who make this kind of argument want to go way beyond what the Scriptures prohibit. There is a distinction between the use of the word “magic” (in any sense) that is broad enough to encompass fairy tales and fantasy on the one hand, and witchcraft proper on the other.

People who protest Lewis and Tolkien need to have these distinctions pointed out to them.

On Dads, Boys, & the importance of Building a Family Culture around Books

My interview with Sarah McKenzie at Read Aloud Revival is up. Just click here.

Ten Great Christian Novels (and a few others you might to check out)

Here is the introduction to my list of great Christian novels at Memoria Press' site:

The following is a list, not of the ten greatest Christian novels, since I haven't read all the novels ever written, but at least ten of the greatest. Any one of these would make a great Christmas present for the reader in your family (hopefully there are more than one). These are not children's books, of course, but they are books that an adult or even a well-read, classically educated highschooler could read for profit and enjoyment. They are also books that warrant spending a little extra money on and getting a nice, hardback edition, maybe one with nice illustrations—one someone could hand down to his children or grandchildren. I have included in each case a comment on a good audio version of each book, where this is one, but I do not intend this as a substitute for reading the book. I find it helpful—with books that one should read more than once (and all these books meet that criterion)—to both read and listen to them. These are two quite different experiences and you will notice quite different things about the story. 

See the list here.

The "Demon Irony": Classic literature as an antidote to modern thought

The following article is featured in the new Classical Teacher magazine:

When the movie Les Misérables came out last year, my wife and I went to see it with several of our adult children, none of whom are fans of musicals. I don't know how this happened. My daughter was the only one who would even consent to sit down and watch “The Sound of Music” with me.

But their reaction to Les Misérables was interesting: There they were, sitting there, loving the movie. In fact, one of my sons declared that it was one of the best movies he had ever seen.

Somewhere in their youth or childhood, I must have done something good.

In the case of Les Misérables, I expected that my children would be the movie’s harshest critics. But they weren’t. The harshest critics, as it turned out, were the critics.

Although my children gave the movie a thumbs up, many highbrow reviewers didn’t like it at all. Not one bit.
A week or so after the movie came out, Stanley Fish, on his blog at the New York Times, reacted to the hostility of many of these reviewers by going and seeing the movie himself—twice: “The first time I liked it,” he said. “The second time I loved it.”

So what was the problem with the critics? Fish said he found his answer in an interview with Les Mis director Tom Hooper in USA Today. “The time we live in,” said Hooper, “is a postmodern age where a certain amount of irony is expected. This film is made without irony.”

Fish goes on to explain what irony does:

Irony is a stance of distance that pays a compliment to both its producer and consumer. The ironist knows what other, more naïve, observers do not: that surfaces are deceptive, that the real story is not what presents itself, that conventional pieties are sentimental fictions.

The artist who deploys irony tests the sophistication of his audience and divides it into two parts, those in the know and those who live in a fool’s paradise. Irony creates a privileged vantage point from which you can frame and stand aloof from a world you are too savvy to take at face value. Irony is the essence of the critical attitude, of the observer’s cool gaze; every reviewer who is not just a bourgeois cheerleader (and no reviewer will admit to being that) is an ironist.

This explains not just why critics didn’t like particular movies, but why so much of modern art, particularly film and literature, are the way they are and why we react to them the way we do.

The irony that Fish alludes to is a form of cynicism—and of arrogance.  Critics are guilty of it, but we—not just critics and authors and film makers, but we the audience—respond to it. It is the attitude by which we both make and view narrative art today. We are invited by the director or author to deconstruct a story and its characters, to tear them down, to subvert them, an invitation to which we readily respond.

I have long wondered why my students are at first put off by older literature in which the conflict involves a morally upright hero and in which the conflict is extrinsic—between the hero and some evil force or person (rather than the intrinsic psychological dramas of today). It is not as if they have never come across such a tale. They have read plenty of children's stories in their time.

The problem is that, while they will read them, their inclination is not to believe them. They consider them idealistic. These works don't seem to speak to life as it really is. Students bring a cynical attitude toward what we have them read. They are not critics (at least not yet), but they are full-fledged ironists.

We are trained to be this way by the culture around us. If you look at modern film and our entertainment culture in general, you see irony everywhere.

One recent evening, I turned on the television and landed on a channel that was playing The Lone Ranger. I had not seen it in the theater, so here was my chance.

Being in my mid-50s now, I am of the generation that saw my share of reruns of the original television show. So I was curious as to what Hollywood would do with it (or to it).

In the old television show, the Lone Ranger was a serious character, as was Tonto, his Indian companion. They were strong and good and they fought the bad guys, who were not good and definitely not as strong (partly, as it used to be thought, because they were not good). It was a serious show: There was a moral earnestness to it that characterized most of the shows on television and at the movie theaters of that time. When it came to chasing and capturing the bad guys, there wasn’t any joking around.

I imagine that if I watched the show today, I would find it fairly shallow and boring.

The movie, I found, was very different. There was the pretension of good—the evil railroad owner was desecrating Indian land (not to mention just being an all around jerk) and the Lone Ranger and Tonto were trying to foil his plans—but at the same time neither character was a traditional hero.

Unlike the old television series, Tonto was the real leader and he basically has to drag the less than enthusiastic Lone Ranger (who is portrayed as something of a wimp) along with him on his quest. In addition, Tonto provides the comic relief. Much of his dialogue consists of wisecracks. Neither of them were what we would call role models. The Lone Ranger was not a drama. The good guys had become comic figures. The movie was far more interesting and entertaining than the television show, I have to admit. And yet I didn’t like it very much. It had other kinds of problems that any mediocre movie has, but there was something else about it that bothered me.

What I realized after I thought about it a bit was that it too had been ironized. In fact, the very purpose of the movie was clearly to take the original idea of the show, which had a kind of nobility, and to deconstruct it. At almost every point, the movie is a complete inversion of the original.

In the TV series, you never knew who the Lone Ranger really was, but in the movie, we are allowed to see behind the mask, and behind the mask is no hero at all, but a figure mostly comic.

