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That way of putting things . . .

I’m back to Kirk after Lukacs, re-reading Eliot and His Age because (1) I am better able to appreciate and learn from it now and (2) I’m also pecking at Axel’s Castle–which is surprisingly limpid–and (3) I’m also pecking at the chapter on Eliot in Scruton’s book. Besides that, I’m doing Williams’ He Came Down from Heaven on Sundays and he talks about the interpretation of Scripture being literary criticism, which it is. All of them have that way of putting things.

What way? It can be called startling, although it is not entirely startling. But that’s what’s startling: it is the right use of words: avoiding overstatement, setting the principal describing word in a setting that does not strain the honesty of the statement, correcting the common expression into something charged with insight, structuring sentences and paragraphs toward clarity. In other words, the mental labor that goes into creating the easy grace of their final expression was considerable.

And the result? Literary pleasure of a very high order. Wait though; order in what sense? Do I mean literary pleasure of a very high quality? Yes, providing ‘quality’ is not restricted to literary craftsmanship, but includes moral considerations and everything that goes into the high and comfortable seriousness of thinkers of mature stature.

I appreciate Lukacs for his precision about expression and words, however peculiar sometimes they seem, however distorted by his vanity and opinions (he has a right to his opinions!). I appreciate Kirk for his unassuming penetration and how he deals with Eliot not in hieratic but in human terms. I love Williams’ because though he is difficult he is always and fully poetic–he made poetry his mode of thinking, and though he is wild he is poetically wild, not arbitrarily so.

The danger in writing about those who put things well is that one shows oneself up thereby. But though I may not admire and love the way these men put things enough, I do admire and love the way they put things a lot, and it exerts a fascination on me that keeps me reading these works thanks to which, it can be said, for all the bad there is in the world, it could be worse. I have (and can get) and, however dimly, still enjoy with real and keen enjoyment what they thought and wrote; and that is something.

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by unknowing on May 18, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on May 18, 2013

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Reading Lukacs

What’s Lukacs’ big thing? Understanding.

The historian’s task is to understand and then to explain how we can understand: the situation, the decision, the event. What did Churchill accomplish? What did Tocqueville mean? What was the problem with Arthur Schlesinger? What are the political divides of our time–what do they amount to and what do they mean?

His thing with Arthur Schlesinger is that he never bothered to understand his times–and Lukacs demonstrates this. His admiration for Churchill is that he did understand, both the need to be allied with Stalin and then what would happen after the war.

And when you understand? Then you see clearly. The whole thing dawns on you and it makes sense, and then you are better prepared to go forward.

* * *
His most recent book is a collection of essays and reviews he’s made in the past few years, and some of the ideas he’s been handling over the years become–at least for me–clearer now. It may be that I didn’t understand, and it may be he’s gotten a hold of them better (he’s one for precision, but precision sometimes comes after worrying at the thing over a long time, even years, like a poem). One of the things I get clear from this book is this: conservatives and liberals divided the political landscape in the 19th century. Not so much in America, but in Europe. Then that passes and what becomes the issue in the 20th century is nationalism and socialism. Nationalism is a bad copy of patriotism gone militaristic and with a cult of the people (the folk). Socialism is international rather than nationalistic and we see it in the various shades of the left. The point he makes is that many so-called conservatives are nationalists. Republicans are nationalists, not necessarily conservatives. You can see that a warped sort of patriotism explains a good bit, and you see why he’s never been altogether keen on chaps like Reagan and Bush.

* * *
He’s really down on the word ‘culture’ and prefers the word ‘civilization’. He was also talking about that in A Thread of Years, his last book I read. Civilization and urbanity, the life of cities and the point of cities interest him more than the idea of culture. I wonder what it means.

* * *
He’s a fine old chap–I hope he cranks out a few more things. Puts things nicely, makes interesting observations, gets to the point of things, understands and can explain exactly very often. There are things he says I still can’t figure out, but I like what I can figure out an awful lot.

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by unknowing on May 16, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on May 16, 2013

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In Parenthesis, by David Jones

And how is man to know the habits of their God, whether He smites suddenly or withholds, if you mishandle the things set apart, the objects of His people He is jealous of. –David Jones

In Parenthesis is David Jones’ telling of the birth of the modern sensibility. Not modern as in contemporary, but that which is best represented in T.S. Eliot, characterized Pound, and to which Yeats adjusted.

The work is classified as a poem, but is mostly prose, though it rises often into the cadences of poetry; the lines break off like waves and it lies waiting, like the sea. If it is a sea, it is full of ancient fish: allusions, especially to Mallory–that work of failure and what might have been. What Jones does is to narrate along freely, then suddenly start juxtaposing, build into a rhythm of incantation and at that point deliver his poetic insight, which, Jones’ being Catholic, is sacramental. Sacramental: when ordinary objects are suddenly caught up and set apart by becoming luminous in an otherworldly light that shines through with Christian meaning. (That’s my own definition and, I suspect, defective, but perhaps still adequate.) He has such a remarkably sensitive ear for the cadences of language, for juxtaposing ancient expression with modern and for establishing a continuity of sense in a bewildering variety of expression.

You should read this book if your ear is not of tin and you at all care about the wider world. It leads you with the soldiers into the experience of the trenches, and seeks even in what many made into meaningless desolation, meaning. It really is an astonishing work of art, and you do not need me to endorse it; just check with Eliot, Yeats and Auden.

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by unknowing on April 26, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on April 26, 2013

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Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, by Paul Fussell

The first thing to say about this book is that it is very funny. It is worth it just for the intelligent entertainment it provides. But even though it was written in 1983 (and no doubt ably reviewed forty years ago), it is still informative: while things are changing things haven’t changed that rapidly.

What the book aims to do is clear from the subtitle: it provides a guide to the American status system. The American status system, in turn, provides many occasions for witty descriptions, and Paul Fussell takes them all. It is instructive if you are (like me) straight from the proletarian estate–one of the signs of which is that you live with a basic suspicion but no clear idea about class. So this book can save you from ignorance and unease. It provides a view of places you may have never been, such as the upper out of sight class, and a funny detached view of what you are familiar with. Nine classes are herein distinguished.

