literary criticism

The Weekly Wrap: May 25-31

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The Weekly Wrap: May 25-31

AI Laziness

A romantic novel in which the AI prompt was never edited out. A White House report on health citing non-existent sources. An article with summer book recommendations in which some of the authors existed but not the books attributed to them.

One might argue that each of these expose the flaws of AI. I suspect what they really expose is the flaws of the particular humans using this tool. Laziness that doesn’t carefully line edit, that doesn’t verify sources, and that doesn’t confirm the existence and availability of books. Similar to computer programming, AI is only as good as the prompts given it. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Actually, AI has become quite good. A college professor friend now considers AI capable of writing at a professorial level. He shared examples of using AI in various forms of analysis of large amounts of material.

But one thing both of us are agreed upon is that AI offers a dangerous temptation to let it do our thinking for us. It may be a student writing a paper or an author cranking out a steamy novel. What we are doing when we let AI think for us is denying the intrinsic worth of thinking. For many of us, hammering out our ideas in writing serves to clarify thought.

Lest you think I am an AI Luddite, I do believe AI may be a helpful interlocutor in the process. I might ask AI to evaluate an argument for weaknesses or to raise counter arguments. It strikes me that when the chance to do this with real people is unavailable, this could be quite helpful. However, I am still thinking, and indeed, am forced to think harder and better.

I guess what it comes down to is that the ability to think and reason and create from our thoughts is one of the things that makes us human. I’m just not willing to give that up. I’m not ready to slack on the hard work of being a thinking human.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Alasdair MacIntyre, the philosopher, died recently. Charles Matthewes reviews his life and work in “Remembering Alasdair MacIntyre.”

“In a nation known for its relatively poor health, nearly everybody seems to be thinking about how to be healthy….” This line in “The Perilous Spread of the Wellness Craze” captured my attention. Sheila McClear explores the connection between our health care inequalities and the explosion of the wellness industry.

Nick Ripatrazone explores the decline of literary criticism in “The Art of the Critic.” Specifically, he argues for the importance of criticism as a benefit not only to audiences but to writers.

Geraldine Brooks is popular with many readers. Her husband died in 2019. In this interview, “Geraldine Brooks Is a Widow Now,” she talks about loss, grief, writing, and her Jewish faith.

Finally, the summer can be a great time to break out of our reading ruts. The New York Times Book Review has published a “Summer Reading Bucket List” of ten literary “to-do’s,” challenging us to see if we can check off five. The even include a copiable checklist!

…And a Video Worth Watching

The Covenant of Water was one of my favorite books of 2024. I have Cutting for Stone on my reading stack. On Thursday, physician and author Abraham Verghese gave the commencement address at Harvard. One of his pieces of advice for students was to commend the importance of reading novels. As an immigrant to the U.S., he also had some thoughtful and challenging critiques of our current political scene. In case you haven’t seen the video, it is worth watching, especially if you appreciate his writing.

Quote of the Week

G. K. Chesterton was born May 29, 1874. I’ve often appreciated his wit and turn of phrase. This one has some good advice:

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Regular followers of this blog may have noticed that I have been posting two reviews a day this week. One of these has been of a children’s book published by IVP Kids. What a joy. I’ve loved the combination of brilliant illustration, good writing, and especially the inclusive character of these books. The first book I reviewed, Jesus Loves the Little Children, typified this approach showing pictures of children from every culture as well as children with disabilities. The reason for the extra reviews? I wanted to review these books, compliments of IVP Kids, before passing them along to our church’s Little Free Library, which we’ve just set up.

I was thrilled to visit the new Barnes & Noble store in Dublin, Ohio. When I walked in, it took my breath away–it was huge and overwhelming at first. And it was packed. But I like how the different sections were set apart from each other, many with comfortable seating. Not only that, the cafe was huge. But there was one drawback: the checkout and service counter was smaller than in the old store. And the lines were long.

