Late Papers

Why Read Literature?

2009-10-17T14:49:00.003-05:00

"In this country and in England, the study of English literature began in the latter part of the 19th century as an exercise in the scientific pursuit of philological research, and those who taught it subscribed to the notion that literature was best understood as a product of language. The discipline treated the poems and narratives of a particular place, the British Isles, as evidence of how the linguistic roots of that place — Germanic, Romance, and other — conditioned what had been set before us as “masterpieces.” The twin focus, then, was on the philological nature of the enterprise and the canon of great works to be studied in their historical evolution."

The the ancillary role of literature to science goes beyond the folk tales collected by those philologists, the Brothers Grimm. For example, pick up an old burgundy copy of the Book of Knowledge (before the Internet, we had these collections of facts called encyclopedias):

Volume 4 (1957).
"Time and the Seasons"

The Round of the Year by Coventry Patmore
Days by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Time, You Old Gipsy Man by Ralph Hodgson
The Garden Year by Sara Coleridge
Written in March by William Wordsworth
Song from Pippa Passes by Robert Browning
Why It Was Cold in May by Henrietta Robins Eliot
June (from the Vision of Sir Launfal) by James Russell Lowell
Summer is Icumen In
When the Frost is on the Punkin' by James Whitcomb Riley
November in England by Thomas Hood
The First Snow-Fall by James Russell Lowell
The Frost by Hannah Flagg Gould

Leopardi on Boring Poets

2009-06-28T09:14:00.003-05:00

"There is continuity of this or that pleasure, and this continuity is uniformity, and therefore it is boredom also, although its subject is pleasure. Those foolish poets who, seeing that descriptions are pleasing in poetry, have reduced poetry to continual descriptions, have taken away the pleasure, and substituted boredom for it."

Leopardi trans Nichols (Oneworld), p290

Or as Shakespeare's Hal once mused:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish'd for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

2009-06-23T22:41:00.002-05:00

"We are truly moved by the dead. We naturally, and without reasoning about it, before we reason, and in spite of reason, think them unhappy, regard them as pitiable, consider their lot a wretched one, and death a disaster." Leopardi, Oneworld Classics (trans. Nichols), p 293

2008-12-13T21:14:00.002-06:00

"Traduttore, traditore" (translator, traitor) is an Italian saying which bemoans the uncertainty of translations. In the last two posts, I've presented criticisms of translations by Roberts Lowell and Bly. To be sure, the ideal is to read works in their original languages. Reading poetry through a translator is a perilous thing, like when King Mark sent his nephew Tristan to bring back Iseult (or Farquaad sending Shrek to bring back Fiona).

The cases of Bly and Lowell are a bit different. Bly is criticized for his inadequate poetic form, while Lowell is criticized for "improving" Leopardi's poetry with concrete details. What do I want in a translation of poetry? Well, a translation should be done by a poet who is a native speaker of the destination language and is highly fluent in the original language. The translation should not be merely literal but be sensitive to the relations of words and ideas in the destination language. I'm not a fan of prose translations, but am interested in seeing something of the poetic form of the original reproduced in translation.

Why do I read poetry in translation? I do so in order to encounter the geniuses of other cultures. I read Leopardi to get his perspective on life, living in Italy at a particular time. What I want is the human: this man who lived and died and struggled, who got some things right and other things wrong.

Do I want the translator to be invisible, transparent? No, I don't think so. Some translations I like: Marianne Moore's Fables of La Fontaine, John Ciardi's Divine Comedy, and J.G. Nichols translations of Italian poets. Each of these translators has a certain style and personality and negotiates the perils of translation with care.

Poetry in Translation: Wrestling with Another -or- an Exercise in Egotism?

2008-11-29T14:27:00.004-06:00

The previous post highlighted translator J.G. Nichols' criticisms of fellow translator of Leopardi, Robert Lowell. Thinking about what Nichols wrote reminded me of Dana Gioia's essay on Robert Bly: "The Successful Career of Robert Bly." Here's what Gioia says about the task of translation in that essay (from Can Poetry Matter?):

"The main problem a translator of poetry faces is not in bringing across the surface sense. That task, at least in modern languages, is relatively easy. The difficulty comes in re-creating the complex design of sound and connotation that charges the original with energy. [Robert] Bly usually solved this problem by ignoring its existence. He merely provided prose translations, often curiously awkward ones, lineated as verse" (170).

