Category Archive: Literature
Talking Animals
The other night, after meeting Glimfeather the Owl in C. S. Lewis’s The Silver Chair, Theia said to me, “Papa, talking animals are only in stories, aren’t they?”
“Are they?” I asked.
“There aren’t talking animals in our world,” she replied. “Only in stories.”
At first, I acted as if I was just teasing her. “There are talking animals in our world, too,” I said. She denied it, insisting that there aren’t. I insisted there were. She laughed, sure I was teasing, and insisted that there weren’t.
But I’ve read the Bible to her and she remembers it. “Do you remember the serpent who talked to Eve in the Garden?” I asked. She did. “And do remember when we read the story about Balaam the prophet and how his donkey talked to him?” Again, she did. “That wasn’t just a story,” I said. “That was in our world. That really happened. So animals in our world can talk.”
Stop a moment and think about that. When it comes to the serpent, it’s easy to say that the serpent spoke because it was impelled to do so by Satan who was somehow linked up with or inhabiting the serpent. After all, the Bible does speak of Satan as “the serpent of old” (Rev. 12), thereby identifying the tempter of Genesis 3 with the devil. So, we conclude, snakes don’t talk — unless, of course, the devil is speaking through them.
But that doesn’t account for Balaam’s donkey. I can imagine someone maintaining that it was really God who was speaking to Balaam, using the donkey’s voicebox to do so, and so people sometimes say, “God can speak through a donkey, and so he can speak through you, too” or something like that. But look at the story. It doesn’t say that God was speaking to Balaam through the donkey; it says that the donkey spoke. And what’s more, the donkey draws on its memory of its past good behavior: “Have I ever been accustomed to do so to you?” (Num 22:30). It was YHWH who opened the mouth of the donkey, that’s true, but it was the donkey who spoke to Balaam (22:28).
And that means that not just in Narnia, not just in fairy tales, not just in fiction but in this very world in which we live, there have been — and could be — talking animals.
“Yes,” Theia said. “But they don’t talk to us very often.” True. But maybe someday.
Cajun Palate
The restaurant may have “Cajun” in its name and the dish may have “Cajun seasoning” on it, but would a Cajun recognize it? In the novel I’m currently reading, Tim Gautreaux’s The Next Step in the Dance, Paul Thibodeaux has moved from Tiger Island, Louisiana, to Los Angeles….
Paul had found a job with a machine shop and boiler-repair business in Van Nuys, and after cramming for a week in the company library, he had tested out into a position that paid double what he had made at LeBlanc’s…. He decided to get used to Los Angeles, and his first attempt to do so was to locate a place he could eat on a daily basis, as he had in the Little Palace back home. The first time he walked into a restaurant, he asked for a poor boy, and the waitress looked at him as though he had lost his mind. She handed him a menu, which showed no red beans, gumbo, or étouffée. He looked up at the tanned waitress, feeling stupid and alien. He ordered a cup of coffee, then stared through the weak brew to the bottom of the cup, feeling naked without his food.
The next day he was driving on the beach highway south of the city when he saw a gold-lettered sign for a Cajun restaurant. He warily pulled into the parking lot, his appetite hopeful. Inside, he was seated in a dim, crowded dining room under a drooping net that held a few dried starfish, animals he had seen only in pictures. When the waiter brought the menu, Paul opened it and frowned.
“Do you need help with our selections?” The waiter was a healthy blond kid.
“What is all this stuff? I thought this was a Cajun place.” Paul looked past the boy at a tank of lobsters.
“Yes, sir, we have have authentic dishes from the bayou state. Today’s special is blackened swordfish.”
Paul stared at him blankly. “I never seen a swordfish in my whole life.”
The waiter motioned to the man at the next table and bent close. “It’s what the gentleman next to you is eating.”
“It’s all burned,” he cried.
“Not burned, sir. Blackened. It’s the most traditional way of cooking seafood among the Cajuns.”
“Someone’s been pulling your leg, man.” Paul went back to the menu and read the descriptions of bayou lamb, Cajun barbecued liver, and escargot de Lafayette. He found the word gumbo on the back page and ordered a large bowl. A half hour later his waiter brought a small cauldron of bitter juice so hot with Tabasco that after the third spoonful, Paul broke into a sweat.
His waiter glided past and asked, “How’s the gumbo?”
“Man,” Paul said, “you people must have spilled Tabasco in this stuff. My tongue’s been killed dead.”
The waiter laughed. “It takes time to develop a true Cajun palate.”
Paul pushed away the steaming bowl. “Let me tell you, it sure don’t take much time to ruin one” (80-81).
Grits
Another reason to read Patrick O’Brian: Wonderful passages like this, in which Stephen Maturin, the naturalist and ship’s doctor, is talking to a colleague from Boston about American politics and the American language. The conversation takes place during the War of 1812, though the first part of it looks forward to another conflict within America itself. But it’s the comment about grits, though, that made me laugh out loud and I now repeat it every time I make grits for breakfast.
Stephen said, “Your republic, now, Mr Evans: do you look upon it as one and indivisible, or rather as a voluntary association of sovereign states?”
“Well, sir, for my part I come from Boston, and I am a Federalist: that is to say I look upon the Union as the sovereign power. I may not like Mr Madison, nor Mr Madison’s war — indeed, I deplore it: I deplore this connection with the French, with their Emperor Napoleon, to say nothing of the alienation of our English friends — but I see him as the President of the whole nation, and I concede his right to declare it, however mistakenly, in my name; though I may add that by no means all of my Federalist friends in New England agree with me, particularly those whose trade is being ruined. Most of the other officers aboard, however, are Republicans, and they cry up the sovereign rights of the individual states. Nearly all of them come from the South.”
