In Covert Praise of Socrates

Merton recounts an influential teacher and mentor, Mark Van Doren, and in doing so, sketches what I still aspire to (though often failing) in terms of pedagogy--the great tradition of the Socratic method:

"Mark would come into the room and, without any fuss, would start talking about whatever was to be talked about. Most of the time he asked questions. His questions were very good, and if you tried to answer them intelligently, you found yourself saying excellent things that you did not know you knew, and that you had not, in fact, known before. He had 'educed' them from you by his question. His classes were literally 'education'--they brought things out of you, they made your mind produce its own explicit ideas."

~Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 154

Beware of Metaphysics!

"Fortunately, this was one of the matters in which I decided to ignore his advice. Anyway, I went ahead and tried to read some philosophy. I never got very far with it. It was too difficult for me to master all by myself. People who are immersed in sensual appetites and desires are not very well prepared to handle abstract ideas. Even in the purely natural order, a certain amount of purity of heart is required before an intellect can get sufficiently detached and clear to work out the problems of metaphysics. I say a certain amount, however, because I am sure that no one needs to be a saint to be a clever metaphysician. I dare say there are plenty of metaphysicians in hell."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 104

The Psychology of Comfort

[Resuming a series on Merton's Seven Storey Mountain after a hiatus over Lent.]

Merton offers a concise but insightful take on on a feature of our collective psychology which has only increased since he made the observation:

"Indeed, the truth that many people never understand, until it is too late, is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most: and his suffering comes to him from things so little and so trivial that one can say that it is no longer objective at all. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 91

Faith, Hope, and "Gentlemanness"

In England Merton was enrolled at Oakham, a second-tier English public school in the Midlands. There he continued to encounter the strange blend of religion, nationalism, and lingering aristocracy that he associated with the Church of England. This becomes sadly humorous when he recalls the theological vision of the chaplain at Oakham:

"His greatest sermon was on the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians--and a wonderful chapter indeed. But his exegesis was a bit strange. However, it was typical of him and, in a way, of his whole church. "Buggy's" interpretation of the word "charity" in this passage (and in the whole Bible) was that it simply stood for "all that we mean when we call a chap a 'gentleman.'" In other words, charity meant good-sportsmanship, cricket, the decent thing, wearing the right kind of clothes, using the proper spoon, not being a cad or a bounder.

There he stood, in the plain pulpit, and raised his chin above the heads of all the rows of boys in black coats, and said, 'One might go through this chapter of St. Paul and simply substitute the word "gentleman" for "charity" wherever it occurs. "If I talk with the tongues of men and of angels, and be not a gentleman, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal...A gentleman is patient, is kind; a gentleman envieth not, dealeth not perversely; is not puffed up....A gentleman never falleth away"...'

[...]

The boys listened tolerantly to these thoughts. But I think St. Peter and the twelve Apostles would have been rather surprised at the concept that Christ had been scourged and beaten by soldiers, cursed and crowned with thorns and subjected to unutterable contempt and finally nailed to the Cross and left to bleed to death in order that we might all become gentlemen."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 81-82

Merton goes Orwellian

In his critique of the Church of England, Merton's prose brings to mind Orwell's stinging critique of class in The Road to Wigan Pier. Pointing out the conflation and assimilation of the "established" church, Merton writes:

"The Church of England depends, for its existence, almost entirely on the solidarity and conservativism of the English ruling class. Its strength is not in anything supernatural, but in the strong social and racial instincts which bind the members of this caste together; and the English cling to their Church the way they cling to their King and to their old schools: because of a big, vague, sweet complex of subjective dispositions regarding the English countryside, old castles and cottages, games of criticket in the long summer afternoons, tea-parties on the Thames, croquet, roast-beef, pipe-smoking, the Christmas panto, Punch and the London Times and all those other things the mere thought of which produces a kind of a warm and inexpressible ache in the English heart."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 72

Ordinary Saints, Unsuspecting Evangelists

Merton's prose ripples with hagiographic energy when he recalls the influence of a humble French family, the Privats in Murat, remembering "their kindness and goodness to me, and their peacefulness and their utter simplicity. They inspired real reverence, and I think, in a way, they were certainly saints. And they were saints in that most effective and telling way: sanctified by leading ordinary lives in a completely supernatural manner, santified by obscurity, by usual skills, by common tasks, by routine, but skills, tasks, routine which received a supernatural form from grace within."