And here's how Gioia describes the results of that translation:

"Concentrating almost entirely on syntax and imagery, Bly reduced the complex originals into abstract visual blueprints. In his hands, dramatically different poets like Lorca and Rilke, Montale and Machado, not only all sounded alike, they all sounded like Robert Bly, and even then not like Bly at his best" (172).

Translation could be a great opportunity for cultural exchange, for a man of one country and heritage to stretch himself by attempting the impossible task of expressing the dynamic tensions of another person's formed thought into his own native tongue. To do so, one would have to submit himself to the other person's expressed language and limit himself to recreating it as faithfully and devoutly as possible. Such a task would entail respect, that is working as if the original author could see one's translations and evaluate them. But how many translators exhibit this respect for difference, for otherness, to such a degree that they can pour all of their creativity into the task and yet also restrain the temptation to meddle.

Translation could involve the commitment to dialogue, the encounter between two parties who are different. Instead, all too often, translation is a superficial tourism. There's a place for tourism and dialogue both, I suppose, but one shouldn't confuse a border run to Taco Bell with a National Geographic expedition...

Why Prefer Translations by JG Nichols?

2008-10-12T09:12:00.004-05:00

From the translator's note for Leopardi's Canti (republished 2008 by Oneworld Classics!):

Robert Lowell's versions are symptomatic of a general tendency. He calls them "imitations," and says that he has been "reckless with literal meaning, and labored to get the tone." Why not? This is one method, a time honored one in fact, of transferring a foreign poem into English, and Lowell's candor is welcome. What I am particularly concerned with here is the precise way in which he is "reckless" when it comes to Leopardi. Here are a few lines of 'The Villlage Saturday' in the original and in my translation:

I fanciulli gridando
su la piazzuola in frotta,
e qua e là saltando,
fanno un lieto romore...
[24-7]

The small boys crowd and shout
Throughout the tiny square,
They crowd and leap about,
They leap about and cheer...

I now quote Lowell's version to show the greater specificity, the concrete details, the sheer elaboration he introduces out of the blue into the simple original.

Children place their pickets
And sentinels,
And splash round and round
The village fountain.
They jump like crickets,
And make a happy sound.
["Saturday Night in the Village,' Imitations]

A Question About a Poem

2008-10-07T06:44:00.002-05:00

In my poem "Requiem" (see Birth of a Poet) would it change the tone of the poem if it were read as a response to the end of a romance?

A little more house cleaning

2008-10-05T18:41:00.001-05:00

Victory

What beetle burrowed in the brain
of our enemy to arouse him to war?
Was it voracious crow-song of famine,
brutality, or biting lust?
In an instant of perverse clarity,
he grew suspicious of peace,
To him a wild and violet boar,
that eats up women first, then men.

Like rows of teeth they snarled at us,
they stabbed at us with tusks,
but seeing that we were fierce, they turned
and mangled each other.
And violent craving for desolation
writhes frustrated in consummation.

Watery Blue Depth

Watery blue depth, the stones welcome you
to the surface, shield you, crown you with shade.
You climb to the surface all thirstiness,
your blue eye consuming green, white, blue.
As you gasp your airless gurgle,
the wind ripples you, and your crown
Becomes a lobe all listening
for the call of the river.

My sister, come with me to the ocean—
come with me to the depths of the great sea;
Feel my current swirl you as
my sunsplash drinks your icewater:
Your cistern cracks,
you are fed and feed into the river.

Summer of 1995. Poems written while smoking cigars on the back porch of an ex-monastery in Washington, DC.

Lincoln Center 2

2008-10-05T09:24:00.000-05:00

Ad Fontes

The falling

water rhythms of

the heart

of a fountain

a city of valves, pipes

gushing, rushing

pushes against the

weight of the earth and tumbles

lost in the swirling

water thrusts columns

heaven-torn caryatids hang

Naiads flesh out, twist, melt

relapse

hear Atlantis singing

as she sinks

Lincoln Center 1

2008-10-05T06:53:00.000-05:00

Sunniva

She glides through Manhattan
like the misplaced tooth of a glacier,
smiling goat’s milk and Ricola,
haystack ponytail strewn behind,
her mind wandering the spruce
forests of the suicide philosophers.

