“Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” by T. S. Eliot

“Notes” is far more than it implies, as Eliot has two overarching themes.  The first is that religion and culture are inseparable, and the second is the relationship between regional, national, and world cultures. Eliot believes that a world culture is the only basis of peace, but probably impossible because of the lack of a world religion.  His definition of a healthy culture seems to be a shared system of beliefs that allow both mutual understanding and vibrant disagreement at the same time. This is not unlike the great theological debates of the High Middle Ages, Christianity’s most confident time, when Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Peter Abelard, Albert the Great, and other philosophers flowered.

He wrote these “Notes” in the 1940s, with Nazis fresh in memory and in the shadow of Stalinist Russia. Sometimes he seems elitist and dated, other times full of timeless wisdom, and always writing very well. His chapter on education is presented almost as an afterthought but has actually held up the best over the years.  His appendix on the poetic nature of the English language and the mutual influences European cultures have had upon each other is also inspiring (and written for a German audience).

“To the unconscious level we constantly tend to revert, as we find consciousness an excessive burden; and the tendency towards reversion may explain the powerful attraction which totalitarian philosophy and practice can exert upon humanity.  Totalitarianism appeals to the desire to return to the womb.”

In lesser words, group think is for babies who don’t have the courage to think for themselves.

“Aesthetic sensibility must be extended into spiritual perception, and spiritual perception must be extended into aesthetic sensibility and discipline taste before we are qualified to pass judgment upon decadence or diabolism or nihilism in art.  To judge a work of art by artistic or religious standards, to judge a religion by religious or artistic standards should come in the end to the same thing, though it is an end at which no individual can arrive.”

Eliot’s Christianity is as unapologetic as his poetry, and it is heartening to know that even an Eliot struggles with the relationship between his art and his belief. 

“We know that good manners, without education, intellect, or sensibility to the arts, tends towards mere automatism; that learning without good manners or sensibility is pedantry; that intellectual ability without the more human attributes is admirably only in the same way as the brilliance of a child chess prodigy; and that the arts without intellectual context are vanity…we must not expect any one person to be accomplished in all of them… we are driving in the end to find it in the pattern of the society as a whole.”

I think this paragraph says a lot about the sort of people Eliot had to spend too much of his time with: pedants, prodigies, and the vain.  Not that these are his friends, but he’s obviously tired of single-minded or thoughtless individuals he met in his circles. But he’s also right… it brings to my mind the famous Paulian scriptures about the relationship between faith, hope, and love. Virtues need each other’s support.

“I have suggested elsewhere that a growing weakness of our culture has been the increasing isolation of elites from each other, so that the political, the philosophical, the artistic, the scientific, are separated to the great loss of each of them, not merely through the arrest of any general circulation of ideas, but through the lack of these contacts and mutual influences at a less conscious level, which are perhaps even more important than ideas.”

I think the real divide today is between the political elites and the elites he mentioned above. Our political class has learned how to win political battles, but are woefully ill-informed about the truths of what they are fighting over.

 

 

Rollar coaster day

Well, I had a great morning and a pissy afternoon, and not just because it can’t decide if it’s going to rain or not.

The morning was great because I wrote a thousand words of a novel, then went to the gym, came home and ate, and then wrote another thousand words. So far, so good.

Then I went to a lecture about research methodology that was too vague to be very useful, which wasn’t so bad really. I got a chance to diss Google for their search engine’s partialities, but didn’t get a chance to complain about how the days of browsing for books in a library is more difficult than it used to be. I can’t just ask, “Where’s the Chinese lit section? I want to browse for books on a particular topic,” because it’s all so electronic and the libraries so big even the librarians can’t keep track.

Then I went to poetry class and we had a constructive dialogue about each other’s poems, but then the professor put on his bad cop hat and told us he was disappointed with our essays judging by criteria he was never very specific about in the first place. If he had given us the same speech two weeks ago, we would have given him the essays he wanted. My professors are good at explaining their subjects; I just wish they were better at explaining their assignments.

I also think I told too much about myself to one of my classmates, because we had talked about a third classmate and this afternoon the third party looked at me funny, in a knowing sort of way. Fortunately I didn’t say anything particularly bad, just that when he invites the class to go hang out in a bar my first thought was that I didn’t really have the money, so we might be self-conscious around each other for a while because he’s rich and I’m not (and she made it quite clear she knows how much money he has).  But I’m not going to tell the first classmate anything more about myself if she’s going to be like that.