Staying with them for a few weeks as a boy, the now-boy-become-monk considers the weight of their impact on his life:

"Those were weeks that I shall never forget, and the more I think of them, the more I realize that I must certainly owe the Privats for more than butter and milk and good nourishing food for my body. I am indebted to them for much more than the kindness and care they showed me, the goodness and delicate solicitude with which they treated me as their own child, yet without any assertive or natural familiarity. [...] I was glad of the love the Privats showed me, and was ready to love them in return. It did not burn you, it did not hold you, it did not try to imprison you in demonstrations, or trap your feet in the snares of interest. [...]

After all, this going to Murat was a great grace. Did I realize it? I did not know what grace was. And though I was impressed with the goodness of the Privats, I could not fail to realize what was its root and its foundation. And yet it never occurred to me at the time to think of being like them, of profiting in any way by their example. [...]

Who knows how much I owe to those two wonderful people? Anything I say about it is only a matter of guessing but, knowing their charity, it is to me a matter of moral certitude that I owe many graces to their prayers, and perhaps ultimately the grace of my conversion and even of my religious vocation. Who shall say? But one day I shall know, and it is good to be able to be confident that I will see them again and be able to thank them."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 62-65

The Architecture of Grace

Reflecting on St. Antonin, Merton's French hometown during his formative youth, he observes:

"Here, everywhere I went, I was forced, by the disposition of everything around me, to be always at least virtually conscious of the church. Every street pointed more or less inward to the center of the town, to the church. Every view of town from the exterior hills, centered upon the long grey building with its high spire.

The church had been fitted into the landscape in such a way as to become the keystone of its intelligibility. Its presence imparted a special form, a particular significance to everything else that they eye beheld, to the hills, the forests, the fields, the white cliff of the Rocher d'Anglars and to the red bastion of the Roc Rouge, to the winding river, and the green valley of the Bonnette, the town and the bridge, and even to the white stucco villas of the modern bourgeois that dotted the fields and orchards outside the precinct of the vanished ramparts: and the significance that was imparted was a supernatural one.

The whole landscape, unified by the church and its heavenward spire, seemed to say: this is the meaning of all created things: we have been made for no other purpose than that men may use us in raising themselves to God, and in proclaiming the glory of God. We have been fashioned, in all our perfection, each according to his own nature, and all our natures ordered and harmonized together, that man's reason and his love might fit in this one last element, this God-given key to the meaning of the whole.

Oh, what a thing it is, to live in a place that is so constructed that you are forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative!"

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 41.

Paradoxes for a Francophile

In chapter two of Part One, we find the young Thomas Merton returning to France, the land of his birth. It opens with this musing from the older Merton, in puzzled recollection:

"How did it ever happen that, when the dregs of the world had collected in western Europe, when Goth and Frank and Norman and Lombard had mingled with the rot of old Rome to form a patchwork of hybrid races, all of them notable for ferocity, hatred, stupidity, craftiness, lust, and brutality--how did it happen that, from all of this, there should come Gregorian chant, monasteries and cathedrals, the poems of Prudentius, the commentaries and histories of Bede, the Moralia of Gregory the Great, St. Augustine's City of God, and his Trinity, the writings of Anselm, St. Bernard's sermons on the Canticles, the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf and Langland and Dante, St. Thomas' Summa, and the Oxoniense of Duns Scotus?

How does it happen that even today a couple of ordinary French stonemasons, or a carpenter and his apprentice, can put up a dovecote or a barn that has more architectural perfection than the piles of eclectic stupidity that grow up at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars on the campuses of American universities?"