Sapphire cicada-shell encrusts
icy freshness in robin’s egg;
thatch plaid skirt stretches pulsing
drumskin across thighs;
while blue stockings restrain
counter-explosion of calves.

Five and one-half inches of snowcap knee
peak between sky brilliance of hem and sock
as she turns her sensible black heel
away from Dante’s statue.

She smiles an ancient snowmelt,
eyes brimming August tea
through fused icecube lenses.

Leopardi's Canti translated by JG Nichols

2008-10-04T18:33:00.003-05:00

Found for under $20. I ordered mine — so if you're looking for this one, it's at Cornwall Discount Books in Yonkers online at AbeBooks.com. I haven't bought from this vendor before. I see they're rated 5 stars, which AbeBooks calculates based on completions & returns, etc.

A couple of Fordham poems

2008-10-04T08:43:00.000-05:00

Allegory

Morning yawns her bright mouth open,
Becomes a glowing cave of sun.
In the jawbone of the trees shadows flow
Northwest in green rivers that twist
And branch in brooks and rivulets.
A rabbit jacks across the field,
Is swallowed sweetly by the day.

Eclipse

I step out into the sunny dim
and am lost, directionless
Stumbling like a survivor
of catastrophe when I see
The shadow, half-shadow of building,
and beneath the trees the lunatic
Stamped crescents of light and blurred edge:
a trove of Arabian earrings.

Fordham Rose Hill Campus
Edwards Parade: the corner between Dealy and Freeman

A Couple of Poems Written Years Ago

2008-10-03T23:59:00.004-05:00

Ensemble
One jazz-packed day
We chased over green hills
Down the loud, busy streets:
Hands tug this way, then that.

Crocus and daffodil trumpet
The weeks-distant season
While gnarled oaks keep muffled
Surprise of leaves.

You hold me with hands, mouth,
And the deep bass-chord of gazing;
By the stone drum table, our hearts
Beat full in the warm winter breeze.

Sitting here in careless embrace,
I close my eyes and cherish your face.

Purgatorio
In my dream I’m climbing skyscrapers
And mountains in the woods.
Hills crest the mountaintops and
Chasms fall between the skyscrapers.

I plummet on cables toward the sky
A hundred stories where wind and spirits
Shake the curtains of the hundredth floor,

Then fall into the sky itself —
O, silence and starlight!

As day breaks I walk alone
On fallen leaves like stained glass
Shattered on the sidewalk.

You meet me near my home,
Your eyes, green angels in a dark valley.

Blog realignment

2008-09-28T14:06:00.002-05:00

Ok.

Deep Furrows: Personal and wide ranging posts;
Late Papers: literature/poetry/history topics;
La Nouvelle Theologie: Theology and American Protestantism.

Now Reading: Crazy for God

2008-09-27T21:53:00.001-05:00

Saw it at the library and couldn't resist. Also picked up the video Wings of Desire (1987).

Second Great Awakening and the forging of Protestant consensus

2008-09-27T15:43:00.004-05:00

«The Second Great Awakening set the tone for evangelical Protestantism's hegemony that would last until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when large numbers of Roman Catholic and Jewish immigrants began to challenge the Protestant consensus the Awakening forged.»

The Second Great Awakening
and the Transcendentalists, p 48
Barry Hankins

Timothy Steele: Advice to a Student

2008-09-21T21:28:00.006-05:00

Frame your excuse, when your work is late,
By Aristotelian laws.
It is essential that your fate
Derive from a credible cause.
Fill the instructor with pity and fear:
You mustn't be afraid
To fabricate deaths of the near and dear
If this will serve your grade.

Gods-from-machines won't help you pass.
Only the inept say,
As I was bringing my essay to class
Boreas blew it away.
Don't get too tricky; unify;
Keep your tale under control;
Make each part of the alibi
Suit the organic whole.

Always present yourself as one
Who, neither saint nor god,
Didn't quite get the assignment done,
Being tragically flawed.
Art judges not only deeds but intentions;
Much is allowed to youth.
You may win pardon by means of inventions
That supersede the truth.

Review: The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists by Barry Hankins

2008-09-21T14:35:00.010-05:00

Seeing that Barry Hankins has a biography coming out on Francis Schaeffer, I found another of his books which promises an interesting scope. Since it is a volume of the Greenwood Guides to Historic Events: 1500-1900, I also expected an introductory volume suitable to an undergraduate class. I was not disappointed. Although evangelical himself, Hankins clearly recognizes Catholics as Christian — in contrast to the attitudes of many of the reformers of the Second Great Awakening. This book is a solid introduction to the Protestant revival movements of the first half of the 19th Century. It's a good book for a public or academic library to have on hand for general readers.

