Category Archive: Literature
Chaucer
If you were about to plunge into a study of Geoffrey Chaucer (which is something I’ve been wanting to do for some time), which books on Chaucer would you most recommend? I’m looking in particular for books which will explore Chaucer’s literary art, symbolism, and so forth.
By the way, this book, edited by Roy Battenhouse, looks great. I believe I read the article by Nevill Coghill back when I was in university and loved it.
Trollope’s Symbolic Names
Often exegetes of Scripture get nervous about symbolism and typology, or even about conclusions drawn from literary features of the text (repeated words, chiasms, and so forth) — after all, those things aren’t completely provable or (as one person expressed it to me once) they aren’t “falsifiable.” You never have the kind of certainty about symbolism that you do about Greek grammar or about the identity of the Pontius Pilate referred to in the Gospels.
As I read through Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne a question came to mind: How would you respond to someone who asked you to prove that many of the names in this book are plays on words or have some symbolic reference? I’m thinking of names such as Dr. Fillgrave or the pub manager Mr. Reddypalm who just wants his little bill paid (by the candidate for the election).
Clearly those names aren’t just random syllables Trollope has put together, nor are they simply common English names which Trollope happened to pick because they sounded nice. Trollope crafted those names, intending them to have significance (and intending them, especially, to make us chuckle).
But if you were exegeting the novel using the sort of strict grammatical-historical approach many exegetes apply to Scripture, what would you do with those names? If you were to approach Trollope with the same caution with which some exegetes approach Scripture, with the fear of not having quasi-scientific certainty in your exegesis, could you say anything about the significance of those names? What kind of proof would you provide someone who claimed that Dr. Fillgrave’s name isn’t funny?
The proof wouldn’t be grammatical or historical. Part of your response, I suspect, would be to take the questioner to a number of other books (including perhaps The Pilgrim’s Progress) in which characters have significant names: It’s a common feature of English literature. But your questioner would likely say that you haven’t proven anything; you’ve simply moved his question from Doctor Thorne to the rest of English literature.
You might also want to assert that the meanings of the names do fit well with the way the characters are described in the book and with the events that involve them. In other words, within the framework of the story, this interpretation of the names seems to fit and make good sense and even contribute something to the story. Would that satisfy your questioner? Probably not. But I’m not sure how much more proof you need.
Bad Books
In the latest Credenda/Agenda, Nathan Wilson has an article on “Bad Books for Boys,” with which I concur wholeheartedly. I haven’t read all the books he mentions, but I have read a fair bit of John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard. (One quibble with Wilson’s comment: I’m not sure that the Buchan books contain “inadequacies.” Maybe they do, but I don’t spot ’em when I’m reading.)
Which brings me to this comment: I’m sure there are some people who hear about classical Christian education and start making plans to have their kids read all the classics and nothing but the classics — no mysteries, no science fiction, no fantasy, no swashbuckling adventures.
I don’t want to say too much against the classics, though some of them are overrated and several are rather dull. I would remind you of James Jordan’s beef with much classical education. But I’m very thankful that my parents didn’t raise me reading nothing but “good books” (in the sense Wilson is using the term “bad books”). Give me some of the classics, sure, but I’ll take Buchan any day — to say nothing of Gene Wolfe and Rafael Sabatini and P. G. Wodehouse and Colin Dexter and….
Doctor Thorne
My first encounter with Anthony Trollope took place when I was 10 years old. I read The Warden and Barchester Towers and then plunged into most of the rest of Trollope’s Barchester books. I didn’t finish the series, however. In fact, at the end of that year, I reread Barchester Towers. Eleven years later, I reread both The Warden and Barchester Towers. And last year, I reread them again.
This time, however, I’m once more moving on to the rest of the Barchester books. The other night, I finished Doctor Thorne, the third in the loosely-connected series. While the book was enjoyable, marked by Trollope’s usual good humour, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I did the previous two books in the series. Part of the reason for that may be that those books dealt with the ecclesiastical situation of the town of Barchester and this one didn’t. But it also strikes me that some elements of this book are a bit too contrived. I’m not going to give anything of the plot away, but it did strike me that the book might have been more interesting if Trollope hadn’t introduced a deus ex machina which allowed a resolution within the expectations of the people of the day. It seemed to me that he took the easy way out.
Nevertheless, I did enjoy the book and someday I’ll move on to Framley Parsonage and the rest of the series. Right now, however, I’m about halfway through Colin Dexter’s Death Is Now My Neighbour and I’m having a hard time putting it down. (I love Chief Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis!)
Storeys from the Old Hotel
On Saturday night, I finished reading Gene Wolfe‘s Storeys from the Old Hotel. As with every short story collection, some stories are better than others. With Wolfe, my initial judgments are tentative (unless I really like the story) since there’s often more going on in his stories than appears at first glance.