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, p. 33

Brothers: Elder, Prodigal, and Otherwise

"I suppose it is usual for elder brothers, when they are still children, to feel themselves demeaned by the company of a brother four or five years younger, whom they regard as a baby and whom they tend to patronise and look down upon. So when Russ and I and Bill made huts in the woods out of boards and tar-paper which we collected around the foundations of the many cheap houses which the speculators were now putting up, as fast as they could, all over Douglaston, we severely prohbitited John Paul and Russ's little brother Tommy and their friends from coming anywhere near us. And if they did try to come and get into our hut, or even to look at it, we would chase them away with stones.

When I think now of that part of my childhood, the picture I get of my brother John Paul is this: standing in a field, about a hundred years away from the clump of sumachs where we have built our hut, is this little perplexed five-year-old kid in short pants and a kind of a leather jacket, standing quite still, with his arms hanging down at his sides, and gazing in our direction, afraid to come any nearer on account of the stones, as insulted as he is saddened, and his eyes full of indignation and sorrow. And yet he does not go away. We shout at him to get out of there, to beat it, and go home, and wing a couple of more rocks in that direction, and he does not go away. We tell him to play in some other place. He does not move.

And there he stands, not sobbing, not crying, but angry and unhappy and offended and tremendously sad. And yet he is fascinated by what we are doing, nailing shingles all over our new hut. And his tremendous desire to be with us and to do what we are doing will not permit him to go away. The law written in his nature says that he must be with his elder brother, and do what he is doing: and he cannot understand why this law of love is being so wildly and unjustly violated in his case."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 25-26

The Best Laid Plans...

Continuing to meditate on the milieu of his parents' predictably unconventional sensibilities, Merton reflects:

"If we had continued as we had begun, and if John Paul and I had grown up in that house, probably this Victorian-Greek complex would have built itself up gradually, and we would have turned into good-mannered and earnest sceptics, polite, intelligent, and perhaps even in some sense useful. We might have become successful authors, or editors of magazines, professors at small and progressive colleges. The way would have been all smooth and perhaps I would never have ended up as a monk.

But it is not yet the time to talk about that happy consummation, the thing for which I most thank and praise God, and which is of all things the ultimate paradoxical fulfillment of my mother's ideas for me--the last thing she would ever have dreamed of: the boomerang of all her solicitude for an individual development."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, pp. 12-13

Bohemian Monks

"My father and mother were captives in that world, knowing they did not belong with it or in it, and yet unable to get away from it. They were in the world but not of it--not because they were saints, but in a different way: because they were artists."

~Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain, Harcourt, 1998, p. 3.

Here Merton, the writer, presages in a mirror his own struggles as an artist who, by the end of this journey, will also be trying to detach himself from the world by entering the cloister. Both the monk and the artist enact a bohemian refusal of "success" as dictated by bourgeois expectations.

Blogging Merton's "Seven Storey Mountain"

Over the holidays I finally began reading Thomas Merton's classic, The Seven Storey Mountain (in a lovely 50th anniversary edition that my gracious neighbors gave me several years ago). Reading it was just what I had hoped: a veritable retreat between two covers, the itinerary of a soul in the best Augustinian tradition. (Indeed, while Merton talks more about Thomas and his neo-scholastic heirs, Gilson and Maritain, it seems to me he absorbed an Augustinian sensibility--the parallels to the Confessions are striking.)

This was a significant book for me, so I'm going to try a little experiment here: blogging The Seven Storey Mountain as a way of revisiting it and paying homage to the book. My goals are quite minimal: simply to highlight some passages of Merton's charmed writing, with little if any commentary, across the sweep of the book, over the next several weeks. I hope these snippets might be an invitation for others to pilgrimage with Merton's masterpiece.