This impulse to unmask the conventional is all over our culture. It affects our sports and entertainment media, as well as the news.

 Gone are the days when Mickey Mantle could come to the plate stone drunk and no one know about it but the other players—and the sportswriters, who kept it a secret. (Mantle admitted to it later on, saying he would see three balls coming at him. "I just hit the middle one," he said.)

And how many times have we seen the media swarm around a movie star or famous musician who has fallen from grace and who is then the subject of about a week's worth of coverage on CNN, whose producers are well aware of our lust to know what these people are really like underneath all that makeup and pretension? What a comfort it is to the rest of us to know that they're really no better than we are.

One recent event was a telling measure of how far irony has taken root in our public discourse.  When David Letterman recently retired from NBC's "The Late Show," he was replaced by Stephen Colbert. Letterman was more simply a comedian, but Colbert is an arch-ironist.

Colbert’s show, "The Colbert Report," differs from "The Late Show" in that it is almost pure satire. Colbert does not play himself as host of his show ... or does he? So wedded is his character to himself in ironical union that his Wikipedia page describes him thusly: “Stephen Colbert is the persona of political satirist Stephen Colbert.”

Colbert’s character is a send-up of various prominent television pundits. As Deborah Solomon at the New York Times has put it, Colbert plays a “well-intentioned, poorly informed high-status idiot.” He is pompous, overly confident in his opinions, and self-obsessed. And we are expected to believe, not what he says, but exactly the opposite.

Colbert’s show, along with John Stewart’s “The Daily Show,” were conceived as political humor shows, engaged in lampooning the serious shows that serve as the the primary news sources for many Americans. But according to one report, for as many as 25 percent of young adults under 30, The "Colbert Report" and the "Daily Show" together are now their main source of news.

These shows were designed to be parasitical on the mainstream news shows. But with Colbert now set to occupy Letterman's chair, we are seeing a complete cultural inversion. Where the serious was once supreme and satire subordinate, irony now rules.

We live under the sun, where we know there is nothing new. Irony existed even in ancient Greece. The comic playwright Aristophanes mercilessly lampooned Socrates. But the comic poets, who employed a destructive kind of irony, were always subordinate to the tragic poets, whose irony was sympathetic. And both of these were subordinate to the epics of Homer, which contained no irony at all.

Modern irony differs from ancient irony in two ways. First, it is almost entirely destructive. The tragic irony of a story like that of Sophocle's Oedipus led the viewer to sympathize with the hero who is being victimized by fate. The greatest of the Greek playwrights wrote tragedies, but tragedies, like epics, are almost entirely absent from modern  literature and film.

 Behind the old irony was a recognition, if not an affirmation, of an underlying metaphysical hierarchy with greatness at the top and meanness at the bottom. It was an order in which the hero ranked high. But behind the new irony is a rejection of that order. The belief in a logos—an ordering principle of reality—underlay the old irony; the belief in nothingness underlies the new. The old irony was theological; the new irony is nihilistic.

The Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard praised irony when it was used to allow one to stand above and judge himself: He called this "mastered" irony. But he condemned the kind of irony that allowed one to stand above and judge the world, as if he were not part of it himself: This was "unmastered" irony. This kind of irony, he said (echoing Hegel), was "infinite absolute negativity." This is why  literary critic Irving Howe once called  irony the "gospel of chaos" and why one of Dostoevsky's characters in his novel The Possessed termed it "the demon irony."

But the chief difference between traditional and modern narrative is not that the modern contains irony and the classical does not. The chief difference is that, in modern culture irony has become the chief literary and critical mode. Satire and cynicism now predominate in an unprecedented way. What are the cultural consequences of a situation in which, for many people, the parasitical has become the primary? How does it affect the way people think when they are saturated in the sarcastic? What happens when parody becomes the primary mode of cultural cognition?

The most obvious consequence of the dominance of modern irony is that there can no longer be a hero. This is why we no longer see epic stories being written today. The only epic hero story of any consequence written in the last 100 years is J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and the only reason it exists in the modern world at all is because it is not modern. Although written in the 20th century, it is of another time—a time in which greatness was acknowledged. It is the same in American films: There are a few exceptions—like Ridley Scott's film Gladiator―but they are the exception that proves the rule.

And with the hero goes the good guy in general. "All writers," said Dostoevsky, in a  letter to his niece in 1868, "and not only ours, but even all Europeans who have tried to portray the positively good man have always failed." Dostoevsky underscored his point about the impossibility of a good character in modern literature by writing his story The Idiot. The protagonist Myshkin is good, but he has to be portrayed as a complete misfit.

"Of the good figures in Christian literature," said Dostoevsky, "the most perfect is Don Quixote. But he is good only because at the same time he is ridiculous and succeeds only by virtue of that fact."

Even the good characters of children's literature, which one would expect to be the last bastion of innocence, are being assailed by the satirists. In a culture in which many children never read classic children's stories, books such as Honestly, Red Riding Hood Was Rotten!: The Story of Little Red Riding Hood as Told by the Wolf; and Seriously, Cinderella Is SO Annoying! The Story of Cinderella as told by the Wicked Stepmother are now common fare.

There are children who have never read the Three Little Pigs who do know The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.  I remember going with my family to see the movie Shrek and wondering how many of the children in the theater watching it actually knew the fairy tales which it so gleefully fractured.

But there is a child even in the modern adult, which is perhaps the reason superheroes are so popular at the box office. Despite our cynicism, the hero is still preserved in Superman, Batman, and Iron Man. The superheroes now so common at the theater are heroes, but they are also either historically distant or utterly fantastic. We seem to have driven the hero into our cultural subconscious, and he has turned back up in Metropolis, the Bat Cave, and Stark Tower.

There is nothing wrong with irony as long as it does not become villainous and try to take over the world. But the ironic should always be subordinate to the heroic, which is why classical literature is such a great corrective to modern literature and film. It preserves the hero, and he is primary.