They say that you’re learning to read Wolfe when his endings feel like endings. Well, some of the stories in this collection clicked for me completely and the endings did feel like endings. Others I’ll need to reread and puzzle over some more.
My favourite stories? I liked several of them, but the two I liked best were “The Death of the Island Doctor” and “Westwind.” I read “Westwind” as something of an allegory, with intentionally Christian themes, though saying that really doesn’t capture the magic of the story very well.
Critics
Here’s Borges on his critics:
People have been unaccountably good to me. I have no enemies, and if certain persons have masqueraded as such, they’ve been far too good-natured to have ever pained me. Any time I read something written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself. Ah, the unvarnished truths I harbor! (p. 259).
Borges and Blindness
Later on in his “Autobiographical Essay,” Borges talks about going blind:
My blindness had been coming on gradually since childhood. It was a slow, summer twilight. There was nothing particularly pathetic or dramatic about it. Beginning in 1927, I had undergone eight eye operations, but since the late 1950’s, when I wrote my “Poem of the Gifts,” for reading and writing purposes I have been blind.
Blindness ran in my family; a description of the operation performed on the eyes of my great-grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, appeared in the pages of the London medical journal, the Lancet. Blindness also seems to run among the directors of the National Library. Two of my eminent forerunners, Jose Marmol and Paul Groussac, suffered the same fate.
In my poem, I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness. One salient consequence of my blindness was my gradual abandonment of free verse in favor of classical metrics. In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose, and to remember regular verse forms rather than free ones. Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and meter have mnemonic virtues (p. 250).
Mark Twain on Jane Austen
In his “Autobiographical Essay” at the end of The Aleph and Other Stories, Borges mentions how much he dislikes his first seven books:
In fact, when in 1953 my present publisher — Emece — proposed to bring out my “complete writings,” the only reason I accepted was that it would allow me to keep those preposterous volumes suppressed. This reminds me of Mark Twain’s suggestion that a fine library could be started by leaving out the works of Jane Austen, and that even if that library contained no other books it would still be a fine library, since her books were left out (pp. 230-231).
I don’t agree with Twain, and I don’t know that Borges does either, but I found that comment amusing, and all the more so since Borges is applying the comment to his early works.
Some Wrinkles in A Wrinkle in Time
A couple of entries ago, I mentioned that I was reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and Sarah asked what I thought about it.
On the whole, it’s a fun book, written, of course, for younger readers but readable for grown-ups too. (Wasn’t it C. S. Lewis who said that was the mark of a good children’s story: You can read it with pleasure when you’re older.)
Looking back, though, I enjoyed the beginning of the story more than the middle and end. The enjoyment had to do with atmosphere as well as with characterization: I liked the sense of mysteries deepening and the characters — Meg, in particular — interested me. But some of the adventures in the middle of the book seemed to be padding; they didn’t deepen the characters or advance the story. The end was predictable and, well, a bit flat.
In my earlier entry, I mentioned that L’Engle’s theology in this book is hardly orthodox. Before I comment on that, let me say that I did appreciate the scene where the children encounter the sorta-angelic beings who are singing a song which, when translated, is a psalm of praise to God. The other times Scripture appeared felt a bit forced, though not inappropriate.
I wasn’t pleased, however, with the scene where the children realize that the great fighters against evil have included Jesus, of course, but also Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Bach, Pasteur, Madame Curie, Einstein, Schweitzer, Gandhi, Buddha, Beethoven, Rembrandt, St. Francis, Euclid, and Copernicus.
That scene is at the heart of what I perceive as one of the biggest weaknesses of the book. The children are shown that their planet is in danger from the (rather unimaginatively named) Black Thing, which appears to be Evil. But … what is evil? In particular, what is this evil which has been fought, not only by Jesus, but also by Einstein, Beethoven, Michelangelo, Pasteur, and others? I grant that science and art are gifts from God and that, through them, He has relieved some of the effects of the fall (e.g., sickness). Perhaps that’s what L’Engle has in mind. But that isn’t particularly clear. The other possible implication — that advances in science are themselves conquests of evil — doesn’t reflect the true nature of evil.
So, too, with the encounter with evil on the planet Camazotz (is that name related to the word “comatose,” I wonder?). Evil there seems to be embodied in IT (again, by the way, an unimaginative name; I refer the reader to Lin Carter’s helpful discussion of the naming of things in Imaginary Worlds). But what exactly is ITs evil?
Well, it seems to be the imposition of uniformity and the eradication of diversity. Fine. I grant that that’s evil. But IT wasn’t completely satisfying as a foe, perhaps (I’m groping to understand my own reactions here) because evil was simply a character-less impersonal external force and those aren’t much fun to defeat (nor is IT actually defeated in the book).