Top Reads 2009: Fiction

To culminate the 2009 retrospective, let's count-down my favorite fiction reads Letterman style, in reverse order. So here, without further adieu, are the five works of fiction that will continue to stick with me into the new year:

5. Wells Tower, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. I remember first reading Wells Tower back in March 2005, in a hilarious article for Harper's, "Bird-dogging the Bush Vote." That put him on my radar as a journalist. But then I started seeing his stories and was equally impressed. In fact, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned is one of the very few books I have ever pre-ordered, waitng for it to appear. I was not disappointed (indeed, I'm puzzled that this book hasn't gotten more attention in the glut of literary look-backs at year end). While the settings range from the contemporary Florida Keys to Viking-ravaged northern England (I'm not kidding), Tower's literary eye is trained on relationships of all sorts and stripes, particularly the awkward strains of family. And I found him refreshingly devoid of the "cleverness" that besets the McSweeney's crowd. Masterful, realistic dialogue; a literary style that's not indulgent; and a sense of humor that's not to be missed.

4. Nicholson Baker, U and I: A True Story. This one had been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years, unread. When the shock of Updike's death hit me (why did it affect me so?), I pulled this down from the shelf that night and devoured it. As with much of Baker's work, akin to Julian Barnes, classing it as "fiction" is not straightforwardly simple. (Indeed, while reading this I kept thinking of Barnes' chronicle of a literary obsession in Flaubert's Parrot.) But I find reading Baker sheer (guilty) pleasure.

3. Robertson Davies, The Fifth Business. This was a late 2009 read for me, finishing it just before Christmas. And I shouldn't have been reading it. While the rest of the family was Christmas shopping, I wandered into the $1 section of our local "Bargain Books" and found this volume. Still waiting for the family on the bench in the mall, I dove in and was immediately hooked. Davies, one of the great Canadian men of letters, is someone I should have read years ago, but never did. Fifth Business, the first volume of his Deptford Trilogy, is a wonderful way into Davies' strange blend of realism and mythology (a mythologized reality? realized mythology?). But I should confess that my relationship to the book is a bit strange since it narrates the life of a guilt-ridden boy born to Scots-Canadian Presbyterians in a small village in southwestern Ontario, so I'm a bit prone to over-identification. But Davies is a hard-nosed psychologist and a disciplined stylist. I'm looking forward to finishing the trilogy.

2. Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist. Any new book by Nicholson Baker would be on my must-read list. But a Nicholson Baker book whose protagonist is a poet? And who's regularly pontificating about theory? Sign me up! It's hard for me to communicate the pleasure I feel when reading Baker (this all began with The Mezzanine). It's as if reading "literary" fiction shouldn't be this fun, this delightful. Part of this probably stems from a kind of obnoxious insiderness, the winks and nods of allusions and references that are the inside jokes of literary culture. But I think it's more because Baker's writing is an exercise in attention--a sort of hallowing of the mundane (which, for Baker, always includes the fruits of our pop culture). Such attention is also at the heart of good poetry, which is why The Anthologist is just brilliant.

Tracking the charming neuroses of Paul Chowder, a middling poet unable to write the Introduction to his long overdue anthology, Only Rhyme. Chowder is a throwback and a romantic, devoted to rhyme and armed with an idiosyncratic account of meter. (It was hilarious to see Charles Simic, taking the bait, get sucked into a debate with the fictional Chowder in his NYRB review of The Anthologist!) But woven throughout is also a low-grade love story (Chowder's live-in girlfriend has finally given up on the relationship) drenched in beautiful longing. Even here he hallows the mundane. In fact, I can't resist putting two passages side-by-side:

What if sometime Roz let me hold her breasts again? Wouldn't that be incredible? Those soft familiar palm-loads of vulnberability--and I get to hold them? That's simply insane. Inconceivable. (p. 178)

And then later:

One time when Roz was still with me I came home late from a reading in Madison, Wisconsin, and she was already asleep, and so was the dog. I kicked Smacko in the head by mistake in the dark, not too hard, but he made a little growly yelp, and I said I was sorry to him, and that woke Roz. I got in bed, and she smelled so smilingly sleepy that soon I had my hand on her hip and I said, "Baby, that is one big sexy hip."