Grounding ourselves and our children in books like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy (as well as classic children's literature)―unironic stories which portray characters living in a morally ordered world―will not only keep us metaphysically grounded in the True and the Good, but will better equip us to appreciate the ironic when it is appropriate.

One of the disadvantages of putting irony first is that it undermines even irony itself.  When everything is satirical, what is there to satirize? Irony encourages us to see through things. But "if you can see through everything," said C. S. Lewis, "then there is nothing left to see."

Rod Dreher on literature and evil

My article on evil and literature that recently appeared in the CiRCE Journal was quoted extensively by Rod Dreher at the American Conservative in his article, "The Crap Stories We Tell Our Kids" as well as at The Deeps of Time.

How Literature Solves the Problem of Evil

My new article on literature and the problem of evil is in the new CiRCE Magazine here. Here is an excerpt:

When people look for a solution to the problem of evil in its rational or logical form, they are looking for a resolution to a technical problem. But this question—the rational question of evil—is not the real problem of evil. At least it is not the question with which people who experience suffering actually struggle. In fact, the vast majority of those who actually struggle with evil couldn’t even tell you what the logical question was. And even if they were aware of the problem—and even if they knew the answer to it—they would not be satisfied.

How would the answer to a logical question assuage their grief? Their grief is not a logical problem. The logical dilemma of evil would not be satisfying to anyone but a logician—and it would only satisfy him as a logician; it would not satisfy him as a human being. 

The purely abstract philosophical problem of evil is an impersonal question. It is always someone else’s problem. But the real problem of evil and suffering—the existential problem—is necessarily a personal question. It is a problem for me. 

The philosophical question of evil is not the question parents and friends of those killed in Newtown or Japan or the twin towers asked themselves. It is certainly not the question addressed by God speaking from Job’s whirlwind. 

There is, in fact, not just one problem of evil: There are two. The first is the logical question, “How can there be evil and suffering in a world created by a good and all powerful God?” But the second question, which can often sound the same, is actually much different. The second question is “Why is evil happening to me?” This second question is not a logical question, but an existential question--or perhaps we might better say that it is a phenomenological question.
It is not a question about something that happens in the abstract, it is something that happens to us. 

In Job’s story, the characters do not make this distinction, but I think the author does. Certainly God does, as we see by the end of the story. Job is dealing (whether he knows it or not) with the second question—why is evil happening to me?—while his Comforters are dealing with the first question—“How can there be evil and suffering in a world created by a good and all powerful God?” Job’s question is concrete and existential, not abstract and philosophical. But his friends are all philosophers. Job himself seems unaware of this distinction—or maybe, to borrow a phrase from Chesterton, it was in his soul but not in his mind. In any case, this was part of his struggle, and this is the primary reason why the advice of his friends is not a help to him: He thinks they are addressing his question, when, in fact, they are not. 

While his Comforters bring him reasons, God brings the news of the poetic order of the world. God’s words mean more to Job than those of his comforters because the world is more like a poem than a syllogism.

The Battle of the Red Books and the Blue Books: The literature of the town vs. the literature of the country

After the 2004 presidential election, someone posted a map showing, county by county, who voted for which candidate. Whoever made the map (I have forgotten now) chose to represent the counties that voted for George W. Bush, the Republican, in red, and the counties that voted for Al Gore, the Democrat, in blue. The map has become a familiar part of the American political lexicon, invoked now by pundits on an almost daily basis.

If you look at the map, the association is as clear as day: the denser the population, the more liberal the political leanings—and the sparser the population, the more traditional. But it is more than just politics that divides the red states and the blue states.

From before most of us can even remember, we are soaked and steeped in the distinction between the town and the country. As far back as Aesop, we are told that the ways of the city are not the ways of the country, and that, in fact, the country life is more solid, more stable, and more satisfying.

Aesop's Town Mouse, having visited the Country Mouse’s home and found the lifestyle too quiet and the cuisine too plain. He convinces the Country Mouse to return with him to the city, where there are “sweetmeats and jellies, pastries, delicious cheeses, indeed, the most tempting foods that a Mouse can imagine.” On its face, the city offers luxuries unattainable in the country, and the country mouse is dazzled. But as soon as he has availed himself of these delicacies he is confronted by the servants, the dog, and, worst of all, the cat. The Country Mouse stopped in the Town Mouse's den only long enough to pick up her carpet bag and umbrella.

"You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not," she said as she hurried away, "but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it."

I think I understand the Town Mouse’s impatience with the country. Shortly after we were married, my pregnant wife and I moved from the suburbs of southern California to the rustic environs of small town Kentucky. When we first visited the small town in which we still live, we were charmed by the old-fashioned main street, with the bandstand in the park in front of the courthouse and the classic beauty of the little college in town—not to mention the lush green of the fields and horse farms that seem to go on forever.

But it wasn’t long after we moved when other things began to loom large: There was little in the way of restaurants, fewer choices at the grocery store, and if you wanted to shop for clothes, you had to drive for an hour to Lexington to do it. Everything seemed to close at 5:00 p.m. And don’t even ask about Sunday: Nothing was open, and you were on your own.

We traveled back home frequently with our two, three, and then four children. And, for a time, we might have moved back to what we perceived to be civilization if we could. We missed the luxuries and dainties.

But the years began to tell on our way of looking at things. The trips back to California became less frequent and less gratifying. The polluted air, the crowded roads, the endless asphalt—I don’t remember noticing them much when I lived there, but they came to seem chief features of the landscape. Where were the cows? Where were the corn fields? Where were the patches of woods and the occasional deer crossing the road? Why did no one wave to you when you drove by?

Our three boys had by then spent a good part of their childhood tromping through the creek that ran through our backyard (or fishing in it), and our daughter had already taken to horseback-riding (which eventually became her profession). We left as unwitting town mice, but every successive trip contributed to our transformation into country mice.

There was something about the country that seemed more solid, satisfying, and safe—and there was something about the city that was artificial, anxious, and threatening. And this was not our judgment only, but the judgment of time and civilization.