I have chess club tonight but I don’t really feel like going. With all the scheduling nonsense and room changes I’ve only made it to chess club twice in a month and a half. I’m beginning to think my club fee will be a donation.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Stranger, pause and look;

    From the dust of ages

Lift this little book,

    Turn the tattered pages,

Read me, do not let me die!

    Search the fading letters, finding

    Steadfast in the broken binding

All that once was I!

 

From the “Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay”

 

Millay has a way of hitting things on the nose. I’m really enjoying her “Collected Poems” and am reading on the side “Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal” as a part of grad school strategy to not only read more poetry but to figure out how to read (and understand) it.  Meanwhile I’ve snatched up two stanzas from her poems to kick start two of my own novels (attributed, of course).

 

The first essay in “Millay at 100” argues that she is underappreciated in the sense that critics don’t think she’s worth the time to analysis but academics apparently enjoy quoting her. Perhaps that a good sign that her poetry is well written, evocative, and easy to understand. For most people ease of understanding is a sign of good writing, but I suppose critics need difficult writers to justify their profession.

 

I chose this quotation above because it speaks to me personally, and to anyone else out there being an author, regardless of your publishing success. Anyone’s work could, basically, molder away, become an “ex-poem” in the sense that no one reads it anymore. The statistical chance of anyone achieving the literary longevity of Austen or Dickens is depressingly low, and probably getting lower with 3000 new published books each year crowding for attention, drowning each other out.

My Introduction to Exeter

I can’t believe how busy I have been between the paperwork, getting to know various clubs, seminars on life and law in England…

 

Exeter is a beautiful place, but the hills are both a source of the beauty and my leg aches. My butt is sore after walking up these hills and when I get home and sit down my calves take their turn to complain. It’s a very nice small city and I’m amazed at how far a pound will go when I go grocery shopping.

 

At the club for SF, fantasy, and horror, there wasn’t much talk about any of that, but at the Sherlock Holmes fan club they talked about Holmes, Dr. Who, Harry Potter… I suggested they rename themselves the Fandom Club. They took that comment in the spirit in which it was intended.

 

The student body is pretty diverse and interesting.  I ran into some of the same people more than once and the conversations grow from there. I’ve found that I can strike up conversations with Chinese pretty easily by starting off with “Ni hao. Wo zai Nanjing Daxue wu nian jiao Yingyue,” which means, “Hi. I taught English at Nanjing University for five years.” The conversation usually moves back to English, but it’s the opening I need. I could end up with as many Chinese friends in England as I had back in China, depending on how busy everyone is.

“A History of England” by David Harris Willson

I was a little surprised that this textbook was written by an American, since America plays such a minor role. Granted, when it was published America was new to being a superpower, but it even makes our roles in the First and Second World Wars feel so trivial.

It was also written before professors stopping putting their own conscious opinions into the textbooks, so we get little authorial asides about which historical figures he wishes to redeem. For example, he goes out of his way to write that the appeasement of Hitler wasn’t entirely Chamberlain’s fault; English memories of WWI were still too painful and the Depression was keeping their concerns economic. The last several Prime Ministers had been trying to help Germany recover to become a market for British goods, and the Germans electing who the Brits thought at the time was just some nutter wasn’t going to stop their desperate economic policies.

The take home lesson from reading these 800+ pages was the precariousness of good government. For 2000 years, England has wavered from good to bad government, regardless of being monarchical or democratic. Power shifts that have little to do with policies and too much with politics change the government of their, and probably most, countries.  It’s rather depressing to be reading about a good king or prime minister doing their best only to have it set back by a following incompetent.

And yet progress is made. England did become wealthier and more democratic, often times in spite of their leaders. Progress comes from innovators, grass roots movements, and the expansion of knowledge, while politicians play their games.

From Robert Scholes “The Roots of Science Fiction”

“This radical dislocation between the world of romance and the world of experience has been exploited in different ways. One way, the most obvious, has been to suspend the laws of nature in order to give more power to the laws of narrative, which are themselves projections of the human psyche in the form of enacted wishes and fears…in the sublimative narratives of pure romance they are merely more obvious than elsewhere because less disguised by other interests and qualities.”

 

This is why literature is the true window to our souls, reflecting our worldviews more than our world. People who wish to resist evil but don’t have the power to do so will be attracted to stories about the successful resistance, and the less power one has the more power one will dream of having, hence why children are attracted to comic book and video game heroes. Adults develop “other interests and qualities” so one’s taste in literature can evolve, but the same basic desire for empowerment or satisfaction never goes away completely.  Just yesterday I read an otherwise very good novel, “The Language of Flowers” in which the heroine has remarkably forgiving friends, leaving me wondering if that is what the author secretly wishes for.

