If our review of Exiles is un-enthusiastic, we’re still pretty certain, based on this review, that Hansen’s novel is better than the latest by Robert Olen Butler, a collection of stories that consists entirely of the thoughts that characters (primarily historical figures) have during sex. Butler likes writing gimmicky stories, and sometimes they work—“Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot,” like the other stories of Tabloid Dreams, was inspired by a goofy headline, and is both a very funny and moving story. But this gimmick is just sad and shameless, and reinforces the importance of works like Hansen’s, which while falling short of expectations, still attempts to clear a path for thoughtful, faithful literary fiction.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Where's Writer's Block When You Need It?
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Exiles: The MLR Review!
We had been eager to read Ron Hansen’s Exiles. He is easily the most acclaimed novelist—whose work is always well-received by critics and film producers—who is proud of his Catholic faith, and here was a novel that was about Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of his favorite poets. It’s a perfect storm of Catholicism! (Excuse the tumultuous maritime pun.)
The exiles to which the title refers are six characters: five German nuns leaving Bismark’s kulturkampf, hoping to start a school in Missouri (which, for our many international readers, is a state in the Midwestern United States). They never reach their destination, dying in a shipwreck off the coast of England. The sixth exile is Gerard Manley Hopkins, who at the start of the novel—that is, at the time of the Deutschland’s wreck—is a young priest in Wales. Reading about the death of the nuns, he is inspired to write a poem for them, and the novel traces his struggles writing what would become “The Wreck of the Deutschland”—as well as his personal, religious, and health problems—until his own early death.
Hansen’s affection for Hopkins, and his sympathy for the priest’s struggles as an artist, are clear; we also enjoyed the details of the everyday lives of these holy people. Hansen makes them human and imperfect, but never diminishes their sacrifices or their holiness. Indeed, it is their apparent normalcy that makes their decisions to enter Holy Orders compelling.
Still, we couldn’t help but feeling a bit let down by the novel. The main reason for this disappointment is the telling-instead-of-showing that Matthew Lickona observes, which makes the novel seem impersonal. The novel is short (just over 200 pages), so there’s not enough room to engage with six characters in very much detail. Hansen devotes about half of the novel to the nuns and half to Hopkins, which makes formal sense. The trouble is, he’s totally democratic with the nuns—they each get the same amount of back-story, the same attention in the present, etc. We suppose it would seem a bit crude to determine that one of these nuns is better than the others, or more worthy of our attention. For the sake of the novel, though, the author needs to make that decision, and I would have liked to have seen Hansen write that particular half of the novel from the perspective of one of the nuns. By trying to show us all of them, we end up not knowing any of them very well. They are all admirable and likeable (and, because they’re human, unlikeable) in different ways, and of course their deaths are very moving, but their narrative is unfocused, and not as powerful as it could be. (This same impersonal feeling is even true of the Hopkins half of the novel, as Hansen rushes through much of the priest’s life.)
Another formal problem arises because of the time differences between the narratives. At the start, there are only a few days difference between the departure of the nuns for America and Hopkins’s attempt to write the poem. Toward the end of the novel, as Hopkins nears the end of his own life, there are years between him and the wreck, but the novel alternates between the two plot strands as it had in the start. By now, though, the time difference makes this alternating seem forced, a formal relic from the start of the novel that seems irrelevant by the end because Hopkins was no longer preoccupied with thoughts of the shipwreck.
I’ll end with a minor gripe. At one point, Hansen refers to “a handwritten poem in Shakespearean blank verse of five accented syllables per line.” There’s no such thing as Shakespearean verse as opposed to plain old blank verse; blank verse is more complicated than just five accented syllables; and the lines that he actually provides aren’t blank verse, either. That just annoyed us; we assume that Hansen knows what blank verse is, and was simplifying the definition for his readers, but there’s a difference between simplifying and getting it wrong.
This is not a bad novel, only a disappointing one. That disappointment could be as much our fault as Hansen’s, since we built unrealistic expectations for The Great Catholic Hope. For now, though, we still prefer his short stories (in many regards, especially the understated presentation of the tragic deaths, this novel reminds us of “Wickedness”) or his essays in A Stay Against Confusion.
Monday, August 04, 2008
A Few Harsh Words
It is normally our policy at the Review to refrain from any unpleasant comments directed at members of the literary community. Normally. But I am afraid it is about time to direct some harsh words towards a certain type of critic, and a certain type of criticism, which is emerging of late, and which deserves quite a number of harsh words directed towards it. I am referring to that species of literary criticism which makes pretense to being a scientific inquiry, and applying a scientific methodology to the comprehension of literature. The latest performance of this meaningless though increasingly popular farce was put on by one Philip Davis in the pages of the Literary Review; it is quite representative of the phenomenon, and on this account (and no other) merits our attention.