The ancient Romans loved to tell the story of Cincinnatus, who, after serving as Roman consul, retired to his country estate. When Rome’s enemies later began to rise against them, the Roman senate sent a delegation to his farm to beg him to return to lead the country out of its crisis. They found him, the story goes, at work with his plow. He returned to Rome and led it out of one of its darker moments and, as soon as he had accomplished his purpose, gave up the absolute powers they had granted him and returned to his farm in an act that George Washington consciously copied when he resigned after his second term as first president of the United States.

Washington, a farmer himself, saw in Cincinnatus the same agrarian virtues that animated the many Virginia planters who attended at the birth of this nation. In fact, if you visit the Capitol Rotunda today, you will find the famous statue of Washington. He is leaning with one arm on the fasces, the cylindrical bundle of bound rods and axes that represents civil authority, and behind him is a plow. Jefferson too extolled the virtues of agrarian life. If you ever visit the Jefferson Memorial, walk to the back of his giant bronze statue and notice the two things sitting behind him: a column of corn and column of tobacco.

Once you notice the prevalence of these symbols on almost every statue and pediment in this nation’s capitol city, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this nation’s founders saw the agrarian life as anything other than the seedbed of virtue.

And literature joins history in its testimony to these values. The story of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is joined by innumerable others in the case for the country. Children’s literature in particular is full of it. It is hard to imagine Laura falling asleep to the sweet strains of Pa’s fiddle in mid-town Manhattan. Wilbur was “some pig,” but would not have been so “terrific” in a place other than the barn in which he lived. And good luck finding blueberries for Sal in the cement jungles in which many of us live.

In fact, it is striking when you consider how few children’s stories take place in a city. The lessons which we are admonished to learn (or which, more frequently, are taught implicitly) are country lessons. When Almonzo’s father in Farmer Boy is showing him how to plant a wheat field, he tells him the story of a “lazy, worthless boy” who was sent to sow a field, but who instead poured the seeds on the ground and went swimming, thinking no one would ever know. “But the seeds knew, and the earth knew,” and in time, when the weeds finally grew, they would tell of his wickedness when even the boy had forgotten it.

It is hard to imagine what urban analogy could be employed to make a similar point. There is something about the fields and forests that allow the moral imagination to run free, and something too particular and artificial about the things of the city to allow what happens there to be universalized. What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the "urban distaste for the concrete" seems to militate against the poetic. For some reason we seem to know ourselves better when we are closer to the soil. In fact, it is worth observing that the word “human” comes from the Greek word humus, which means “earth” or “soil”—that from which, according to Genesis, we are made.

We are more and more in thrall to the artificial, as Levin, the protagonist of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina sees when his city-dwelling brother comes to visit him at his country estate. His brother sees it as a place to escape to for leisure, while Levin sees it as a place to work and live in. Shoulder to shoulder with the peasants mowing the fields Levin finds “a remedy … for every folly,” and finds in his wife, Kitty, who also loves the country, a down-to-earthness that grounds his life in reality. So too in Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, a story in which Stephen Kumalo, an old, Black Anglican priest leaves his tribal home in the country on a mission to find his son who has left for the fleshpots of Johannesburg, and who is in trouble. Johannesburg in Alan Paton’s story is a modern Babylon that has taken and corrupted his son.

Our modern lives are spent more and more in company with man-made things. We build man-made houses in man-made subdivisions in which we watch our man-made television sets and eat our increasingly man-made food, enabling us to lead our man-made lives and think our man-made thoughts. The country life, far from being “at odds with God and man,” as the pastor tells the reclusive Uncle Alp in Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, is a life closer to the things that God made.

There is a distinction made in the old material logic of the medievals between man-made artifacts, whose pattern and purpose are imposed on them from without, and natural objects, whose pattern and purpose are really in them. The wood of a tree has its formal and final cause buried within its very being, whereas a bed has its pattern and purpose imposed on it from the outside by man. This is why, said Aristotle, if you were to bury a wooden bed in the ground and it sprouted, it would sprout a tree and not a bed.

In the old classical conception of the cosmos, natural things not only seem more real, but really are more real. So when we surround ourselves with unnatural things, we should not be surprised when we find that we have been distanced from our natural selves.

Heidi, who is being raised by her grandfather in the mountains, is taken to Frankfurt, Germany to be the companion of Clara, a young disabled girl where she turns the house upside down with her impulsiveness, driving the stuffy Miss Rottenmeier to consternation and the more good humored servant Sebastian to fits of suppressed laughter. Used to going out first thing in the morning “to see whether the sky was blue and the sun shining, and to say good morning to the trees and flowers,” Heidi finds the doors of Clara’s house nailed shut and no view at all from the open front door. She was “like a wild bird in a cage, seeking a way through the bars to freedom.”

She is sorely unhappy there, and her very health deteriorates. Clara’s doctor recommends returning Heidi to her mountain home—and after later visiting Heidi and her grandfather, the same doctor ends up recommending that Clara too be taken to Heidi’s mountains.

There are stories set is small towns, but seldom in big ones. Small towns are towns in which humans not only live, but, being human-sized towns, they are towns into which they can comfortably fit. Margaret Wise Brown’s Mike Mulligan, Jane—Eleanor Estes “middle Moffat,” Robert McClosky’s Homer Price—all live in the kind of small towns that still dot the red state landscape.

The nihilist modern adult stories that make up so much a part of modern literature are set exclusively in the city. All the modern tales of alienation and despair—Gogol’s Overcoat, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment , Tolstoy’s "Death of Ivan Ilych," Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Sartre’s Nausea, Camus’ The Stranger—They all take place in an urban setting, far away from the hundred acre wood.

But the allure of the city is strong, and more and more of us eventually end up there at some point. The boy in Robert Penn Warren’s “Blackberry Winter” sees a strange man walking down the road and onto their farm. He is an outsider who asks for work, but he is a threatening presence, invading the innocence of the life of the boy and his family. He wears tattered city clothes and seems to represent the more modern industrial life. After he is told to move on by the boy’s father, the boy follows him for a ways down the road. Finally, the tramp turns to him, saying “You don’t stop following me and I’ll cut your throat …”

“That was what he said,” said the boy, “for me to stop following him. But I did follow him, all my days.”

