From Word To Word

Dave Humphrey gave me a book a month or so ago, a collection of pages really, a printout of a pdf  document.  It was a novel, written by Robin Sloan and entitled Annabel Scheme.  Dave passed the book to me, he said, because it had been published in an interesting way, where the author had solicited people, a posse of patrons as he calls them, to sponsor the project in return for a copy of the book when it was completed.  This idea intrigued me, and I put the pile of pages on my desk to await a more or less quiet afternoon, which finally happened yesterday.

Sloan describes the novel as “Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century”, but I am not sure this accurately describes the sense of the book for me.  It feels like a less drug-induced Philip K. Dick mashed with a more tech-savy Douglas Adams and a more playful William Gibson, all writing of a world with demon-possessed computers and ghosts using electric lines as an internet to haunt the living.  The paranormal is mixed liberally with the technological, and both are infused with a mischievous and affectionate satire of google, hard-boiled detective novels, start-up culture, urban ghost stories, and sundry other things.  It may not be great literature, but it is certainly good entertainment.

The story moves quickly and directly with a minimum of description and introspection.  In some places it reads almost like a more fully realized film script rather than a novel, but this feels like a strength rather than a fault because the tone and the narrative arc proceed in similarly easy ways.  The accomplishment of the novel, I think, is that it can move at this pace and still comment interestingly on the almost mystical ways that our culture relates to its technology.  It manages both to be an entertainment and a playful reflection on the gods and the ghosts in our machines.

All this is encouraging to me, because it is an example of  an alternative publishing model that has been largely successful in achieving its admittedly limited goals.  Though the model is still unable to provide a sufficient living for the author, it is perhaps a movement in that direction as it reimagines patronage apart from wealthy benefactors or corporate sponsors or government grants, where people can come together to support the kind of writing and music and art that is most meaningful to them.  I am interested to see if Sloan, or someone else for that matter, will be able to push the model further, to make the posse of patrons a means through which our increasingly virtual communities are able to choose and support adequately the artists that will define and represent them.

I have written before about how much I love the strange, dream-like, mystical novels of Charles Williams, but they are hard to come by now. They can be purchased new, of course, though they are never in stock and are often “unavailable to order a this time,” and I do not often buy books new in any case. My local library is even less helpful, as it usually is, so I am reduced to looking in used bookstores and thrift shops, which has so far met with only very limited success.

Last semester, however, I found one of Williams’ novel’s in the EBC library discard sale, so I thought I might check to see if there were any more of his books in the school’s collection. I had low expectations. The EBC library, serving a Bible College as it does, is adequate in areas like theology and biblical studies, but its English Literature section is literally a few shelves in the furthest corner of the stacks. I did not even bother to check the computer catalogue. I just went to the section and scanned the shelves, and there, against all my expectations, were every one of Williams’ novels and a book of his theology besides.

In retrospect, I should have expected that a Bible College library would be likely to include the fiction of a writer who was also a Christian theologian and a who was, perhaps more importantly, a close friend of C. S. Lewis, for several decades now the closest thing that Protestants have to a patron saint. None of analysis after the fact was able to spoil my mood, however, and I have just finished the first of these books, entitled Descent into Hell.

The novel is superficially about a group of actors who are putting on a play at the residence of its famous playwright, Peter Stanhope. More deeply, it is concerned with the way that some of these actors relate to themselves as selves. For example, the heroine, Pauline Anstruther, sometimes sees a copy of herself approaching along the street, and another of the actors, Laurence Wentworth, creates for himself a succubus that is never really distinct from his own substance, and he falls into a kind of demonic narcissism. Others of the characters are also self-obsessed in the more usual ways, and much of the book’s philosophizing has to do with this question of self.

In this context, Williams has Stanhope muse to Pauline about the shift that occurs from the Greek philosophical tradition’s “know thyself” to the Christian tradition’s “love thy neighbour”. The shift, he implies, is not just from knowing to loving, but also, perhaps primarily, from the self to the neighbour. Though Stanhope does not articulate this distinction at any great length, some of his other comments make it unlikely that he is opposing knowing the self and loving the neighbour absolutely. Rather, he seems to be arguing that it is only possible to know the self through loving the neighbour, that loving the neighbour is precisely what produces true knowledge of the self, and the conclusion of the plot goes so far as to suggest that knowing the self apart from loving the neighbour is productive only of a kind of hell on earth, where the human imagination creates succubi for itself and the dead cannot rest in their graves.