I love the ancillary material in this book, which is invaluable for students and general readers like myself. A three page timeline takes us from 1706 to 1920. Events listed include preaching to slaves, First Great Awakening, the main events of the Second Great Awakening, the formation of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and Disciples of Christ denominations, the foundation of Transcendentalist utopias, the events of the abolition and feminist movements. There's a photo essay of 7 images: 2 lively caricatures of the revival movement and portraits of Charles Finney, Angelina and Sarah Grimke, R.W. Emerson, and H.D. Thoreau. At the conclusion of the volume are short biographies of the major figures, restating in summary form the main issues of their lives. These include: Amos Bronson Alcott, Richard Allen, Susan B. Anthony, Lyman Beecher, Alexander Campbell, Peter Cartwright, Timothy Dwight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Finney, Margaret Fuller, Sarah and Angelina Grimke, James McGready, Lucretia Coffin Mott, Phoebe Worrall Palmer, Theodore Parker, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Barton Stone, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, Henry David Thoreau, Nat Turner, and Theodore Dwight Weld. And some primary documents are also included by Richard Allen founder of the AME, Peter Cartwright (a supportive report on revivals yet critical of excesses), Lyman Beecher (a supporter of revivals who held to a Calvinist view of God's sovereignty), Charles Finney "How to Promote a Revival," Angelina Grimke (promoting the immediate abolition of slavery), Thomas Dwight Weld (emphasizing the injustice of slavery), letters between Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimke debating the relative importance of abolition and feminism, Emerson's "Self Reliance," Thoreau on Transcendentalism, Thoreau on walking, Thoreau on Civil Disobedience, two poems by Margaret Fuller.

Forgive me for detailing these supporting materials, but this may help the student or teacher who is looking for something in particular. There's also a glossary and an index.

The heart of this book is the impact revivalism had in changing American Protestantism from a Calvinistic emphasis on God's sovereign predestination of elect and the damned to an Arminian belief that salvation is open to all and the pivotal role of human free will. The First Great Awakening had been Calvinist and Presbyterianism had been able to deal with the tensions which arose (probably because it was in a geographically contained area). By contrast, the Second Great Awakening faced a dispersal due to the opening of the frontier. Like the First Great Awakening, the Second began with Presbyterians, but when Presbyterian authorities tried to reign in revivalists like Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell, they formed their own non-denominational group, which later became denominations: the Disciples of Christ, the Independent Christian Churches, and the Churches of Christ.

The Methodists and the Baptists were better able to flourish in the Second Great Awakening due to structural and doctrinal differences from the Presbyterians. Methodist preachers were circuit riders, responsible for shepherding a series of churches at one time. This lessened the impact of a cult of personality as their bishop could assign them to other circuits from year to year. Being fully congregationalist, Baptists had no hierarchy to be in conflict with. This congregationalist structure allowed them to expand wherever a group could be brought together, without depending upon a licensed and formally educated pastor. The human effort and initiative involved in organizing and choosing to attend a revival was somewhat problematic for Presbyterians because it conflicted somewhat with the emphasis on God's free election (although Lyman Beecher and Jonathan Edwards before him were able to reconcile the practice of revivals with divine sovereignty). The Methodists in particular had an advantage here because their theology was framed in terms of free will and seeking holiness. Clearly, this Arminianism also influenced Presbyterians and Baptists as they expanded into the frontier and as the waves of revival swept back from the frontier to the cities in the East.

The major engine of changing Presbyterianism from Calvinist to Arminian was Charles Finney, who is discussed throughout Chapter 3 of this study. Finney, who infamously claimed that "a revival of religion is not a miracle" (44), put the emphasis of conversion on the hard work and methods of the preacher and the cooperation of the converts. Although the Presbyterian establishment in the Eastern cities opposed him in principle (Asahel Nettleton and Lyman Beecher, p 45), they ended up conceding to him in practice (46). As an urban phenomenon, the revivals of this time have been examined from a Marxist social control theory as well as a societal change that called all classes to reform their lives. Although Hankins is mostly opposed to the social control theory, he does see it as having some impact in the complex mix of the history of revivals.