I like the writing of Amor Towles. And I love bookstores, in case you haven’t noticed. I enjoyed this brief video clip of Towles supporting BINC, a national foundation supporting independent booksellers.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Reviews: May 2025

Tuesday: Ian Harber, Walking Through Deconstructioin

Wednesday: Josephine Quinn, How the World Made the West

Thursday: Brian Goldstone, There is No Place For Us

Friday: Terence Halliday and K.K. Yeo, eds., Justice and Rights

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for May 25-31, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

Review: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?

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Cover image of "Flannery O'Connor's Why Do The Heathen Rage" by Jessica Hooten Wilson

Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do The Heathen Rage, Jessica Hooten Wilson with illustrations by Steve Prince. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587436185), 2024.

Summary: The text of O’Connor’s unfinished work with commentary on her literary process and the tensions she wrestled with in writing.

Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 from lupus at the young age of 39. Despite her illness she penned a number of short stories and two novels. She also wrote numerous letters, essays, and reviews. She was working on a third novel at the time of her death, a fact known mostly among O’Connor scholars. But none dared put the fragments of this novel into print until now. Jessica Hooten Wilson describes how she was a fan of O’Connor since her teen years. During her doctoral research on O’Connor and Dostoevsky, a friend encouraged her to look at the unpublished novel as the most Dostoevskian of O’Connor’s works. This began research that culminated in this work.

In this work, Wilson has arranged the fragments of the novel into something of a coherent narrative. Between fragments she offers her commentary on the work, O’Connor’s process, and the literary influences on the text, and her struggle to complete it. Portions of the novel are introduced by woodcut illustrations by Steve Prince of One Fish Studios. He provides an afterword describing his work with the O’Connor text.

The principle characters of the story are Walter Grandstaff Tilman, a scholar who spends his days writing letters to all and sundry between bouts of illness (shades of O’Connor’s own life?). His father, T.C. Tilman, is nominal head of the family but has suffered a stroke, and is tended by Roosevelt. His mother keeps up the slowly fading farm, directing the efforts of the farm help. She is frustrated but has come to accept Walter’s lack of interest in the farm.

Oona Gibbs is the one other character who plays a significant part. She is a civil rights activist. She lives with a domineering mother and one gets the sense that her correspondence and activism is part of her liberation. Walter begins corresponding with her. He tells her about his life but portrays himself as lack. Too late he realizes the consequence of his deception. Her interest awakened, she wants to visit. To avert the visit, he writes asking her not to come, trying to end the relationship. Too late. She is on her way.

Wilson takes liberty with what O’Connor wrote in the final part, fashioning a crisis and conclusion of sorts from a cross-burning scene on a neighbor’s farm. Wilson borrows scenes from other stories and acknowledges this as presumptuous. To me, it seemed an effort to offer some kind of closure to what was plainly unfinished and unsatisfying. While it would have busied up the text, I wish she would have annotated this chapter: what was from Why Do the Heathen Rage, what came from other works, and what was Wilson.

Wilson interleaves commentary with the fragments of O’Connor’s work. She traces the different iterations of the story, including the name changes Asbury/Walter and his different backstories. Speaking of backstories, Wilson introduces us to the friendship of O’Connor with Maryat Lee, a New York playwright. Lee, a polar opposite to O’Connor, is the likely inspiration for Oona Gibbs, with shades of Ivan Karamazov.

Wilson’s commentary also explores O’Connor’s wrestling with race. She contends that this, as much as illness, helps account for O’Connor’s inability, despite three years of work, to fashion and finish a coherent novel. She notes the plot elements of Roosevelt, Walter’s conflicted choice to write as a Black, and Oona’s activism, as well as the closing scene as part of O’Connor’s struggle. Wilson discusses O’Connor’s segregated life, her blind spots of experience, and a bifurcated spirituality that relegated civil rights to an “earthly and political position.” Yet she sees the novel as an attempt to address the racism of the South.

For Wilson, the unfinished novel represents the unfinished racial awakening in O’Connor’s life. But how ought we evaluate this unfinished story? On one hand, O’Connor fans will revel in new material to read. On the other hand, despite Wilson’s efforts, O’Connor’s text is fragmentary and lacks cohesion. Given all this, the book is one for O’Connor scholars and devotees. For me, as one who has read O’Connor on and off since college, it added to my appreciation of this complicated Southern Catholic writer. And I grieved afresh that she died so young.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program for review.