The problem with it is that it seems to examine human beings as if we are nothing but a collection of surfaces. Still, one of the points about the American status system Fussell wishes to make is how superficial it all is. The serious point this book assumes is that the unexamined life is not worth living, whatever your class. That is not a bad point, and being witty, clever sometimes, snide occasionally (though far less than you’d expect) is not an unwelcome way to make it. Mild to scathing social commentary can be gotten by way of fiction; but if the kind of social commentary you want is provided in novels which are otherwise unappealing, especially in terms of the spiritual atmosphere, you can at least read Paul Fussell until his book’s gradual transformation over time into a historical artifact is complete. Then the anthropologists will consult it.

The problem with Paul Fussell himself seems to be that he is a nominalist. He is not contemptuous of meaning altogether, but he is not serious about invisible realities. The book makes the point that the unexamined life is not worth living by poking fun at the prejudices each class displays in preference and behavior, but it then aims to lead the reader out of the class system by speaking of a class X (to which the author belongs, obviously). Class X he also calls bohemian, and while it appears to be free of some of the assumptions of preference and behavior of the various American (like t-shirts bearing inscriptions), it also seems free of some crucial aspects of morality and decent human behavior. The problem with Fussell is that his criteria for examining the unexamined aspects are the academic preferences and intellectual dogmas of his day. It contains a certain rigor of intellect, but not the needed proper feeling that informs sound judgment. It is a kind of cultivation without the means to maintain a healthy culture. Which is why I say he’s a nominalist.

I am sure the answer to my objection would be that the notion of proper feeling is a middle class idea. What could be more middle class than feeling that morality (at least modified by the adjective ‘traditional’) and decency are valuable considerations? I could counter that that was a perspective taken from the upper classes, telling, and not entirely unexamined; but I would not like to take that line. Morality and decency ought to characterize more of human behavior than Fussell allows. There are a lot of appealing things about his class X (starting with the ironical designation), but the irreligious and promiscuous aspects are not.

But that is the dilemma. Where does one get proper feeling from? How does one manifest it once one has a source, and how does one pass it along? How is what Fussell talks about more than another hypocritical prejudice? What transcendent criteria measures his standard? Whatever it is, it has to transcend class, doesn’t it?

Perhaps he wrote, continuing in the spirit of the book, with a lighter and more whimsical approach even to his own class and his suggestions about class. There is good reason to believe nothing is to be taken with a great deal of seriousness. The importance of not being earnest about anything at all comes to the fore. And there is a good point to that: if we human beings take ourselves too seriously we tend to get things wrong. We are small and limited creatures, and therefore comical. But it is important to remember that that is not all we are. Morality, in a certain way, can be said to arise out of the consequences of our choices, out of the fact that responsibility rests on us
for how we behave and what we chose; and what we chose is what we prefer. Some of those preferences are more important than others. I disagree with Fussell on the importance of some things he has relegated to lesser significance, and his book is the worse for those things.

On the whole, though, Fussell sticks to what is small and comical and gives us a clever view with useful information and higher entertainment value than many other things available. At least he has the decency not to be tedious. There’s a lot more than class, of course, to consider in life, but the word is vague enough to stretch and pull usefully over a lot of what happens to us. Fussell uses it to good effect.

* * *
Appended Unscientific Observations:

It is interesting to consider all this when you think about religion in the USA. I think what Fussell points out gives one useful categories for explaining some of the otherwise random phenomena one from time to time witnesses.

It seems to me his idea of class X has been considered and has leaked out into inadvertent places like Target, to mention nothing higher, which means most everywhere except some Walmarts. Bohemian kitsch perhaps has seen its day, but it has had its day.

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by unknowing on April 16, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on April 16, 2013

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Fussell and Jones

I’m enjoying Paul Fussell. I’m reading him on the Great War now and forming the opinion that the reason there isn’t as much writing on the Great War is that it was a lot more despairing of a war with not so many clear targets and resolved situations as WWII. Tends to wear down folks’ interest. I also got a book by a guy whose grandfather had been in it. The guy researched and produced an amateur book, but I couldn’t read it because of how badly he wrote. Still, it was consistently sad in its own heavy-handed way.

Paul Fussell is not always on, and he tends to lean toward the Sassoon and Owen view of things, which I do not, but he has a lot of good things and writes awfully well. Good on random literary observations too.

David Jones was in the trenches. Fussell has a paragraph on him Jones’ admirers take great umbrage to, but Fussell not exactly notoriously against, in the main. So I’m back into David Jones. The New York Review of Books has brought out his In Parenthesis, about which Auden said great things. You should get it if modernism is at all your literary ism. Eliot was not unenthusiastic about Jones either. In fact, Fussell positively compares the two because of their religious persistence in a modern sensibility. I picked up a volume of later fragments of Jones’ poems years back that eventually I read before church in Bogotá during several Sundays. Now that I know he was in the trenches, and what with Fussell’s help noticing dawn and twilight, threes, how Hardy looms in vision over the scenes of WWI, David Jones makes more sense.

Somebody is getting rid of Fussell here. I saw two copies of his book at the Graceland Half-Wit, not to mention the copy I got down at the Lane Half-Wit which is the local repository for most of the history wealth. Bet there’s more there. It’s a good work: The Great War and Modern Memory.

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by unknowing on April 2, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on April 2, 2013

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The Narn

I finished the Narn i Hîn Húrin the other night before bed. Not sure it is the kind of thing you want to finish before going to bed, it is such a devastating tale.

The tale has no happy ending, and possibly one of the saddest endings ever, but it is a good tale nevertheless. Not only is it well crafted, but it is properly aligned with the moral polarities of the universe.

And it has these drawings and watercolors by Alan Lee. It really is as close as any book gets to perfection, it seems to me.

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by unknowing on March 21, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on March 21, 2013

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The Value of a Good Leader

There is a moment in The Return of the King in which Samwise Gamgee throws his pots and pans into one of Mordor’s many foul pits. Dwell on the moment a little, imagining the pots and pans he throws away. Are they elegant? Are they of good and decent quality? He has brought them all the way from the Shire and surely they bear something of that place in their design and usefulness. He sends them–and not without pain–into oblivion because at last he has come to realize there is no return. He is throwing away the substance of the Shire, in a way, to keep something more substantial.

