This weekend, the third annual Southwell Institute Writers Conference will convene in Mahwah. The focus of this year's conference will be playwriting, so I would like to offer a few thoughts on the topic. Particularly, I would like to make a short case for the long-neglected genre of verse-drama. One of the principal aspects of the Mahwavian movement thus far has been the cultivation of formal verse, so my first argument in favor of verse-drama would be that it is in keeping with this endeavor. But I think there are other arguments, too.
The tradition of modern realist drama, inaugurated by Ibsen and Shaw, has largely eschewed the devises of artifice - including verse - formerly employed by playwrights, in order to present what its practitioners regard as a true-to-life depiction of nature. Thus, a Eugene O'Neill or an Arthur Miller can draw scenes for the stage in no material way differening from the scenes of common life. The emphasis is on this naturalism, which is everywhere opposed to artifice.
But we would do well to remind ourselves (here and always) of Burke's grand dictum: "art is man's nature." One enters into a strange building, one pays money for a ticket, one takes a seat in an auditorium designed for the presentation of plays, one sees strangers moving around in unfamiliar garb, and speaking in unfamiliar accents - in such a situation, one cannot possibly expect to witness ordinary life. In such a situation, the expectation is art - which is to say, something more beautiful and more significant than ordinary life. The stage is like a pedestal, an instrument designed explicitly for the presentation of the art work, and in effect signaling to the viewer the presence of that unique object which is the work of art. It would be no less ridiculous to see a man sitting on a pedestal in the Louvre, drinking a cup of coffee and reading the paper, than it is to see a troupe on stage at Carnegie Hall, acting no differently than they do at home in their own dining rooms.
The ancient playwrights understood this perfectly, and that is why all early drama - whether we look at the tragedy of the Greeks, the No dramas of Japan, or the Sanskrit plays of early India - is heavily stylized. And the drama of the Renaissance and Neoclassical periods - the drama of Shakespeare, Calderon, and Racine - while abandoning much of the rigidity in the formal structure of those early works, still displayed a wealth of artifice, largely drawn from the stores of rhetoric. To be sure, the aim of the playwright was always to imitate nature. But simply to say that X imitates Y, is to state that X is something different than Y. To say that art should imitate nature is to say that art is something different than nature, and what it is is that collection of principles and techniques, the employment of which allows the maker to fabricate objects excelling the commonplace world in truthfulness and beauty. First among the techniques available to the playwright to fashion a dramatic performance uniquely impressive and lovely is verse.
Whatever their thoughts on this question, I wish the new members of the Southwell family the best of luck over the next couple of weeks, as they get to work on their plays. I hope the Mahwah experience is as special and momentous for them as it was for me, and I hope we hear from some of them soon here at the Review.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
The Use of Verse in Drama
A Psalm & A Poem
Psalm 19
To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David.
1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
2 Day unto day uttereth speech,
and night unto night showeth knowledge.
3 There is no speech nor language,
where their voice is not heard.
4 Their line is gone out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun,
5 which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber,
and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race.
David Middleton
“Things”
After Psalm 19:3-4
We live among them here and partly are
What they have always been and still will be
When soul from flesh is sheared along the scar
That marks the stitching-place as soul breaks free.
Yet if we hold them wholly in the mind
To take apart and savor, then let go,
The essence of our senses but the rind
Of some rich fruit we taste but hardly know—
The bare pecan whose trunk is simply there,
Its winter limbs against a winter sky,
The squirrel that brings the nut through dusk’s dim air,
Just doing what it must to live and die—
Such things in turn may be more than they seem
In matter’s shadow-land of squirrel and tree:
Creatures who’d wake with us in that first dream,
Time’s common tongues in timeless colloquy.
(From Measure 3.1)
Type rest of the post here
Thursday, May 22, 2008
A Good Critic is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" is the most disturbing work of literature I know of; reading it is a genuinely painful experience. An author (at least, a respectable one) who subjects her readers to such an experience must have a very important insight to convey, and I think O'Connor does. Here is how I read her story (with a nod to Dr. Russell for some of his insights); let me know how I do.