C. S. Lewis in America

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C. S. Lewis in America, Mark A. Noll with Karen J. Johnson, Kirk D. Farney, and Amy E. Black. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023.

Summary: An analysis of how C. S. Lewis’s works were received in the United States, considering Catholic, secular, and Protestant/evangelical critics evaluating his work between 1935 and 1947.

Even before the widespread interest in C.S. Lewis due to the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis was being read in both religious and secular circles in the United States from the mid-1930’s and through the 1940’s. In this latest in the Hansen Lectureship Series at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College, American historian Mark A. Noll offers three lectures that analyzed the critical reception and growing interest in Lewis’s works of scholarship, fiction, and theology. Successively, he explores the reception Lewis received among Catholics, in the secular and mainstream media, and among both mainline Protestants and evangelicals, who were late but eventually enthusiastic adopters.

It came as a delightful surprise that Catholics in the U.S. were among his earliest and most appreciative readers. In part, Noll believes that Lewis was a fresh, yet for the most part, orthodox voice that offered a friendly path out of a certain stagnant isolation, reflecting the undercurrent of change developing in the church. Responses ranged from the early and effusive praise of The Pilgrim’s Regress by Fr. Conway, CSP in Catholic World to Philip Donnelly’s criticism of Lewis’s account of “adoptive sonship” in Beyond Personality (later part of Mere Christianity). Other critics had concerns about his doctrine of the church and his ideas about natural law put forth in The Abolition of Man. The high watermark of criticism came from Charles Brady of Canisius College, who read everything Lewis wrote, understood him as well as anyone in this era, and wrote two glowing essays for America that are reprinted at the end of this work.

With regard to secular critics, Noll considers in succession Lewis’s scholarly and imaginative works, and finally his works of Christian exposition. Lewis drew general praise for both The Allegory of Love and for his Preface to Paradise Lost. A number affirmed his argument against E. M. W. Tillyard in The Personal Heresy that in criticism of a poet’s work, the focus should be on the subject matter of the poem and not the poet. Regarding the imaginative works, Noll describes the public as responding “ecstatically.” Noll highlight’s W.H. Auden’s review of The Great Divorce in The Saturday Review combining general praise with fine-grained critique. The widest range of critical opinion was reserved for his works of Christian exposition, from the long-searching response of Charles Hartshorne to a review in the New York Herald Tribune from a young Beloit College professor, Chad Walsh, who would quickly become know as a leading exponent of his work.

Apart from a patronizing review in The Christian Century, Protestants joined their secular counterparts in their warm reception of Lewis. Substantial interest among evangelicals in Lewis first came from conservative Presbyterians in the Westminster seminary circle as well as the first substantive criticism, particularly from a young Edmund Clowney. Wheaton’s Clyde Kilby represented a much more positive response to Lewis as did Wheaton student Elizabeth Howard (Eliot). Kilby’s work led to the donation of Lewis’s letters to Wheaton, forming the core of what would become the Wade Center collection. InterVarsity’s His Magazine also contributed to the growing awareness of Lewis in evangelical circles when it published a lengthy excerpt from The Case For Christianity.

Noll concludes the work in considering Lewis in today’s much more fragmented setting and what might be learned from Lewis’s greater concern for the state of his soul as a writer than the success of his work. The work also includes responses to each lecture. I found most interesting in these Kirk Farney’s discussion of two American contemporaries of Lewis who were also intelligent spokespersons for Christianity: Walter A. Maier of The Lutheran Hour and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen of The Catholic Hour. and the wide interest from people outside the church they enjoyed, as did Lewis. I can’t help wonder if there remains a space for such folk today. I’m thinking for example of the broad impact of the late Timothy Keller and the younger voices like Esau McCaulley and writers like Tish Harrison Warren.