Frodo, it seems to me, realizes what is happening earlier: at the falls of Rauros, on Amon Hen–the hill of seeing. There he sees, doesn’t he? There he understands, perceives, realizes and then decides. Sam is more limited, and his understanding is as well. He protests he knows or that it doesn’t matter, but we know he cannot really decide until he realizes what he is deciding for. He doesn’t realize till much later–the moment when he casts his pots and pans into the pit–the choice before him of following Frodo. Sam is so limited it is not till then, till on the plains of Mordor and in the land of Shadow that he he realizes what surely he would be the last to see. Frodo has sight, and lacks strength. Sam has strength, but cannot see what Frodo does so soon.

Frodo Baggins has eight companions, making nine of the fellowship of the ring. Were you Frodo and going into Mordor with one of these, who would you pick? Perhap a dwarf–since one is available. A dwarf would work, being hardy, enduring, tough, pragmatic, and knowing something of caverns, pits and holes such as the maggot folk of Mordor might be expected to have. But it is not a dwarf who goes. Perhaps we’d pick an elven prince: subtle, light and quick, far-seeing and far-sensing. But he does not go either. We might pick Gandalf: not human but with a curious affinity for Hobbits, as if of the same magic. Gandalf is powerful, experienced, strong and wise. But he does not go. Boromir might be picked for his resume: long experience in batting Mordor plus a whole education in upbringing and traditions of Mordor-resistance. And if not Boromir, then Aragorn surely–a man to have on dangerous journeys. But no, out of all of them (including relatives) the one picked to accompany the ring-bearer into danger and treachery is his gardener, Sam.

In that moment of the pots in pans in the perpetual twilight of Mordor we see the comical smallness of Sam take on another greatness. He is limited in his understanding and in his vision, but how unlimited his loyalty for a good, wise master is subsequently shown to be. So much so, that when they approach that troubled volcano which is for them the ends of the earth, not two, but one set of footsteps goes the last bit of the way. Sam takes on proportions that can only be called epic as he himself carries the ring-bearer to the end of the world. And if you think of it, you’ll see it could have been no one but Sam.

Such is the quality of loyalty and such the quality of leadership here shown that when the strength of the master has given out, his servant out of love picks him up and carries him to his destination.

And that, little ones, is the great value of good leaders.

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by unknowing on March 5, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on March 5, 2013

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Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, Revised Edition, by Paul Fussell

Fussell explains in this book the effects achieved with meter both with forms and with free verse. He wants to help us understand how the poetry that we return to works upon us. The sentence, he reminds us, forms the basis of prose; the sentence and the line form the basis of poetry, and he explains how meter is the way the line’s length is determined. This determination is not arbitrary, but has to do with how modern English sounds—how our words are emphasized and the possibilities the language itself provides. What he does is very sensible and very clear.

Fussell neither dismisses free verse nor denigrates formal verse. What he does is understand. He understands how both work, why both work and then explores some of the limitations and possibilities of each. Obviously he spends more time explaining formal verse because free verse is, in a way, one of the forms—perhaps the most casual of them. He sums up: “Poetry is form, and permanent poetry is permanent form. And by ‘form’ here we mean that pattern which works on the reader and is recognized by him, no matter how unconsciously or irrationally to constitute a significant abstract repetitive frame.”

He has made, by this point in the book, an investigation of the historical development of forms which is informed by more than just the bare knowledge of which poet succeeds each other. It is also informed by a broader understanding of history and the history of ideas. What he achieves (besides heightening the attentive reader’s capacity to read and appreciate English poetry) is a clear picture of the state of our poetry around 1976; and it is a state from which I do not think it can be said we have yet emerged, if we ever shall. But it is interesting for dealing with the contemporary milieu.

Here is how he puts it:

The challenge to contemporary poetry would seem to be a pair of unhappy alternatives; either to contrive new schemes of empirically meaningful repetition that reflect and—more importantly—transmit the color of contemporary experience; or to recover schemes that have reflected the experience of the past. To do the first would be to imply that contemporary experience has a pattern, a point that most post-Christian thinkers would deny. To do the second would be to suggest that the past can be recaptured, to suggest the intolerable fractures and dislocations of modern history have not really occurred at all, or, what is worse, to suggest that they may have occurred but that poetry should act as if they have not.

That paragraph is one of the more culminating conclusions he draws. These are things one has read in other places, but he puts it in terms which cannot just be shrugged off. He has led the reader to the point at which the observation soaks in thoroughly by explaining in this case, for example, how forms have been patterns of experience in our language and during our civilization.

Here is another refreshing and illuminating (both about Fussell and about the world; and yes, I do seem to be overindulging in quotation, but the guy knows how to word things) statement:

It should neither surprise nor distress us that most poetry in English ranges from the mediocre to the very bad and that most poets are technically incompetent. So are most waiters, physicians, carpenters, layers, gardeners and teachers. The genuinely successful poems to which we return again and again constitute a tiny selection from the vast and almost measureless rubbish heap of the centuries.

It is greatly to the credit of Fussell that by the time you read that sentence at the beginning of the penultimate chapter you understand exactly why what he is saying about poetry is so. He has imparted discernment, in this book: true criticism.

And we need it. Emily Dickinson’s experience, so intelligently put, the stanzas divided by the logic of effect and cause distinguished (as Fussell points out) needs to be ours.

It Dropped So Low in My Regard

It dropped so low — in my Regard –
I heard it hit the Ground –
And go to pieces on the Stones
At bottom of my Mind –

Yet blamed the Fate that flung it — less
Than I denounced Myself,
For entertaining Plated Wares
Upon My Silver Shelf –

I think this book is better than Understanding Poetry. Not as thorough, not as big, never so basic or full of all the stuff you already got in High School. Just full of all the stuff you didn’t.

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by unknowing on February 6, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on February 6, 2013

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The Proverbial Tale

This is how Robert Alter translates Proverbs 11:8: The righteous is rescued from straits, and the wicked man comes in his stead.

His comment is then that the little narrative the verse implies does not readily correspond to observable reality. The comment rather begs the question, but not a whole lot. One wishes he would say it does not always correspond to observable reality, because the truth is that it sometimes does. But it takes a rather embittered view of things to believe it usually does not. I don’t think Alter is embittered, but perhaps a bit too detachedly ironic.

