Tag Archives: literature

March 5, 2013 · 9:23 am

Read For Yourself

Recently I was watching C-Span Book TV ‘s coverage of author Robert Richardson at the 2013 Key West Literary Seminar.  As I was suffering from a rather potent bout of insomnia, the thought of listening to some old hippies rattle on about how they do not like the mess they have made of our society seemed to be the best way to put me to sleep under the circumstances.  Much of Mr. Richardson’s presentation was what one would expect., in that  we were condemned to a random rattling off of quotations from other writers, with a single adjective attached to each indicating his approval.  This sort of presentation is of course designed not so much to enlighten, as to impress the audience with the amount of books the lecturer has read.

During his presentation, Mr. Richardson recounted the passage in Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” in which one of the brothers justifies his quasi-atheistic views, doubtless as a foil for the author himself or at least some of his thought process, since if you have read other works by Dostoevsky you know that he was something of a mixed bag when it comes to his opinions on religion.  A story is recounted about an 8-year-old boy who is quite literally hounded to death, with a gruesome punishment for a minor misdeed, before the eyes of his own mother.  If God allows such things to happen, the story concludes, then the recounter of the tale was not interested in having anything to do with him.

That attitude, according to Mr. Richardson, aptly reflects his own views on the subject as well.  The rather obvious rejoinder to this of course, at least for the Christian, is that Mr. Richardson’s argument is something of a cop-out, since God Himself was brutally and unjustly killed before the eyes of His Mother on Calvary.  It also assumes that the concept of free will is something which must be imposed or lifted at will, as if God is playing a chess match with human playing pieces.  Be that as it may, such a simplistic and rather narcissistic understanding of the Divine is regrettably not uncommon among the so-called intelligentsia who dominate our universities, publishing houses, and media outlets.

For forty years or so we have witnessed the build-up of an intellectual establishment built not on universal truths, let alone intellect, but rather on relative opinions, and Mr. Richardson is merely one cog in that infernal machine.  We have seen the effect of the worship of Priapus instead of God, for example, in the enormous amount of sexually transmitted disease that runs rampant through our society which, as a very wise theology teacher of my acquaintance pointed out the other evening, no one seems to talk about.  The supposed freedom granted by the Sexual Revolution has in fact enslaved us to, among other things, the pharmaceutical industry.  This chasing after temporary personal pleasure in lieu of preparing for eternity, following millennia of human intellectual endeavors to instill virtues of self-control and self-sacrifice, has had a devastating impact on our world.

Yet there is something to be said for the example of those like Mr. Richardson, who stand at podiums and preach their gospels of nothingness, and that is the fact that they do actually read.  They may largely be reading a lot of garbage bound between two covers and presented as books, but nevertheless they do undertake the effort to continue to work on the exercise of their minds  through the exploration of writing.  Of course, part of the reason many otherwise educated younger people do not read today, is precisely because they had professors like Mr. Richardson in college.  If you are burdened with a teacher who turns you off to the world of literature by insisting that everything is about oppression and sex, there can be no better barrier to raise to the concept of reading as a form of ongoing education and the formation of ideas.

Fortunately, there are remedies to the situation.  I have always found that one of the best ways to critically evaluate a work of fiction, biography, and so on which you cannot bring yourself to agree with, is to always keep in mind the question of whether the author actually understands the truth he is rejecting.  I do not have to agree with a writer’s point of view in order to be able to find merit or even truth in his work.  This is not an easy task, of course, yet if you know what you believe, then you can be at the ready when you perceive that a scrivener or a professor is trying to convince you that they are right, and you are merely ignorant.  (How one establishes what is right and what is wrong when everything is supposedly relative is another matter entirely.)

By no means am I suggesting that you go off and read the collected works of Engels and Marx, unless of course you are a glutton for punishment, or for that matter wish to fully know thy enemy.  After all, without having at least some idea of what the devil looks like, when he tells you there is no such thing as personal accountability for example, you will be hard-pressed to recognize him when he presents himself in one of his countless guises.  Just as the lawyer in the courtroom needs to be able to anticipate his opponent’s argument in order to be able to successfully defeat it, it is insufficient to say that simply because part of what an author believes or concludes is incorrect, that it is therefore impossible to gain anything from his work.’