The Second Great Revival was a time of change in African-American Christianity as well. While the emotional and dramatic gestures of the frontier revivals resonated with African religious customs, the emphasis of freedom in the Scriptures strongly appealed to slaves and called white Christians to what we might now call a praxis of liberation (at the same time making slave holders and other nervous). The foundation of African Methodist Episcopalism (AME) and the spread of the Baptist demomination among blacks are both discussed in Chapter 4. The orthopraxy of abolition and feminism are explored in Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.

As other reviewers have noted, Chapter 2, Transcendentalism as a New Religious Movement, is the weakest in the book. It's weak because it focuses on the Transcendentalist mostly as parallel yet isolated from the Protestant revival movement. And yet, Emerson and other Transcendentalists were originally called together by George Ripley, a Unitarian minister. The roots of Transcendentalism are mainly seen as an American share in European Romanticism reacting to the rationalism of the Enlightenment. But I do wonder: what elements of Liberal Unitarian Christianity survived and determined the forms of Transcendentalism (Unitarians denied the divinity of Christ but affirmed the miracles)?

On a final note, I think that this book could have benefited from an examination of the Catholic revivals that were going on at the same time with Isaac Hecker — Hecker was a Transcendentalist who joined the Brook Farm movement before converting and becoming a Catholic priest, so some mention of him would be expected (I would also have expected some mention of Rose Hawthorn, Nathaniel's daughter who co-founded a Dominican religious order seeing as it mentions Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe, notable daughters of other figures covered in the book). Readers who are curious as to the roots of revivalism in the Counter-Reformation, should look to (one time Catholic) Bill Cork's study, "The History of the Parish Mission." Revivalism itself has ancient roots in the relationship between the hierarchical apostolic mission and the apostolic mission of the baptized (which is the original impetus of monasticism and the mendicant orders). See Ratzinger's "The Theological Locus of Ecclesial Movements," especially beginning with Part II which offers a historical perspective.

Eerdmans: Library of Religious Biography series

2008-09-21T13:56:00.003-05:00

As I wait for the translation of Luigi Giussani's study on American Protestantism, I'm doing what I can to better understand my religious heritage as an American. To that end, I'm looking at books which can introduce me and others to the main themes and historical schema of the distinctly American and yet authentically Christian experience.

One resource that I've recently become aware of is the Library of Religious Biography from Eerdmans Publishing edited by Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, Allen C. Guelzo. Although there are a few Europeans in the lot, the series has done well to focus on American figures, Protestant and Catholic.

Right now, I'm most interested in A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards by George Marsden (who previously wrote a full biography of Edwards) and Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America by Barry Hankins.

Here's the editorial statement and list of titles in the series:

The Library of Religious Biography is a series of original biographies on important religious figures throughout American and British history.

The authors are well-known historians, each a recognized authority in the period of religious history in which his or her subject lived and worked. Grounded in solid research of both published and archival sources, these volumes link the lives of their subjects — not always thought of as “religious” persons — to the broader cultural contexts and religious issues that surrounded them. Each volume includes a bibliographical essay and an index to serve the needs of students, teachers, and researchers.

Marked by careful scholarship yet free of footnotes and academic jargon, the books in this series are well-written narratives meant to be read and enjoyed as well as studied.

Titles in this Series:

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President

Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody's Sister

Assist Me to Proclaim: The Life and Hymns of Charles Wesley

Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America

Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart

Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism

The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism

Emily Dickinson and the Art of Belief

Francis Schaeffer and the Shaping of Evangelical America

God's Strange Work: William Miller and the End of the World

Her Heart Can See: The Life and Hymns of Fanny J. Crosby

Occupy until I Come: A. T. Pierson and the Evangelization of the World

Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane

Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White

The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell

A Short Life of Jonathan Edwards

Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision

William Ewart Gladstone: Faith and Politics in Victorian Britain

American Protestant history

2008-09-20T16:48:00.003-05:00

I just finished reading Barry Hankins's book, The Second Great Awakening and the Transcendentalists, a fascinating survey of Protestant (and post-Protestant) religious movements in the first half of the 19th Century. I hope to get this reviewed this weekend, but we'll see how that goes...

At any rate, reading about Protestant revivalism reminded me of Parish Missions, which are a similar renewal effort in American Catholicism, and I wondered a bit about the connection between the two forms of Christian renewal. So, look what I found on Google: "The History of the Parish Mission." Sweet!