Of course, Stanhope’s observation makes most of Christian history an irony, since Christianity, especially in its Protestant guises, has been intimately bound up with all the various individualisms of personal salvation, democratic politics, capitalist economics, individual rights, and private property. The self trumps the neighbour here, again and again, resoundingly, even if this self remains largely unknown. What is more, this triumph of the self produces, at least according to the logic of the novel, a descent into hell on earth, and it implies that the Christian tradition, far from bringing about the heaven of the neighbour, has been far more concerned with bringing about the hell of the self.

I am not certain whether Williams would actually have levelled this criticism against Christianity, but I think that his logic is worth following. If Christianity, or any other faith for that matter, has anything worth saying in this age where the hell of the self has become our greatest ambition, surely it is that we can only come to know ourselves by loving our neighbours.  This is surely the only thing that it has ever had to say, the thing that it has always been saying, without end, though it is all too seldom heard, so I will quote:

“This is the first and greatest commandment: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Though I have read enough to know how little I have read, I am still quite often shocked by the size of the gaps in my knowledge, even in subjects where I am interested and fairly widely experienced.  My friend Lenore Walker revealed another of these gaps for me last week when she lent me a little paperback novel called The Garden Behind the Moon by Howard Pyle.  I was at first under the impression that the book had been written quite recently, because the edition that was loaned to me was published in 2002, and it does not list an original publication date, but I had only read a few pages before it became apparent that it had actually been written at a much earlier time or that it had been written by someone who was very skillfully imitating the style and language of that earlier time.  A cursory internet confirmed that the book actually dates from 1895, and the same search revealed also that its author was, and still is to some degree, a quite famous illustrator and writer of books for children.

Now, I have taught courses on children’s literature more than once, have read vast quantities of books for children, have a habit of asking people about their favourite children’s stories, and have associated for many years with homeschoolers, who generally take their children’s reading very seriously, but I had never heard of Howard Pyle, at least not in such a way that I would remember him.  Yet he wrote stories in a wide range of genres, from poetry to pirate stories (The Book of Pirates) to retellings of the Robin Hood stories (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood) to fairytales (Twilight Land).  One of his historical fictions (Men of Iron) was even made into a film called The Black Shield of Falworth.  How I failed to find him until know I cannot quite imagine.

What is more, as successful as he may have been as an author, Pyle was probably best known in his lifetime as an artist and illustrator, earning praise from artists as influential as Van Gogh, who wrote that Pyle’s pictures struck him “dumb with admiration”.  Whether he is depicting pirates, like  Marooned Pirate and Pirate Left for Dead, or fairytale themes, like The Mermaid and David Sat Down on the Wooden Bench, or portraits, like Catherine de Vaucelles, in Her Garden and Abraham Lincoln, or civil war scenes, like The Charge and The Nation Makers, Pyle’s pictures are filled with a gravity and an emotion that make them compelling.  I am particularly drawn to some of his black and white drawings, like The Forging of Balmung or his rendering of a child being taught by an angel to play the flute.  Though my artistic judgment weighs very much less than Van Gogh’s, these pictures fill me with admiration also.

Having found so much to enjoy in its author, I returned to The Garden at the Back of the Moon with renewed interest, and I found its style and its subject and its sensibility to be very much like George MacDonald’s At the Back of the North Wind, which is probably my favourite children’s novel.  Both books are fairytales, not in the vulgar sense of being peopled with tiny creatures who all live in flowers, but in a truer sense that I am not really able to define but that is described by George MacDonald in “The Fantastic Imagination“  and by G. K. Chesterton in “The Ethics of Elfland” and by J. R. R. Tolkien in “On Fairy Stories” and by  C. S. Lewis in “Sometimes Fairy Stories May say Best What Needs to be Said”.   The kind of fairytale that these authors describe is much rarer, at least in my experience, and The Garden Behind the Moon is just such a story.  This fairytale quality, whatever it may be, gives the novel a solemnity and a wonder and a power, even despite the bits that sound a little laboured and preachy to the contemporary ear.  It is a beautiful book and one that I will be sure to share with my children.