 

“When romance returns deliberately to confront reality it produces the various forms of didactic romance or fabulation that we usually call allegory, satire, fable, parable, and so on…traditionally, it has been a favorite vehicle for religious thinkers, precisely because religions have insisted that there is more to the world than meets the eye, that the common-sense view of reality – “Realism” is incomplete and therefore false. Science, of course, has been telling us much the same thing for several hundred years…thus it is not surprising that what we call ‘science’ fiction should employ the same narrative vehicle as the religious fictions of our past.”

 

Science fiction latches onto many of the same questions as religion, but no one novel that I am aware of tries to answer all of them.  The existence of evil is the most common question addressed, but free will v. fate, equality v inequality, our relationship with nature, and our origins are all questions SF authors have struggled with.  Books like “Dune,” “Foundation,” and “The Lord of the Rings” have directly shaped more minds than any book of philosophy. Philosophers may have indirectly shaped more minds, because more popular authors have read their books, but a literary game of connections gets too complicated for me.

 

“And if a writer transports men to Mars merely to tell a cowboy story, he produces not structural fabulation but star dreck – harmless, perhaps, but an abuse of that economy of means that governs mature esthetic satisfaction. Or if he allows such a variety of magical events that his fictional world seems deficient in its own natural laws, his work will fail structurally and cognitively, too, though it may retain some sublimative force.  But in the most admirable of structural fabulations, a radical discontinuity between the fiction world and our own provides both the means of narrative suspense and of speculation. In the perfect structural fabulation, idea and story and so wedded as to afford us simultaneously the greatest pleasures that fiction provides: sublimation and cognition.”

 

Probably the reason I named “Dune,” “Foundation,” and “The Lord of the Rings” is because they provide both sublimative and cognitive satisfaction. Any of the books I enjoy rereading reach that beautiful level of story and idea, from “Jane Eyre” to “The Gap Series.”  Even the controversial “Atlas Shrugged” reveals ideas through plot and description, even if it is weighed down by excessive dialogue.

“Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey” by Isabel Fonseca

“Bury Me Standing” is a disillusioning book, disillusioning about both Europe and the Gypsies. Fonseca seems to have organized the chapters to ease us into the degree of perfidy Europe is guilty of in its treatment of gypsies, from the simple discrimination familiar to students of African-American history to the Holocaust (called the Devouring by the gypsies). 

 

What was disillusioning about the gypsies was how their freewheeling, nomadic, romantic reputation was really a vast minstrel show. The real gypsy culture involves child marriage, rampant illiteracy, and superstitions about the uncleanliness of women. Their real poetry and music are things they keep for themselves, while bear training and fortune telling are cons they pull on us. The most free-wheeling aspect of their lives is a substitution among their men for small time wheeling and dealing capitalism instead of professional careers, and that only works out well for a minority of this largest of European minorities. They aren’t even very nomadic, since the vast majority of them have been settled for generations, only moving when forced to by violence.

 

What was disillusioning about Europe was the centuries long mistreatment of these people. Linguistically they can be traced back to India, but as a group were apparently first brought from Armenia as slaves for a certain Vlad of Romania, the father of the Vlad who inspired Dracula. And like most enslaved groups, they were vilified to justify the slavery. And ever since they have been vilified as criminals, spies, or traitors to justify discrimination to this day, even in countries that would never again dare do the same to Jews.

 

My sweeping statements are necessary for the sake of summarization, but Fonseca worked with an anthropological style, interviewing gypsies all over Europe and even living among their families. Her approach was more individual and thus more heart breaking than mine.

Any Suggestions?

In Aldiss and Wingrove’s article “On the Origin of the Species: Mary Shelly” promoting Shelly as the founder of science fiction, they wrote, “This book (referring to James Gunn’s collection of essays “Speculations on Speculation”) however, makes it clear that we can recognize SF fairly easily, although it is rarely found in a pure isolated state. Just like oxygen.”

 

This got me to thinking that literary conventions, tropes, archetypes, even styles, could call be considered elements of literature. The mixing and matching of these elements creates compounds that we call stories. Long and complicated strings of compounds become novels.

 

A literary SF novel could be called one part prose and two parts SF (Sf2P) just as water is referred to as H2O.  Paranormal romance could R2H(orror). Just about any romance novel would be R2-something: R2S(uspence), R2C(omedy).  I think Star Wars would AFSf while Star Trek would be Sf2F.  Firefly would be Sf2W.