I think the truth is that we wish Proverbs 11:8 always or at least mostly worked out the way it is stated, and that is perhaps where I concede that Alter has a point. I can only really wish it were mostly true.

Here’s were I want to go with it: first, there is the consideration that the book of Job offers and that tempers our approach to Proverbs: that if you take the Proverbs as statements of fact you will miss the point and end up in the position occupied by Job’s friends. The righteous is not always rescued from difficult circumstances only to be replaced by the wicked man. Bad men get away with bad things and good men are often caught in tragic circumstances.

The point (this is ‘second’, if the ‘first’ has you awaiting that) at which this Proverb is true is as a poetic truth. It would make for a satisfying story if the narrative implied in the verse were to be worked out as a complete story. We would cheer and be glad; we would be satisfied with the story (unless we were embittered and preferred nihilist outcomes–which there is a market for). It is something we wish for, something to which our hearts consent, something we desire. The point of the proverb is an expression of justice. In the ultimate sense that Proverb is true–the righteous will be rescued and the wicked will occupy the place of calamity. We hope for that and base our hope in Scripture’s promises; but this hope is not, as Alter points out, based on observable reality. Or as another homely way of putting the proverb goes: this is the worst the righteous will ever have it, but this is the best the wicked will ever get. And believers feel cordial consent.

That is the level at which the proverb operates–or perhaps it is better to say that that is the way proverbs have to be taken. I read them and I think sometimes that here is a manual for good stories. And this is because good stories, in order to work best, must be true in the sense of being sub-creations (Tolkien) that manifest the wisdom on the basis of which creation was created.

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by unknowing on February 1, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on February 1, 2013

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Open Eyes

I’ve been doing Robert Alter a lot. I find I can read long stretches and also linger over short bits with his translations. Whatever they are, they stimulate reflection. He takes unusual views, some of which one casts aside, but others of which provoke consideration.

Lukacs is similar–provoking reflection, teaching you to see things otherwise. With Lukacs you also learn ways of thinking. He is not interested in preserving the categories of subjective and objective; as in: objective = good and subjective = bad. No. Because we know only in ways that are personal and participatory, and because he departs from postmodernism in believing that this is more than a crippling limitation, he develops a style that is personal, full of reminiscing, personal observation and reactions, and engaging–which is to say participatory in a public sense. He recognizes the limits of what he is able to perceive, but we are aware of it: it’s part of how he goes about the point he’s trying to make. And he achieves insights, certainties.

With Alter I’m reading his translations of Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, which deal with the limits of wisdom. What can you know? says God to Job. There are things we can know, and there are things we cannot. And it is not to hard to see that it fits with the idea that our knowledge is personal and participatory. Job’s friends trespass the boundaries of human understanding. In Proverbs Wisdom calls to men to widen the boundaries of human understanding. In Ecclesiastes we are called to reckon again with the limits–to own the advantages and realize they are not infinite but limited to our present existence.

It seems to me that wisdom comes with melancholy, but one that allows one to live. So wise men speak about consolation and take the tragic view, rather than the sentimental on one hand, or the cynical on the other. The sentimental view is shallow, refusing the effort of seeing enough–like Job’s friends. The cynical refuses the effort of hope, refuses to be consoled and is made blind to consolations. It mourns no glories faded because it refuses to admit any of them. Perhaps in order to preserve itself. Books, after all, must be read with open eyes.

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by unknowing on January 30, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by unknowing on January 30, 2013

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Harry Potter and the Moral Imagination

J.K. Rowling’s  great Harry Potter opus begins with a boy to whom the most wonderful thing happens. From living in a closet under the stairs, an orphan with a miserable life, Harry Potter goes on to be not only a wizard introduced to a magical world of wonders, but a famous wizard and the only one who can save the world. As Rowling opens up the world of wonders to Harry Potter, the corresponding dangers are proportional, and so the coherence of her creation is maintained through proportional dimensions. 

It would have been gratuitous—and boring—for Rowling to give him wonders without perils as well. I don’t know exactly what wisdom and insight this woman has, but I do know she knows how to tell a story, and a good one of wisdom and insight. She knows how to do the beginning, sustain the middle, and give it a satisfying end. And whatever Rowling is doing in this sprawling and baroque thing she makes, she is not doing things gratuitously. There is a logic that governs what unfolds that has its seed in the very first book.

There is a reason for the sprawling diversity Rowling sometimes struggles to bring all together in this book. The series sags a bit in book four and then in book five before she masters the complexities of everything she’s trying to accomplish. Her first three tomes grew at a modest pace, and then all of a sudden the fourth could almost swallow all those before, and the rest follow longer. And there are times when you wonder if all the anger in book five, all the snogging in book six, all the clueless wandering in book seven serve a purpose. The answer is that they do, and that by that time Rowling knows most readers will stick with her. And that is the key—if you stick with it long enough, it pays off. It is one work, in seven volumes—and it must be that way.

The ending does not disappoint. It is a big, elaborate quest to understand exactly what magical connections have been made and consequences are being reaped, but it hangs together and points to the theme unambiguously. The theme is that the good holds within itself an unending world of marvel spanning distances from lemon drops to the beauty of undying loyalty to friends and that highest and most powerful magic: love expressed through sacrifice. Which is why I say there is a logic to the whole thing. She is introducing wonder: the books can only increase in wonder. She is not introducing one wonder, but a whole world of wonder, and so the books have to enclose more and end climatically  It is no wonder Rowling struggled with keeping things coherent in the middle of the series, but the wonder is that she was able to pull it off and make a triumph of the whole. And she has to show, which she does, that evil is flat, mean, confused, ignorant and the death of all that is interesting. She does, she does, she does. The story ends with Harry Potter saving the world and is no letdown. 