It is often unpleasant to read the work of those who are still fighting the culture wars that led our society into the morass in which it wallows in at present.  However to back away and give those digging us in, ever deeper, into such muck is not helpful either.  One may be able to refute Mr. Richardson – and indeed Dostoevsky – without having read any of their work, but it would be a difficult endeavor to sustain over a long period.

Thus while it is certainly inadvisable to take your views on the question of eternal life from those who write novels, or indeed biographies of existentialists, it is important to at least be somewhat familiar with such thinkers, however misguided they may be.  It is through a systematic emphasis on the dumbing down of Western society, paradoxically as access to higher education has never been more widespread, that we have found ourselves in a culture that is rather shallow, materialistic, and interested largely in the seeking of personal pleasure, much like the ancient pagan societies we emerged out of.  The fight to make us into a fat, lazy, and ignorant society which can be easily controlled and placated has very nearly been achieved.

In order to take back this battle then,  you cannot rely solely on your wits: you must work. And by work, I mean you must read.  Read all of the writers you love and admire, yes, but also take the time to read those whom you are suspicious of, and do so with a critical eye as to why you find them so untrustworthy.  It is entirely possible to examine what the world is trying to sell you as truth, without actually buying into its message in the process.  And unlike Mr. Richardson, I would posit that reading someone like Emerson does not require that you actually throw yourself head-first into Walden Pond.

3ages (800x600)
“The Three Ages of Man” by Giorgione (c. 1500-1501)
Pitti, Florence

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December 12, 2012 · 10:12 am

In Defense of Peter Jackson: The Value of Interpretation

This blog post will no doubt annoy a number of my closest friends, and particularly infuriate those who are the Middle Earth equivalent of the SSPX – i.e., more Tolkien-than-thou.  However my intent is not to make pleasantries, but rather to challenge perceptions and preconceptions in our culture.  To paraphrase Addison DeWitt, my native habitat is the blogosphere: in it I toil not, neither do I spin – I am simply a critic and commentator.

That being said, I will now freely admit that I am looking forward to catching Part One of Peter Jackson’s new film version of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” this weekend, if I can manage to snag a ticket at my local multiplex.  Rather than review a film which I have not yet seen, I want to address two points which all of us ought to keep in mind, and not just with respect to Jackson’s work.  The first and most important is to remind the reader of the value of variation and interpretation, in expression of the artistic imagination.  The second, which flows naturally from it, is to consider Jackson’s work within that context, as well as to judge it on its own merits.

Our cultural history is replete with examples of theme and repetition, not only because human beings enjoy variety, but also because the human imagination takes new pieces of insight from each reinterpretation of something which is already known to us.  We see this idea all the time, in literature, music, architecture, and so on.  If we look at art, for example, let us consider the subject of David, the shepherd boy from the Bible who became the King of Israel.

Were I to ask you to imagine a work of art representing David, the first image to come into your mind would likely be that of Michelangelo’s giant statue which stands in the Accademia in Florence.  This image of the shepherd-king has been famous since it was completed, an iconic and influential piece of sculpture known all over the world.  The serenity and confidence, the strong determination of this “ruddy youth”, as he is described in the Book of Samuel, who is growing into a man’s body and will soon become a great military leader, may have been intended as an allegory of Florence, but over time has come to represent the very idea of the Italian Renaissance for many.

Yet there are other images of David, created both before and after this particular work, which can bring about other levels of understanding.  Take Bernini’s David in the Borghese in Rome, for example, which was created during the Counter-Reformation as the Catholic Church fought back against Protestantism.  In this image, the young shepherd boy is shown about to slay Goliath with his slingshot.  He is wound up like a professional baseball pitcher, chewing on his lower lip with a look of keen concentration on his unseen target, narrowing his eyes to see exactly where to aim his weapon in order to do the most damage.

Whereas Michelangelo’s colossal David is rather static, Bernini’s is about action.  They are each a product of their time.  The former represents the newly-found confidence of a culture which believed that it was reviving the lost arts and knowledge of the Greeks and Romans, and expressed that confidence in the way it presented saints like King David.  The latter is that of an institution under attack from all sides, which is not going to roll over and play dead, but rather will fight back against those who would see it fail.