“From the South? Do they, indeed? Now that may account for a difference I have noticed in their manner of speech, a certain langour — what I might almost term a lisping deliberation in delivery, not unmelodious, but sometimes difficult for the unaccustomed ear. Whereas all that you say, sir, is instantly comprehensible.”
“Why, sure,” said Evans, in his harsh nasal metallic bray, “the right American English is spoke in Boston, and even as far as Watertown. You will find no corruption there, I believe, no colonial expressions, other than those that arise naturally from our intercourse with the Indians. Boston, sir, is a well of English, pure and undefiled.”
“I am fully persuaded of it,” said Stephen. “Yet at breakfast this morning Mr Adams, who was also riz in Boston, stated that hominy grits cut no ice with him. I have been puzzling over his words ever since. I am acquainted with the grits, a grateful pap that might with advantage be exhibited in cases of duodenal debility, and I at once perceived that the expression was figurative. But in what does the figure consist? Is it desirable that ice should be cut? And if so, why? And what is the force of with?”
After barely a moment’s pause, Mr Evans said, “Ah, there now, you have an Indian expression. It is a variant upon the Iroquois katno aiss’ vismi — I am unmoved, unimpressed. Yes, sir” — Patrick O’Brian, The Fortune of War, 138-139.
I probably shouldn’t have to say this, but because there are readers online who wonder if this is indeed the correct etymology, I will: Stephen is playing with Evans here, pointing out a perfect example of the sort of phrase Evans claims is never found in Boston, and Evans is trying to save face by coming up (“after barely a moment’s pause”) with a fake etymology.
English Usage
David Foster Wallace’s essay “Authority and American Usage,” in spite of problems you can find discussed at various sites online (this essay sparked something of a firestorm and some of the criticisms seem just), was quite helpful. Ostensibly a review of Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, which Wallace praises highly, the essay wades into the stormy waters of the debate between those who believe that grammar ought to be prescriptive, laying down rules that speakers and writers ought to follow, and those who think that grammar (and dictionary definitions, for that matter) merely describe how English is being used today.
Wallace criticizes some of the rules laid down by the prescriptivists. He defends, for instance, the expression “Where’s it at?”:
For a dogmatic Prescriptivist, “Where’s it at?” is double-damned as a sentence that not only ends with a preposition but whose final preposition forms a redundancy with where that’s similar to the redundancy in “the reason is because” (which latter usage I’ll admit makes me dig my nails into my palms). Rejoinder: First off, the avoid-terminal-propositions rule is the invention of one Fr. R. Louth, an 18th-century British preacher and indurate pedant who did things like spend scores of pages arguing for hath over the trendy and degenerate has. The a.-t.-p. rule is antiquated and stupid and only the most ayotolloid SNOOT [Wallace’s term for a grammar-stickler — JB] takes it seriously. Garner himself calls the rule “stuffy” and lists all kinds of useful constructions like “a person I have great respect for” and “the man I was listening to” that we’d have to discard or distort if we really enforced it.
Plus, the apparent redundancy of “Where’s it at?” (a redundancy that’s a bit arbitrary, since “Where’s it from?” isn’t redundant [mainly because whence has receded into semi-archaism]) is offset by its metrical logic: what the at really does is license the contraction of is after the interrogative adverb. You can’t say “Where’s it?” So the choice is between “Where is it?” and “Where’s it at?”, and the latter, a strong anapest, is prettier and trips off the tongue better than “Where is it?”, whose meter is either a clunky monosyllabic-foot + trochee or it’s nothing at all (99; I moved the parenthetical comment from the footnote into the main text ’cause I’m not footnoting this blog entry).
I was told in university that I shouldn’t start a sentence with “hopefully” (as in “Hopefully, I’ll be home by 6:30 tonight”), because “hopefully” is an adverb and therefore this sentence means that I will be home, full of home, by 6:30. Well, no. Wallace explains:
And Hopefully at the beginning of a sentence, as a certain cheeky eighth-grader once (to his everlasting social cost) pointed out in class, actually functions not as a misplaced modal auxiliary or as a manner adverb like quickly or angrily but as a sentence adverb (i.e., as a special kind of “veiled reflexive” that indicates the speaker’s attitude about the state of affairs described by the rest of the sentence — examples of perfectly OK sentence adverbs are clearly, basically, luckily)…. (100-101).
So he’s not an old-school prescriptivist, imposing alien and Latinate grammar on English. But he points out that it’s still important for English-speakers to learn, at least alongside their various colloquial ways of communicating, Standard Written English. He helpfully compares usage rules to the conventions of etiquette: when you speak or write, you are not simply communicating the particular information found in your sentence; you are also communicating a lot about yourself — and how you want people to view you — not to mention how you regard the person you’re speaking to. If you want people to take you seriously in certain settings, you need to communicate in Standard English, even if that’s not the way you speak at home or with your friends.
On the other hand, the kid who speaks only in Standard Written English — imagine a child who never uses contractions or “whose response to striking out in T-ball is to shout ‘How incalculably dreadful!'” (102) — is going to get a lot of wedgies (a word Wallace mysteriously, and incorrectly, capitalizes) from his classmates, because he’s “actually deficient in Language Arts. He has only one dialect” (104).