More importantly, I have the feeling that my relationship with the work of Howard Pyle may be only just beginning.

I found a copy of Orson Welles’ Les Bravades for less than two dollars in a bargain shop yesterday.  I had never heard of the book before, but it is a collection of pictures and writing that he made for his daughter while he was attending the festival of Les Bravades in Saint-Tropez on the Riviera, a kind of picture book and extended postcard all in one.

The book tells the story of Saint Tropez who was beheaded by Emperor Nero in Pisa, where his skull remains, covered in silver leaf.  His headless body was set adrift in a small boat, and it came to rest at a small fishing town that was, from that point forward, known as Saint-Tropez.  A grand church was built for the saint’s remains, but it was subsequently destroyed when the town was captured by Saracens, which was when the remains themselves were also lost, but the town continued to honour Saint Tropez even without his remains.  Even when certain Protestant groups were trying to abolish iconography, by force if necessary,the town organized an armed defense of the saint’s shrine.  The yearly celebration of Les Bravades, then, is to commemorate the saint himself, but also to remember the defense of the saint’s shrine by the people of Saint-Tropez and the disbandment of the Tropezian Army army by Louis XIV in 1678, hence the military nature of the festivities and the continuous firing of antique weapons that is one of its distinctive elements.

The book’s illustrations are mostly line drawings, many of which have a certain amount of colour added to them, but usually only gestures of colour, here and there, highlighting rather than actually colouring the drawings.  The pictures range greatly in size, from individual figures only a couple of inches tall to full page scenes.  They are clearly sketches, drawn hurriedly, and meant as a personal gift rather than for public consumption, but there is something unique and beautiful about them, perhaps just for this reason.  They are, in many respects, just the kind of personal and amateur art that I have elsewhere argued should be encouraged as a way of making of art the gift that it should be, and I enjoyed this aspect of them very much.

I am not sure how widely available the book is, but it is well worth picking up if you should happen to come across it.

I have been reading Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, and though it is not something that I will likely write about in any greater detail, I thought that I would share a particularly beautiful sentence:

“Emerging from a courtyard full of hanging flowers and caged birds just at the hour when the lights came on, and ghosts came out, they saw their fun-house shadows taken by the village surfaces drenched in sunset, as sage, apricot, adobe, and wine colours were infiltrated with night, and up and down the wandering streets they followed their noses at last to the waterfront, lampglow smeared about each municipal bulb up on the green-painted iron posts, music coming all directions, from radios, accordions, singers unaccompanied, jukeboxes, guitars.”

Frederick Buechner’s The Sacred Journey is a spiritual autobiography in the tradition that runs through English literature from John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to C. S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy, and it is not an unworthy addition to the genre.  Like all the best examples of this tradition, its narrative is reflective and anecdotal, never fearing to take a philosophical or meditative aside, and it is in these asides that its most significant moments are found.

For example, after describing a particularly memorable summer from his childhood, Buechner begins to reflect on the nature of things that have been but no longer are.  “Summers end, to be sure,” he says, “and when the sun finally burns out like a match, they will end permanently; but be that as it may, it can never be otherwise than that there was a time when summers were.”   Buechner is suggesting here that there is something unique and irreplaceable about the things that have been, even though they no longer are, something that is defined precisely by having been.  Though things must certainly pass away from the present and from being, they thereby pass into a state of having been, a state that can never pass away.  He articulates this idea more explicitly a little further on, saying, “Once a moment has come into being, its having-beeness is beyond any power in heaven or earth, in life or death, to touch,”  and he argues that “everything that ever was will continue eternally to be what has been – a part of the wholeness and truth of eternity itself.”