Ever since Peter Jackson released the first installment of his film version of “Lord of the Rings” ten years ago this month, there has been a mass of criticism that he has not done proper justice to the books.  Despite the total length of the three films extending to many hours, the refrain from Tolkien fans then was that Jackson had cut too much.  While some of this is made up for in the Extended Editions of the films on DVD, which are even better than the theatrical versions, Jackson admittedly had to make editorial decisions about what to put in, what to leave out, and so on, in bringing the story to the screen.  Similarly, now it seems that a common complaint among the commentariat is that turning “The Hobbit”, a much shorter book – comparatively – than the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy of novels, into three films is making it too long.  In other words, Mr. Jackson is damned if he does, and damned if he doesn’t.

Let us take what we have considered above with respect to the image of David, and apply it to what we are seeing here, with these films.  What Jackson himself has said in the past about his work, and it is a point with which I wholeheartedly agree, is that we need to keep in mind that these are HIS interpretations of the stories, using his talents and the resources available to him as best he can.  Moreover, he fully anticipates that at some point, another director will come along and make his own film version of Tolkien’s books.

It is a bit unfair – and frankly rather illogical – to expect one artistic medium to be able to express itself in the way that another does.  King David, after all, was a real person, who lived a long time ago, and his deeds are described in the Bible.  That, in itself, is an interpretation of his life through the inspired Scriptures.  Do we complain that Michelangelo or Bernini’s statues are unfair representations of David, because they do not actually move?  Do we whine because paintings of David by artists like Castagno or Caravaggio do not speak?

Rather, if we are honest with ourselves, we look at these works of art, and value them based on their own merits, but also in how they bring us back to the person of David and the stories about him in the Bible.  If Mr. Jackson tells an otherwise good story in a way which is unwatchable, then his film will fail; if he tells that story in a way which draws audiences in and makes them interested, then he will succeed.  And in so doing, then perhaps his work will cause people who have never heard of Tolkien or read his work, to go read the books for themselves.

The value of cultural reinterpretations of our values and virtues is that they constantly remind us to reflect on great topics, which with all of our everyday cares and concerns we so often do not get to do.  Tolkien himself was a novelist, not a filmmaker – and neither were Count Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, or any of the other writers whose works are coming to the big screen this season.  While some may not like Jackson’s particular interpretation of Tolkien’s writing, the real question to be asked is not whether it is a complete representation of Tolkien’s work on screen, but whether there is enough virtue in what appears in the film to reflect favorably on at least some of the author’s concerns.

In the spirit of cultural maturity, we need to give Mr. Jackson the chance to tell his version of Tolkien’s story, and enjoy the good parts of it even as we acknowledge those portions which we may not like.  For the next cinematic interpretation of these novels will no doubt be just as different from Jackson’s version, as Bernini’s David is from Michelangelo’s.

Hobbit

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October 25, 2012 · 11:02 am

The Courtier Pays a Call

Last evening I visited some good friends after work for a couple of hours, having a drink outside on their balcony and enjoying both the conversation and summer-like weather.  One of the benefits of getting older is realizing how often such evenings are infinitely more pleasurable, memorable, and even educational than ones spent either surrounded by a great deal of noise and activity, or entirely on one’s own.  The reason I suspect this is the case is something that Count Castiglione himself understood very well, for in fact it forms the framework for his “Book of the Courtier”, from which this blog takes its inspiration, and that is the importance of actual conversation between human beings, and what that conversation does to examine and to build up our society.

Back before the Western world turned in on itself in selfishness and the worship of fleeting images projected onto flat screens, people of all social classes used to engage in what was collectively referred to as “paying calls.”  This involved physically going to visit a neighbor, friend, or relative, in order to discuss how everyone was doing, the news and events of the day, and so on.  The manner and timing of the visit would vary according both to personal desire and local practice.  In one part of the world for example, it might be customary to pay calls after church on Sunday; in another, it might be that one visited one’s neighbor only in the cool of the evening after chores were finished for the day.