There are exceptions to this thesis of course, even among children’s books. Curious George, Mary Poppins, Peter Pan, and Trumpet of the Swan are all set in the city, although even in these the country is often resorted to as a moral refuge and for spiritual relief.

In fact, much of the country life that once thrived in America has atrophied. Anyone who drives the side roads of America can see it: small towns which have been bled dry by the nearby interstate and commercial districts which have taken away the thriving commerce that the main streets of this country once enjoyed. In my home state of Kentucky, the demise of the tobacco culture has left ghost towns where there were once thriving townships .

Conversely, there are many cities which enjoy a more thriving culture, with their burroughs and smaller districts. In these places the very density of the architecture has prevented the larger stores like Wal-Mart from luring people away from the smaller businesses. Here small groceries and corner hardware stores still thrive in a way that is no longer possible in small towns, where the siren song of the strip malls lures many a shopper to her ruin. There is still a community in which you know the butcher at the market, and the waitress at the local coffee shop, and where you are on a first name basis with your doctor, and your mechanic, and where the barber who cuts your hair is the same one who cut it when you were a kid.

You can find a little bit of the country even in many cities.

When Heidi’s grandfather is asked what will become of Heidi if she never goes to school, he responds, “She’ll grow up with the goats and the birds. They won’t teach her any bad ideas and she’ll be very happy.” Most of us wouldn’t go that far. Still, some of us are sympathetic to the judgment of Beatrix Potter, who, after telling of Timmy Willie, the country mouse in The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse, remarks, “One place suits one person, another place suits another person. For my part, I prefer to live in the country, like Timmy Willie.”

The Dangerous Article for Boys: Why boys don’t need to get in touch with their feelings and how you can protect them from people who think they do (with a list of books to help you fend these people off).

The following article contains some elements from past posts, but it mostly new. It is the monthly article for the Memoria Press August E-Newsletter.

It is now well-recognized that boys are not reading. What is the problem? Most commentators want to say that boys have an aversion to books. But the problem is quite the opposite: books—modern books, that is—have an aversion to boys.

A recent edition of The New York Times Sunday Book Review featured an article by Robert Lipsyte that attempts to address this problem. Here is the proffered solution:

[B]oys need to be approached individually with books about their fears, choices, possibilities and relationships — the kind of reading that will prick their dormant empathy, involve them with fictional characters and lead them into deeper engagement with their own lives. This is what turns boys into readers.

Excuse me while I dab my eyes delicately with my handkerchief, touched as I am by this tender thought.

Okay, let's get something straight here: solutions like this are part of the problem. I'm normally against shooting spit wads in class, but I am willing to make an exception in this one case. The entire educational establishment has tried for over 50 years to force boys into their effeminate mold, and in the process, they've succeeded in evacuating literature of all the things boys like in books: action, adventure, danger, bloodletting--and an iron moral code that is taught, not by smarmy sermonizing, but by immersing them in the moral universe of a story about a hero who not only believes in this code, but enforces it with a vengeance.

Boys now seek refuge in cheesy horror novels because the Cultural Authorities won't give them the adventure books that were once staples in every boy's life. It is to this I attribute the popularity of vampire novels (and movies and television shows). But even here a boy is destined for disappointment.

The crisis of wimpy vampires 
In fact, the extent of our modern cultural crisis can be at least partly measured by the plight of the vampire. The vampire of yore was an evil and only partly human creature. He sucked peoples’ blood and didn’t second guess himself. The modern vampire is the pure creation of the modern therapeutic mindset: a tortured emotional soul dealing with his vampire condition as if it were some kind of psychological neurosis.

The vampire of old was a danger to others; the modern vampire is a danger primarily to himself. The vampire of old looked into the mirror and saw nothing; the modern vampire looks into a mirror and sees the other part of his bi-polar self. The vampire of old required only a stake through the heart; the modern vampire requires months on the psychologist’s couch.

The pure evil of the traditional vampire is a rebuke to the modern relativism that dominates our literature, which avoids unadulterated evil because it implies an equally unadulterated—and unacceptable—good.

Morality has been replaced in young adult literature by therapy, and boys have fled in droves.

Heroism can never be completely eliminated from literature because we are naturally attracted to it. And so, when it is repressed (if you will forgive my commission of psychologism in the very act of criticizing in), it always comes back in some other form.

The pathogenesis of the superhero 
This accounts for the continuing popularity of comic books and the more recent phenomenon of superhero movies. Our culture has never fully recovered from the demise of the classic Western. We have to have heroes, and in an age in which we were not ashamed of it, we put them in a historical context. These were things that really could—and in some cases actually did—happen.

But in the modern era, we are not supposed to admire great men, largely because we are uncomfortable with the whole idea of greatness. So today we must relegate our heroes to the realm of the fantastic. They are now figures who could never really be, doing things that can never really be done. And even here, the therapeutic is never far off.

Every modern superhero must deal with the psychological consequences of something from his childhood: for Spiderman it is the murder of his uncle; for Batman the death of his parents; and, of course, Superman’s planet has been blown up. The modern superhero wreaks havoc on the bad guys less because he is pursuing truth, justice, and the American way than because it is the only way he can work out his angst.

The mother of a friend of mine in high school was a famous psychologist. One day I noticed padded bats propped up against the wall and asked, “What are those?” She told me they were for her mom’s patients so they could express their anger without hurting anybody. All we common people get to work out our anxiety are padded bats—and we don’t even get to destroy anything. Batman, on the other hand, gets a helicopter, a fast car, and a cool costume—and destroys half a city.

Life just isn’t fair.

Hands off my psyche
I have three boys, mostly grown now. Not a one of them ever needed to be lead into “deeper engagement” with his life. Had you asked my wife about it at the time, she would have told you that they were all way too engaged in their own lives and that they needed to think about something else—like cleaning their rooms or mowing the lawn. And I hate to think of what would have happened if anyone had tried to “prick their dormant empathy.” To any healthy boy, those are fighting words.

