The Function of Literature

One difficulty of teaching literature that quickly becomes evident at the High School level, and, I suspect, at any level, is that the world depends of resistance. Allow me to elaborate. To make a sound, air passes over vocal chords that resist. Instruments operate on the same basic principal. Movement, writing, pretty much anything requires something to provide resistance in order to facilitate its motion, some standard to move against. Most literature enacts some kind of social criticism. An author writes a story and points out elements of a society that are unjust, absurd, or otherwise distasteful, pointing out human foibles, the human condition of struggle, what have you. To understand the message of a given text, however, requires a standard to measure the meaning of the story. Most school age readers are using stimuli from the outside world, movies, tv, stories, music, to build, formulate, and fine tune their understanding of "the way the world ought to be" or "how I ought to live." But literature assumes either some internalized moral compass, or at least an understanding of some moral standard in existence out in the world, whether it's a simple truth like "life is precious" or something more complex. The problem is that so many of us, especially at a younger age, lack that sense of an established standard. For some it's a hurdle just to decode a text and arrive at basic comprehension. Even as much contemporary literature criticizes oppressive social standards, decries the stifled individual conscience over against group norms (as I tend to myself), the creation and interpretation of literature depends on some kind of awareness of a deeper standard or law that society is violating. The democratization of information makes some coherent moral seem all the more difficult. This would seem to suggest an increasing moral morass, a decay at society's core, some kind of collective moral disorientation. And yet, it is fascinating that, in general, many educators and others who work with youth today seem to think that, by and large our youth are more respectful, more generous, and kinder than their own generation. In the broader populace, as ever, people tend to idealize their own generation or the previous generation, and criticize the youth and culture in general for their moral shortcomings. If in fact, the younger generation is kinder, somehow, by nature, even as the ability to evaluate the actions of others in, say, literature, I'm wondering how to account for this.

The Songwriting of Joe Henry

About a decade ago I interned at an Arts Journal called Image. Also about a decade ago I had two little albums called Fuse and Trampoline in constant rotation. So kudos to Image for finally interviewing one of America's best songwriter/producers, Joe Henry (click here for the interview). He touches on something that could also be said of Dylan's songwriting. It's the idea of leaving gaps in the song, room for the imagination to play, to fill in the gaps imaginatively and thereby co-construct the song. This is the very act of manifesting mystery. There is a given world. We are also. Within this little space we get to imaginatively co-create and fill in the gaps left out of the fabric of Being. In his best songwriting, Henry crystallizes and compresses this very act. He says as much in the interview:

"It is of paramount importance to me to walk on the wire where songs are both specific enough—emotionally and in their imagery—to invite you in, yet with enough prevailing mystery intact to keep you from ever feeling like the song can’t continue to provoke revelation. If a song is a house, the writer needs to leave enough doors and windows open that listeners can come and go freely. As soon as you nail an idea to the floor and start directing the flow of traffic, the house has become a museum and a relic, not a living space: you can peek in, but you’re not allowed to lie on Mark Twain’s bed or touch his pencils."

Since Image is the Journal of Religion and the Arts, I'll add that Henry articulates right here the distance between art and the church as I experience it in the phrase "nailing an experience to the floor." The one opens a door, many doors, invites imaginative play, suggests, implies, allows experience to unfold, and meaning to be co-created. The other shuts doors, prepackages meaning, coerces behavior, if only through rigid policing of in-group norms. The fearful attempt to fix meaning in place does some violence to the nature of reality and experience and diminishes vitality.

A line from Henry's song "You Can't Fail Me Now" may help here: "We're taught to love the worst of us / and mercy more than life / But trust me, mercy's just a warning shot across the bow / I live for yours / and you can't fail me now." Ah.

Hm, I wonder if Joe Henry was raised in the church.

Wonderful blog on Joe Henry.
"You Can't Fail Me Now" as NPR's song of the day.
The liner notes to Joe's album Civilians.