When calling upon others was considered standard practice, the “people from the manor” visited their neighbors and friends, and received visitors in turn, just as the farm laborers working in their fields did in their own cottages.  The merchants in the towns and cities engaged in it, as did their customers.  Please note that in observing this fact, I am not making reference to some dreamy fantasy of what life might have been like in the days before television and the internet: it was simply a fact of life that unless you were desperately poor – and even the poor would visit one another to bring comfort and solace in their commiseration - you had a duty to behave this way if you were to be considered civilized. Ask your grandparents about what life was like when they were younger, and chances are they will tell you about paying calls, or whatever the practice may have been referred to where they lived, where the adults relished the opportunity to sit and talk with other adults.

We can see just how essential this practice was, for paying calls takes place among all classes of society throughout the canon of Western literature.  It is recounted throughout centuries of fiction: without even having to go look up the actual passages, I can think of such scenes in the work of writers such as Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy, Honoré de Balzac, Eudora Welty, James Boswell, Bailey White, Arnold Bennett, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Joyce, and countless others.  It was such a common practice, with so many local varieties, that sometimes the rules surrounding this practice could become quite rigid – even comically so.

Take the beautiful BBC miniseries “Cranford”, for example, based on the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell.  The spinster sisters Miss Deborah and Miss Mattie Jenkins inform their recently-arrived houseguest from the metropolis of Manchester, Miss Mary Smith, of all the multiple protocols adopted locally over the years, as to when and where and how such visits are to take place.  These unwritten commandments on paying calls provide a seemingly endless source of amusement for the  viewer, as the maid repeatedly errs in how she announces visitors, or the visitors themselves stay too long, or raise subjects that are not supposed to be addressed during such get-togethers.

Yet comedy aside, the important thing to note from the practice of visiting and holding conversation on a regular basis in the home, was that it held families and communities together.  When we started building Western civilization through working together, these practices helped to both create and give life to society, and to thereafter keep that society going.  And this marvelous feat of not actually slaughtering each other in the street was accomplished by bringing people face to face within a framework of behaving with respect in someone else’s home, however grand or humble that home might be.

As I wrote about earlier this week, with the coming of shorter days and colder temperatures, many of us are going to become more isolated, turning to television and the internet for company, and we need to make an effort to reach out to those who might be isolated because of the change of seasons.  However I would also suggest that regardless of the time of year, for the larger health of our society, paying calls on a regular basis with those in our community is something we ought to consider reviving.  Perhaps not in as formal a way as it was practiced previously, but we can use technology to make such meetings easier to arrange.  And once we do meet, then the technology can be switched off or ignored, and the type of conversations which led to the building up of Western civilization can once again take place.


“Rev. Thomson paying a call on Mr. and Mrs. Harris in their home”
Life Magazine

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April 2, 2012 · 11:00 am

A Little Sugar in My Bowl

This being Holy Week, as usual I am going to take the time over the next few days on this blog to share some reflections on this most sacred time of the year for Christians. However, I hope that my non-Christian readers will not wander off, to wait until after Easter for me to ruminate on more secular subjects. I believe that even non-Christian readers may find this week’s posts to be worth a read, because I intend to look at some cultural matters related to the events Christians are recalling this week, which I think may prove of interest to all.

The text I will be using as a touchstone for this week’s writing is the retelling of Jesus’ Passion and Death in St. Mark’s Gospel, which we heard at mass yesterday.  You can read St. Mark’s entire account on the USCCB website by following this link.  Today, I would like us to focus on a small detail from the early part of this passage, in which Jesus is anointed with oil by a woman who is traditionally identified as being St. Mary Magdalen.

Before we begin, let us all agree to take The Magdalen as herself, and not some twisted fantasy of diseased minds.  She was a disciple of Jesus – not a mistress, a wife, a female priest, a freemason, a space alien, or anything else you may have heard from those who, like Dan Brown, hate the Catholic Church in particular or Christianity in general, or who are simply ignorant and prone to accept the ridiculous as truth. If you are looking for anti-Catholic, heretical conspiracy theories with your morning coffee, then I suggest you look elsewhere.