Boys, though they cannot articulate it, can usually see right through the modern psychobabble. In fact, say what you will about the Harry Potter books (and plenty has been said), they at least betray a consciousness of the old adventure ideal, and are light on the psychological reflexiveness—at least in the early books in the series, although I am told (I have not read them) that the later books portray a much more effeminate Harry.

We have the mistaken impression that it was traditional children’s literature that was preachy. This is not only untrue, it is almost the exact opposite of the truth. It is precisely the preachiness of politically correct modern literature that offends their innate sense of honesty and justice—a human instinct that we do our best to educate out of them.

Boys are not interested in getting in touch with themselves, and it is particularly off-putting when they are told that it is good for them. The minute the politically correct schoolmarms approach, they head for the woods, where they are free to pick up sticks and pretend they are swords and fight monsters and hunt frogs and swing from trees--anything but be preached at by people whose sermons consist of high-minded meaninglessness.

Most boys are born cynics and are rightly suspicious of moralistic platitudes. They respect words only to the extent that they see them followed by actions. Tell them (in mere words) what the right thing to do is, and they will look at you suspiciously and walk away. Do the right thing—preferably at the risk of your own person or reputation, and they will follow you in zealous allegiance.

The older authors of books for boys knew this: they forsook the sermonizing for the story of men in action. G. A. Henty, Johnston McCulley, Anthony Hope, H. Rider Haggard, P. C. Wren, Howard Pyle, C. S. Forester, as well as Western authors like Louis L’Amour and Max Brand—these were authors boys not only didn’t avoid, but sought out. Even a few female authors were on to this secret about boys: Baronness Orczy, she of Scarlet Pimpernel fame, being the most notable, as well as Laura Ingalls Wilder. These were books once illumined by flashlights under bed covers so that, late at night, when they were supposed to be asleep, the young male reader could find out what happened next. To do the same with most modern therapeutic fiction would be a waste of batteries.

This is not a romantic discourse on the nature of the boy and how we should leave him to develop on his own, but merely a defense of the idea that he has a nature, and that it should be taken into account in how we deal with him. A necessary part of this (given that his nature doesn’t always lend itself to doing what the dictates of civilization require) is a straightforward and honest discipline, something which too often these days has been replaced by psychotropic drugs.

Boys needs to be tamed, not treated.

Good books for boys
But in addition to restraint, a boy needs inspiration. And one way to do this is to give him books that meet him where he is, which is far from the place that most professionals (who are admittedly only trying to help) think he is. In addition, of course, to the great classic hero stories of Homer and Virgil, as well as the various books of the authors I mentioned above, here is a short list of books to utilize that predate the Conspiracy Against Boys, in the general order in which they should be read:

Farmer Boy, by Laura Ingalls Wilder (and anything else Wilder ever wrote)
The Jack Tales, by Jonathan Chase
Call it Courage, by Armstrong Sperry
Robin Hood, by Roger Lancelyn Green
King Arthur, by Roger Lancelyn Green
Adam of the Road, by Elizabeth Janet Gray
Pinocchio, by Carlo Collodi
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Lost in the Barrens, by Farley Mowat (and anything else Mowat ever wrote)
Goodbye Kate, by Billy C. Clark (and anything else Clark ever wrote)
The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth George Speare
The Mask of Zorro, by Johnston McCulley (and the rest of the Zorro books)
The Scarlet Pimpernel and El Dorado, by Baroness Orczy (and the rest of the Scarlet Pimpernel books)
Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle (and anything else Pyle ever wrote)
Shane, by Jack Shaeffer
The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien
Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
Old Squire’s Farm, by C. A. Stephens
Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe
The Story of Rolf and the Viking Bow, by Allan French
Little Britches, by Ralph Moody
Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain
A Texas Ranger, by N. A. Jennings
Penrod, by Booth Tarkington
The Jungle Books, by Rudyard Kipling
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Edison
The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien

Tell your boy to read them. And when you send him to bed, tell him to go to sleep—but make sure there are plenty of flashlight batteries around the house. Just in case he needs them.

Ray Bradbury, RIP

Ray Bradbury died last Tuesday. Bradbury wrote science fiction, but he was always less about science than he was about fiction. Although he wrote many stories set in the technologically advanced future, his themes transcended the futurism and technological glamour that characterized the work of science fiction writers like Arthur C. Clarke. In fact, some of his greatest writings were not futuristic at all. A story like Something Wicked This Way Comes didn't need to be futuristic to be a great novel.

Of the many things to like about Bradbury was his attitude toward learning. As the New York Times obituary recounts, Bradbury attributed his success as a writer to never having gone to college: "Instead, he read everything he could get his hands on: Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway . He paid homage to them in 1971 in the essay 'How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.'"

You gotta love it.

The Book of the Future

As a follow on to my somewhat controversial post in which I said that the demise of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica meant the end of Western civilization as we know it, I am posting a different vision of the future, after electronic devices have taken over our lives.

The 100 greatest novels of all time

The Guardian lists the 100 greatest novels of all time. My only quibbles are:

• It lists Dostoevsky's Brother's Karamazov, which is not as good a novel as Crime and Punishment, which it does not list; 
• To Kill a Mockingbird (assuming the list is in order of quality) is too low on the list; 
• I'm not sure the Pilgrim's Progress is really a "novel," as we think of it (the same goes for Alice in Wonderland); 
• Only one Tolstoy novel (Anna Karennina)?
• Only one Jane Austen novel (and it's Emma?)?
• And why is Catcher in the Rye on the list at all?

Other than that, it's a pretty darn good list.

Tolkien snubbed by Nobel Committee in 1961, says BBC

Okay, if you ever wondered what the deal was with the Swedish Academy that decides who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, now we know. According to the BBC News (via the New York Times), J. R. R. Tolkien was snubbed for the award in 1961 after C. S. Lewis nominated him to receive it.

Said the Academy of his work, “the result has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality...”

Uh, yeah. Right.