Danny Gospel: a followup to my review

2008-09-20T15:13:00.004-05:00

Last week I ended my review of Danny Gospel with the following comment:

«I would also note: a novel about a "holy fool," a Dan Quixote, necessarily presents a problematic understanding of faith, which doesn't do justice to the "grandeur of reason." The task of a reviewer, however, is to evaluate how well a book accomplishes its aim, and not to argue that a different story should have been written. I'm saving the argument for next week.»

When I posted my review, I wanted to answer the question: should I buy this book? Will I enjoy this book? Will this book deepen my appreciation for the drama of life? My answer, then as now is yes. What follows here is critical response to the story. There are spoilers below, but mostly this post presumes a reader who is familiar with the book.

A subjective point of view
The story strains to hew closely to Danny's point of view, although there are points where a third person narrator could have increased the depth and credibility of the story by validating (or contradicting) things told by Danny that the reader must accept on blind faith. How Danny's sister Holly died (around p157) is one of those things. Danny retells the story he heard from his father, but with a crispness of detail that he never saw. And when the narrator is unreliable — a man made crazy by grief — it's too much for the reader to accept on blind faith. The single point of view also makes irony difficult if not impossible. I think of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in which Chaucer is also a character and the narrator of the story. But Chaucer the narrator is sincere enough to convey the objective details that Chaucer the author wants us to know even if the narrator is naive and lacking in judgment. In this case, however, Danny's subjectivity blurs with the objective story. And without an objective foothold, the reader wonders at points if the whole story is a dream, if anything is real.

Danny's friend Grease playing Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, and the women Plain Jane and Melissa in Iowa, moderate the subjectivity of the story significantly. These characters demonstrate to us that despite Danny's intense preoccupation with the past and with his own subjectivity, he still lives in a real, objective world. In the section set in Florida, however, everything becomes quite fantastic and surreal. No longer employed, Danny spends all of his time writing his life story. Although this section serves an important narrative function, I almost think that Danny has already flown from reality.

An Unreasonable Faith
Danny wants intensely to live in a sacramental world, a world in which everything is filled with meaning. Because of this desire, he naively identifies the movements of the world with his own intentions. He follows smoke on the wind, a flock of birds, a crow, and mosquitoes taking them for roadmarks toward his quest. While it's true that every leaf on every tree in the world has a meaning, that meaning is greater than what can be conceived. Danny tells us: "I don't want to be superstitious or deceived in any way" (53), but I'm not so sure. For Danny, faith is less about trusting someone you know and have a history with and more about a personal decision to trust no matter what.

Faith is defined in the story by Pastor Gordon, who once taught Danny and two brothers in an extracurricular "Class for Christian Farmers" (162). When the two brothers begin to fight, Pastor Gordon takes everyone outside for a lesson in faith. His lesson is to close his eyes and allow the two boys to lead him around: a trust walk. While the boys verge on harming the pastor, Danny must stand and watch. Such faith presupposes absence, the absence of the one believed in. It is a faith that embraces suffering and deceit as tests for a will that is determined to remain faithful amid contradiction.

Sacramentality?
Sacramental has become a vague word of praise in literary criticism. In general it seems to describe works that look to the natural world as epiphanies of the divine (e.g. Galway Kinnell). The Christian sense of the word, sacrament, is much more intensely specific. Sacrament means the clear, definitive sign of God's becoming man in Christ. Sacramental refers to the way all things in the world have become magnetized to their Creator through this incarnation. In Flannery O'Connor's story "The Temple of the Holy Ghost," the sun is a bloody host even if the nun or the girl don't recognize it. And when the girl is being hugged by the nun, the girl's face is mashed into the crucifix: the cross is imposed on her, even if she doesn't understand what it means. In other words, sacramentality is something objective. It's the texture of a world comes forth from the Creator's hand at every moment of its existence. And yes, it's better for us to recognize this Creator in His works, but all does not stand or fall depending upon our interpretations and narratives about what happens. A sacramental view means seeing things as signs, not replacing things with interpretations.

The Cross: folly or wisdom?
Among other things, this book attempts to answer the religious violence of September 11, 2001 with the what St. Paul calls the folly of the cross. The terrorists inflicted suffering, but Danny embraces suffering. Although this embrace of the cross is valuable, I would have also appreciated some recognition of the deeper reasonableness of the incarnate Logos, or what C.S. Lewis's Aslan calls "the deeper magic." The result is a personal response to 9/11 — but a fragile one because based in the individual will of the believer.