Noll offers an excellent resource (aided by his wife) chronicling the early reviews of Lewis’s work, which I’ve only highlighted here. I’m struck that Catholics were early adopters and evangelicals relative latecomers. I’m impressed with the theological and scholarly sophistication of the writers and the elegant style of reviewers like Brady. How different things are in the BookTok era! This is a great resource for Lewis scholars and fans and a marvelous addition to the Hansen Lectureship series on the seven authors in the Wade Collection.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: On Literature

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On Literature, Umberto Eco. New York: Harper Via, 2005.

Summary: A collection of occasional writings on literature and literary criticism, many adapted from conference presentations given over several decades.

If you are familiar at all with Umberto Eco, it may be through one or more of his novels: The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before, or one of the others. These were written late in an academic life of amazing breadth: a medievalist, philosopher, a literary critic and a specialist on semiotics, the science of signs and the making of meaning. He was also known for his amazing personal library of nearly 50,000 volumes between his two residences.

The writings in this collection represent conference presentations and articles, mostly of an academic nature given over a couple decades, on various questions and problems in literature. One senses the massive intellect and library of Eco in reading these essays, by turns fascinating, and at other times, utterly obscure, as when he writes on Nerval’s Sylvie or Camporesi. I found most of the essay on Borges challenging because I’ve read nothing of Borges, but he uses it to discuss his theory of influences in literature, illustrating with how this worked with Borges and his writing of The Name of the Rose.

Many of the writings concern different aspects of understanding literature. For example, his article on Wilde was one of the best for exploring the nature of aphorism and paradox–aphorisms may often be contradictory while paradoxes hold the contradiction together to reveal a larger idea. The collection opens with a more general discussion on some of the functions of literature which may be read simply for pleasure, may keep a language alive, and requires a certain integrity of the reader–we cannot read anything into literature we want. Above all, literature tells us our own story–and teaches us how to die.

His discussions of literary works range from Dante’s Paradiso, which he believes is the best of Dante’s tri-partite Divine Comedy, to an exploration of the style of The Communist Manifesto, a wonderfully succinct summary of the work. His presentation on James Joyce, “A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor” is a wide-ranging exploration of the influences on Joyce during his undergraduate education as they turn up in works ranging from Finnegan’s Wake to Ulysses.

For many of us who would read more deeply, there is much to be gained in his explorations on symbolism, style, and poetics. We see that library at work in his presentation on intertextuality and levels of reading. We never merely read a book but books talking to other books, absorbed into the lives of writer and reader.

The final essay, “How I Write,” is a must read for anyone who has read and wondered about Eco’s novels. He describes how The Name of the Rose developed around the idea of a monk poisoned while reading in a library and how the images of a pendulum and a trumpet grew into Foucault’s Pendulum. He describes how he constructed their worlds and created a style. Unlike Wendell Berry, we learn that Eco made friends with the computer.

Who should read this? First of all, if you are a fan of Eco, you will find much to enjoy. Also, if you want to understand how literature works, Eco will raise ideas that make you think afresh about the transaction of one person putting words to a page, drawing not only upon her own imagination but all those who, consciously or not, influence the writing, how a writer seeks to “mean,” and then the ways what is written is apprehended by the reader, each who has his or her own prior influences and predilections. It is actually quite an amazing world we bibliophiles inhabit, one which only gains in fascination as it is examined. But prepare to work…and to be humbled by what remains obscure.

Review: Resisting the Marriage Plot

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Resisting the Marriage Plot (Studies in Theology and the Arts), Dalene Joy Fisher. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: Contrary to prevailing ideas of Christianity being an oppressive force in women’s lives in Victorian literature, looks at four instances in this literature where women resist cultural expectations around marriage due to the liberating and empowering quality of their faith.

It’s fairly common in Victorian literary studies to show the oppression of women in the conventions of marriage. And it was indeed the case that marriage could be oppressive. Under coverture, discussed in this book, a woman’s legal rights were subsumed under her husband and she had no independent legal existence. She had no property rights of her own and so was economically dependent or “covered” by her husband. Even in a beneficent situation, the deprivation of these tokens of personhood, of agency, were a form of oppression. In an abusive situation it could be much worse. And many critics point to ways the church supported this understanding of marriage and the place of women.