Hungerford's Failure to Read McCarthy

One aspect of McCarthy criticism that has become annoying is the claim, especially in regard to the profound violence in Blood Meridian, to have “failed” in reading it. This claim is made in the famous introduction to the Modern Library Edition by none other than the most self-aggrandizing of American literary critics, Harold Bloom. So it is perhaps against this backdrop that all other claims to “fail” reading Blood Meridian are similarly self-aggrandizing. I believe it is poet/critic Christian Wiman (a personal favorite, actually) who makes a similar claim. And I recently stumbled upon the Open Yale Lecture by Amy Hungerford, whose reading of the novel strikes me as a trenchant and willful misreading of the text. Her conclusions are tenuous at best. She stops just short of saying McCarthy is an egomaniac who aspires to supercede all his influences, when in fact he pays homage to his literary antecedents and readily acknowledges them in interviews, whether Melville, Shakespeare, or Faulkner. First, her claim to have failed in her first attempts at reading the novel reek of melodramatic academicese. Failure suggests persistent inability to accomplish something. Obviously, at some point she finished the book. Therefore, this “failure” is blatant hyperbole. It also seems blatantly unoriginal, as if she’s showing off her sophisticated literary sensibility, situating herself with Bloom and others by making this claim. Whether disingenuous or not, it is irksome. Second, it is as if, in her lectures, Hungerford has a predetermined bias against the text and its author. There is no need to prove your sophisticated sensibility. You are a professor of literature at Yale university, not a Victorian schoolteacher. One element McCarthy touches on in the novel is that, at bottom, reality contains conflict, tension, but this is a creative element that gives rise to process and Being, (see Heidegger, Martin), but that we fail to see that reality, instead distorting that creative tension into destructive conflict, war, oppression, exploitation, reducing the wide mysterious world and each other into so many flat, exchangeable commodities, desacralizing and dehumanizing. This lies at the heart of McCarthy’s work. Now, he may be a writer of immense ambition who also admits he "doesn't know how to write women," but to allow that to undermine a deeply necessary work -- that of restoring mystery and pointing out the ways in which we distort it, is well nigh tragic. In his most recent novel, he says as much as "[creation] hummed of mystery," whereas the villian in Blood Meridian perpetuates the distorted view that "there is no mystery." He portrays the effects of this distortion and draws attention to it so that we might learn from it. McCarthy is trying to bring us face to face with who we are and, historically, who we have been. Savagery has been an element of our existence from The Iliad through the Holocaust. Why is that? McCarthy offers some insight. Far from a mere celebration of violence, this attempt to expose its roots is entirely in line with Hungerford’s own interest in genocide, holocaust studies, religion, and social justice. It’s a shame she “failed” to see it. Whether this will all be captured in the upcoming film version is doubtful. That a Yale literature professor missed it highly disappointing.

Poetic rhythms

I'm currently writing a paper on Cormac McCarthy's novel Suttree, tracing Heideggerian notions of truth as aletheia. He literally grounds the weaving of truth, the venturing of art as the setting forth of truth, in the poetic act. For him, ultimate reality consists of ongoing conflict and tensions giving rise to process and reality in its becoming, and poetic language is uniquely capable of manifesting this underlying reality. I'm convinced McCarthy quite consciously pursues this task in his novels. The Mysterium Tremendum of ultimate reality is a revelation of this very unity of surface dualisms. Unlike the Judge from Blood Meridian who suggests "the mystery is that there is no mystery," McCarthy himself has said "the mystery is that we don't perceive the mystery." It is this mystery, uniquely present in poetic language, and its pre-rational way of knowing that gave rise to myth. Enter Robert Graves, whose "White Goddess" I cracked open tonight, and who directly takes me to task as one who participates in and perpetuates the infernal industrial machine, btw, includes the following as his main thesis "The language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry - "true" in the nostalgic modern sense of "the unimprovable original." (9-10). Given my personal history being raised in a Pentecostal church, I found the following further fascinating: "As a popular religious tradition it all but flickered our at the close of the seventeeenth century: and though poetry of a magical quality is still occasionally being written, even in industrialized Europe, this always results from an inspired, almost pathological, reversion to the original language--a wild Pentecostal "speaking in tongues"--rather than from a conscientious study of its grammar and vocabulary. (12) Ah.