Another response to terrorism and anarchy is below:

«The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.»

Pope Benedict XVI
September 12, 2006, Regensburg

This challenge to broaden reason with experience is the challenge of our times, and not just for universities and theologians, but also for novelists, poets, salespeople, parents — in short, every person whether baptised or not. Reason has become flesh and dwells with us: how then can we answer one foolishness with another?

Book Review: Danny Gospel

2008-09-14T15:16:00.000-05:00

Thanks to David Athey for sending me a review copy of his book, Danny Gospel.

Genre:
In terms of genre, Danny Gospel is not a novel, but a comic romance, a commedia. The romances that come to mind when I read this are Confederacy of Dunces (Toole), Wise Blood (O'Connor), The Last Gentleman (Percy), Invisible Man (Ellison), and Song of Solomon (Morrison). In fact, the story has a couple of hat tips in the direction of Wise Blood. I like romances, but my wife Karen doesn't, and she can smell them a good ways off. Romances are episodic and multi-climactic, and comic romances have a bit of coarseness: e.g. Dante's flatterers swimming in a river of shit. In general, romances end with marriages and reunions and reconciliations (think of Charles Dickens). Novels, on the other hand, mainly build toward a big climax at the end, even if they have a minor climax or two early on. Novels typically end with a dramatic resolution of the main conflict — for better or worse. I suspect the more negative reviews that this heartbreaking book have received are due in one way or another to the reader's unfamiliarity with commedia, or at least a preference for novels rather than commedias.

Synopsis:
Danny Gospel is one of the last survivors of the Gospel Family, a family musical group. He lives in Iowa in a trailer park, having lost everyone and everything except his brother. His ex-fiance left him to return to her birthplace in New York. She had called him every year, but didn't this year. One day, Danny receives a kiss from a woman in white who disappears, setting Danny on a quest to find her again. Along the way, Danny grapples with his past and with the beautiful, haunted world.

Response:
Although I was a bit skeptical, this book won me over quickly, causing me to care about Danny and the other characters and investing myself in their struggles. I read earnestly, finishing the book in three days on September 11th, and then reading it again right away. The story is well constructed with beautiful description, good pacing, and a coherent plot. For those who may be confused about the ending, I recommend reading Chapter One again. Everything should fall right into place.

I would also note: a novel about a "holy fool," a Dan Quixote, necessarily presents a problematic understanding of faith, which doesn't do justice to the "grandeur of reason." The task of a reviewer, however, is to evaluate how well a book accomplishes its aim, and not to argue that a different story should have been written. I'm saving the argument for next week.

2008-09-09T21:40:00.002-05:00

Never use the exceptional as metaphor for the everyday. Rule of analogy: use the familiar to describe the exceptional.

I chanced to hear a violation of this rule this morning on my drive to work:
Jason Beaubien of NPR's Morning Edition, reporting from Haiti: «The Catholic Cathedral of Gonaive is inundated with mud. The pews are strewn in every direction as if the devil himself had come in and furiously kicked the chairs about» (2:52).

The part following this colorful language dramatically described the human devastation in Haiti.

Eco's The Name of the Rose borrows the language of Revelations and the Song of Songs to add a supernatural patina to his mystery novel.

poetry and sacrilege

2008-09-06T13:02:00.007-05:00

I was challenged by this particular line the article "The Long March to Maturity" by Fr. Giussani:

«the bewilderment is overcome suddenly through an energy and a will to intervene, to operate, to act, to–using the Christian term according to the aspect of sacrilege–“incarnate” (for a Christian, it’s sacrilege to use the world in a way not according to the mystery of Christ). The bewilderment is overcome suddenly as will to intervene, solicited by the positivity immanent in the phenomenon, by the proclaimed will for authenticity, by the accusation of lack of authenticity, etc.»

Too often, the language of Christian experience is cheapened by a crass metaphorical usage that uses words to express things which are superficial. Instead of inviting folks to a deeper reality even in banality, it slaps the label of the profound on things that are superficial. A mood may be christened an inspiration. In marketing, when a prospect acts in reaction to marketing it's called a conversion; customers who promote your product are called evangelists. In describing application bugs, I have carelessly typed that a certain action in the software generates errors.