She stirred and said, "Yikes, what's going on here?"

I said, "I don't know, what's going on with you?"

She turned and unbuttoned her pajama top over me, and I could see one of her breasts outlined in the orange light coming from the street. Her breasts didn't have to rhyme, but in fact they did rhyme (pp. 203-204).

Did you catch that--"she smelled so smilingy sleepy that soon..."? The beauty of The Anthologist is that it retrospectively helps us appreciate what we should have seen all along: Baker's prose is positively poetic.

1. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel. Some books are so significant for me I'm too intimidated to write about them. (I don't think I've ever written about Jean Giraudoux's Choice of the Elect, which might be the most significant novel I've ever read.) Wolfe's gargantuan (662 pages!) Bildungsroman is still seeping into and out of the joints of my imagination. I spent the summer with it, including a week in Asheville, NC (the setting of the book, where I visited Wolfe's boyhood home in pilgrimage). Without any direct influence, I think it is a profoundly Augustinian meditation on selfhood and identity in terms of "exile" and "home." At times Wolfe's modernism is Joycean in its stream-of-consciousness peeks into the rattled mind of E.O. Gant. But it is the characters of this family that endure most (something like the characters of The Sound and the Fury). This book will be "with" me for a long time and I hope someday I'll be able to approach it more reflectively and critically.

Honorable mention: Philip Roth, The Ghost Writer. My first Roth, read in a little season spent with Jewish writers (including Bellow's Ravelstein and stories from The Collected Stories of Isaac Babel). While these are often meditations on exile and outsiderness, I find myself feeling most "outside" the literary world when I read Jewish-American writers--a sensation which has its own strange pleasures and temptations.

Top Reads 2009: Poetry

My poetry reading was varied and haphazard this year, but I would highlight the following five collections and poets for 2009:

• While it seems like it must have been ages ago, my reading log notes that I devoured Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters on January 1-2, 2009 (a Faber edition I recall buying in York). They are haunted by the suicide of their addressee (Sylvia Plath), and now also by allegations of Hughes' abuse and callousness in the relationship. But I guess I'm still enough of a New Critic to not let that detract from the poetry, like the eerie earthiness of "Karlsbad Caverns."

• I've praised Simon Armitage before--who I take to be the heir apparent to Hughes' Yorkshire poiesis. But when Armitage's Tyrannosaurus Rex Versus the Corduroy Kid arrived in the mail, I was sucked in on the first page, dropped everything, and dove in--until I got to the eleventh poem, "To the Women of the Merrie England Coffee Houses, Huddersfield" [follow that link and read immediately]. Then, enraptured, I could only respond by dropping Armitage and picking up my notebook to try my own hand at poetic making (coming back to Armitage's mastery quickly afterward).
  

• Charles Wright's latest collection, Sestets, gathers his work that has been trickling out in magazines and literary quarterlies over the past few years, including one of my all-time favorites, "Cowboy Up." This is an almost 'metaphysical' collection about which I hope to write in more detail soon.

• For something completely different, I was deeply marked by a week with Carl Sandburg, Selected Poems (in a LOA edition edited by Paul Berman). This was a treasured purchase from the celebrated Malaprop's bookstore in Asheville, NC and was a source of meditation while we stayed in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. During our time there, we also visited Sandburg's home near Flat Rock, NC. His gritty homage to Chicago is still a paen to the underside of glitzy America, and his honesty about the "working class" still rings true. His was an America that still made stuff, before all that was solid melted into thin air.
  

• 2009 will also be the year that I kept bumping into Albert Goldbarth in various places--like his poem, "Sentimental," which I recently noted. But it took me a while to connect this to a poem I highlighted back in 2008, a recent New Yorker poem, "The Way." He's now at the top of my "to-read" poetry list for 2010, along with Sherman Alexie and Anne Carson.
  