Dalene Joy Fisher offers us a counterfactual in this study of four novelists whose characters resist the “marriage plot” in different ways, often at great cost to themselves, but sustained by convictions of their Christian faith that led them not to submit to marriage where this would compromise their human dignity. They are:

Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria in The Wrongs of Woman. Maria marries George Venables, only to discover he is libertine. He even pays a friend to seduce her. She decides to flee with her daughter, an unlawful act, and is confined to an asylum, guarded by Jemima who eventually helps her escape.

Jane Austen, Fanny in Mansfield Park. Fanny is an impoverished girl who is sent to live with her wealthy Aunt and Uncle, who attempt to marry her off to Henry Crawford, an impressive man of questionable morals. She resists the pressure to do so because of her faith and understanding that the power to “transform” him is beyond her. Eventually she marries a clergyman, Edmund, who has counselled and befriended her.

Anne Brontë, Helen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Helen discovers her husband Arthur is both alcoholic and adulterous and flees with her young son Arthur, living under an assumed name and supporting them by selling paintings. Her faith will not allow her and her son to live in a state of moral degradation, despite society’s expectation. She falls in love with Gilbert Markham but cannot marry. When Arthur suffers what will be a fatal accident, She returns to for one final attempt at his reform, then marries Gilbert after Arthur’s death.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth in Ruth. Ruth is a teenage orphan seduced by Henry Bellingham, then abandoned when she becomes pregnant. A reform minded minister takes her in, they label her a “widow,” and under this identity, she becomes a highly respected governess. Later, Bellingham, using the name Donne, shows up and insists she marry him, but she refuses because of her faith. But her true background is discovered, and she has to turn to nursing the most impoverished, gaining a name for herself. Donne falls ill and comes under her care, and, while caring for him, she contracts his disease and dies.

One of the key themes running through these novels is women refusing or leaving unworthy marriages due to their understanding of the Christian faith, that gives them a sense of agency to stand against the pressures to conform to societal norms. It is also the case that they resist the pressure to adopt the approach that a good woman can reform a bad man. They recognize that only God can transform hearts. In two instances, their resistance is rewarded with loving marriages. Two others end sadly, reflecting the consequences of oppressive structures.

The novelists considered were powerful voices. They reveal a more complex narrative of both ways Christianity has been used to oppress and Christian faith as liberative, of characters empowered by their understanding of Christian faithfulness to resist the “marriage plot” when not to so would implicate them in immoral behavior and subject them to abuse. Victorians spoke of marriage as “he for God only, she for God in him.” Fisher shows the power of Christian faith to lead both men and women to say, “they for God only, he and she for God,” a message which seems as needed today as in the Nineteenth century.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher.

Review: The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis

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The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, Jason M. Baxter. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2022.

Summary: An exploration of the great medieval writers whose works helped shape the mind and the works of C. S. Lewis.

Many of us who are Inklings lovers have heard the rule C. S. Lewis proposed that “after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in-between.” This was not mere scholarly pontification on the part of Lewis. As Jason Baxter observes, when asked about recommendations, Lewis would turn to a Kempis, Hilton, Theologica Germanica, Lady Julian, Dante, Spenser, Boethius, Milton, and the poet George Herbert. Rudolf Otto was the one relatively contemporary exception. Surprisingly, he read little or nothing of what many of us consider the great modern theological writers like Barth, Brunner, Tillich, or Niebuhr. This was Lewis the medieval scholar, the “third Lewis” lesser know to most of us who know him by his children’s stories and other fiction or his apologetics.

In this work, Jason Baxter contends that this third Lewis, in addition to scripture and ancient mythology, profoundly shaped all that Lewis thought or wrote. Lewis not only devoted himself to medieval scholarship, it was his native land, according to Baxter, and he was determined to bridge the chasm between the medieval and modern worlds, so convinced was he that even as there are things we understand that they did not grasp, there were things they understood that we have lost–and at times, we have slighted them in our understanding. The ancients also understood our smallness in the cosmos even though their models of the spheres were faulty.