This sense of what has been as irreplaceable reminds me very strongly of G. K. Chesterton’s Napoleon of Notting Hill, where Adam Wayne, the protagonist, defends his love for Notting Hill in much the same terms. “Notting Hill has fallen,” he says, “Notting Hill has died.  But that is not the tremendous issue. Notting Hill has lived.” “There has never been anything in the world absolutely like Notting Hill.  There will never be anything quite like it to the crack of doom.  I cannot believe anything but that God loved it as much as he must surely love anything that is itself and irreplaceable.  But even for that I do not care.  If God, with all His thunders, hated it, I loved it.”

Both Chesterton and Buechner are suggesting something quite profound here, I think: that the past is valuable, not merely because it has formed the present, and not merely because it may keep us from repeating our mistakes in the future,  but simply because it was what it was and is therefore an inextricable part, as Buechner says, of the wholeness and truth of eternity.  This moment now, which will soon have been, is irreplaceable.  It will have been for all eternity what it is now, and this perhaps changes how we should live it, how we should experience it.

Perhaps this idea also changes how we should read Buechner’s very text, how we should understand his entire project.  Perhaps we need to understand it, not as a spiritual autobiography at all, not properly speaking, but as a recollection of the things that were, as a recollection of the things that will always have been, for and through Buechner, a part of the wholeness and truth of eternity.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, is a tidy little book.  Its narrative wanders, but only in the most precise and deliberate ways.  Its events are scattered unchronologically, but they have been placed by hand rather than flung indiscriminately.  It is the kind of book that feels light at first but grows heavier the longer it is carried.  It is short and deft and nimble and effortless, a lovely little book.

The death in the title is foretold in several ways.  Structurally, much of the book is spent foretelling Santiago Nasar’s murder, announcing it in the first line and describing the events leading up to it, all before it ever takes place. The murder is also foretold within the narrative itself, as the murderers alert almost the whole town to their intention and the reasons for it, so that virtually everyone but Santiago is aware of the impending murder before it happens. Santiago also has a dream about his own death, though it is misinterpreted and ignored both by his mother and by himself.

The force of the book comes from the ways that these three kinds of foretelling come to inform each other. For example, the dream has a kind of inevitability about it.  Dreams are the signs of fate.  They can be interpreted, but they cannot be avoided.  A death foretold in a dream is a death that will certainly come to pass.  The novel itself moves according to a similarly unavoidable logic.  Once the author has foretold that the death will take place, has written about it as if it has already occurred, the death must inevitably come.  There is no escaping it.  This sense of inevitability then comes to inform how the murderers themselves foretell the crime they will commit.  Though it would normally seem impossible that a murder could be committed after the killers have alerted a whole town, the inevitability of the dream and of the novel seem to make their intentions equally unavoidable.  They take on the quality of prophecies.

Yet, these foretellings also combine to undermine the very idea of foretelling as such. The dream had initially been interpreted as a good omen, and the warnings of the murderers were interpreted as mere drunken ravings, and both would have remained interpreted in this way had the murder not occurred. They are reinterpreted as true foretellings only after the fact, much the same way as the narrative of the novel itself is able to foretell the murder only because it has in a sense already been accomplished. The foretelling only becomes apparent, perhaps only becomes created, after the event that it foretells.

In this way, the novel recreates the structure and the problem of prophecy as such, and does so on several parallel levels.  It embodies the paradox that a foretelling is only certain after the fact, only once it has come to pass, only when it is no longer a foretelling, only at a time when it has the inevitability of history.  Perhaps this is a function that the supernatural sign, the social movement, and the literary work all have in common: they all prophesy something that has already come.  They all foretell, but only after the fact.

I posted some time ago about textual apparatus and the web, and I have been thinking ever since about the kinds of tools that might be most appropriate to the kinds of textuality that find their place on the web.  More recently, I read Ivan Illich describe his use of footnotes as a place to share the things that he has collected through his reading, and I began to wonder how this more convivial approach to textual apparatus might be applied to the web as well.