The upshot of Mr. Davis’ article is that he and a number of apparently unoccupied “brain scientists” have discovered that listening to certain lines in Shakespeare makes certain lights on certain machines flash in a certain way. Employing their EEG’s, their MEG’s, and their fMRI’s – you know, the usual tools of the literary critic – they found that listening to sentences containing various types of what Davis calls “functional shifts” causes things called N400 and P600 effects, which are surges in the amplitude of waves moving through different locations of the brain. These surges are indications of the brain’s aroused attention, its preparedness to “work at a higher level.” Since the “functional shifts” which were used in the experiment are similar to the ones that Shakespeare frequently employed, Davis concludes that Shakespeare can be said to goad our brains “into working at a higher adaptive level of conscious evolution,” and leaves from his experiment with “a greater sense of how and why Shakespeare really does something to our inner reality.”
Where to start. First, quite obviously, no discovery is being made here; Davis is not presenting any substantial information here which hasn’t been known for centuries. That Shakespeare makes our brains “work at a higher level” or, in less pretentious terms, that he makes us think, is, I would suggest, a less than earth-shattering assertion. One doesn’t need an MEG machine in one’s study to adequately grasp the way “Shakespeare does something to our inner reality.” Similarly, the pleasing and arresting qualities of “functional shifts” of language have been known to rhetoricians from antiquity to the Renaissance, as is indicated by Davis’ citation of Puttenham, and are readily apparent to any sensible reader. After all, why did Davis choose to experiment upon precisely these features of Shakespeare’s language if he hadn’t felt their power prior to stepping foot into the lab?
I know the response; Davis and his ilk will say, now we have proof, by which they mean scientific verification, the only thing they will admit as proof. Its not true, but suppose even that it were. There are a million experiences in the course of our lives which we admit as legitimate and settled without scientific verification; we could hardly get on were it not the case. We do not ask the little men in white coats to “prove” to us that chocolate has a wonderful taste, or that an unexpected clap of thunder shocks us; indeed, to ask for such proof in such cases would be tantamount to a sort of paranoia. If a man should say to us, “I believe I am rather fond of Beethoven’s chamber music, but I am heading downtown today to have my brain scanned in order to be certain that is the case,” I think we would all suspect his sanity. But when a man writes “I believe that I find Shakespeare’s style striking and lovely, but I had the brain’s of several unwitting strangers scanned in order to prove it,” he is published in the Literary Review and, quite likely, takes one step closer to that cherished tenure-track position. The dogma that scientific modes of verification are the only legitimate modes of verification is nothing more than an epistemological disease of the modern world; it is a dogma because no one can possibly demonstrate why scientific modes of verification are the only valid ones available on all matters, particularly on those matters of which we possess phenomenological knowledge. A man who says to himself, and to the readers of the Literary Review, that we only possess certain or clear knowledge of a feature of Shakespeare when it has been subjected to scientific procedures is a man whose mind is in serious epistemological disorder.
Such would be the case even if Davis’ experiment proves what he thinks it proves. But, as I said, it doesn’t. It proves nothing because it explains nothing. Here is what Davis knows: when his subjects read certain kinds of “functional shifts,” a change in wave amplitude – called a P600 – is observable, and correlates to an increase in attention. Now here are all the things that Davis doesn’t know: why is a P600 triggered by a “functional shift” instead of one of the other literary devices, such as metaphor or synecdoche? Why does a “functional shift” cause a P600 effect, instead of a P700, or a N300, or a XYZ56 and a third? How can there exist a causal relationship (as opposed to the observable correlation) between language heard and changes in wave amplitude in the brain? How can there exist a causal relationship (as opposed to the observable correlation) between changes in wave amplitude in the brain and increases of awareness? How can there exist a causal relationship between brain processes and increases of awareness? Or between brain processes and awareness itself? How can matter in any form or arrangement fully account for the phenomenology of subjective experience?
If Mr. Davis had done more than dip his little toe into the baby pool of philosophy, and gone diving into the deep end instead, he would understand that these are fundamental and intractable problems which have no answers now, and very likely never will. Yet his whole article presupposes that all of these questions have been tidily answered by now, and of course, in this, he is no different than that army of academic frauds in cognitive science, philosophy of mind, neuropsychology, etc, etc, who, by producing mountains of new empirical data every year, think they can pretend to have answered the philosophical dilemmas presented by subjective experience. But it is the most ridiculous thing in the world for Mr. Davis to suppose that he has presented an explanation of the beauty of Shakespeare’s style clearer or more compelling than one offered in purely phenomenological terms, when his own explanation carries with it dozens of insoluble difficulties.