 

This simple coding could tell anyone at a glance just what they are getting into, and perhaps even lend a more scientific organization to literature as a whole. Maybe after all the different novels and movies have been coded, we could match them up with the “Rotten Tomatoes” website and see if particular balances get better or worse ratings.

 

So I’ve started a table. Any suggestions for filling in the blanks?

 

A=Action/Adventure

B=?

C=Children’s

D=Dark

E=Erotic

F=Fantasy

G=gothic

H=humorous

I=?

J=?

K=

L=literary

M=mystery

N=?

O=?

P=Poetical prose

Q=?

R=romance

S=suspense

Sf=science fiction

T=thriller

U=?

V=?

W=western

X=women’s

Y=men’s

Z=?

“Father, Son, and Co.” by Thomas J. Watson Jr. and Peter Petre

Thomas J. Watson Sr. built IBM from a tiny company into the dominant name in office machine supply, especially punch cards machines. He brought his son, Thomas Watson Jr., into the company, and he began the massive transformation of IBM into a computer giant. This is their story.

 

It is the story of two strong, stubborn, temperamental personalities who were not the easiest to live with, including with other.  Their battles with each other were as epic as their battles with competitors. Thomas Sr. both wanted his sons in the company, but didn’t want to let up on his control. Yet it was Thomas Jr. who realized that computers would drive punch cards out and dragged IBM into the second half of the twentieth century. Since they also liked smart, stubborn people, the Watsons surrounded themselves with smart, stubborn people, creating a “team of rivals” except their goal was to make money, and make money they did.

 

Thomas Sr. and Thomas Jr. both had adventuresome lives. The father worked his way up from poverty to moving the circles of power in American industry. As one of the few liberal businessmen, he had access to the Roosevelt Administration, and pioneered the good treatment of workers to create company loyalty.  Chapter twenty-four of this book borders on Thomas Jr. considering paternalistic companies as an antidote to what Marxism would call the alienation of worker; he considered ways to turn IBM into a company owned by its employees and related that to the protection of democracy.  Thomas Jr. was an Air Force pilot in WWII, flying in Russia, China, and over the Atlantic, and after his retirement an ambassador to the Soviet Union.

 

You can also read this book for an outline of the computer industry in America.  IBM provided most of the computers in the nation. The New Deal created so much paperwork that IBM’s sales and thus production increased through the Great Depression and obviously then WWII. To explain company decisions, Thomas Jr. had to explain his competitors, too. Much of the middle third of the book is the struggle to keep up not only with technological advances, but with years of back orders.

 

So whether you are interested in family history, computer history, or management theory, this is a good book for you.

“The Casual Vacancy” by J. K. Rowling

When I watch “The Midsomer Murders” I’ve often wondered how these small British towns could sustain a murder rate high enough to sustain the TV series; after having read “The Casual Vacancy” I wonder why there aren’t more.  The only sympathetic people in the book were a couple of Londoners who moved out there because the mother had thought she could marry one of the townsmen, much to the chagrin of the daughter who lost her school, her friends, and her boyfriend.  The mother even ends up with a lower paying job to be closer to the schumck, which introducers her as a social worker to the life of a family ruined by addictions to drugs and sex. I feel sorry for the kids of that impoverished family, even if the daughter’s angry acting out leaves me glad I won’t have to actually meet her.  

 

The majority of the book is about the ramifications of the death of the one reasonably good person in Pagford, and even he apparently neglected his family to try going good for society as a whole. As the ripples spread, as people compete for his seat on the parish council, the unhappy people of Pagford mistreat each other and rat each other out for it. Fear, selfishness, and hypocrisy drive the people of this town and it’s too small for the people to escape it except by leaving altogether.

 

The contrast between “Fats” and Kay, the social worker, reveal one aspect of the possible theme of authenticity.  “Fats” attempts to be authentic are justifications for his being a jerk of the typical teenage boy variety, and his one act of redemption is accept blame for the misdeeds of others. Is Rowling telling us that civilization depends upon inauthenticity, since the authentic human being is so unlikeable?  Civilized values, and even more so liberal, cosmopolitan values, require education and training.  On the other hand, Kay’s quixotic search for love, and her daughter’s, is derailed by her boyfriend’s inability to be honest with her.

 

This is not to say I didn’t believe the book. There are people like this all over the world; Pagford was just at the unlucky end of a bell curve for collecting so many of them into such a small area. Underneath all the repulsive characters is a talent for plotting that brings so many lives into a web of human weaknesses. 