This is one of the longest essays in the book and probably the densest. Wallace crams a lot in here, and, not surprisingly, this is one of the essays that has Wallace’s trademark footnotes-to-footnotes and interpolations, the result of which is that I can’t possibly summarize what he says. But I can say that I found a lot of what he says here helpful in thinking through how we teach grammar and, perhaps more importantly, why we communicate the way we do. It’s not just a matter of following rules because some Language Legislature imposed them in the past and language must never change. Instead, Wallace says, it’s a matter of communication and the rules of Standard Written English, for the most part, help us do that a lot of the time.
Wallace & Updike
Today, I finished David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster and Other Essays. Foster is in many ways an odd writer, given to almost obsessive self-clarification, leading to lots of parenthetical remarks and footnotes to his footnotes (I’m not kidding), or, in the case of the final essay, “Host,” to lots of little (and some not-so-little) explanatory boxes scattered all over the page, with arrows pointing to them. He knows he has a weird style and he’s having fun with it, and, to tell the truth, I did too.
I’m not going to review the book, but I will say that Wallace frequently raised points I had never considered or shed light on things I had never thought about. There are probably too many to include in one blog entry, so let’s start with just this one.
Wallace’s review of John Updike’s novel Toward the End of Time (“Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think”) points up the problems I’ve had with Updike’s novels: while I, like Wallace, enjoyed some of Updike’s earlier work, in his later work “his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent” (52). I’ve often heard Updike recommended as a Christian author because he did identify himself as such and he often deals with Christian themes, has characters talk about God, and so forth. And yet so much of what he wrote…. Well, here’s how Wallace sums up toward the end of his essay:
Maybe the one thing that the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps clarify what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid: he can quote Pascal and Kierkegaard on angst, discourse on the death of Schubert, distinguish between a sinitrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants is a cure for human despair. And Toward the End of Time‘s author, so far as I can figure out, believes it too (58-59).
Of course, Wallace is not the first to point this problem out. John Gardner, in On Moral Fiction, wrote about Updike’s novel A Month of Sundays that it “can easily be read as a piece of neo-orthodox Presbyterian heresy (Christ has redeemed us in advance, so let’s fornicate)” (98).
If you want Updike stories that I think are really worthwhile, check out his short story collection Pigeon Feathers, or perhaps try his novels The Centaur or Of the Farm. But more and more, after that, Wallace’s complaint is exactly on target. (Someday, I’d like to read the whole of Larry Woiwode’s essay on Updike, of which I have only the first part, published in the now defunct BIAS Report years ago. Maybe someday I’ll obtain the rest of it.)
Food as Communion
Recently, I’ve been reading Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which has been occasionally illuminating, not only for reading literature in general but also in terms of reading the Bible. (I hasten to add that the Amazon reviews point out a number of genuine problems with this book, too.)
Reading literature (including the Bible) is not like doing math. When you do math and come up with a certain solution to a problem, you can go back and prove your solution so that anyone else who understands math can follow along with you. But “solutions” in literature aren’t often that way.
Sometimes, of course, you can point to a particular passage that spells out your point. Sometimes you can appeal to the grammar (“That verb is past tense and so it must be talking about something that happened in the past, not something that’s still happening today”) or to history (“The Scarlet Pimpernel is set during the French Revolution, which went through various phases, and therefore…”) to establish your point.
But sometimes you can’t. When a writer sets a scene in the winter and describes the bleakness of the setting, is that symbolism? Well, it sure feels like it sometimes, especially if what happened just before winter arrived is that the main character’s beloved left. When a writer includes a meal — think of the extended meal scene in the movie Babette’s Feast — is that a form of communion? You might think so, but it would be difficult to “prove,” because reading is not a science.
Foster’s book is intended to help readers spot things they otherwise might not. Food as communion is just one of the themes he spends time on, and his comments in that chapter are quite helpful, shedding light on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (sometimes a meal in a story can substitute for sex), Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Heartbreak Restaurant (why can’t the mother get the whole family to sit down together for a meal, until the end of the book?), and James Joyce’s “The Dead.” About the latter, Foster writes:
No writer ever took such care about food and drink, so marshaled his forces to create a military effect of armies drawn up as if for battle: ranks, files, “rival ends,” sentries, squads, sashes. Such a paragraph would not be created without having some purpose, some ulterior motive. Now, Joyce being Joyce, he has about five different purposes, one not being enough for genius. His main goal, though, is to draw us into that moment, to pull our chairs up to that table so that we are utterly convinced of the reality of the meal. At the same time, he wants to convey the sense of tension and conflict that has been running through the evening — there are a host of us-against-them and you-against-me moments earlier and even during the meal — and this tension will stand at odds with the sharing of this sumptuous and, given the holiday, unifying meal. He does this for a very simple, very profound reason: we need to be part of that communion. It would be easy for us to laugh at Freddy Malins, the resident drunkard, and his dotty mother, to shrug off the table talk about operas and singers we’ve never heard of, merely to snicker at the flirtations among the younger people, to discount the tension Gabriel feels over the speech of gratitude he’s obliged to make at meal’s end. But we can’t maintain our distance because the elaborate setting of this scene makes us feel as if we’re seated at that table. So we notice, a little before Gabriel does, since he’s lost in his own reality, that we’re all in this together, that in fact we share something.