• Honorable mention: Keith Taylor, If the World Becomes So Bright. A collection of "Michigan" poems by a Michigan poet; a regional treat. And I love how the last lines capture our inbuilt semiotic proclivities to "read" the world: "I would like to be cold and clearheaded about / these events, but it is hard not to take them as signs."
  

Top Reads 2009: Nonfiction & Memoir

Julia Child, My Life in France

I bought this for my wife a couple of years ago, and then decided to cram it before going to see Julie & Julia. What a delightful surprise! Part travelogue, part cookbook (in a way), the book is an homage to a "simple" way of life that also relishes and revels in "the good things" of life. And it is a beautiful memoir of a marriage well-lived, without idealization or idolization.


Madeleine L'Engle, Two-Part Invention: The Story of Marriage

This is an oldie Deanna picked up at a thrift shop. After she devoured it, it was put on my must-read list. (I find this to be a delightful part of the friendship that is marriage: reading books together.) In the same spirit at My Life in France, L'Engle sketches the story of a kind of bohemian marriage, but this one is constrained by Christian commitments, and also beset by suffering.

Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food, with an Introduction by Michael Pollan

An timely, accessible, and representative collection of Berry's writings on food production, farming, and husbandry, including some fiction selections that picture mealtimes and practices of eating. The selections span his entire writing career (and the early selections show how prescient he was/is). An excellent introduction to, and compendium of, Berry's thought.

David Foster Wallace, This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Not sure where to place this in terms of genre, but DFW's 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College appeared as a book last spring. Part of me was cynical about stretching this into a little hardcover--accomplished by publishing it with one sentence per page. On the other hand, this makes reading it a sort of meditative exercise--which is fitting. I see Wallace trying to redeem cliche in this piece (something he was already doing in Infinite Jest), and in doing so, he hits upon the centrality of worship. I assigned this as required reading in my Intro to Philosophy class (right after we finished Augustine's Confessions and watched American Beauty).

Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem

With Eagleton's typical verve, and post-theory rancor, this book is a philosophically-astute account of poetry, and specifically reading poetry, that isn't afraid to actually appreciate poetry.




Honorable Mention: Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creating Writing. Playing on, and somewhat extending, Kenner's The Pound Era, McGurl considers the formative role of ever-expanding MFA programs on American post-war fiction up to the present. Having been sometimes tempted to enroll, this book birthed in me a principled resistance. (See also Louis Menand's review and discussion in the New Yorker.)

Top Reads 2009: Short Stories

It's that time of year again--time for retrospective lists of all sorts, and bibliophiles seem to be particularly prone to the temptation. I'll be continuing the tradition of my 2008, 2007, and 2005 reflections, with a new twist: an installment on short stories read in the past year, and maybe an installment on poets/poems.

Rather than a comprehensive list, let me begin by highlighting five short stories I read in 2009 (not necessarily published in 2009--though the selections will be New Yorker heavy). I don't pretend to make any claims about these being the "best" stories of the year; instead, these are the stories that, for various reasons, stuck with me, made an impact on me, or otherwise made a dent in my consciousness that, even now, still lingers.

• Charles D'Ambrosio, "The Open House," in The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms. A familial tale that presages the stories of Wells Tower (more on him in the 2009 Books retrospective).

• Jonathan Franzen, "Good Neighbors," New Yorker, June 8 & 15, 2009. Fabulous flaying of Volvo-driving urban-gentrifying liberals (i.e., us, minus the Volvo).

• William Styron, "Rat Beach," New Yorker, July 20, 2009. A war story in the spirit of Sassoon that includes this unctuous account of snails: "I couldn’t shake the memory of one ambulance that stalled, then jerked back and forth, jostling its poor passenger until the voice from within screamed “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” again and again. Poetry was no remedy for such a sound, and so I’d close the book and lie there in a trance, trying to shut out all thought of past or future, and focus on the tent’s plywood deck, where there was usually at least one huge brown snail, with a shell the size of a Ping-Pong ball, propelling itself laboriously forward and trailing a wake of mucilaginous slime with the hue and consistency of semen. Giant African snails, they were called, and they slid all over the island, numberless, like a second landing force; they woke us up at night and we actually heard them sibilantly dragging their tracks across the flooring and colliding, with a tiny report like the cracking open of walnuts."