“The Casual Vacancy” by J. K. Rowling

When I watch “The Midsomer Murders” I’ve often wondered how these small British towns could sustain a murder rate high enough to sustain the TV series; after having read “The Casual Vacancy” I wonder why there aren’t more.  The only sympathetic people in the book were a couple of Londoners who moved out there because the mother had thought she could marry one of the townsmen, much to the chagrin of the daughter who lost her school, her friends, and her boyfriend.  The mother even ends up with a lower paying job to be closer to the schumck, which introducers her as a social worker to the life of a family ruined by addictions to drugs and sex. I feel sorry for the kids of that impoverished family, even if the daughter’s angry acting out leaves me glad I won’t have to actually meet her.  

 

The majority of the book is about the ramifications of the death of the one reasonably good person in Pagford, and even he apparently neglected his family to try going good for society as a whole. As the ripples spread, as people compete for his seat on the parish council, the unhappy people of Pagford mistreat each other and rat each other out for it. Fear, selfishness, and hypocrisy drive the people of this town and it’s too small for the people to escape it except by leaving altogether.

 

The contrast between “Fats” and Kay, the social worker, reveal one aspect of the possible theme of authenticity.  “Fats” attempts to be authentic are justifications for his being a jerk of the typical teenage boy variety, and his one act of redemption is accept blame for the misdeeds of others. Is Rowling telling us that civilization depends upon inauthenticity, since the authentic human being is so unlikeable?  Civilized values, and even more so liberal, cosmopolitan values, require education and training.  On the other hand, Kay’s quixotic search for love, and her daughter’s, is derailed by her boyfriend’s inability to be honest with her.

 

This is not to say I didn’t believe the book. There are people like this all over the world; Pagford was just at the unlucky end of a bell curve for collecting so many of them into such a small area. Underneath all the repulsive characters is a talent for plotting that brings so many lives into a web of human weaknesses. 

“Moment in Peking” by Lin Yutang

Weighing in at 951 pages, “Moment in Peking” is a good literary introduction to pre-Communist modern China, when the Chinese were struggling to absorb western ideas without losing their Chinese identities.  It is told mostly from the point of view of a middle class Chinese woman, starting from when she was a little girl with her family fleeing Peking (now Beijing) during the Boxer Rebellion to when she, as an older woman, flees Peking ahead of the Japanese invaders while her son joins one of the Chinese armies.  I suspect the entire book has a Taoist structure; I will leave it to you to decide if I’m imaging things.

 

Lin Yutang loves his China enough to have written extensively about it, both fiction and non-fiction, including my favorite aphorism about the Chinese character: that they are so good at making the best of life that they forget to make it better. The Chinese friend who gave me the copy I read told me that Yutang was a feminist; I was skeptical until I realized that Yutang is a feminist in the sense that he likes women. Uniquely, he likes both traditional and modern women (the yin and yang of Taoist femininity?) as long as they are good tempered and educated conversationalists. Even the young woman who takes the “bad girl” path finds new heroism as a spy against the Japanese. 

 

Reading “Moment in Peking” after living in China for nine years leaves me thinking that the period from 1937 (the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong) until 1980, roughly when China really kick started its economy, was an aberration.  Reading his book about the turn of the last century, I recognize the corrupt governments, the students who are both idealistic and cynical, and the tightly knit families. The ideological period of Communist rule that ground China down is like a nightmare from which China has awakened, and the Confucian and Taoist character of Chinese psychology has reasserted itself.

 

Yutang doesn’t have a steady point of view. He’s willing to switch to other characters and freely changes the distance from close POV to a distant, historical view as if this book was the Tao and POV distance a flow between yin and yang. He finds time to have a character expound upon his views, such as promoting the idea that Taoism is a good religion for scientists. The patriarch of the family is also a Taoist version of “Father Knows Best,” rarely ordering his family around but people who take his advice have happier lives. Yutang isn’t a dogmatist about his religion (to be a dogmatic Taoist would be quite the contradiction, but I’ve heard of stranger), giving good scenes to Confucians, Buddhists, and even one to Catholic nuns hiding two Chinese women from Japanese invaders. Yutang drew such close parallels between Buddhist and Catholic monastic life that I wasn’t quite sure which they were until the Mother Superior spoke French.

 

But in the end, “Moment in Peking” is a family epic, with the plot having more to do with romance, marriage, raising children, and gaining personal wisdom than the great events.  The sprawling family has to continually adjust to this complicated period in Chinese history, so the reader will flow between learning about Chinese individuals and Chinese culture the way the Taoist symbol flows between yin and yang.

“Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrop Frye

So I finally finished reading “Anatomy of Criticism” today. The first 150 pages and the last 50 page are fascinating reading, but I did get bogged down in the middle as he tried to prove his theories instead of just explaining them. Proving ideas is always the more tedious duty of scholars, undoubtedly why pundits avoid it.

 

Frye’s attempt to free literary criticism from the tides of philosophy gave me a lot of food for thought. He was tired of literary criticism being dragged in the wake of Marxism, feminism, etc, and preferred to find an independent means of literary analysis. To do so, he has to hope that literature has an inner logic of its own independent of culture. Sometimes he sounded a little like a bridge player who knows in order to win the hand he has to play as if the distribution of the cards is in his favor, and if not, oh well, at least he tried.

 

He often compares his image of literary logic to math.  Math is a symbolic representation and perhaps underpinning of science; perhaps literature could be a symbolic representation of reality.  Math works so well that it can make predictions about reality as well as any scientist.  Someone asked Einstein if he was worried an experiment would disprove his theory; he said he wasn’t worried because his math was correct. If literary criticism is equally valid then maybe the educational value of reading novels would finally be proven, even if only concerning the psychology of people.

 

Thus, Frye spends a great deal of time defining terms, and this is where it starts getting tedious. But if he wants to shape the debate, the first step to control the definitions. The book picks up again when he starts discussing the literary nature of “The Bible,” the book that more than any other shaped our literary world.  Most of our conceptions of heroism, morality, and coming of age stories can be traced back to “The Bible.” Stories about the fall and redemption in characters abound in literature, while “The Bible” is about the fall and redemption of humanity.

Green is the New Sexy

Do the Aristotelian unities really matter when dealing with space opera?

Nah.

I saw “Guardians of the Galaxy” last night, and while some of the characters took themselves a little too seriously, I had a lot of fun.  The previews had not given me much hope, but word came back that it was better than it looked, so I gave it a chance; it was funny when it meant to be and exciting the rest of the time.  Movie magic is still catching up with comic book imagination; no one in Hollywood has demonstrated the ability to beat comics at this most pure element of creativity: unbridled dreams. All Hollywood can do is cherry pick the best elements, distill them down to their most dramatic, and make money of distributing them to the rest of the world.

It was definitely an ensemble movie; Quill had the most face time and gave the inspirational speech, apparently because he’s the white guy because I’m not sure why else, but Gamora contributed more information and kicked plenty of ass of her own. She was the one who originally wanted to resist the bad buys, so it would have taken little tweaking to make her the main character. She reminded me a lot of my college girlfriend: good at martial arts, pretty, surrounded by male friends, and severe daddy issues.

Don’t get me wrong, the guys, the tree, and the raccoon did a good job, but the movie  I want to see next is the Black Widow and Gamora vs. the Expendables. My bet is on the ladies.

 

A Religious Theory of Literary Criticism

While listening to a lecture about the origins of psychological literary theory, I found myself wondering what a religious literary theory would be like. My vague recollection of “The Autumn of the Middle Ages” suggests it would be just as symbolic as feminist, Marxist, or Freudian theory, but symbolic of the intentions of God.

Instead of comparing Kirk, Spock, and McCoy to the Id, Ego, and Superego, or Heart, Mind, and Spirit, would they become the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and would we be arguing over which was which? (Note to self, write a novel in which the bad guys are the Freudian and the good guys are their New Age equivalents?)  It is easy to find intentional Christ-figures in many movies and books: “Man of Steel,” “Aliens III,” even the avowedly atheist “Atlas Shrugged” has the hero being tortured on a machine so the villains can expose the futility of their own evil.

Since we have a Christian mythos imbedded in our psychology, it’s normal to find Christian psychology in our literature and movies, but what about Buddhism? Books like “Cloud Atlas” and movies like “Groundhog Day” could be interpreted by my theoretical Buddhist literature professor as referring to how our spirits learn through the cycle of reincarnation. Martial art movies often discuss the proper control and channeling of emotions as the key to victory.

But no matter the philosophy or theology of your imaginary professor, these novels and movies are more often than not a push back against reality. All those movies about people giving up making more money to spend time with their families describes the behavior of a minority. All those movies about rogue cops breaking the rules to kill bad guys represent the frustration we have with rules designed to prevent rogue cops from imprisoning or shooting the innocent and incidentally make it more difficult to arrest the guilty. All those SF movies in which humans triumph over superior technology and overwhelming odds might well be push back against our fears of our technology and our smallness compared to the infinity of space-time.