That is the great appeal, it seems to me, of Harry Potter. There are wonders and depths of wonder, the world is not simply a place of clashing envy, hatred and will to power. Those things belong to the side of evil, destruction and death—the line of which runs through every human heart. The world is more, and the interesting story is the one in which real knowledge is used to resist darkness, ignorance, hatred and in short, evil of every kind. It is not accidental that the story takes place in a school: one of the great points she makes is that evil is inferior to good in what it knows because it does not love. There is this sense all throughout that maybe the dark side knows things, secrets, mysteries that the weak and the good are too cowardly to acquire. But that is set on its head in the end. And that is true to life. Are we not seduced? Is there not a glamour to debauchery, a mystery of iniquity that mocks prudence and proper caution as cowardice? But it is a false boasting, only an illusion, a magic of deception that beckons us not to life, but to death and the fear of death. Evil is for coward, traitors, liars and thieves. True courage is on the side of what is right and honor is amirable. And when Rowling makes this point it resonates in the deep heart’s core. The deepest magic is still the magic of love. That last spell Harry casts is a symbol of all he stands for, and why we admire him, and there is a tremendous symbolic resonance in the last duel and its just outcome. 

A great work like this has a lot of themes one could speak of. The flaws in people, the imperfection in us that might prevent but does not have to prevent admirable behavior seems to me a powerful one. When Dumbledore met Harry at King’s Cross and confessed his faults, it brought before me the truth that we each of us tend to perceive morality to favor our own weaknesses in a way I had never before seen it. She is dealing with heroes and has to deal with how we ought to deal with heroes. She does it well. There is a generous ambiguity about what makes one hero better than the rest around him. There is a humility about self and an admiration and regard that shows a very deep wisdom. The way she handles from start to finish the character of Severus Snape—not completed until that crucial epilogue in book seven—is an example of this and rich food for thought. 

A lot of kids have grown up with Harry Potter. It is for better or worse a part of the world of many people and I think it is if nothing else as an act of cultural literacy that we should be familiar with it. The good news is that it is a good addition to our cultural literature. In this sprawling work there is God’s plenty, and certainly enough for people to find that to which they may take exception. But it is in its broad themes and its architectural execution a triumph of the moral imagination.

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by unknowing on January 22, 2013  •  Permalink
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The Hunger Games

The Hunger Games has at least three very compelling things: the moral dilemma, the page-turner plot, and the character Katniss. Obviously, one has to get over Collins’ great weakness: names. But she makes up for that with the characters.

The moral dilemma is this: the Capitol rules the districts oppressively and every year the districts are required to offer up two tributes under the age of 18 (or so) to fight to death in a televised event. If you are one of those children, what do you do? How do you survive without capitulating? Can you? Collins walks you through the dawning implications as the books unfold; it is a panorama of horror. The nice thing is that this young adult literature contains no semicolons that might frustrate its target audience with requirements above their capacity; just a lot of chopped sentences and people.

The plot is wonderfully done and well sustained through the three books. In a way, the same thing happens in each, only each time it gets worse. The reason Suzanne Collins does this is that she knows what she is aiming at. Oppression is simply war by other means, and as things escalate you understand that her great theme is war: what it does to people, how awful it is. Near the end our heroine is seriously considering various means of suicide—which is the ultimate act of war (see Chesterton).

And what is most compelling is what the situation does to Katniss, the heroine. As the story progresses, Collins beguiles her readers so that one cares about Katniss, rejoices in her triumphs and is appalled at her setbacks. It works very well. Really, the power of The Hunger Games is the character of Katniss Everdeen: her courage, what is precious to her, how she changes and develops, her decency. And in the end the big let-up, her vindictiveness and loss of decency.

One could argue the end is not redemptive but rather vindictive. And the ending is certainly characterized by a certain ambiguity as to the satisfactory resolution of events. Resentment and revenge rise–not entirely unexpectedly–to cloud the events at the sudden conclusion. I think this is due to Collins’ point about war; in her mind war has no satisfactory resolution. So we end our wars and go on living by whatever means, and so does Katniss. Because after the wrenching considerations of suicide in the aftermath of the climactic and catastrophic conclusion to the war, she takes up life and goes so far in affirming it as to have children.

One of the things we learn very early on about Katniss is that she intends never to bring children into a world that knows the Hunger Games, one that knows war. But in the end she does, and I think Collins meant it as a redemptive epilogue. It is a bit meager, but it is there. It is all that war leaves.

And with nothing greater, nothing transcendent, what would be left?

I wish there had been chivalry. Here’s this terrible dystopian vision; what could be better than for the light of chivalry to shine of our heroine at the crucial moment? The answer to the perpetual renewal of wars by whatever means waged among us of the human race is not that we are going to usher in world peace—and think how much a modern author of a run-away bestseller is conceding in our times to write a book denying that pipe dream. No, the answer is that there must be rules, there must be honor. The only thing descending again into barbarity will bring is a new and crying need for real chivalry, for a code of honor that is more valuable to the soldier than life. This is what is missing in The Hunger Games, it seems to me: or maybe I should say it is what Katniss whom we so admire never gets. Had there been a point where somebody begins to read Malory . . . ah well.

Of course, chivalry would require the affirmation of something transcendent. I was watching recently a BBC adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters with Katrina (we liked it awfully; though I’m sure the book is way better;). The triumph after all her trials of Molly Gibson is an affirmation of a transcendent benevolence that upholds the moral order. But when that is not the clear vision of the writer, the only thing you get by pretending such and outcome will be sentimentality. Collins does not fail there, and I think she’s trying—however badly it may seem to some—to find a way out of brutality on the other hand.

I think that’s Collins’ message: war can have no heroes. The theme is the same of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen: denying that it is sweet and right to die for a cause greater than yourself. Or perhaps I should say they deny that such a cause exists. Katniss loses her hold on that cause, it fades from view the moment she shoots her last arrow. And then? Then life continues, diminished.

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by unknowing on December 4, 2012  •  Permalink
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Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century, by George Gilder

I don’t know why I should go for a book on economics of all things. I am working in a financial services company now, and part of getting ahead there is knowing something about the whole shebang. I saw the Uncommon Knowledge interview with Gilder and found it compelling enough to get to the book, but I am still not sure what it was made me want to read about the dismal science to begin with.

What I found is a book that I’d compare in its effect on me with Collingwood’s The Idea of History. Wealth and Poverty is an argument for the metaphysicality of wealth just as The Idea of History is an argument for the metaphysicality of history, and that is the sort of idea I find most exciting.