The family is described at the beginning of the story as quite ordinary; they are immersed in their mundane tasks, the father reading the newspaper, the children perusing the comics. Little love - one might even say, little concern - is apparent among the various members of the family; Bailey ignores his mother as she speaks to him, the children speak disrespectfully towards their grandmother. To ask if these are good people or bad people seems entirely inappropriate; they are uncommitted people, who, like the great horde in the antechamber of the Inferno, have never taken the side of good or evil in their lives.
The grandmother seems particularly frivolous, fawning over her kitten, obsessed with making a decorous appearance. When the family stops at Red Sammy's barbecue, she mourns with the proprietor over the loss of "better times," and they agree that "Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now." This preoccupation with other people's sinfulness seems to mark in O'Connor's work those characters who fail to live a genuinely moral life (I am thinking here of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own").
Then the accident happens and the Misfit appears. Here is a character who clearly has taken a side, and its the side of evil, the most heinous evil imaginable. He explains to the grandmother that the reason he acts as he does is because he is convinced that he has been wronged by his incarceration; since the world is a realm of injustice, he sees no reason why he himself should be any different: "You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it." As he goes on to say, "I call myself the Misfit, because I can't make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment."
Of course, the Misfit's conception of himself as "a man more sinned against than sinning" reveals an obvious, even ridiculous, lack of self-understanding. But I think it is also true that his words have a representative character; all men, in so far as they are subject to "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" find it impossible to match their sufferings to their sins in a comprehensive manner. This, in the most practical sense, is what it means to live in a fallen world.
And yet, as the Misfit recognizes, if Christ rose from the dead, then the order of an unjust world (which is essentially disorder) has been overthrown, and our duty is to commit ourselves to acting in accord with the just order of the world to come: "If He did what He said, then its nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him." Of course, the other alternative is apparent: "if He didn't, then its nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness." His words here are reminiscent of Ivan Karimozov's dictum "if God does not exist, then all things are permitted." The life of the Misfit demonstrates as emphatically as possible what exactly he believes concerning this question.
But the grandmother? Her response to the Misfit is "maybe he didn't raise the dead." This response, too, is revealing and what it reveals is a soul uncommitted. But an unrestrained commitment is precisely what the Misfit (and not just the Misfit) says Christ's triumph requires of us. So in this respect, the grandmother and the Misfit are living lives of a similar moral tenor; this is why the grandmother's last words to the Misfit are: "You're one of my own children." Both have failed to make that commitment to the Gospel which alone can justify the strenuous efforts of a moral life. Both of them, in the absence of that commitment, enjoy that awful liberty which is really death, the liberty to do whatever we want. The difference between them is that the Misfit is conscious of this, and the grandmother is not; the enormous disparity in the kinds of lives they live is really a consequence of taste, more than anything. But the grandmother, in so far as she too belongs to the unjust order of a fallen world, is a misfit also. We all are, and it is only in a consistent commitment to the kingdom of heaven that we can discover the world into which we truly fit.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Waugh, Waugh, Waugh!
We’re crying over this adaptation:
Ross Douthat says that the apparently over-sexed adaption of Brideshead Revisited may be just what the novel needs, because even Waugh thought his book was sentimental and sappy. We agree that parts of the novel are overwrought, but it would be nice to have a movie that didn’t elide the novel’s Catholicism…or compress the time-line to create a bi-sexual, pseudo-incestuous love triangle…or turn Lord Marchmain into a proud pimp of a pappy.
That’s not to say the movie shouldn’t be sexless; after all, the novel is subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. And of course, it’s dangerous to assume too much from a trailer alone. Maybe the preview intentionally misrepresents the film to generate more interest, and the movie is actually a fair adaptation of the novel, one in which Catholicism is presented as a serious and positive force in the characters’ lives. From the looks of it, though, we’re afraid that this movie will be as disappointing as the 1999 adaptation of The End of the Affair, which took some, er, liberties with the strength of Sarah’s conversion.