Since moral systems are push back against the same amoral world, it shouldn’t be surprising that Christians, Buddhists, etc, have similar moral conclusions. Since philosophical systems are attempts to understand a similar world, we shouldn’t be surprised when we find similarities.  Since ideological systems are Ego-attempts to shape the world in Id-visions, and everyone’s Id is the product of the same evolution, we shouldn’t be surprised at similarities between tyrannies. When Christians and Buddhists disagree about moral decisions, chances are one of them is using their religion as a moral system and one of them is using their religion as an ideological system.

An image of literary evolution...

I was watching an Open Yale lecture by Paul Fry and it got me to thinking about the context of authors: a world of ideas. My image is thus: take a piece of paper and place three random dots on it, then draw radiating lines in 6-8 directions from each dot. Those dots are books, those intersections are authors. Of course, those authors can then radiate lines as well. You can imagine the lines in three or four dimensions as well. And there you have my own image of cultural/memetic evolution.

“Saladin” by Anne-Marie Edde

“Saladin” is an interesting book about an interesting figure in history. She spends most of her time considering not just how his contemporaries saw him, but why they saw him in a certain way.  Saladin was praised in many Christian stories about that Crusade to the point of Christianizing him, because they could think of no other way to justify his victory. It seemed impossible to the medieval Christian mind that non-believers could defeat them, so Christian legends about him made him a descendant of Christian knights, or a closet Christian, or an eventual convert to Christianity. They certainly held him to be a virtuous knight, because in the Middle Ages’ theological mindset, right made might, so Saladin had to be good to have won.

Edde extensively explains Islamic sources as well. Saladin was a Kurd, so in many ways he could transcend the Arab-Turkish-Persian rivalries for power in the Islamic world. But those same documents show the vices of his virtues; Saladin was so generous with his trophies that his family was poor after he died, and he was so busy fighting wars he failed to establish a lasting power structure (in the historical sense). For a long time Saladin’s reputation in the Middle East was overshadowed by Baybars, who defeated the more ruthless and numerous Mongolian invaders only 70 years after Saladin’s death. It was only with WWI and its colonial aftermath that Muslims again began turning towards Saladin as a hero.

Edde also provides a great deal of historical context to explain Saladin’s decisions, so much can be learned about why Saladin was tolerant of other religions, about economic trade, the proper treatment of women (in that time), and the ‘rules of war.’  Saladin was particularly tolerant of Jews and Christians with philosophical and medical backgrounds or, like Richard the Lion Hearted, lived up to his warrior ideals. This is in sharp contrast to groups like ISIS, which are presently attacking both non-Muslims and other Islamic groups, which in the long run is why I think they will run out of steam. Being too exclusionary is the primary reason most religious variants fade out.

The most surprising thing about “Saladin” was how it resembles our time.  Western countries, then and now, had more reliable means of transferring power. Today we vote, yesterday power descended from father to son (generally), and unless there were unusual circumstances, people accepted the transfer. Meanwhile, then and now, Islamic countries have often not had such stable means of transferring power, which means the Islamic world has spent more time at war with itself.  Saladin, a Sunni, learned most of his warcraft fighting Shiites to unite Islam against the Christians, wars that turned so rough that his armies against the Crusaders were smaller than his previous armies against Muslims.  And yes, it does seem ironic that he was more tolerant of Jews than of Shiites.

I also thought it was interesting that, then as now, politicians scrambled to make sure that trade is not too disrupted by prejudice, religion, and sometimes even war. No secular ruler wants to stop the stream of taxable trade.  A pope was angry that Christians were selling materials useful in war to Muslims, but Muslim rulers would protect Christian merchants, especially in Egypt.

"Fringe"

I finally reached the ending of "Fringe." Aside from some too long longing looks between each other while under fire and in critical need of moving fast, I was generally satisfied with how they ended the series. I was especially happy with how Nina Sharp showed her metal, how the Fringe heroes used their stored up tricks from villains to rescue Phillip, and the transcendence of the emotion v reason argument.

I think the acting skills of the characters had shown up the most during the season focused on the parallel universe as the actors had to portray different versions of themselves and even react to each other. The episode where the two Astrids meet was especially touching.

Over all, I feel like this built and improved upon "The X-Files" even if the producers didn't quite have the same knack for atmosphere. But maybe that's not important; on a sliding scale between horror and sci fi, "X-Files" was more on the horror side and "Fringe" more on the Sci fi side, so a different atmosphere makes sense, even if many of the episodes seem to have been filmed in the same part of Canada.  I guess the biggest difference is that "Fringe" knew what it was and "X-Files" never quite made up their mind.