Instead, the recipient of the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature was that household name ... Ivo Andric. You know, the Yugoslav writer and author of the runaway bestseller, Na Drini ćuprija На Дрини ћуприја.

Wouldn't you know, I've searched my library and I just can't lay my hands on my copy.

If only Tolkien had written in Cyrillic script.

The Swedish Academy frowns on American authors, is a little bit more favorable toward Europeans, and has a curious penchant for giving the award to (you guessed it) Swedes. Other writers rejected by the Academy include James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, W. H. Auden, Emile Zola, Robert Frost, E. M. Forster, and Mark Twain.

Literature and the Bible

One of the things that strike you when you delve into English literature is the extent of the influence of the Bible, a place great writers find hard not to go to when looking for ways to reach the soul. Here is Marilyn Robinson, writing primarily about William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and secondarily about Fyodor Dostoyevski's The Idiot--two of the great portrayals of Christ figures in literature--in the New York Times:

Each of these works reflects a profound knowledge of Scripture and tradition on the part of the writer, the kind of knowledge found only among those who take them seriously enough to probe the deepest questions in their terms. These texts are not allegories, because in each case the writer has posed a problem within a universe of thought that is fully open to his questioning once its terms are granted. Here the use of biblical allusion is not symbolism or metaphor, which are both rhetorical techniques for enriching a narrative whose primary interest does not rest with the larger resonances of the Bible. In fact these great texts resemble Socratic dialogues in that each venture presupposes that meaning can indeed be addressed within the constraints of the form and in its language, while the meaning to be discovered through this argument cannot be presupposed. Like paintings, they render meaning as beauty.

Read the rest here.

The death of literature and how to stop it

If you are not rendered functionally illiterate by being subjected to incompetent reading instruction in American elementary schools and you are not rendered disinterested in books altogether in high school where vocational training and driver's ed are just as high a priority as literature, then you will probably end up in college, where what an author actually says in a book is less important than the ideology you bring to reading it. Here is the Atlantic Wire giving a brief synopsis of the whole mess:

For hundreds of years, people read books for plot, character, action and nice turns-of-phrase. Then, in the 1970s literary theory emerged on American campuses, and suddenly that wing in the English department faculty lounge--the one reserved for the professors whose classes never had a wait list, the ones who knew too much of academia, and too little of life and books--had to tell students they were reading wrong. As The Atlantic's Scott Stossel wrote in 1996, professors at the time were offering up just about "any esoteric ism" you could think of to support reading a book not as a book, but as a coded text (always a text) dealing with the semester's most provocative social issues. Eventually, people graduated and could return to reading books like normal. It was all very silly, and by the end of 20th century, the backlash had begun against criticism "disconnected from life" and academia's "love affair with reducing literature to ideas, to the author's or reader's intention or ideology," argued Lindsay Waters in The Chronicle of Higher Education back in 2005.

Meanwhile, over at the Millions, which another link at the Atlantic Wire brings us to, there is a list of five books to bone up on exactly what is up with literary criticism these days, and give us books about the postmodernist ideologies that rule the higher education roost. But there is little in this list in the way of an actual cure.

I would suggest several books and resources of my own to inoculate yourself against the literary nonsense:

At War with the Word, by R. V. Young: This book is an excellent account of the origins and philosophy behind various kinds of postmodernist literary criticism and champions the (old) New Criticism of Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, Alan Tate, W. K. Wimsatt, and others, who, although their school at times caricatured itself, were largely on target.

From Plato to Postmodernism, by Louis Markos: This is actually a tape/mp3/DVD series put out by The Teaching Company. It is an excellent introduction to the history of literary criticism. Markos points out that Northrop Frye was the last of the logocentric literary critics and after that, it is all been downhill. I have listed to this series several times and look forward to doing so again.

The Meaning of Shakespeare, by Harold Goddard: This collection of commentaries on the plays of Shakespeare is a great work in its own right. I have sought wisdom in it many times and always found it. Published posthumously, Goddard's observations on Shakespeare will give you an insight into the Bard that you can take back to the text like a light to illuminate the mysteries of the greatest writer in English.

All the literary criticism T. S. Eliot ever wrote: Eliot shocked the literary establishment who, after ruling the world of poetry for several decades with poems like" The Wasteland" and "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock," then mostly gave up poetry and began writing literary criticism that was, despite the modernism of his poetic style, highly traditional. This of course was a scandal to the Philistines of the literary world--as good intellectual thinking usually is.

All the literary criticism G. K. Chesterton ever wrote: Chesterton is now getting his due as a Dickens critic. But his literary observations in Heretics, and A Handful of Authors (as well as all the literary criticism that is strewn throughout his other works) is so stunning and insightful, you will need someone to awake you from your exalted state after reading them.

All the literary criticism Alfred Kazin ever wrote: I discovered Kazin when I read his introduction to Moby Dick, one of the greatest pieces of criticism ever written. It's what got me interested in Melville again, for which I am manifestly grateful. Kazin was one of the last traditionalists writing about literature for a popular audience.

All the literary criticism Harold Bloom ever wrote: Bloom is a controversial figure, partly because he attended the birth of the postmodernist literary criticism and partly because he often inserts Fruedianism into his commentary. It also doesn't help that his writings on the Bible assume some of the sillier versions of higher criticism. But that doesn't stop Bloom's work from being among the most cogent and interesting commentary on literature ever written. His books Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, and The Visionary Company, are among the greatest books on books ever written. He may have a number of intellectual quirks, but he is still treats literature like it should be treated.

All the literary criticism Mark Van Doren ever wrote: Mark Van Doren was the father of rather more famous (or infamous son) Charles Van Doren who was implicated in the cheating scandal on the TV game show "Twenty One." That, of course, has little substantively to do with Mark. The elder Van Doren's book Shakespeare is one of the best works of criticism on that great playwright ever written, and his The Noble Voice, a set of ten commentaries on the great epic poems is simply outstanding.