In the midst of this wondering, I became increasingly dissatisfied with how I was linking to books and to their authors in my posts.  Sometimes I could find a useful place to link, but most often I was merely linking to some brief biographical page or to a short review of a book, usually something that I had searched out for the purpose and had not even bothered to read very thoroughly.  Yet, when I began actually studying other people’s linking practises, there did not seem to be many alternatives.  As long as people were linking to something very specific, the links were interesting, but as soon as they began linking in a general way, in order to provide a citation or some context or some supplementary information, the links ceased being useful.  They were links to information that was too general to be useful as a citation and too uninteresting to be useful for anything else.  I felt that this kind of linking was often worse than not linking at all, and it was certainly not a kind of linking that was reflective of my own reading of the web, but I was not certain what I might do instead.

A few days ago, however, I read a post called “Notes on Methodology” on the Philosophy and Modern Carpentry blog that was working through the difficulties of citing the web.  It is a longer post, and it does not touch on the question of citation until somewhere near the middle, but it argues essentially that citing the web is difficult because the web is changing c0nstantly and because, even with third party web archiving projects, it is not possible to ensure that what has been cited one day, or even one second, will be there the next.

Now, I have no real solution to this problem, and it is not even a problem that troubles me very much as such, but it is a problem that gave me a moment of clarity.  I realized suddenly that citing the web was never going to be the same as citing a physical artifact, at least not in the technical ways that academic writing has come to understand citation, but that citing the web might very well allow the kinds of footnotes that Illich was making, footnotes as a kind of sharing, and might do so to a greater degree than even Illich could have imagined.  Citations, in this sense, would perhaps cease to be useful as references, and this would remain a problem for a certain kind of writing, but they would become much more useful as a kind of recommendation, a kind of sharing.  They would cease saying, “This person wrote these words in this edition of this text on this date,” and they would begin saying, “This person is an interesting writer, or thinker, or artist, so take some time to check this link, however much it might have changed since I posted it for you.”  They would cease providing a justification or a supplement to what has been written, and they would begin providing the textual connections that the author feels are worth sharing.

In that moment, I realized how it was that I will change my practise of linking.  Rather than linking an author’s name to a brief biography that I would never be bothered to read myself, I will link to an essay or an interview or a story, something that I have enjoyed that has been created by or about the author.  Rather than linking the title of a book to a synopsis or a short review that is useful only at the level of basic information, I will link to an interview with the author or a scholarly article about the book.   Instead of accepting the illusion that these links can and should be made to justify and support the facts of what I am writing, an illusion that most of the web seems to maintain subconsciously, even if only in the most general way, I will foster the practise of making my links into recommendations to the things that I find interesting about the authors, books, directors, films, and ideas that become the subjects of my writing.  Instead of asking links to be technical or informational, I will ask them to be personal and convivial.

If everyone were to link like this, perhaps, just perhaps, we would end up following links more often, rather than just noting that they are there.

I stopped by a little thrift store on my way home from work.  I often do this.  I pick up a sandwich from a deli, and I eat it while looking through the used books in Bibles for Missions or The Salvation Army Store, a different place each week.  Today I struck gold.  Among several less exciting finds, I discovered first editions of two Somerset Maugham books: Catalina: A Romance and Great Novelists and Their Novels.  I am not an edition hunter exactly.  I am usually more interested in having a good solid copy of a book than in having a particular edition of it.  Even so, I appreciate the pleasure of finding something rare as much as the pleasure of finding something common, and today’s discoveries gave me much delight.

I have written several timed on the poetry of the list, particularly with reference to the writing of Georges Perec, so I enjoyed what Umberto Eco had to say on the subject in an interview with Spiegel, a piece to which Dave Humphrey directed me this afternoon.  You should read the interview yourself, so I will not say very much about it.  I will just list the following ideas that I think deserve some future discussion.

1. “The list is the origin of culture.”

2. “How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists.”

3. “The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it.”

4. “We like Lists because we don’t want to die.”

5. “I like lists for the same reason other people like football or pedophilia. People have their preferences.”

6. “The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions.”

Of course. Eco has much more to say about lists than a list could convey, about education and about culture and about libraries and about many other things, so you should take this list only as an invitation to read further.