All of this is bad enough, but perhaps the worst part of the article is that reference to Shakespeare causing our brains to operate at “a higher level of conscious evolution.” Of course, this is a phrase with no meaning. There are no such things as higher levels of evolution, nor is there any such thing as an evolution of consciousness. What Mr. Davis is attempting to do here is smuggle into literary studies the language of sociobiology, or totalizing Darwinism. And in this, he has quite a number of accomplices. Darwinian literary criticism (a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education covers the phenomenon) is the latest challenger for the title of most ludicrous ideology to corrupt literary studies, vying with feminism, multi-culturalism, and deconstructionism for the distinction. Any decent person who – in an act of penance or of masochism – has read a sociobiological account of ethics or politics knows how incoherent, equivocal, and downright revolting such accounts can be, and any such person with a love of literature would want to make sure that sociobiology, with all of its phony methodology and all of its dishonorable prejudices, be kept as far away from the literary arts as possible. The literary Darwinists are like credulous merchants, plunging recklessly into the ports of some long-rumored kingdom, only to carry back in their voluminous holds all the vile, corrosive, vermin-born plagues of abused science, wherewith to infect the happy realm of letters.
The fact remains that Mr. Davis’ experiments offer no grounds for distinction between the “functional shifts” as they occur in Shakespeare and in his own examples; they both apparently produce the same changes in the amplitude of brain waves. A method of criticism which provides us with no grounds for distinguishing between the style of Shakespeare and the style of a scribbler for the Literary Review is a perfectly worthless and irrelevant method of literary criticism; that, and nothing more, is what Mr. Davis has presented in his article. That, and nothing more, is what all “scientific” literary critics have to offer. I trust that all intelligent readers recognize this fashionable travesty for what it is, and regard it with the sort of disdain that it deserves.
Saturday, August 02, 2008
"With Hope in Our Hearts and Wings on Our Heels": Chariots of Fire
We were recently watching Chariots of Fire, and it occurred to us that the movie is a great example of an extraordinary work of art that engages with religion in a serious and thoughtful way. In this regard, it’s a model for young artists seeking to use their art to present their faith without being polemical.
A brief plot summary in case you haven’t seen it: the movie follows two British sprinters as they prepare for and compete in the 1924 Olympics in Paris. Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross) is the son of a Lithuanian Jew, and who constantly feels as if he is treated unfairly by his countrymen because of his religion. (We see this unfair treatment for ourselves in the behavior of two Cambridge dons, who I think are played by Statler & Waldorf.) He races in part to prove his worth to his countrymen. As he says, to prove himself he’ll “take them on, one by one, and run them off their feet."
Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), meanwhile, is a Scot and devout Christian. Like Abrahams, his religion defines him, but in his case there’s more of a conflict between faith and sport: he is torn between his talents as a runner and his family’s missionary work in China. He eventually decides that because his talent is a blessing from God, he should continue to run to glorify Him. As he explains to his sister (in a beautiful scene shot on Arthur’s Seat overlooking Edinburgh), “I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.” Liddell’s greatest challenge comes when he learns that his qualifying heat is on a Sunday. (I won’t give away the outcome.)
Some qualifications. First, the movie comes awfully close to reinforcing some stereotypes: the wild and talented but unrefined Scotsman who trains by running through the hills, the Robert Burns of running; the ambitious Jew who comes dangerously close to becoming a professional athlete by hiring a coach. And of course, the film takes liberties with history, among them that Liddell knew that his heat was on a Sunday long before the Olympics. This site has plenty of left-wing complaints, too (basically, “the movie says that liking your country is a good thing, which movies really shouldn’t do when Margaret Thatcher is prime minister!”) Though the article is silly, it does clarify that Abrahams converted to Catholicism, which would indeed clarify why his funeral is in a church!
Still, the movie has cracked our all-time favorite list. It helps that we’re an Anglophile (and a Scotophile, too)—there’s lots of British culture here, and many beautiful scenes in English manor houses, ancient universities, the Scottish Highlands, plus the famous opening and closing running scene along the beach (filmed in St. Andrews, but which is presented as Kent in the film).
But what makes the movie extraordinary and moving is its presentation of these two very driven men whose religions are central to their lives and their senses of themselves. The movie is not preachy, yet still makes clear that these men are admirable for both their ambition and their devotion. Still, the movie doesn’t present these men as exactly the same. It suggests that Harold will never be satisfied, that he will never think he’s done enough to feel like he’s accepted by his countrymen. (That’s why the complaint that the movie is excessively nationalist is so misdirected—this sense of dissatisfaction is the country’s fault more than it’s Harold’s.) Liddell’s desire, though still rooted in his faith and the faith of his family, is fueled less by a sense of dissatisfaction or resentment, so he’s much more satisfied and content after the Games, having done what he set out to do for God.
And although the movie gives voice to the critics of these men—Liddell’s decision is said to smack of “fanaticism,” and they’re both criticized for putting their religions over their countries—the movie presents their beliefs sympathetically and realistically (the two are not contradictory!).
It’s an inspiring movie for many reasons, including Liddell’s belief that his running matters because it’s an opportunity to glorify God. As his father tells him, “You can praise the Lord by peeling a spud, if you peel it to perfection.” (That sounds like Josemaria Escriva!) It’s also inspiring to recognize that the movie was widely acclaimed in 1981 (it won the Oscar for Best Picture), which suggests that even in a “post-Christian” popular culture, there is a place for great art that presents religion as an important force in the lives of great men.
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