Not to say the book doesn’t have statistics and at times threatens to take a way that seems dreary. But it never ends up taking that way. His argument I found persuasive (but you know that I want to believe anyone telling me that reality is spiritual and that our senses give us a world of appearance merely), and his explanations of various phenomena satisfying and illuminating.

I like his energy and I also like his resilience. We live in a day when many under the constant defeats of life have taken to viewing all the world in the light of defeat. Life has defeats and our age has many defeats for people like me, no doubt. Gilder’s vision of our economic times is not gilded, but it is not one of despondency or resigned apathy. Here’s the curious thing: one might say it is a book on economics aimed at the affections. Or at least one I was able to take as such. Like the heroic ideal in which defeats abound, but the only defeat is dishonor and the real triumph is the splendid triumph of honor. Highly recommended.

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by unknowing on November 22, 2012  •  Permalink
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A Jane Austen Education, by William Deresiewicz

To reduce it to as few words as possible, I think Deresiewicz succeeds because he explains to us why when we have read and understood any of Jane Austen’s six novels we are grateful to her for ever after.

The joy of Jane Austen’s literary triumphs is that they are far more than merely literary. To appreciate what she does is to appreciate things about life, things that make it better and us happier. Now Deresiewicz is distinctly modern in his appreciation of Jane Austen, but that just goes to show how permanent the things Jane Austen values and teaches us are.

What he does may seem in the doing a bit on the black and white extreme and without sufficient shades of grey, but give him time to do what he is about. It is, after all, about Jane Austen, and nobody who has understood her is insensible of the fact that there are some things the doing of which takes time and is, moreover, time well spent. One is grateful to William Deresiewicz in the end, which is a mark of true Austenite triumph.

Reader, these explanations of Austen’s books deepen one’s appreciation and enhance one’s pleasure. And if, for some reason, it has been a while since you’ve returned to the volumes in question, this ought to encourage you.

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by unknowing on October 27, 2012  •  Permalink
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Two Poets

I finished two books of poetry today. I read most of Wiman’s Every Riven Thing walking back from the library. He’s not difficult or inaccessible. There are several things to say about this book:

One is that there is a value in reading modern poetry when it is good: it helps us with living in modern times. In what way? In finding meaning in modern waiting rooms, clinical procedures, traffic and such. You can go through all these activities without any reflection, you can go through them with your own reflections, and you can go through them enriched not only by your own reflections but those of people who have searched for meaning in things = poets. I couldn’t help thinking that this book would be very valuable to readers in the future in wondering how life was like in our days and how it affected us. But more than that, there is an aspect of being conscious of how it affects us now, and responding well to that. I can’t say that I’d personally ever be inclined to describe the continual roar of the highway as an Om, but I understand why Wiman does, and now I hear that as well when I’m within range.

Another thing one might say about this book is that Wiman is a Christian, not only in name. I think reading his poetry is worth it for the sensibility he brings to devotional poetry. Here’s the title poem:

Every Riven Thing

God goes, belonging to every riven thing he’s made
sing his being simply by being
the thing it is:
stone and tree and sky,
man who sees and sings and wonders why

God goes. Belonging, to every riven thing he’s made,
means a storm of peace.
Think of the atoms inside the stone.
Think of the man who sits alone
trying to will himself into the stillness where

God goes belonging. To every riven thing he’s made
there is given one shade
shaped exactly to the thing itself:
under the tree a darker tree;
under the man the only man to see

God goes belonging to every riven thing. He’s made
the things that bring him near,
made the mind that makes him go.
A part of what man knows,
apart from what man knows,

God goes belonging to every riven thing he’s made.

The other book of poetry I finished was The Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun, J.R.R. Tolkien’s adaptation of material from the sagas. He was apparently trying to teach himself to write according to the corresponding ancient poetic conventions of alliterative verse which are not as easy as one might think. He was of course a master of the texts from which he borrowed, and had thought both about the history and how the stories were told and retold by various traditions, what succeeded and what didn’t. When it comes to the feeling of old things, I’m no purist. My introduction to this world did not come so much from when I tried to read the sagas in translation but E.R. Eddison’s Styrbiorn the Strong, a re-telling imaginatively expanded and enhanced of a fragment found in some saga. That Tolkien should do the same seems to me to add to the living tradition in a reputable and reliable way. I don’t care if it is genuine, I can settle for Beowulf, or Tolkien.

It gives substance to what he says in “The Monsters and the Critics” about an age heroic and tragic. He makes the argument there that the southern gods were against men and for the monsters. He contrasts this with the northern gods who were for the heroes and against the monsters, but doomed. That’s exactly the thing, isn’t it? The gods of Greece are capricious, but the gods of Asgard are doomed. And it suggests the grandeur of Northern things that even though the gods are doomed, it is no refutation: heroes align themselves with right and honor when the world is torn apart by those to whom honor is not due.

The poetry of this volume shows that heroic northern age in strokes swift and tragic. Worth it just for what it gives of the North, worth it for the use of words, and also of value for someone trying to understand something of the creative process and story making considerations of the author of the Lord of the Rings.

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by unknowing on October 24, 2012  •  Permalink
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Planet Narnia, by Michael Ward

One of the things one wonders about as one approaches the end of the collected letters of C.S. Lewis is how he words his negative replies to inquiries about more Chronicles of Narnia. He speaks as if the idea is exhausted; there can be no more Chronicles than the seven written; as if he had a good and perfect reason that he simply doesn’t bother to go into. And it leaves one wondering because it would seem that he can’t have run out of good things he might say, and since the Chronicles evidence such a higgledy-piggledy sloshing together of the disparate things his learning and catholicity of appreciation gave him access to all charmingly fused by his great storytelling capabilities, why not? Why quit like that when these books are successful and loved and doing a lot of good? He could write about the adventure of another set of kids in a different part of Narnia, or expand on the reign of the Pevensies or do a complete biography of Tumnus, Reepicheep or even Jadis. Lewis was asked more than once from what we can see in the surviving correspondence, and by children, to write more, but he didn’t.

When I started Planet Narnia and realized what Ward was proposing, I reacted the way Alan Jacobs describes on the blurb on the back of the dust jacket. “Noting Michael Ward’s claim that he has discovered ‘the secret imaginative key’ to the Narnia books, the sensible reader responds by erecting a castle of skepticism.” By the end of the book, my castle was demolished too. The argument is persuasive.