There are other great ones, of course. The older critics are just as relevant today: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, and, of course, Samuel Johnson (particularly his various commentary on Shakespeare and his Lives of the Poets). 20th century writers on literature like Hugh Kenner, Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More (the two most widely known of the New Humanists), as well as Lionel Trilling, Wayne C. Booth, M. H. Abrams, F. R. Leavis, and H. L. Mencken. Then there are the New Critics like Alan Tate, John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, and Cleanth Brooks. Some of these writers can, however, be hard to read, unlike the ones mentioned in previous paragraphs.

And who can forget George Steiner's Dostoevsky or Tolstoy?; A. C. Bradley's great Shakespearean Tragedy; Northrup Frye's Fearful Symmetry; and C. S. Lewis' essay, "Satan," concerning Milton's Paradise Lost?

Even some of the postmodernists, as many times as they get it wrong, are worth reading. Nietszche's The Birth of Tragedy, Terry Eagleton's After Theory, and the writings of Slovaj Žižek are well worth reading, and postmodernists such as Stanley Fish, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Foucault have insights that you can benefit from as long as you are well grounded in the older, greater critics.

Do yourself a favor and pick up an older edition of Criticism: The Major Statements and Critiques and Essays in Criticism. They are widely available used. Also A Handbook to Literature, by C. Hugh Holman (again, an older edition, unadulterated by the postmodernist plague is better, although there will be less on more contemporary writing--in fact, it's a good idea to have both an older and more recent editions like I have) is the best literary reference ever written.

The Chesterton Revival

When I was writing a master's thesis on G. K. Chesterton's religious thought in the mid 80s, it was hard to find anyone who even knew who he was. Despite little knowledge of Chesterton's actual writing, some did recognize the name, simply because he was still commonly quoted, but beyond that, he was a largely forgotten writer. Since that time, however, there has been a steadily growing familiarity and appreciation of his work.
In a review of a new Chesterton biography by Ian Ker, Jay Parini recounts just how highly Chesterton has been regarded:

Chesterton's work includes nearly every type of writing—poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, biography, political and social argument, playwriting, detective fiction, and Christian apologetics. Yet he was, in the main, a journalist at heart, pumping out weekly columns for a variety of papers, especially The Daily Mail, on every conceivable subject, and his devoted audience included the likes of Mahatma Gandhi, who was "thunderstruck" by Chesterton's fierce independence of thought.

Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine fabulist, never failed to mention Chesterton among his favorite writers. Being a fan of detective fiction, he too adored the Father Brown stories, regarding Chesterton, with Edgar Allan Poe and Conan Doyle, as a founding father of the genre. Yet it was more than the detective fiction that interested Borges; he quoted Chesterton extensively as a linguistic philosopher, crediting him with "the most lucid words written about language."

Writers often gravitated toward Chesterton, including George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, both ardent socialists but good, if contentious, friends during his lifetime. Indeed, Chesterton debated Shaw in public on several occasions, and Chesterton's own idiosyncratic but highly suggestive history of the world (The Everlasting Man, 1925) might be considered a riposte to Wells's The Outline of History (1919). (Wells regarded human beings as a species who evolved from a highly primitive form and might one day use their intelligence to establish a peaceful and prosperous world. Chesterton thought that impossible; human beings would continue to suffer from something akin to what Christians call "original sin.") Among later writers, T.S. Eliot and J.R.R. Tolkien admired him, while W.H. Auden took the trouble to edit a selection from Chesterton's nonfiction in 1970.

Read the rest here.

Logic is human: Literature is angelic

There is a sense in which literature transcends logic. Logic is limited in its access to truth by the Law of Noncontradiction: Both A and not A cannot be true at the same time and in the same respect. Napoleon was the emperor of France or he was not; water is made of two hydrogen molecules and an oxygen molecule or it is not; It is either a fine day or it is not--in each case, both things cannot be true in the same way.

But poetry (and by that word I mean what it has always traditionally meant--namely, literature in the broad sense) is not limited in this way. Poetry transcends the laws of logic. In a story, something can be something and not be something at the same time. This is the whole power of symbolism and metaphor: one word, or one idea, or one character can be something that it is not--at the same time and in the same respect.

Lewis' Aslan is not Christ, but he is; Tolkien's Galadriel is not Mary (or Eve), but she is; Fitzgerald's Gatsby is not the American dream, yet he is; Melville's Moby Dick is not nature itself, but he is; Steinbeck's Pearl of the World, is not mammon, but it is.

Literature is angelic while logic is human. I had someone challenge me one time about my use in my logic textbook of the Porhyrian Tree, a medieval division of all substance: Everything that exists is a substance; a substance is either immaterial (like an angel) or material. A material substance is either not living (like a rock) or living; a living material substance is either non-sentient (like a plant) or sentient; a sentient, living, material substance is either non-rational (like a beast) or it is rational. Man is the only rational, sentient, living material substance.

But, I was asked, if this classification is correct, then angels are not rational, but we know they are. Therefore, this classification cannot be correct. I pointed out that angels are not, in fact, rational beings. To be "rational" is to have to go through the several step process of deductive reasoning. We are composite (or complex) beings and so we have to go to all the trouble of attaching the minor and major terms together (which constitute a conclusion) by way of a middle term which takes two premises to spell out. This is a lot of trouble, of course, and if you think it's easy, just look at my comboxes on this blog to see how few people are able to do it correctly :).

Angels, however, are not composite beings. They are simple beings. The only beings that can possibly be complex are material beings, matter being necessary for complexity. But angels are immaterial. They are constituted exclusively of form. They are therefore simple. They do not have to go through steps in the process of apprehending truth: it is immediately accessible to them without the necessity of reason. Angels are "intelligent" beings, but they are not "rational" beings, and to call an angel "rational" would therefore be, not a compliment, but an insult.

The person who challenged me on this was a Catholic, and I pointed out that my analysis here was taken directly from St. Thomas Aquinas, the "Doctor" of his own Church.

Logic is human because it requires us to go through a complex set of steps in order for us to find truth, but literature is angelic in the sense that it is simple: it is a direct avenue to the truth. It requires no steps. It makes truth immediately accessible analogically through the literary object which is the thing it symbolizes.

Even though it's not.