The thing we share is our death. Everyone in that room, from old and frail Aunt Julia to the youngest music student, will die. Not tonight, but someday. Once you recognize that fact (and we’ve been given a head start by the title, whereas Gabriel doesn’t know his evening has a title), it’s smooth sledding. Next to our mortality, which comes to great and small equally, all the differences in our lives are mere surface details. When the snow comes at the end of the story, in a beautiful and moving passage, it covers, equally, “all the living and the dead.” Of course it does, we think, the snow is just like death. We’re already prepared, having shared in the communion meal Joyce has laid out for us, a communion not of death, but of what comes before. Of life (13-14).
I don’t know that Foster is right to say that all meals in literature are communion in one way or another. If a writer says, “I was grabbing a burger at Joe’s when the trouble broke out,” the burger isn’t likely to be communion. Food serves other roles beyond just communion. Food can be fuel; it can also be reward.
But it does seem likely to me that any extended meal in a story is going to be significant (why else write about it?) and that shared food — or even, as Foster mentions in the chapter, shared cigarettes — forges bonds between people, not just in stories but in real life. Of course, as in the example from Joyce, meals may also be taken in isolation or may be times of hostility, not communion, and the lack of communion in such cases may be significant.
The point, then, is not to take every meal as “communion” but to have communion on your mind when you come to the meal and to ask “Why is this here? What’s really going on? Are these people being bonded by the food they’re sharing? If not, what else might the author be showing us?”
God has designed food as a form of fellowship. Think of the dietary laws in the Old Covenant and how they symbolize the bonds that Israel may or may not form with the Gentiles. Think of the sacrificial system, where the worshiper is represented by his offering, which is then consumed in the fire on God’s altar as “food for God.” That’s what we want to be, and symbolically that’s what’s happening to the worshiper. Think, too, of the times people prepare a meal for the Angel of Yahweh, sometimes without recognizing Him, and He refuses to eat with them. You don’t usually eat with people you’re angry at, and neither does God. And think, of course, of the Lord’s Supper in which we partake of Jesus, the great sacrifice, and are nourished by Him, but in which also we become one bread, one body, with one another.
Without committing ourselves completely to Foster’s dictum (“food is communion”), his chapter ought to alert us to a common function of meals in the stories we read and especially in the Bible. If you’re interested in pursuing more food theology in the Bible, I’d highly recommend Peter Leithart’s Blessed Are the Hungry.
Schooling and Reading
A while back, I was blogging some things I had gleaned from Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles. I hadn’t intended to give up that project, but I did get sidetracked into a bunch of other things. In my last blog entry on this book, I talked about Peterson’s distinction between learning and schooling. Peterson argues that in schooling, because of a drive toward standardization and uniform performance, there is a strong emphasis on the learning of facts and on the transfer of data from the teacher to the student “with as little personal contamination as possible” (94). He goes on to say that this approach to education affects our ability to read:
The reading skills that we acquire under such conditions are inevitably attentive primarily to the informational: we are taught to read for the factual, the useful, the relevant. Most pastors have twenty years or so of such training. We read to pass examinations, to find out how to parse a Greek verb or to run a church office. If we read occasionally to divert ourselves on a cold winter’s night it is not counted as serious reading. We are not systematically taught over these twenty years (I don’t count an occasional course as “training”) to pick up nuance and allusion, catching the meaning and intent of the living voice behind the words on the page. As a result we are impatient with metaphor and irritated at ambiguity. But these are the stock-in-trade of persons, the most unpredictable of creatures, using language at their most personal and best. Our schooling has narrowed our attitude toward reading: we want to know what is going on so that we can get on our way. If it is not useful to us in doing our job or getting a better one, we don’t see the point (94-95).
Peterson goes on to say that, though language does provide information, its primary purpose is relational:
The primary reason for a book is to put a writer into relation with readers so that we can listen to his or her stories and find ourselves in them, listen to his or her songs and sing with them, listen to his or her answers and question them. The Scriptures are almost entirely this kind of book. If we read them impersonally with an information-gathering mind, we misread them (95).
I’m not sure if Peterson means to imply that we are to question the answers God gives in Scripture, and surely questioning is not the only thing we are to do with someone’s answers. But leaving that aside, Peterson’s point is worth pondering.
How much exegesis is really a give-me-the-facts or give-me-something-useful approach to reading the text of Scripture? The Bible is full of poetry, of metaphor, of allusion, of recurring patterns, of “deep weird” comments, of long lists, of a host of things that may not at first seem all that helpful. What am I do to with all the repetition in Numbers 7? Wouldn’t it have been better to say it all once (“Each prince presented …”) instead of saying it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again? Would we really have lost any information if Moses had simply given us a summary? And why did we need to know this stuff anyway? How does having this information help us? And so, as Peterson says, when we read for information or for something we think will be useful, we get frustrated with the Bible as it is.
There are certainly things that we can do to improve our reading — better: our hearing — of Scripture. But Peterson is suggesting that one thing that would help would be a change in our approach to education, so that reading is not presented primarily as a fact-finding mission.
I realize that I know little about how literature is taught today, even in classical Christian schools. So I’ll end with questions instead of ignorant assertions, and hope that someone who knows more (or better) than I do can help answer some of them.
Is Peterson right? Do we do students a disservice with regard to their reading of the Bible — or of literature — by such things as focusing on whether the student picked up certain facts from reading a novel (e.g., a quiz on Pride and Prejudice that focuses on names and relationship and who did what and so forth) or by requiring students to paraphrase or summarize or (the thing I hated the most in school) find the theme of a given story or poem? How could we improve our teaching of literature — and of reading in general — so that our reading of the Bible may also be improved?