Trinities in Frye’s Philosophy

 

From “The Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrup Frye:

“This is the division of ‘the good’ into three main areas, of which the world of art, beauty, feeling, and taste is the central one, and is flanked by two other worlds. One is the world of social action and events, the other the world of individual thought and ideas. Reading from left to right, this threefold structure divides human faculties into will, feeling, and reason. It divides the mental constructs which these faculties produce into history, art, and science and philosophy. It divides the ideals which form compulsions or obligations on these faculties into law, beauty, and truth…

“Similarly, we have portrayed the poetic symbol as intermediate between event and idea, example and precept, ritual and dream, and have finally displayed it as Aristotle’s ethos, human nature and the human situation, between and made up of mythos and dianoia, which are verbal imitations of action and thought respectively.”

I acknowledge the historicity of these divisions. These are such incredibly common metaphors that they are unavoidable when discussing Western art and philosophy because the artists and philosophers assumed their validity. If I had been born in the 12^th Century I’d probably write this essay about how will, feeling, and reason reflect the holy trinity of Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost and my fellow monks and I would probably argue about which symbols from which trinity matched the symbols from the other while stomping around in grape buckets making wine.

Trinities of these natures abound in fiction.  The classic example from “Star Trek” has been Spock (mind and thesis), McCoy (heart and antithesis), and Kirk (will and synthesis), even if the original series focused on that more than the Kirk/Spock duality represented by the recent movies.  The tensions in “Harry Potter” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” have come from purposefully re-aligned trinities.  In the “Potter” books, true power resides not with the “will” but with the “heart,” while Ron merely wishes he was a hero and is frustrated. In “BtVS,” the power also lies with someone who doesn’t want it, and instilling the slayer power in women leaves the men around them often feeling inadequate; being men they do not take their secondary status as well as women do in these sorts of shows and movies.

But one of the lessons that really stuck with me when I read “Atlas Shrugged” was that will, reason, and feeling work out best when aligned rather than separated. All three come from our brain, and neuro-science has found plenty of evidence of how humans go wrong when reason and feeling are cut off from each other. When I am writing fiction, I am happiest with the result when my historical knowledge, philosophical beliefs, and artistic knowledge are working in tandem. I suspect the most common reason lawyers, for example, become unhappy is because their profession places them in situations that create contradictions, such as an idealistic law student finding himself defending oil companies.

On a more personal note, I do not believe I could marry a woman unless my heart, my mind, and my will (in this case my sex drive) agreed upon her. If any one of those ingredients was removed, a relationship of some sort is possible (heart + mind = friendship, heart + will = romantic relationship, mind + will = something a little more sordid), but marriage would probably be a bad idea.

Maybe this is why I’ve found so many artistic endeavors lacking. Many artists fall so hard on the side of emotions that I find myself shaking my head at their naivety. I don’t believe love reforms bad boys, I don’t believe that if you build it they will come, and I don’t believe running wild killing bad guys makes the world a better place.

The Gap Series

By Stephen R. Donaldson

 

I just finished rereading “The Gap Series,” which I do about every other year, five books in a space operatic universe, except better thought out than most. Humanity is threatened by its own corruption and the “genetic imperialism” of an alien race similar to the Borg but more insidious and with biological technology.  The themes are the struggle between virtue and vice within and without individuals and how people build narratives to understand the world.

 

It is also about Morn Hyland, a good cop in a corrupt organization, who is captured and raped by a pirate, and then sold to pirates who work in a mercenary fashion to do work too dirty even for the police. The main characters on the second pirate ship are Nick, a man driven by vengeance, Mikka whose primary goal is the protection of her brother, and Vector, a scientist who fled after the police suppressed his vaccine for the virus the aliens use to turn us into them. The police did so to keep people afraid of the aliens thus enhancing their own power.

 

While Morn struggles with abuse and eventual pregnancy, the police themselves struggle to rise above the political corruption within their own organization.  There is continual tension between Data Acquisition (their CIA) and Enforcement Division, and the head of the police struggles against the powerful businessman who had too much control over the government. These struggles even influence the programming of a super-cyborg created using the body and brain of Angus, the rapist who is the father of Morn’s son, and whether the cyborg should kill or save Morn.

 

And those are just the first two books.

 

Style wise, the most interesting thing about these books is that the every character spends a lot of internal energy creating stories to find the meaning within their limited facts. None of the characters know everything, so they all have to engage in guess work based upon rumors, research, and the careful weighing of their lives’ premises. The winners are those who build narratives the closest to reality and yet leave open the possibility of improving humanity.