The Christian experience has bequeathed a thesaurus of terms to the world that no longer has the experience of being seized by faith. It is tempting for even Christians to draw on this language, dressing up nihilism in the rags of transcendence. I once heard a Jewish poet being asked on the radio why he uses so much Christian symbolism: he answered that that's what's available in the language. But words without referents quickly dissolve into nonsense. And when the words are used this way, it masks a profound shift: the loss of a unique experience.

As mentioned in the quote which heads this post, incarnation is a word that's used with little awareness of its referent. In the case, Fr. Giussani cited, the word incarnation was a substitute for choosing to act, to do something, anything (I think of the protagonist of The Nun's Story: the important thing in that movie is that she decides to do something, anything — at which point the movie ends). Incarnation could also mean embodiment or the taking of one form in a series of forms. So, let's purify the source: what is the exceptional experience that the word incarnation should refer to for a Christian?

«As Camus wrote in his Notebooks, “It is not through scruples that man will become great; greatness comes though the grace of God, like a fine day.” For me, everything came like the surprise of a “fine day,” when a teacher [Fr Gaetano Corti] in the first year of high school–I was fifteen years old–read and explained the first page of John’s Gospel. It was then a rule to read this page at the end of every Mass, so I had heard it thousands of times.

But the “fine day” came (…) when that teacher explained the first page of St John’s Gospel: “The Word of God, in other words, that of which all consists, became flesh,” he said, “so beauty has become flesh, love, life, truth has become flesh, justice has become flesh: being does not stay ‘above the sky’ as in Plato’s view; it has become flesh, one amongst us.”

At that moment, I remembered a poem by Leopardi that we had studied in that month of “escape” in the previous year, called To His Woman. (…) In that instant I thought how that poem by Leopardi was, after 1,800 years, a begging for that event which had already happened, that John had announced: “The Word was made flesh.”

(Traces March 2005
L’avvenimento cristiano, pp. 31–32»)
[line breaks mine]

Incarnation, then, is not just anything coming to form, not just anything or anyone taking on flesh, but the Author of the universe, truth and beauty Himself.

My own act of contrition is this: I've been guilty of this same prostitution of language. When I wrote:

«Then you and I will also mesh
In incarnation, nothing less,»

yes, I was thinking of the resurrection of the Body of Christ, the Church, but I also deliberately eclipsed that totality for the sake of a merely carnal one. Mea maxima culpa!

This brings me back to Galway Kinnell. I really wanted to like Galway Kinnell's poem, "Freedom, New Hampshire." First, because the place name is so evocative. And second, because as an elegy for his dead brother, it won't let Kinnell be satisfied with a metaphorical, pantheistic resurrection. But, when I tried reading it aloud it wouldn't go: the line breaks were awkward and the syllables bottlenecked in my mouth. I was also irked by the cheap use of "incarnation" in the final stanza:

«But an incarnation is in particular flesh
And the dust that swirled into a shape
And crumbles and is swirled again had but one shape
That was this man. When he is dead the grass
Heals what he suffered, but he remains dead,
And the few that loved him know this until they die.»

Galway Kinnell is not Christian, so I don't fault him so much for using words as metaphorical because he found no correspondence with them. What I do fault is the way that folks will fawn over him, calling him sacramental when he is actually antisacramental.

The bio linked above claims that in What a Kingdom It Was, Kinnell expresses a "traditional Christian sensibility" and later still maintains a sacramentality. Who writes this shit? Here is a little bit of another poem from What a Kingdom It Was, a poem about the sacrament of Communion, apparently Protestant in form:

«Jesus, it is a disappointing shed
Where they hang your picture
And drink juice, and conjure
Your person into inferior bread —
I would speak of injustice,
I would not go again to that place.»

You see, what makes a sacramentalist is that he knows the presence of Christ's person in the world: definitively, substantially; in sacraments and because of this, His presence amid circumstances that one dare no longer presume to be inferior. If justice permits Himself to be crucified, then who am I to dispute it? And it's this same antisacramentalism that turns "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World" into contempt for the poor masked as pity — instead of the cry of charity, a life shared.

why does poetry matter?

2008-09-06T11:03:00.002-05:00

«Poetry is the art of using words charged with their utmost meaning.»

Dana Gioia
p21, Can Poetry Matter?