Here is what Ward is doing: he claims to have discovered an underlying unity Lewis never spoke about directly, but which is all over his published work and can be demonstrated by analyzing the Chronicles. There was an imaginative idea which at the end of seven Chronicles was played out, which is why Lewis could say categorically there would be no more Chronicles once the seventh was published. And he never told people about this. We know he was doing other things with the Chronicles, but this is the deepest and most profound aspect of what he was doing—something he kept a secret.

Why? That is the question Ward has to take head on; and he does: he starts there. He also ends there, and I have to say he structures his last reason very nicely. But he takes the thing on from the start knowing that nobody is more skeptical of special hidden meanings in the works of C.S. Lewis than the people who are most influenced by those same works.

The answer to the question why is twofold. On the one hand, it actually is something Lewis would do; not in the kooky sense of leaving cryptic messages but in the sense of leaving a great achievement modestly concealed and even unrecognized. Think of Till We Have Faces. Nothing cryptic or especially esoteric there; but it was his greatest work and it was one of the worst received ever. Read how he felt about it in his letters (Hint: use the index). On the other hand—answering the Why of what Ward finds—it has to do with how Lewis communicates. For this Ward coins the term donegality (I know how it seems at first, but the term grows on you, and I wonder if Ward himself, since his concept and his book are that way, isn’t that way in person as well: he grows on you).

Donegality has to do with a very important distinction in the thinking of Lewis (and reasonable people everywhere). It is the distinction for which Ward uses the words enjoying and contemplating. The second is more of analysis, detached, watching from the outside. The first one is about personal, participatory knowledge (Ward gets into Barfield sufficiently to satisfy me even on Barfieldean grounds, though he doesn’t list Saving the Appearances in his bibliography, which is odd from a few conclusions he later draws; apparently he gets all he needs from Poetic Diction and The Rediscovery of Meaning). Donegality is when a story is full of the quiddity of a thing; it is to communicate by a sort of gestalt. Don’t think of it as something peripheral here, think of it as central, though it is like a hovering presence all around. When Ward explained donegality, I grew excited but my skepticism was not dispelled till he demonstrated the Jovial donegality in Lewis’s scholarship, poetry, fiction outside of the Chronicles, and then finally in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

So Jupiter, Jove, has the jovial donegality, Mars the martial, Sol the solar, Luna the lunar, Mercury the mercurial, the adjective for the influence of Venus alas is venereal and that of Saturn is saturnine. Seven Ptolemaic planets with all their ancient and medieval associations to communicate in each book the peculiar donegality through the influence each planet has. There is a gestalt of Jove you don’t express except through atmosphere and the accrual of symbols. You don’t state it, you suggest it with all the elements working in concert, including the plot, the details, the characters involved (such as Father Christmas). And when that is done, the series is done and the organizing principle all used up. You see? No more planets, at least not with a richness of ancient and medieval associations on which to build.

What Ward also does at the end of each chapter on each planet is to speak of the logos, the theological importance. It ties in the work of donegality with that of pre-evangelism Lewis explicitly mentioned. And what Ward does after all that in a chapter dealing with the debate with Anscombe and the flaw in the first edition of Miracles and Lewis’s thoughts on apologetics did much intrigue me.

This is not an idea calculated to win over those who are incapable of appreciating the Chronicles: donegality. But if you are one of the lovers and re-readers of Narnia, then this will add to the enjoyment, because it leaves everything you’ve ever had and opens up new possibilities along lines that are true to what you already have and appreciate. Which is what makes me think that this book can’t help those who don’t already appreciate to appreciate: it just is not part of how donegality works. You have to be inside the building to get to the door this key unlocks.

Let me tell you, what Ward does is amazing and I am a believer. Ward has been studying and thinking about Lewis for decades, apparently, and he’s also a theologian and a good one from what I can tell. The book was apparently conceived while he was working on a Ph.D. and there is perhaps a bit too much of the academy about the thing still, but the idea is so exciting one forgives him.

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by unknowing on October 18, 2012  •  Permalink
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Planet Books

I got Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia and have been drawn in. More later, perhaps.

I’ve done a couple of William Gibson’s (Neuromancer) latest. Lots of London, some Paris, international travel, a bit of Tokyo. They’re interesting for the places he uses and for the way he makes description work for him, create atmosphere, foreshadow. Things creep up on you by way of the surroundings he choses to describe; characters also get telling descriptions. It is highly instructive.

I do wish he’d go different places too and not be so banally cool.

Looking forward to trying N.D. Wilson, as his books seem to have hit the mainstream to judge by Amazon. One is leery, and nowadays one notices large sections in bookstores dedicated to “Christian Fiction,” which does not serve to attract. But maybe he’s not. Let us hope he is not.

You know, I think Michael Ward may be on to something in that whole area. I’ll be disappointed if he isn’t.

Pecking away at old stuff from around the North Atlantic. The needle of my heart is always pointed in that direction.

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by unknowing on October 10, 2012  •  Permalink
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The Uses of Pessimism by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton has some odd notions about the Bible. He seems not to realize that the believer’s hope is in God and as a consequence is a bit down on Jeremiah; Jeremiah is a pessimist in ways Scruton does not want to be. But still Scruton wants to use pessimism. He uses pessimism to show how it helps to avoid seven fallacies that are in the world today. While Scruton is a bit screwy on his use of Scripture, the good news is that he uses Scripture very little in this book—mostly near the end.

What is good about this book is how he deploys pessimism to expose the fallacies.

#1 – The Best Case fallacy is a common one. You know how you are told to expect the best and plan for the worst? Well this is the fallacy where you expect the best and plan for the best and don’t think about the worst at all. What makes this one interesting is where Scruton finds it occurring.

#2 – The Born Free fallacy is the notion that freedom is about being without constraints. Natural is better; follow your heart. But we need customs, tradition, the gradual accretion of ways and means we call culture. Inhibitions allow us to live together in a civilized way. A certain pessimism, you see, about human abilities, human reason and human nature is in order.