The Language of the American South
I was glad to discover recently that the local library has a copy of Cleanth Brooks’s The Language of the American South, a slim volume containing Brooks’s three Lamar Memorial Lectures given at Mercer University in October 1984.
The primary thesis of the lectures, to which Brooks devotes the second and especially the third lectures, is that “the strength of even the more formal Southern writers stems from their knowledge of and rapport with the language spoken by the unlettered. Most of our writers have in fact recognized the colloquial and even dialectical aspects for what they are: dialects of great vitality and power, dialects capable of eloquence and even of a kind of folk poetry” (17). The examples Brooks provides to support this claim were interesting enough to make me want to read the writers he’s citing.
But what particularly caught my interest was his claim in the first lecture that the language and idiom of the American South, which often seems quaint to outsiders, is not “a corruption of proper English” or a “discoloring of the clear waters issuing from the well of English pure and undefiled” (4), but is instead an old-fashioned form of English. “As far as pronunciation is concerned, we Americans speak an old-fashioned English. Contrary to what the layman assumes, in pronunciation it is the mother language that usually changes, not the daughter language” (5).
That sounds right to me. A friend of mine, who grew up in a Dutch-speaking home in Canada, went to visit the Netherlands. He knew Dutch well enough, he thought, and so he spoke it when he was there. The response? “Why don’t you speak English? When you speak Dutch, you sound like my grandmother.” And no wonder. My friend’s parents (or perhaps grandparents) had immigrated from Holland back in the late ’40s or early ’50s, and they continued to speak the sort of Dutch that was spoken at that time, while in the Netherlands the language continued to develop, certain words became archaic, other words were dropped almost completely, and so on. Similarly, a friend here in Louisiana recently had some visitors from France. When my friend spoke Cajun French, they told him that it sounded very much like the sort of French that you’d find spoken in France by old people who lived way out in the country. The mother country undergoes a change in the language, while immigrants tend to maintain the language as it was on the day they immigrated.
But if that’s so, then doesn’t that imply that older forms of American English, such as the ones preserved in the American South, actually maintain the English language as it was when America was first settled, while the language continued to change and develop in England? Yes, and that’s precisely what Brooks argues in this lecture.
The broad a which we associate with the English pronunciation of words like bath (“bawth”) and laugh (“lawf”), he points out, was probably not adopted into Standard English until the nineteenth century, so that the shorter a sound we associate with the American pronunciation of these words was probably closer to the original. In particular, Brooks argues, “The language of the South almost certainly came from the south of England” (13), where we find similar pronunciation.
Some more examples:
* Brooks points out that the dropping of the final -g in words such as going, doing, and thinking is not a corruption of the way English was once spoken. On the contrary, it is the way English was once spoken. There are many rhymes in poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats that work only if that -g is dropped (4-5).
* “Would you expect to learn that when Uncle Remus has Brer Rabbit remark that he is ‘gwine’ to town, he is using a word that Thomas Hardy, at about the same time, was putting in the mouths of the Dorsetshire countrymen who figure in his famous Wessex novels?” (7).
* What about pronouncing mercy as massy (“Law’s-a-massy”)? That was still heard in the southern counties of England in the twentieth century (7).
* Joel Chandler Harris has Uncle Remus pronounce muskmellon as mushmillion. A mistake? Brooks checked the Oxford English Dictionary and found that mushmillion is indeed an old English form of muskmellon, found in a letter dated 1592 and written by a man from Dorsetshire.
* When Brooks grew up in west Tennessee, he could hear someone say that a chiggerbite’s itch terrified him. Did he mean that it frightened him? No. An examination of the Oxford English Dictionary reveals “that in the standard language terrify once had as one of its meanings ‘to irritate or torment,'” and even John Milton used it in that sense (14). Brooks comments: “Though this meaning is now obsolete in Standard English, it is still to be found in the country dialects all over England, just as it is still to be found in our Southern states” (14).
* What about de, dis, and dat? Brooks spends a fair bit of time on these pronunciations, showing that they were common in east Sussex and Kent in the 1600s: “Thus, any of the common folk of east Sussex and the neighboring county of Kent who set out for Virginia or the Carolinas might have brought with them such a pronunciation” (10). Nor was that just an old pronunciation in England. Brooks cites a number of authorities from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who attest to these pronuniations in these counties. And even as late as the 1960s, the d forms of these words could still be found, though rarely, in Kent and Sussex (11).
Brooks cites Mark Antony Lower’s translation of The Song of Solomon into Sussex English, which begins this way:
De song of songs, dat is Solomon’s,
Let him kiss me wud de kisses of his mouth; for yer love is better dan wine.
Cause of de smell of yer good intments, yer naüm is lik intment tipped out; derefore de maidens love ye.
If you look up Lower’s translation online, you’ll find his guide to the pronunciation of the Sussex dialect, in which he points out that th often becomes d (as in dis, dat, dere), that the letter r is frequently suppressed (so that horse becomes hoss, children becomes childun, and I suspect barn becomes bahn and never might become nevah), that there are some different past tense forms (e.g., heared and brung), that the vowel a is often “very broadly sounded” so that it becomes ay-uh (so that taste becomes tay-ust or, as in the example above, name becomes naüm, pronounced nay-um), that ea is pronounced almost like the ai in pail (so that beans and peas sounds almost like bains and pays), that the d is dropped at the end of some words (e.g., hel’, han’, and stan’), that the g at the end of an active participle is rarely sounded (so that going becomes goin’), that oi is pronounced like a long i (so that spoil becomes spile), and that ask becomes ax. And I bet you thought those were all characteristics of southern American English.