• Alice Munro, "Save the Reaper," in The Love of a Good Woman. Set in my old haunts near Lake Huron in southwestern Ontario, this is Munro at her Southern (Ontario) Gothic best.

• Sherman Alexie, "War Dances," New Yorker, August 10 & 17, 2009. Explores the dynamics of Native American displacement in the Pacific Northwest, with charming (Adn knowing) references to country music, and an undercurrent of deep longing.

• Honorable mention: Jonatham Lethem, "Procedure in Plain Air," New Yorker October 26, 2009. This is a supercharged story on several different levels, exploring the dynamics of complicity with a kind of realistic surrealism (that is, the kind you experience when something real is happening, and you say to a friend, "This is surreal.") It also regularly tempts the reader to read it as an allegory (say, of Gitmo). In these ways, it reminded me of Ursula K. LeGuin's, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
  

Prodigal Critics

In his Chronicle Review essay, "Prodigal Critics," Jeffrey Williams provides a very nice little history of shifts in criticism in the last century--specifically the rise of New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks [who, I have to confess, are secret favorites of mine, lining the shelves here at home] who in turn gave birth to their own critics, like Harold Bloom, Stanley Fish, and Stephen Greenblatt. Williams' brief is that "theory" in the US was more home-grown than a foreign (i.e., French) import. Worth reading--there's an education crammed into this little essay.

Locating Religion: On "Faith and Place"

Mark Wynn's Faith & Place: An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology (Oxford, 2009) is one of the most interesting books in philosophy of religion I've read this year. As he notes in the opening, philosophical theologians tend to be concerned with place only to transcend it, focusing on God's omni-presence which relativizes differences in place. And yet religious practice is always placed, local, often in very intentional spaces--what he calls "the place-relative character of religious belief and practice." So Wynn sets for himself the task of articulating "the differentiated religous significance of place."

Wynn is primarily interested in knowledge of place as an analogue for knowledge of God. Drawing on figures such as Bachelard [an old favorite of mine], LeFebvre, and Bourdieu, he contests the paradigms of “knowing” in contemporary philosophy of religion (Swinburne and Alston are recurring examples throughout the book). The way we “know” a place, Wynn argues, points to a kind of embodied, affective, tacit knowing which gets little attention in philosophy of religion because of the regnant epistemology assumed in the field. So knowledge “of” place is a kind of limit case, pointing to a different kind of knowing, which then primes us to consider knowledge of God in similar terms. This alternative account of knowing is most fully developed in chapter 8, on the “aesthetic” dimension of knowing. (Throughout the book Wynn regularly builds bridges to poetry by autobiographically exploring his friendship with poet Edmund Cusick--and the way their friendship was tied to places.)

However, while this is the core argument of the book, Wynn is also attentive to the religious significance of place—how places are charged “sites” of knowledge (e.g., in a chapter on pilgrimage). Thus he is concerned both with knowledge of place and the “placed” nature of knowledge. An excellent book and an encouraging sign of alternative trajectories in philosophy of religion.

Boersma on Nouvelle Theologie's "Sacramental Ontology"

Contemporary debates in “postmodern” theology often return to ground covered by a mid-twentieth century Catholic theological “sensibility” described as la nouvelle théologie (particularly questions of nature and grace, immanence and transcendence). A movement of ressourcement, these nouvelle theologians looked to the ancient fathers as a resource for engaging contemporary culture. And it is just this sort of constructive retrieval that characterizes much of the best work now being done in theology, which is why Hans Boersma's new book, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford UP, 2009) is such a gift. Boersma’s comprehensive, carefully-researched monograph will now stand as a classic study of this movement. Immersed in the primary documents, but with one eye on contemporary debates, Boersma especially shows that what was at stake in nouvelle théologie was a comprehensive vision of culture. These were not just intramural debates in ecclesiology or liturgical theology; nouvelle théologie was concerned with nothing short of a sacramental ontology—a theological account of the nature of reality per se. It is this ontology that unifies a coherent theological “sensibility” associated with a diverse array of theologians. Boersma also provides a reading which sees the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI as extensions of the ressourcement vision rather than a derailing of it. Indispensible.