The End of the Potter

So. Before heading to watch the final send-off and the fairly paint by numbers hero's journey finale to the harry Potter franchise, Karla gets my attention with the following statement: "I think Harry Potter has affected more people than 'The Lord of the Rings.' Don't you think? I mean. An entire generation grew up with it." Now, there are some issues of logic with the above statement, fair enough. Like an entire generation didn't grow up with "Lord of the Rings?" And yet, she might be right: more books, more films, more money. Of course, the Lord of the Rings franchise had a greater groundswell of followers by the time the films came out due to longevity. But you could make the argument at least. Now, the statement made me bristle and long for a scathing counterargument. Why? Lord of the Rings resonates with me, in an admittedly geeky kind of way, while Harry Potter? Pleasant and well- wrought escapist fare, maybe, but at the end of the day I could take it or leave it. My wife's argument was that Lord of the Rings was written for too specific an audience (?) and Harry Potter cut across all kinds of boundaries, even though it was ostensibly written for children. Now, there are two main obstacles for Harry Potter having much meaning for me in the long run, and a minor detail in the film versions that has the same alienating effect. It seems to me, for a story to work properly we have to be immersed in it, invested in a selfish kind of way. "If I were in that situation, I would..." This kind of magic has to work seemlessly. You're imagination is not so much captured by a good story, but unleashed by it. So. What's wrong with Harry Potter? First, when it came out, it was strictly kid's stuff, and marketed accordingly. By the time the film came out, HP had been crammed down your throat enough, even looking at the billboard felt like dancing to the tune of the Advertocracy. But let that go. If a movie is hyped enough, we all watch it eventually. I knew next to nothing about the book and yet when I watched the first film I felt "something was missing." That sense didn't leave me even when each of the succeeding episodes became "darker." I realized after this final film not that there was something missing, but that there was "too much there." Oddly enough, some of the story is appealing at first...the Gothic elements of Hogwarts, the mystery novel motifs. But something is also alienating, preventing that suspension of disbelief, full immersion. The first aspect of the stories that prevents them from having any staying power for me is the Charles Dickens-cum-Mother Goose alliterative quality of all the names. Hufflepuff. Dumbledore. Salazar Slitherin. Even the name "Voldemort," despite its obvious latinate etymological roots has a sing-songy eightees cartoon character ring to it. This effectively boundaries the story with a sugary cotton candy rim, communicating that "nothing too bad will happen here." And even when it does with a villain here, a murder there, it feels ho-hum, occurring as it does within the boundaries of candyland, and there is an awareness that all will be made right soon. The second obstacle to any kind of resonance from the films has to do with the main characters' aw-shucks virtue. I'm all for selflessness and loyalty, but the inscrutable moral Puritanism of the characters flattened them out beyond distinction for me. Now, you could simply argue "but these are kids movies, they're supposed to be simple." All well and good, but then I don't understand their widespread appeal to adults and why I have to explain myself anytime I respond to someone else's Potterthusiasm with "Meh." The final, albeit minor, reason the films don't finally resonate is that, in terms of inspiring fear, Ralph Fiennes' "Voldemort" just didn't cut it. Sure, people in the story were scared of him, and he wore black, and was kind of pale and ugly, but the very form of children's story set boundaries of taste on what could be considered scary for an adult audience. I think The Neverending Story's Gmork might have been scarier, and he could hardly move. The most inspired piece of the film series, ironically, was the animated insertion in film seven of the tale of the "Deathly Hallows" from the (excuse me) "Tales of Beedle the Bard." There is some simple folk wisdom in the books, to be sure, and a hint that the author has some experience with the wisdom that comes with loss, and she weaves an entertaining story. But in the end, it doesn't quite achieve the same level of mythos as other modern mythologies, such as, oh, I don't know, say, "Lord of the Rings."

Levertov's Essays Continued

So, I picked up Levertov's collected essays again and continued reading. Odd what solicits a longer response from me, given that since my last entry I've read most of Dante's Inferno, most of Frye's study on Blake "Fearful Symmetry," (more on Blake later) Harold Bloom's collection "Romanticism and Consciousness," but what seems to get me to actually write an entry is a smallish low print run book of essays by Denise Levertov. There's something about a well-written essay that opens up an ordered internal space. For me, this mostly occurs when I read essays written by poets (Wiman's "Ambition and Survival," Walcott's "What the Thunder Says," Heaney's "Finder's Keepers" to name a few I've come across recently...or to be more honest, those which Wiman recommends in one of his essays). I think this has something to do with a poet's attention to detail, the care with which words are chosen, the facility a good poet has with ideas and their interrelationship, a knack for the timely image, and a motivation to be precise. I'm thinking of some of the moral implications of art that Levertov argues for. In her work, it seems, she was frequently responding to critics saying she ought to be an observer, not an activist, artistic, but not didactic. For Levertov, however, deep attention to art cultivates a moral sensitivity, cultivates a kind of sacred awareness, or the longing for it, and the lack of it. She quotes a speaker at a Danforth Conference (in 1966!) named Tom Bradley, who says

"Literature is dynamite because it asks - proposes - moral questions and seeks to define the nature and worth of man's life...The vision of man we get from art conditions our vision of society and therefore our political behavior...Art and social life are in a dialectic relationship to each other that is synthesized by political action."