Brooks writes:
Now this pamphlet was not printed until 1860, and I can assure you that the villagers and the countrymen of this essentially rural county had probably never seen a black man, let alone heard one speak, in their entire lives. If the resemblances between the Sussex dialect of 1860 and the Negro dialects of the Southern states just before the Civil War do amount to something more than pure happenstance, then what is the nature of the relation? Clearly the men of Sussex did not derive their dialect from the American blacks. Did the black people of our Southern states then derive their dialect from the dialects of such English counties as Sussex? If so, what was the link?
The only link I can conceive of is this: the Englishmen who emigrated to the Southern states and from whom the black man necessarily had to learn his English — from whom else could he have learned it? — must have come predominantly from the counties of southern England (9).
What that would imply, then, is that those who view the Southern dialects — and particularly the Southern black dialects — as corruptions of pure, standard English, perhaps springing from poor education or some other defect, have things backwards. If Brooks is correct, and his case seems pretty strong to me, it is precisely the Southern dialects that have preserved the older “standard English” from which the newer “standard English” has now deviated.
But what that also implies is that certain approaches to education can destroy this older dialect, along with its wealth of once understood but now almost obsolete words and idioms. Brooks writes:
I am confident … that I can identify its most dangerous enemy. It is not education properly understood, but miseducation: foolishly incorrect theories of what constitutes good English, an insistence on spelling pronunciations, and the propagation of bureaucratese, sociologese, and psychologese, which American business, politics, and academies seem to exude as a matter of course. The grave faults are not the occasional use of ain’t but the bastard concotions from a Latinized vocabulary produced by people who never studied Latin. Gobbledygook is a waste of everybody’s time (53).
Invective
Why read Patrick O’Brian? There are many reasons. I could mention the gripping plots, the interesting characters, the historical accuracy and the air of authenticity, the many hilarious passages mingled with ones that break your heart. But here’s another reason: the quality of the language. Where else (besides Shakespeare) can you find such enjoyable invective, here from the mouth of Dr. Stephen Maturin?
They are deeply attached to one another; but since her mother, a widow with considerable property under her own control, is a deeply stupid, griping, illiberal, avid, tenacious, pinchfist lickpenny, a sordid lickpenny and a shrew, there is no hope of marriage… (H. M. S. Surprise, p. 26).
Two Kinds of People
The opening paragraph of P. G. Wodehouse’s novel Sam the Sudden, it seems to me, could well apply to southwest Lousiana … except that it starts in May, not August:
All day long, New York, stewing in the rays of a late August sun, had been growing warmer and warmer, until now, at three o’clock in the afternoon, its inhabitants … had divided themselves by a sort of natural cleavage into two main bodies — the one crawling about and asking those they met if this was hot enough for them, the other maintaining that what they minded was not so much the heat as the humidity. — P. G. Wodehouse, Sam the Sudden, p. 11.
Books I Enjoyed Most in 2009
Year after year, I intend to post, early in January, a list of the books I enjoyed most during the previous year. Year after year, that list gets delayed. It’s March already, but here at last is the list of the books I enjoyed most in 2009, listed alphabetically by author’s last name:
* Walter R. Brooks, Freddy Goes to Florida. This is the first of the Freddy the Pig books, and in fact this one doesn’t focus on Freddy and originally didn’t have him in the title. But somehow Freddy took over. I read many of these as a kid, came upon them again more recently, and now have started reading them to my daughter. Lots of fun.
* Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part Two: From Noah to Abraham: Genesis VI 9 – XI 32. As I said last year, Cassuto is a very careful commentator and, even though he’s sometimes wrong, always worth reading because he discusses and notices things others often ignore.
* Rebecca Caudill, Happy Little Family. This is the first in the Fairchild Family series, and I enjoyed reading it to Theia before bed. Too bad the local library doesn’t have the whole series.
* Dale Ralph Davis, Looking on the Heart 1: Expositions of 1 Samuel 1-14. Very helpful material on 1 Samuel, which we’ve been going through in our Wednesday night Bible study here. Supplement with Peter Leithart’s A Son to Me.
* Brian Doyle, Spirited Men: Story, Soul, and Substance. A number of very interesting short biographical essays on men such as Plutarch, William Blake, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Van Morrison.
* Keith Ferrazzi, with Tahl Raz, Never Eat Alone and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time. The title attracted me. There’s a lot of stuff a pastor could learn from this business-related book by a master networker.
* Dan Fesperman, Lie in the Dark and The Small Boat of Great Sorrows. Two novels about Croatian detective Vlado Petric by a journalist who knows Sarajevo and its recent struggles inside out. I enjoyed the first of these more than the second, but both were gripping.
* Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea-Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age. I first heard about this book years ago in one of Gary North’s books and have been interested in it ever since. It turns out that the Medford Public Library has a copy. Hapgood’s book is one of the most boring but fascinating books I have ever read.