The Year of the Flood

Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (Bloomsbury, 2009) chronicles the sort of post-apocalyptic world familiar to readers of Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, or Cormac McCarthy's The Road--worlds devastated by those supposedly civilizing animals we call humans.

In Atwood's world, the corporation has trumped the state, the suburbs have fallen into ruin, the artificial has replaced the natural, and murderous violence has become commonplace in the sandlots where kids continue to play out their make-believe games. And yet, somehow, Atwood's world isn't nearly as haunting as McCarthy's wending, minimalist Road. But it sure ain't Mayberry, either.

Our focus is drawn to a band of resistance centred in "The Gardeners," a green cult, living out a consistently vegan discipline rooted in an interesting combination of biblical metaphors and an unblinkered appreciation for natural selection, articulated in a rich set of practices including their own liturgical calendar of Feast Days and Saints Days (including some Canadians like Saint David Suzuki and Saint Terry Fox!), as well as their own hymnbook. (Indeed, I'm starting to think that knowledge of theology is a handicap while reading this novel because one could so easily get sucked into the minituae of Gardener theology, and be tempted to draw all sorts of parallels and analogies with Christian theology. It would be an interesting read for Christians concerned with creation care--but I'd worry that this would be instrumentalizing the story Atwood wants to tell.) The Gardeners are a remnant, squatting on what corners and ruins of former suburbia they can find, led by a cadre of Adams and Eves who are responsible for catechesis, education, and government--but regularly haunted by CorpSeCorp, the privatized industry that has assumed responsibility for what used to pass for "the common good."

While the world as described seems bad enough, things get worse when a plague ("the Waterless Flood") is unleashed--"a plague that infects no Species but our own" (p. 424), thus giving Creation a chance to try again without us.

So not unlike The Road, this is a relationship-as-the-means-of-survival story. We follow a small band of acquaintances whose relationships are bound by a kind of love, though they might not think so. In particular, the book is organized around Toby (a Gardeners convert who becomes an Eve) and Ren (a child in the Gardeners commune). The book is spliced in two parallel tracks: the "Toby" track is narrated in the third person (just who is that?), while the "Ren" track is told in the first person. We regularly jump from Year 25, "The Year of the Flood," back through the years leading up to Year 25, back as far as Year 10. Eventually, these two tracks intersect in the final chapters. (It is also significant that time in the book is organized according to the liturgical calendar of the Gardeners.)

What to make of it? It's been a long time since I'd read any Atwood (who is the doyen of Canadian letters). Having, of late, read stuff that wears its literary flourish on its sleeve (Thomas Wolfe, John Updike, etc.), Atwood's prose is spare and simple--and yet not quite the charmed minimalism of McCarthy. But it has a remarkably cumulative effect--she is carefully drawing a character such that 300 pages in, one can look back on a rich development that seemed transparent at the time. (Is this is the sign of someone whose medium is rightly the novel rather than the short story?) While her lexicon is tight and rather puritan (I can see how the realism of Ren's first person demands this, but not sure why the third person narration of Toby's experience had to hew to the same rules--perhaps this is a sign I'm missing something about that narrator?) And in the end, there were just a few too many "coincidences" for me; or at least, it seemed to me that the world would have been bigger, and our encounters more anonymous, then the close of the story suggests.

But that said, the story also turns into a beautiful page-turner with 100 pages to go, and the glimpses of friendship, charity, and compassion are welcome respites in such an appalling world.