Now, turning back to the matter at hand, St. Mark tells us that Jesus and His Disciples were in the town of Bethany, outside of Jerusalem, and He had been invited to dinner at the home of a friend:

When He was in Bethany reclining at table
in the house of Simon the leper,
a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil,
costly genuine spikenard.
She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on His head.

Rather than focus on the spiritual significance of this event as understood by Jesus, which becomes clear if you read the rest of the passage, I want to focus our attention on the jar, if the reader will indulge me. The connections that we make between everyday objects and more complex concepts when we are children, often have an impact on the perceptions we have and the choices we make as adults. In this case, The Magdalen’s jar of perfumed oil is something that I am reminded of almost every day, because of just such a connection I made when I was little.

When I was growing up – and indeed still now – my parents kept the household sugar in two places. A bulky, large sugar bag was kept in a canister in a high cabinet in the kitchen, along with the flour, salt, and so on. From this large container, a much smaller, lidded, sterling silver sugar bowl was filled for everyday use, and kept on a lower cabinet to reach easily. So for example, when I go home for Easter this coming weekend, I will get the sugar for my morning coffee out of this silver sugar bowl; if it is empty, I will have to fill it from the large canister in one of the high cabinets.

This particular sugar bowl has a very pleasing shape, looking very 18th century, yet it was also somehow vaguely exotic in my mind. As I grew older and I began to look more closely at the objects one could see depicted in paintings and sculpture, I noticed that St. Mary Magdalen was often shown with a jar that looked not unlike a taller version of our sugar bowl. Indeed, in the back of the church connected to my primary school, there was a life-sized, very Victorian-looking Crucifixion sculpture group, with Christ on the Cross flanked by the Virgin Mary and St. John, and with The Magdalen sitting at the foot of the Cross with her alabaster jar. When I was very small, I always wanted to go over and take off the cover of the jar, and see whether I might find some tasty sugar inside.

When I moved into my present house some years ago, I had to purchase a number of household items, including a coffee service. I did not really think about it until I got home, but of all of the different sugar bowl options available, I chose one that most closely resembled the one that my parents have. The ones with more squat lids, or with side handles, or with simpler lines simply did not appeal to me. My brain had made the connection between the sugar bowl it had known growing up, and the symbolic connection of that sugar bowl to the Passion and Death of Jesus, through the gift of St. Mary Magdalen, and so of course I wanted to have that iconographic reminder in my own home.

The point here is something which I think is worth all of our noting. Whether it is a sugar bowl that reminds me of The Magdalen, and thereby of Holy Week and the central matters of the Christian Faith, or a bald eagle that reminds me of the United States when I see it in a documentary film or carved onto the side of a building, human beings have a unique ability to express and to comprehend complex concepts by distilling them into simple objects. Even if I myself am not creating these objects, by “reading” them I am giving them meaning beyond the obvious. Finding sugar in the sugar bowl may be a pleasant discovery, but remembering Christ when I pick up that sugar bowl affords me an opportunity which is even sweeter.

The importance of our understanding and passing on the meaning of symbols in this way cannot be overestimated. Forming these connections may get a child to think about, understand, and retain mature concepts, and then be able to recall them as an adult. This is why our creative output in things such as art and architecture, literature, film, and music, are vital elements of culture, which we ought not to ignore. When they can be seen as something more than just intrinsically pleasant, they serve as powerful tools for reminding us of who and what we are.


“The Magdalen” by Bernardino Luini (c. 1525)
National Gallery of Art, Washington

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September 27, 2011 · 2:01 pm

Don’t Be Afraid of the Art

The reader will not be surprised to learn that I take a very dim view of the state of cultural education in this country.  The American educational establishment tends to use the worlds of art, music, and literature as a kind of winnowing fan, designed to separate young people of good will and common sense from the disaffected or anti-social, discouraging the former from pursuing interests in these areas, and co-opting the latter into swallowing the moral relativist, cultural warrior agenda.  The selection of artists, composers, and authors whom most American young people are forced to study, many of whom have little or no real merit in their work, effectively “turn off” most students for the rest of their lives from learning about painting, sculpture, classical literature, opera, and so on.