It is boring in that he discusses in exhaustive detail all the various steps of his research, the mistakes he and his associates made, the failed attempts to figure out how the ancient maps worked, and so forth. If you’re a cartographer, you’ll be able to follow his discussion; if you’re like me, it’ll be pages of stuff you can hardly understand and you’re not remotely interested in. Boring.
But also fascinating: Hapgood, together with his students and aided by the US Air Force, studied Renaissance maps that seem to draw on even older maps. These maps involve both latitude and longitude, though it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that modern-era mapmakers figured out how to calculate longitude. The Renaissance mapmakers couldn’t, but the old mapmakers from whom they borrowed could. These old maps are remarkably accurate, when understood properly. For instance, if you look at an old map, you might see that Greenland is enormous, far larger than it really is. But Hapgood notes the reason for that distortion. The lines of longitude are farther apart at the equator and closer together the closer you get to the poles, but if you draw a map as if the lines of longitude are exactly the same distance apart everywhere, you end up with a huge Greenland. In fact, everything closer to the poles is going to be distorted and made a lot larger than it really is. (Note that every map involves some distortion, since you’re reproducing a rounded world on a flat surface.)
The implications of many of Hapgood’s claims, if they’re accurate, are fascinating. It appears that long, long before the Renaissance, there were mapmakers who were able to calculate longitude, who had traveled down the coast of South America (for instance) and had mapped the contours of those coasts, and who had even seen large portions of Antarctica without the ice caps. The last claim should then make you ask: How old are these maps? Don’t know. But it’s fun to think about.
* A. C. Harwood, The Recovery of Man in Childhood. Cecil Harwood was one of C. S. Lewis’s best friends. He was also committed to Rudolf Steiner’s Anthroposophism, which Lewis strongly rejected, and was one of the first teachers in a Waldorf school in England. So I don’t share the same philosophy, let alone theology. Nevertheless, Harwood’s book was extremely interesting and often made a lot of sense. Extremely thought-provoking.
* Jon Hassler, Staggerford. I enjoyed this novel a lot and will be reading more of Hassler’s in the future.
* Herge, King Ottokar’s Sceptre; Red Rackham‘s Treasure; The Seven Crystal Balls; Prisoners of the Sun; and Explorers on the Moon. 2009 was the year in which I reread the entire Tintin series, except for the earliest volumes which I was not able to obtain from the library. I loved them all, but the ones listed here especially stood out.
* Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train. Unputdownable. So intense that when a character sinned, I felt guilty.
* Peter Hopkirk, Trespassers on the Roof of the World: The Secret Exploration of Tibet. A couple of years back, I read Hopkirk’s Like Hidden Fire, which is the true story behind John Buchan’s novel Greenmantle. I enjoyed it a lot and wanted to read more Hopkirk. This one is the story of all the various explorers who tried to get into Tibet in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Tibet was off limits to outsiders.
* Mark Horne, Why Baptize Babies? An Explanation of the Theology and Practice of the Reformed Churches. Clear and helpful.
* Morag Joss, Half Broken Things. A well-written suspense novel. Like Ruth Rendell, Joss writes in a way that makes you sympathize with her characters, and all the more so as things start to go wrong. And they go very, very wrong here.
* Beth Kephart, Into the Tangle of Friendship: A Memoir of the Things That Matter. Good meditations about the meaning and implications of friendship, drawing on Kephart’s own life. Midway through the book, Kephart starts to talk about her former next door neighbor, a woman who was married to a Korean seminary student in Philadelphia and who eventually began to write. For a long time now, I’ve enjoyed the writing of Andree Seu in World magazine and I knew that she matched the description. Could it be? Well, I was right. That’s who Kephart’s neighbor was.
* Rudyard Kipling, The Phantom ‘Rickshaw and Other Stories. There are only two reasons this collection of stories is in this list. One is that Kipling has an amazing ability to make it seem as if he’s telling you a true story, though I can’t easily explain how he does it. It has something to do with the narrative tone and something to do with the incidental details, all of which ring true. The other is that this collection includes “The Man Who Would Be King.”
* Marsena Konkle, A Dark Oval Stone. A good novel about the very small changes that bring healing after terrible hurt. Konkle is the daughter of Ransom Fellowship’s Denis and Margie Haack.
* Ursula LeGuin, Rocannon’s World. LeGuin does a masterful job of writing richly detailed stories about other worlds.
* Peter J. Leithart, Wise Words: Family Stories that Bring the Proverbs to Life. Truth be told, the connection to the Proverbs here often seems tenuous. But these are good fairy tales, each one involving many layers of meaning and inviting rereading. I read this to Theia.
* C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. It has been a long time since I read this book as a child and I deeply enjoyed reading it to my daughter for the first time. I have to admit, though, that I was surprised when Mr. Beaver says that Jadis is the daughter of Adam and Lilith. That’s weird, but it was the only grating flaw in the book.
* C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. Another book I read first a long time ago. It was far better than I had remembered, full of deep, rich wisdom.
* W. H. Lewis, Levantine Adventurer: The Travels and Missions of the Chevalier, d’Arvieux, 1653-1697. This is the first book I’ve ever read by C. S. Lewis’s brother. I found it in the Medford library. My review is here.
* Rich Lusk, Paedofaith: A Primer on the Mystery of Infant Salvation and a Handbook for Covenant Parents. Thought-provoking, challenging to me as a parent, and well worth reading.
* Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World. Someday, I’ll post a longer review of this book, which I received as part of Thomas Nelson’s Book Review Bloggers program (now renamed BookSneeze). I enjoyed the story Mansfield told and was charmed by his description of Guinness’s generosity toward its workers, but found myself wishing that there were a stronger and more obvious connection between that generosity and the founder’s Christian faith. I guess in general I wanted more from the book, but I did enjoy it.
* Nicole Mazzarella, This Heavy Silence. A slow-paced, thoughtful novel from a Christian writer.
* E. Nesbit, The Book of Dragons. I read this to Theia; it was a lot of fun.
* Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander. I had read this before, got part of the way through the series, and then, for some reason, failed to continue. So I went back and started over. Having read this novel before didn’t diminish my enjoyment of it at all.
* Jeffrey Overstreet, Through a Screen Darkly: Looking Closer at Beauty, Truth and Evil in the Movies. I have long enjoyed Jeffrey Overstreet’s online reviews. Highly recommended to help you look closer at the movies and think better about them.
* Paul Park, A Princess of Roumania; The Tourmaline; The White Tyger; and The Hidden World. One long novel, divided into four volumes. I enjoyed it a lot, though I didn’t find the ending entirely satisfactory.
* Eugene H. Peterson, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work. I have a like-dislike relationship with Peterson’s books. I don’t care for his approach to Scripture, which often seems to draw on higher criticism and what I consider liberal scholarship. But his insights into pastoral work are wonderful.
* Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Some very good things here, especially on the push toward “total work” (as opposed to leisure and worship), toward defining people in terms of their work, and on worship as a bulwark against “total work.”
* Nina Planck, Real Food: What to Eat and Why. Planck, who has established farmer’s markets in various cities, argues strongly (and sometimes scientifically) for the health benefits of … well, of the kind of diet your grandparents used to have. She contends that raw milk (and cream!), cheese, butter, and other dairy products are good for you; that it’s good to eat red meat as well as chicken (including the skin!) and certain types of fish; that eggs are good for you; that cholesterol scares aren’t worth getting frightened by; and more.
* Barbara Pym, Some Tame Gazelle. The first of Barbara Pym’s novels. It’s slow, quiet, and often funny, much like the village lives she describes.
* Paul Shepherd, More Like Not Running Away. An intense novel; I eagerly await the sequels that have been promised.
* Russell Smith, Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress. A very helpful guide. Often, I asked my wife about the things Smith says (“Is that really what looks good?”), only to have her confirm his opinions again and again.
* Robert Spencer, Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions about the World’s Fastest-Growing Faith. Very well documented. Joins many other helpful volumes written by Spencer.
* Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island. A long time ago, when Theia asked what other books I had out in my office library, I used to tell her that I had many exciting books I could read to her someday. I’d name a few, but I often mentioned Treasure Island as an extremely exciting story. This past fall, I finally got to read it to her. I doubt she understood all the words, but she was certainly grabbed by the story.
One night, after I read the passage where Long John Silver falls on a good sailor and stabs him to death, I turned out the light and started to pray before bed … and Theia interrupted and said, “Pray that God would kill Long John Silver.” Do you pray for fictional characters? I did. I figure they are (as Doug Wilson said to me, when I talked to him about it some time later) “typological placeholders”: they stand in for real life people. So praying for the death of Long John Silver is praying for God to kill all such wicked people.
I prayed, and then Theia spoke up again: “Pray that God would kill his parrot, too.”
* Deborah Tannen, I Only Say This Because I Love You: How the Way We Talk Can Make or Break Family Relationships Throughout Our Lives. Very helpful. Tannen is not a psychiatrist, psychologist, or counselor; rather, she’s a linguistics professor. Her work involves careful study of how people communicate, and that makes this book extremely helpful for counseling, as well as for understanding your own communication patterns.
* John Thorne, Outlaw Cook. Fun reading, even though I didn’t attempt any of the recipes. Thorne writes well, challenges those who are bound to recipes, and interacts with (and often argues with) other famous food writers. His chapter on Martha Stewart is well worth reading (see here).
* James Thurber, The 13 Clocks. Read to Theia; a lot of fun. See here.
* Megan Whalen Turner, The Thief. A fun fantasy novel, though I do wonder why Turner set it in a Greece that never was instead of simply creating her own fantasy world entirely. This is the first in a series, and I’ll keep reading.
* Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy and On the Banks of Plum Creek. Read to Theia. I especially enjoyed all the eating that takes place in Farmer Boy.
* Valerie Worth, All the Small Poems and Fourteen More and Peacock and Other Poems. Absolutely wonderful. Worth is now one of my favorite poets. What’s strange is that libraries put these books in the juvenile section, as if the fact that these are small poems must mean that they are (only) for small people.
* Jane Yolen, Raising Yoder’s Barn. Gorgeous. So often when I see lists of great children’s books, I’m disappointed. I go and look up those highly recommended books and find that they were published in the 1970s and the artwork strikes me as sloppy and unattractive. I’m glad that from, perhaps, the 1990s to today, more and more books are coming out with beautiful artwork that complements well-written stories. This is just one example, but now I wish I had written down more of the books I’ve been reading to my daughter.
Imago Dei
Those who don’t perceive beauty in the face of a Down’s syndrome person are blind to all beauty or are so fearful of difference that they must at once turn away from every encounter with it. In every face — in even the plainest and the most unfortunate countenances — there is some precious aspect of the divine image of which we are a reflection, and if you look with an open heart, you can see an awesome beauty, a glimpse of something so radiant it gives you joy —Dean Koontz, Seize the Night, 280.