#3 – The Utopian fallacy is easy to guess. What Scruton also delves into here a bit is why people can believe and proceed on the basis of such errors. How can people think things are perfectible? And yet they are still with us . . . after all the failed revolutions. Pessimism tells you this world is not going to be perfected and attempting final solutions only makes it worse.

#4 – The Zero Sum fallacy is the one in which people assume that if somebody gets ahead, they did it at the expense of somebody else. The Republicans jumped all over a statement betraying this fallacy during their recent convention. How does pessimism help here? Read the book.

#5 – The Planning fallacy is a harder one to get, but goes hand in hand with all the ones before it. It’s the idea that top-down management is the only way to make things work. Competing ideas only lead to confusion, people are led to believe. It favors oligarchy, you see. A bit of pessimism about anybody on a crusade is what is needed.

#6 The Moving Spirit fallacy is the idea that things are as they are now out of some inexpressible necessity to which all must bow. Get with the times, recognize the consensus, don’t object to what people think everybody is doing because such must be. Take this one to the Evangelicals—as well as the previous.

#7 The Aggregation fallacy he puts nicely when he explains that these people will tell you, if you like chocolate, ketchup and cherries that the best thing then is to combine all three. Or the old: what’s better than the sound of one accordion? The sound of two (which happens to be true, but think of it in terms of the chap who bought a fuel-efficient heater and cut his fuel consumption in half; the next day he went to the store to buy a second and save himself on fuel altogether). Scruton makes an accurate and snide remark about American palates and the combinations perpetrated by people here, but also about the French notion of combining liberty and equality, something even Americans may be persuaded to think about.

None of these fallacies have passed an expiration date, and having them explained and illustrated by Roger Scruton, it seems to me, will give you a certain clarity of perception which in the present condition is no small thing. It isn’t as cheerless as it sounds, actually: it is kind of an exposition of the underlying philosophy of Puddleglum, and can anybody who knows the arc of Puddleglum’s story fail to see the value of that? Next time I read The Silver Chair I’ll have to see how many of these fallacies are there exposed.

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by unknowing on October 4, 2012  •  Permalink
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Eminent Lives

Searching for stuff by Joseph Epstein I came across his biography of Alexis de Tocqueville in a series called Eminent Lives. I glanced at the information on a flyleaf and was intrigued at the possibilities: Christopher Hitchens on Thomas Jefferson, for example. I want to get the one on Freud, as an engaging narration and explanation of his life would be welcome.

I’ve now read two: the Tocqueville and the Beethoven. The latter is done by Edmund Morris. I wondered when I saw he had done a biography of Reagan, but after I read a riveting prologue I marveled no more; the guy won a Pulitzer for doing one of the Roosevelts back in the day. It seems the series editor (one James Atlas) is looking for a story well told.

With Epstein it is humor you get; and with Morris you get drama. With both a good, basic biography done with intelligence and flair. One often picks up a biography wondering if it will be more than solid plodding: the admirable research all present in an uninterrupted sequence of indigestible lumps; as if having all the facts straight were the only consideration. These authors so far know better.

There is a difference between merely informed companionship on the tour of another person’s life and interesting, informed companionship–if you know what I mean. And it seems to me that this James Atlas is a very sensible chap.

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by unknowing on September 27, 2012  •  Permalink
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Grossman’s Magicians

I have binged a bit on Lev Grossman. He writes a kind of anti-Narnia that is a lot more clever than Philip Pullman’s. The kids end up at Brakebills, which is a kind of Hogwarts without so much magic and little of the wonder–not greatly elaborated on at least. They even have an unexciting sort of Quiddich which is more like chess. There they are worked nearly to death, drink a lot, fornicate but for some reason do not do drugs. Once they get out they get apartments in Manhattan and do drugs. And that is part of the point.

Being a magician contains no wonder: what it does is give them opportunities to get into greater danger. The magic helps them deal with the danger–barely–and leaves them still mostly bored afterward. There is something there about the wasteland of modern life and feeling, and the powers technology confers.

Curious how he weaves in the vernacular, and really that’s part of his theme. And he does it well and thoroughly. Also, playing through the whole book is the mention of a series of five books where some English kids go to a magical land called Fillory; everybody studying magic at Brakebills has read the books and secretly longs to go to Fillory. What Grossman does is subtly to poke fun at the Aglophilia that is involved, to whet the appetite for all who want to go to such places by hinting and hinting, and then to take his crew there for the great let down.

The bathrooms are still smelly in Fillory, the bar tenders are keen on partaking, the bears oddly up-to-date dumb, and the centaurs keep herds of horses to have casual sex with. All this is actually slowly and carefully revealed in a rather devastating way. I may have made it sound cheaper than it is, because the truth is Grossman does make you think.

Not, mind you, that I agree; it is kind of like Neverwhere in that they get in, don’t want to be there, deal with it barely, escape, never want to go back, and then decide to go back. Same plot as Neverwhere, just longer on the preliminaries because of what the even is going to reveal.

Part of the charm–or the anti-charm–of Grossman is that the whole thing is written (and felt) in the vernacular. Have you ever tried to write something meaningful in the contemporary vernacular? He can still make the vernacular do an awful lot of things. And Lewis did his in the vernacular and made the vernacular do and the reader feel an awful lot of things. Emphasis on ‘lot’ with Lewis, emphasis on ‘awful lot’ with Grossman. Growing up, the book indicates, is about getting over Narnia, even if you can go there; and man that kind of thing is NOT up my alley, but the point was so interestingly made that I don’t resent being put through the book. One feels a response is in order, but that would take the cleverness and talent of a Grossman which I am not sure I have.

There is also a lesson for those of us writing stories and anybody interested in the possibilities of the contemporary use of our idiom for purposes of the imagination–my eyes were opened because I struggle with that aspect of expression a lot. Urban fantasy, I gather, is about fantasy without any of the illusions. And I understand part of that, but it seems rather a doomed effort. I do believe it is an interesting thing to deal with and I kept thinking of Till We Have Faces as the point of the book dawned on me–as a contrast.

Grossman’s book is not a book calculated to stimulate or aid the moral imagination.

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by unknowing on September 14, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Books

Posted by unknowing on September 14, 2012

http://unknowing.wordpress.com/2012/09/14/grossmans-magicians/

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