Only when Meg herself responds to someone she loves with bitterness because he has disappointed her do we get a real human being acting evilly — and only then do we really have a truly human complexity and depth. Only then do we have the kind of thing we all struggle with. Otherwise, evil is an impersonal and therefore rather superficial and uninteresting force.
This is the first of L’Engle’s books that I’ve read and I’ll likely go on to read more. Again, I did enjoy the beginning of the book, with its mysteries deepening and its likable characters. Perhaps in subsequent books, L’Engle’s plotting and characterization — and treatment of evil — deepens. And hey, I think I’m a bit of a sucker for this sort of thing. Though I haven’t read Nesbit (surprisingly enough), I did read Edward Eager’s somewhat humorous Nesbit pastiches and I grew up on C. S. Lewis.
2003 Book List
Happy new year!
A couple of years ago (yes, my blog just passed its second birthday), I posted a collage of book covers representing the books I had enjoyed the most during 2001. I didn’t provide such a list for 2002, but I thought I would this year (sorry, no collage: it takes too long to load). So here’s the list for 2003:
* Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
* Carl Braaten & Robert W. Jenson, The Catholicity of the Reformation
* John Buchan, Salute to Adventurers
* Dale Ralph Davis, Looking on the Heart: Expositions of 1 Samuel 1-14
* Dale Ralph Davis, Looking on the Heart: Expositions of 1 Samuel 15-21)
* Dale Ralph Davis, Out of Every Adversity: 2 Samuel
* Jean Danielou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers
* James Herriot, The Lord God Made Them All
* Thomas Howard, Evangelical Is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament
* James B. Jordan, Primeval Saints: Studies in the Patriarchs of Genesis
* James B. Jordan, The Sociology of the Church: Essays in Reconstruction
* James B. Jordan, Theses on Worship: Notes Toward the Reformation of Worship
* Fergus Kerr, Theology After Wittgenstein
* Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics
* Peter Leithart, Against Christianity
* Bret Lott, A Dream of Old Leaves
* Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman
* Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Fruit of Lips or Why Four Gospels
* Ralph Smith, The Eternal Covenant: How the Trinity Reshapes Covenant Theology
* Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
* Nigel Tranter, The Bruce Trilogy: The Steps to the Empty Throne, The Path of the Hero King, The Price of the King’s Peace
* Anne Tyler, If Morning Ever Comes
* John Updike, Of the Farm
* Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy
* Steve Wilkins, Face to Face: Meditations on Friendship and Hospitality
* Charles Williams, War in Heaven
* Gene Wolfe, Soldier of the Mist
* Gene Wolfe, Soldier of Arete
* Gene Wolfe, There Are Doors
* N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God
And now I need to eat something and sleep. I didn’t get to bed last night (ahem, this morning) until 3:30.
Stories: Beginning, Middle, End
Yesterday afternoon, between our Christmas service and supper at my deacon’s house, I picked up my copy of The Avram Davidson Treasury and read the introductory material and the first story (intriguingly titled “My Boy Friend’s Name is Jello” and based, in some odd way, on the rhymes that little girls sing, for instance, when skipping rope).
Davidson, I gather, was a rather odd man with a love of words who wrote science fiction, fantasy, and mysteries, all characterized by his sense of humor and love of fun. Here’s some characteristically written advice about story-writing from the Foreword (I recommend reading it out loud to get the full effect):
A million schoolmams, male and female, have taught us as if teaching geometry or other holy writ, that a story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And, of course, a story has. The beginning of a story is where it begins, the middle of a story is where it middens, and the end of a story is where it ends. This is exemplified by the one book found even in homes where the mom and the dad have provided no Bible, namely the telephone book. It begins at A and it ends at Z and it middens at or about L. It is the story or song of the Tenth Sister, Elemenope, the Muse of the Alphabet. Characters? Look at all those characters! Plots? Plots? As many as you like. From Abbott Plott to Zygmunt Plotz.
Adventures
John Buchan has long been one of my favourite authors. (Thanks, Mom, for introducing me to him!) I’ve recently been reading his Salute to Adventurers and I’ve enjoyed it greatly. The novel starts in Scotland, just before William of Orange took the throne of Great Britain, but our hero, Andrew Garvald, soon ends up in Virginia, getting deeper and deeper into adventure. Here’s a quotation, as Andrew heads off to meet a dangerous friend:
Once at Edinburgh College I had read the Latin tale of Apuleius, and the beginning stuck in my memory: “Thraciam ex negotio petebam” — “I was starting off for Thrace on business.” That was my case now. I was about to plunge into a wild world for no more startling causes than that I was a trader who wanted to save my pocket. It is to those who seek only peace and a quiet life that adventures fall; the homely merchant, jogging with his pack train, finds the enchanted forest and the sleeping princess; and Saul, busily searching for his father’s asses, stumbles upon a kingdom (p. 106).