(By the way, we're tempted to agree with Douthat’s claim that the Sword of Honour trilogy is Waugh’s superior serious work. But Waugh swings too far into his ironic mode with his [SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT] sudden, unsatisfying, and emotionless description of Virginia’s death.)
Monday, May 19, 2008
An Implausible Thesis
Much futile ink has been spent dissecting the so-called "new atheist" movement, which in fact has nothing new in it besides an unprecedented measure of impudence and asperity. Some have argued that the phenomenon is a reaction to modern fundamentalisms; others have maintained that it is the latest defense of Enlightenment rationalism. To many, the appearance of this faction has appeared quite puzzling. But to my mind, it is not very hard to understand what sort of thing this movement is, nor in what prior circumstances it has its causes.
Even the most cursory glance at the writings of Dawkins and Hitchens (and what sensible person could stand anything more than a cursory glance at their writings) reveals that their particular take on religion consists not merely of disagreement, but of disdain. Those who believe in a god are not simply persons maintaining the truth of a proposition insufficiently demonstrated; they are persons adverse to all rational demonstration. They are fools and liars. Their beliefs have no more intellectual substance than belief in unicorns and elves. They are not to be trusted, in the words of Hitchens. They are abusers of their children, in the words of Dawkins and Dennett. They are objects of pity, when isolated from the public sphere, and objects of unrestrained loathing, when engaged in the public sphere. Perhaps the most striking example of the "new atheist" contempt for religion can be found in their assertion that theology is not even a legitimate field of study; there can be no grander disdain for an opponent's position than the claim that the opponent has no real position.
Thus, in considering the general stance of the new atheists, one cannot escape the conclusion that, if they are correct, everyone who ever wrote or spoke in defense of a belief in God, a God to whom we owe certain duties, was perfectly benighted and untrustworthy. Simply put, the new atheist thesis boils down to the following: we have reached the point in history when the superstition of Plato, and Aristotle, and Isaiah, and Cicero, and Boethius, and Abelard, and Dante, and Chaucer, and Aquinas, and Donne, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Pascal, and Bishop Butler, and Samuel Johnson, and Edmund Burke, and Kierkegaard, and Cardinal Newman, can be replaced with the light and wisdom of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris.
That such a ridiculous thesis could seem plausible to such large numbers of people is attributable to one obvious fact. No fair-minded person who has read Dawkins and Cardinal Newman would consider Cardinal Newman the bigger fool; the only reason why so many people in our age have convinced themselves of this falsehood is simply because they have not read Cardinal Newman. They have not read Cardinal Newman, nor have they read any of the other classic authors, though they may have flipped through the latest issue of the New Yorker or the last installment of Harry Potter. The new atheist movement is nothing more than the entirely predictable consequence of the mis-education of the Western world over the last several generations; it is nothing but the upshot of the now intractable stupidity of Western populaces, which alone could turn a Sam Harris or a Christopher Hitchens into a respectable intellectual figure.
Or, to state the same in somewhat more dramatic fashion, the rise of such evidently ignorant and dishonest men to the status of intellectual authorities in our age fulfills the dire prophecies of Arnold, Spengler, Ortega, Chesterton, and others who wrote at the beginning of the modern era, and confirms that the barbarism which they foretold has now settled firmly over the west.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Glory, Praise, & Puppets
A friend sent us the following footage of an unusual liturgical celebration. We were particularly fascinated by the large puppets that enter during the procession.
Of course, puppets are especially successful in attracting young people to the Church, which explains why the average age of the worshipers above appears to be somewhere around 90 years old.