He examines the cathedral of Salisbury and the writings of Augustine and Dante to capture the awe with which the ancients viewed the cosmos. It was his “medieval apprenticeship” that trained him that literature enables us to look, not at, but “along the beam” of light. The medieval sense of the world as a symphony reminds us of the chasm that has opened when we see the world, indeed all of life, as a form of machine. He was convinced of the need of a renewed chivalry that combined courage and civility in an age of “flat-chested” beings devoid of moral sentiments.

Baxter explores Lewis’s love of Dante, the wonder and weightiness of the Divine Comedy and the ways he drew upon this as he described the substantial weightiness of heaven in The Great Divorce. In Lewis we find both the apophatic of The Cloud of Unknowing and Otto’s “wholly other” and the incredibly intimate cataphatic of Nicholas of Cusa, captured in Lucy’s encounter with Aslan in Prince Caspian. In the unveiling of the pilgrim in Dante at the end of Purgatoria, we see Lewis’s own understanding of unveiling of our false selves when we stop hiding from God and are converted, portrayed in the concluding scene of Till We Have Faces. The final chapter explores the chasm between modern science and ancient myth and makes explicit that the ancients understood more of the world than we credited. We also discover the sources of Oyarses and the personalities of the planets.

We often say the Old Testament illumines the New. Likewise, the medieval writers and what Lewis gained from them illumine his writing and make our understanding of his works richer. Indeed, reading Baxter inclines me to pull Boethius off the shelf and determine to read all the way through the Divine Comedy, having not read past Inferno. I do have to admit, I’ve read Otto and fail to see Lewis’s attraction. In this case, I might choose Barth instead.

What Baxter also reminds me of regarding Lewis is how his voice stood out from the many clerical voices of his day. I can’t help but wonder if it was that he spoke from a different time, though living in ours, and hence from a different perspective. He brings “Narnian” (or perhaps Boethian) air into our modern, stale atmosphere. It also makes me wonder if so many who seek the mantle of Lewis miss something crucial–the startlingly different worlds of scripture, mythology, and ancient theological and literary figures with whom Lewis lived. He dared to speak from a different time rather than seeking to baptize the present with a veneer of Christianity. Perhaps we might begin, as this book models, with interspersing those old books with our new ones. Today we are encouraged to read diverse books. Lewis reminds us that the greatest diversity may be found in the writers from another time.

Review: The Western Canon

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The Western Canon, Harold Bloom. New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing, 1994, this edition 2014.

Summary: A spirited defense of the traditional Western Canon of literature against what Bloom calls the “School of Resentment” and a discussion of 26 representative works Bloom would include.

Harold Bloom wrote this book in 1994 at a time when the “dead white males” who constitute most of the works considered part of “the Western Canon” were under attack. With the continued growth of feminist, anti-racist, post-colonial, and queer criticism, many of the works Bloom treats in this volume have been further marginalized. Alternate reading lists have flourished, classics departments have closed down, and course offerings focused on those in the “traditional” canon have been done away with in many English departments.

This is not without some warrant. The men clearly outnumbered the women. Writers of other cultures were non-existent as were those who were BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and LGBTQ. The perspectives of most represented ruling and affluent classes, and the dominant powers of the world.

Harold Bloom is less diplomatic than I am. He calls the critics the School of Resentment, who want to replace these works with representative modern authors. Bloom’s case is that the works we’ve called “canonical” have survived not because of some hegemonic dominance of white and mostly male proponents, but because of their compelling originality and what he would call their “strangeness.” Coming from a different time and social milieu, they nevertheless pose insights about the human condition that generations of readers, and other writers have wrestled with.

For Bloom, the works of William Shakespeare are at the center of the canon, with Dante and Milton close by. Under the categories of aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic ages, he considers 26 authors representative of those he would include in the canon. A theme running through his discussion of authors from Milton to Whitman to Beckett and Joyce is how they interacted with and defined themselves in relation to the Bard. Their “anxiety” about Shakespeare, Bloom contends, is part of what drives them to their own brand of greatness.

Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, and Virginia Woolf manage to make it into the men’s club. Bloom seems to especially like Dickenson, praising her intellectual complexity, literary originality and own brand of strangeness. Borges, Neruda, and Pessoa also make his list.

Bloom plainly doesn’t care about critics or the academic guild where he spent so many years. What he does care about is the love of reading and the awareness all bibliophiles have of there being so many books and so little time. He wonders how many of the books replacing what once were canonical will be read in a generation or two. He also observes how great authors in later generations wrestled with the greatness of those who preceded them. The inference is, what great influences will our contemporaries have? What does this bode for literature.

Bloom also offers us an extensive list from the Greeks to the present (at least the 1990’s) of books he considers worth reading, going far beyond the works he focuses on. This list alone might keep most of us busy for a lifetime, and expands to include a variety of Latin American and African authors in the recent era.

If you have not read the works Bloom discusses, the book could be a hard, long slog. In that case, read the “Prelude and Preface,” “An Elegy for the Canon” and “Elegaic Conclusion” and you will have the gist of the argument. On the other hand, if you know many of the works, Bloom offers a fascinating intertextual commentary. Beware that Bloom is a curmudgeon who has little sympathy for contemporary authors seeking to develop voices unbeholden to the “dead white males.” Yet I think we must also consider what makes works sufficiently great that they are read long after the authors (and all our literary critics) are dead. Are not these the works we hope to read before we are dead?

Review: Defending Middle-Earth

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Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien: Myth and Modernity, Patrick Curry. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Summary: A study of the enduring power of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, tracing it to both its counter to modernity and its genius as modern myth.

Many in the critical community have puzzled over the public acceptance and staying power of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Patrick Curry notes that Tolkien has been described as “paternalistic, reactionary, anti-intellectual, racist, fascistic and…irrelevant.” Curry believes the nature of the books account for their success. It is a myth about an earlier age of the earth drawn from both Norse and Anglo-Saxon material, fashioned into a truly unique place, not to be read allegorically, yet one that speaks into late modernity, a project more or less exhausted.

He describes the work as centered around three domains. The first is the social, centered around the Shire, where community, local government, and love of place dominate. There are many such places throughout Middle-Earth from Lothlorien to Fangorn forest to Gondor, all standing in contrast to the soulless industrial wasteland of Mordor. The social domain is nested within a second domain, an ecological or natural one of Middle-Earth. Everything, from the mountains and rivers to Tolkien’s beloved trees, pulses with life and the peoples of Middle-Earth live harmoniously within these domains–Elves in the forests, dwarves in the mountains and hobbits in the Shire, and the Ents shepherding their trees. Surrounding Middle-Earth is the Sea representing the spiritual–the ethical, the questions of death and life, the ultimate.

Curry’s exploration of the latter notes how Tolkien did not impose Christian theology by another name on his story, unlike the Narnia Chronicles of C. S. Lewis. Oddly enough, Curry notes that Tolkien combines a polytheistic pantheon at war with evil with a kind of animism, that resacralizes nature. All this combines with Christian virtues of humility, courage, hospitality, and compassion drawing together a fellowship of the “differents.”

Curry proposes that a Middle-Earth with this character, these domains, speaks powerfully to modernity-weary readers, tired of big and bureaucratic states, alarmed by the exploitation of the planet, and groping for a spirituality that embraces all of life. But he believes it is also powerful, certainly in the English speaking world because Tolkien succeeded in his project of fashioning a contemporary myth, a story neither true nor false, but one that explains something of the origins and place and future of not only those in the story but that of the reader as well.

Curry’s discussion rings true for me in many ways. The Shire of the hobbits is the local membership of Wendell Berry’s Port William, calling us away from identity-less exurbia. The love of all nature, and especially the forests speaks into a land stripped of trees, seemingly destined for a Mordor-like wasteland. Then there is the surrounding sea, the reminder of lives answerable to something greater, destined for something beyond, longing for God knows what.

Finally the mythopoeic elements helps explain the power of this story for me, that only grows as I age–not merely the adventure but the hope and loss of which life consists. And there is the power of traveling with the Fellowship, the Nine who faced wonder and danger and sorry and strove to overcome. Having traveled so far, and through so many readings, we each face the question of what then shall we be and “what to do with the time that is given us.”