Levertov herself continues: "The literary critic or the teacher of literature is merely scratching the surface if he does not live out in his own life some experience of the multitudinous interactions in time, space, memory, dream, and instinct that at every word tremble into synthesis in the work of a poet, or if he keeps his readings separate in a box labeled 'aesthetic experiences.' The interaction of life on art and of art on life is continuous. Poetry is necessary to a whole man, and that poetry be not divided from the rest of life is necessary to it. Both life and poetry fade, wilt, shrink, when they are divorced."

Now, on the one hand I feel like applauding. On the other hand, I feel like hiding behind a large patch of shrubbery. I frequently harangue my wife for reading many light novels quickly, and for rarely delving into the ethical questions they open up, of mining for truth, or whatever. She wants pace and plot more than thematic complexity, allusive texture, and conceptual depth. And I sit back and fold my arms thinking, "but it's supposed to mean something, dammit." Meanwhile I can tease out ethical implications of McCarthy's The Road or Wiesel's Night and assign projects to bring it home for the students, expanding their awareness and all that, but when it comes to lifting a finger to bring about real change in the world? Um, can't we just read another book?

Art and Identity

Ok, so this semester I'm going through a book called "The Artist's Way" with a small group of selected students, each of whom responded to an invitation and each of whom shows some artistic promise, or creative impulse, and I thought it a good idea to nurture that, or to have some project close to home at my job. Now, there've beeen some challenges. I scheduled it in the morning during home room. Some students have test prep in their home rooms and couldn't make it. Another student was out. Another was depressed, talking to his counselor. So that left two for the first meeting. We'll see how this week turns out. But there was an underlying issue that day as I prepared an introduction for the group. What's the point? Why engage in art and foster a creative sensibility? Do I do that because it's my personality type? Some pre-disposition? Without coffee and with quizzes to write that day I couldn't come up with a satisfying answer. But a student read me one of their poems and my response to him hinted at an answer. If you engage in this process, art can both destabilize and solodify. It can subvert and convert. For us Westerners, this means becoming rooted more deeply in an integrated vision. By this I mean the default world we live in, call it a technocracy, corporatocracy, advertocracy, what have you, is prone to tell you who you are by what you want, and it sets the framework for your choices, telling you what you want, and then setting up a profit system around it. Identity lies at the heart of marketing. And for us, identity is mostly framed by desire, by what we want. And what do kids want, right now? Not much. That is, it falls along a fairly narrow range of choices, as it usually does: something Hello Kitty related. Tom's shoes. The latest smartphone. etc. What does it mean that something is "in" right now? It means a certain set of objects and products are widely desireable right now. And that desire is cultivated by advertising. It is a parasitic force that seeks to channel your thoughts and energy. And with the shifts from phone to laptop, to car radio, to three shots-per-second TV shows, our attention spans are so short, the information we absorb in a single day so great, what we lose is memory, rootedness. Art provides a way of recovering memory, of recovering identity, a process of genuine self-discovery, rather than the vapid "extreme makeover" offered by advertising culture. I was struck earlier in the year that one of my students, who lives apart from his two younger brothers in Guatemala, who undertook a long and arduous journey at the age of ten with his mother to come to America, struggled to learn the language, battled a serious disease, lives in a crime infested area, and manages to pull in A's and B's in honors classes describes himself as "basically an average American teenager." This extraordinary kid sees himself as anything but. He seems to have no sense of context, of awareness, of identity. Now this could have a lot of causes, but at least part of it is that he knows he wants the same things as other American teenagers - a good education, a good job, a nice car, a nice house, a nice cell phone - material prosperity. Which is fine, but when that becomes the totality of a person's identity, as it seems to have become for some, there's a problem. Now with the population I work with, this could also be a case of just wanting to fit in, to not be seen as outsiders, of being accepted as equals, of wanting to be "basically an average American teenager," instead of, say, an average Guatemalan teenager. It could also stem from lack of exposure to the lives of "average American suburban teenagers." But art can step in here and solidify the sense of identity, of connecting to richness of cultural roots, of family, through preserving memory. How do you cultivate a desire for this kind of awareness, to become more rooted, less prone to the Sturm and Drang of advertising culture, which tells you what to want by telling you who you are? I think by letting someone taste that kind of water, or at least leading them to the well. Of course there are a million other directions to take this - art allows you to process your relationship to the world, art preserves cultural values, art questions and comments on culture, art deepens the soul, gives access to the sublime, art allows us to participate in the divine through exercising our creative impulse, or for some people, serves no practical purpose whatsoever. I'm trying to come to grips as to why I'm forming this group n a communicable way. The route of paideia, of forming personhood, identity, in a culture that wants to form it for you. That seems good to me.