Still, the usual curmudgeons are upset by this style of worship, which they consider inappropriate and vulgar. These Philistines do not recognize that there is in fact a proud precedent for such celebrations, like this:
And this:
We think that the West Coast Call to Action Conference should be commended for incorporating these celebratory accessories into their liturgy, and we are particularly interested in seeing what muppets they use for their service next Good Friday.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
A Thing Ineffable
In his essay "The Study of Poetry," Matthew Arnold employs a now famous method of delineating poetic excellence. He claims that we should "have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and...apply them as a touchstone to other poetry," and then proceeds to cite a number of lines which he considers worthy of such exemplary status. This method, no doubt unrigorous and capricious, has come in for considerable derision from subsequent critics, not entirely without justice. Yet Arnold's larger point in this passage is sound, and particularly helpful to young poets searching for guidance through the wasteland left behind by modernism.
The criterion of excellence which Arnold points to is "in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness," and it is fair to say that gravity is a characteristic which all of his examples possess. He goes on to maintain - and this is the real insight, I think - that it is just that "seriousness" which produces real stylistic excellence: "the superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and movement marking its style and manner." Or to put it in contemporary terms, the beauty of poetic style is largely a consequence of the wisdom of its content.
Let me offer an example of a passage which illustrates this point, one which quite merits placement even among the samples offered by Arnold himself. In the fourth act of "King Lear," the old king awakes from his curative sleep to find Cordelia beside him; remembering the hasty injustice he committed against his one faithful daughter, he acknowledges her perfect right to resentment: "If you have poison for me, I will drink it./ I know you do not love me, for your sisters/ Have, as I do remember, done me wrong./ You have some cause; they have not." To which Cordelia's simple response is: "No cause, no cause." Now, it is just these four syllables which I often think must be the most gorgeous four syllables in all of English literature; they are certainly an unrivaled example of pure poetic beauty. There is an unobtrusive tropical effect in the repetition, although in this case, the artifice is hardly distinguishable from a natural speech pattern. But, of course, the beauty of the line is really a consequence of everything it expresses: the tender and humble pathos of human forgiveness. Here, as in all fine poetry, and in confirmation of Arnold's proposition, truth and beauty become one thing.
What can we say about the causes of this union? As Arnold pointed out, nothing at all; this is the ineffable thing in poetry. But as incapable as we are of understanding the roots of this identity of truth and beauty, we are perfectly capable of recognizing it as the most prominent feature of all great poetry. Many important things follow from such a recognition, but let me point to one. Aestheticism, or the creed of "art for art's sake," explicitly rejects all moral or theological content in poetry, regarding these things as obstacles to the pure pleasure of the aesthetic experience. But, considered in the light of Arnold's observation, we can see that such a notion fails entirely to account for the unique beauty of poetry, which has its essence, not its hindrance, in truth.
Aestheticism has been one of the fundamental impulses of modernism, and its rejection can help liberate us from the brutalizing strictures of the modernist program. Art is not for art's sake; nothing exists for its own sake; all things, art included, exist for the glory of God. When we commit ourselves as poets to search only for that beauty which has its life in a serious reflection upon His truth, I think we will find ourselves, and our tradition, back on the right path. Then perhaps we will begin to understand the deep significance of those long-contested words which Keats overheard from the lips of the urn, that beauty is truth, and truth indeed is beauty.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
A Sonnet for the Internet Age
By Marion Shore, from (where else?) Measure:
“Lost in Cyberspace”
Confession: here’s the latest of my vices,
small but time-consuming all the same
(Guilty pleasure? Maybe. Midlife crisis?)—
I Google long-lost friends’ and lovers’ names.
Classmates.com, Switchboard, and the like
can yield up treasures. Other times I slog
through a mire of hits. Sometimes I strike
the mother lode: a Webpage or a blog.
So anyway, I type your name, press “search”:
an e-zine has a poem of yours—quite clever;
you’re organist and choirmaster of some church;
you’re on your second wife—or third? Whatever.