For example, yesterday a young friend from the Twitterverse mentioned that he had to read J.D. Salinger’s tiresome “The Catcher in the Rye” for school, and write a report about it.  When I was in school and the inevitable time came to read that incredibly overrated volume about teen angst, I refused on the grounds that it was both trashy and intellectually beneath me.  I insisted that instead, I read the complete Victor Hugo “Les Miserables”, which was both more my speed and more challenging, and was granted permission to do so.

However, it must be admitted that I am rather stubborn, whereas not all young people are of like mind.  So while I would sit in art appreciation class and tell the teacher that Jackson Pollock was a mental defective and a charlatan, or raise my hand in music appreciation class and ask why in the world would anyone with any sense voluntarily choose to listen to the work of Arnold Schoenberg, I had a basis for asking these questions.  My parents had introduced me to the world of art, music, and literature long before my peers, not assuming that it was solely the responsibility of the educational institutions I attended to do so, and so as a result I was already forming my own opinions and tastes in these areas long before my contemporaries.  Not everyone is so fortunate, of course, but this point is where the cultural breakdown of Western society truly begins.

If we look back to our grandparents’ day and earlier, when and where children were fortunate enough to have a decent education and learned about art, music, literature, and so on, they were taught to look at the foundational and seminal works of Western Civilization in these areas.  They were also taught that to be considered well-educated, they would have to make an effort to learn about these things now, and to continue to learn about them and appreciate/patronize them to some degree at least for the rest of their lives.  It was an aspirational kind of cultural education. Small towns considered it their duty to promote a civic society, about which I have written previously, and this was reinforced through the educational system.

For the past few decades however, the idea of teaching the Western “canon” – a list of artists, musicians, and authors considered the leading lights in the development of Western Civilization – has turned off a great many modern educators as being too Christian, or too European, or too male-dominated for their personal tastes.  With all due respect to non-Christians, non-Europeans, and of course to the ladies, this is nonsense. One must acknowledge the contributions of those who do not fit the “dead white men” description, but denigrating the reality of the foundations of Western Civilization or ignoring it completely is, frankly, intellectually dishonest.  It is no wonder that young people today, who have suffered at the hands of the Baby Boomers for the past 30-40 years, are so culturally illiterate that they know who Toni Morrison is, but have never heard of Anthony Trollope.

Unfortunately, such is the state of much of the cultural community today that the arts and literature can only be understood by those who have spoken the creed that there is no god but the self, and Germaine Greer is its prophet.  This is what has become a substitute, in the arts and literature, for a real appreciation of our cultural riches, and the greatness of Western Civilization: a parroting back of the views of bitter, ageing Baby Boomers, who set out to change the world back in 1968, but achieved little other than to ruin most of what they touched.  It leaves it to us to pick up the pieces of their myriad failures, and try to rebuild with the incredibly rich but overlooked resources at our disposal.

Let us therefore approach the project with hope, being selective in our choices of art, music, and literature for ourselves and for children, turning to those whose opinions we know and respect and asking things like, “You’re well-read, tell me whose work I ought to try?”, or “What good, solid art/music resources are available for me to educate myself?”  For this must start with you, gentle reader, on your own: the world of academia and cultural commentary is, generally, going to be hostile to your attempting to do so. And like the Early Christians or the White Russians, we may need to learn to communicate with each other through other means so as to avoid detection by the culture stasi.

That being said, my suggestion to you is, simply ignore the other side. You may be called a philistine, or a provincial, or even worse, for daring to disagree with the cultural powers that be, with regards to the arts, music, and literature, by expressing a preference for the marvels of a classical education and Western Civilization to the offal served to most of us in school.  If you even care to give a reply to such denigration as may come your way, which of course is not really necessary any more than one must throw stones at a barking dog chained behind a fence, you may wish to adopt the level of argument recommended by psychiatrist Eric Berne in his seminal book “Games People Play”. All one must do is temporarily come down to the opponent’s childish level, and bring out that equally childish, but debate-ending response to their fits and screaming about conservatives not understanding art, music, literature, or oppressing others in some way: “Sticks and Stones”.


“The Boy Cicero, Reading” by Vincenzo Foppa (c. 1464)
Wallace Collection, London

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