I wonder, as I press the enter key,
darling, do you ever Google me?
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Mary Jo Salter in "Measure"
The current issue of Measure opens with several poems by Mary Jo Salter, followed by an enlightening (and, as always, inspiring) interview between Salter and Dr. Baer. What we appreciated most about the interview was Salter’s unpretentious recognition of her audience, which she attributes to her time working as an editor for The Atlantic. There, she explains, she realized that poets “aren’t just writing for ourselves; we’re writing for other people.” Or, as she says elsewhere, “it’s the audience that truly matters.” As a result, “to this day I have very little patience for people with unintentional slowness in writing. I realize that some very great writers have a style that depends upon the slow accumulation of detail—writers like Henry James or Anthony Hecht, for example—but, for the most part, I feel that such writers create a comfortable pace within a gradual buildup. Their readers know that they’re getting somewhere, and they feel it’s worthwhile.” This outlook really should seem obvious, but the fact is that the desires to communicate and to capture the reader’s interest immediately seem unfashionable compared to the instinct to simply get one’s thoughts down on paper, and leave all the hard work to the reader.
Dr. Baer also asks her about the religious overtones of her work. Though she explains that she has “vacillated over the depth of [her] belief in God,” she explains that “I do feel, on some level, that there’s a force out there that teaches us how to love, or that, at least, makes it possible for us to love.” She continues by describing the connection between her poetry and her belief in “a God of love”:
It seems to me that much of the very act of poetry—making likenesses, and metaphors, and similes—is consonant with human love. That’s what Herbert thought poets were doing. Finding and acknowledging the likenesses in the universe. So even though I don’t go to church or feel part of any organized religion, I can’t either as a person or a poet, completely discount the yearning for something divine.
Here’s our favorite from the selection in Measure; it is also available here. (Unfortunately, because we're still tyros at this, we're unable to get the formatting exactly right: the second line of each stanza should be indented.)
“Erasers”
As punishment, my father said, the nuns
would send him and the others
out to the schoolyard with the day’s erasers.
Punishment? The pounding symphony
of padded cymbals clapped
together at arm's length overhead
(a snow of vanished alphabets and numbers
powdering their noses
until they sneezed and laughed out loud at last)
was more than remedy, it was reward
for all the hours they’d sat
without a word (except for passing notes)
and straight (or near enough) in front of starched
black-and-white Sister Martha,
like a conductor raising high her chalk
baton, the only one who got to talk.
Whatever did she teach them?
And what became of all those other boys,
poor sinners, who had made a joyful noise?
My father likes to think,
at seventy-five, not of the white-on-black
chalkboard from whose crumbled negative
those days were never printed,
but of word-clouds where unrecorded voices
gladly forgot themselves. And that he still
can say so, though all the lessons,
most of the names, and (he doesn't spell
this out) it must be half the boys themselves,
who grew up and dispersed
as soldiers, husbands, fathers, now are dust.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
The Future of Catholic Fiction
There’s an interesting discussion going on over at InsideCatholic.com about the future of Catholic fiction. Todd M. Aglialoro observes:
There's no question that Catholic fiction these days is pretty slim pickin’s. Those of us yearning for novels with Catholic themes, supported by a Catholic moral universe, are generally forced to go back fifty years, to Waugh or Greene or O'Connor. We hunt down Sigrid Unset, or play up the Catholic signals (just don't call it allegory!) in Tolkien. Or maybe we cruise used bookstores and seminary going-out-of-business sales for some of the many less-masterful but still quite solid examples of popular Catholic fiction that abounded in the first half of the last century…And so I ask, along with the frustrated authors, where is the Catholic fiction?
One respondent identifies Ron Hansen as a particularly good Catholic novelist. We’ve been reading a bit of Hansen ourselves lately and will be posting about his A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith & Fiction. (Surprisingly, though, nobody’s yet mentioned J.F. Powers, even as one of the great Catholic writers of the past.)
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