Review: Bookmarked

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bookmarked

Bookmarked: Reading My Way from Hollywood to Brooklyn, Wendy W. Fairey. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2015.

Summary: A literature professor who is the daughter of a famous Hollywood columnist writes a memoir interweaving her life with significant books and characters.

“I want to write of the private stories that lie behind our reading of books, taking my own trajectory through English literature as the history I know best but proposing a way of thinking about literature that I believe is every reader’s process. We bring ourselves with all our aspirations and wounds, affinities and aversions, insights and confusions to the books we read, and our experience shapes our response.”

In Bookmarked, Wendy W. Fairey draws upon her own life, both experienced and in books, as an illustration of this thesis. The daughter of famous Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham, she grew up in a home with one of many Graham’s lovers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who selected books for Graham, a “College of One.” Reading through Fitzgerald’s books started her on a lifelong journey with books, books that helped make sense of her life.

In David Copperfield, she sees in brutal Mr. Murdstone the violent male paralleling “Bow Wow,” one of her mother’s lovers. She takes us through Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Henry James The Portrait of a Lady, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Forster’s Passage to India, and more recent authors from India.

She intertwines four themes from these various books, also paralleling her life–the orphan, the new woman, the artist, and the immigrant. As she does so, she traces her own discoveries that her mother was a Jewish orphan (not unlike Daniel Deronda) and that her true father was British philosopher A.J. Ayer. She takes us through the ups and downs of her marriage to Donald Fairey, her own self-discovery as a woman in academia, and her love affair and eventual marriage to Mary Edith Mardis. She reflects on Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse as well as “Tonio Kroger” in Thomas Mann as she recalls her affair with Ezio Tarantelli. She considers the immigrant experience as she recounts her travels in India and growing familiarity with Indian, ex-pat Indian, and Indian-American writers.

As we read, we listen to a skilled literature professor critically reflect on issues of class and gender, even as she also considers her own life. We read someone who both thoughtfully engages books on their own terms, and yet not in a way detached from her life. She both reads these books with her life, and in some respects, finds the books reading her.

At times I wondered if all of this might be considered a bit self-indulgent. And then I reflected on the self-indulgence that is reading–an exercise in which we both lose ourselves, and sometimes find ourselves as well, making sense of ourselves, our lives as we have lived them thus far, and perhaps making some sense of our world. Isn’t this, as she contends, “every reader’s process”?

The book made me wonder what books I would use in narrating my life. It clearly would be a different shelf of books than the author’s. But I have no question that there were books that resonated with my experiences, and others that served to shape and crystallize my understanding of the world. It is an exercise I would like to pursue further as time allows.

 

Review: Balm in Gilead

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balm in gilead

Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, edited by Timothy Larsen and Keith L. Johnson. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019.

Summary: A collection of presentations from the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, discussing the work, and particularly the fiction, of Marilynne Robinson with contributions from Robinson.

It is not unusual at an academic conference to discuss the work of a particular author. What is perhaps more remarkable is to discuss the work of a living author with the author present and contributing. The subtitle of this work calls this “a theological dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, and this is true in two senses. The various essays do engage the theology, particularly the Calvinism of Robinson’s work. But the conference also engaged Robinson, with a presentation by her (“The Protestant Conscience”) and a conversation between her and Rowan Williams, and an interview with Wheaton College President Philip Ryken.

Most of the essays focus on some aspect of the theology found in Robinson’s work. Timothy Larsen considers the main character of her fiction, Reverend John Ames, his heritage as the grandson of a staunch abolitionist in the mold of Wheaton’s Jonathan Blanchard, his reaction against that as a pacifist, and the mindset of the 1950’s Christian Century which he and fellow minister Boughton regularly discussed. Han-luen Kantzer Komline explores Ames “heart condition,” both physical and spiritual, and his struggle to forgive and extend grace to Jack Boughton, the wayward child of his friend. Timothy George explores the unusual, for an academic and a writer, embrace of Calvinism by Robinson, with its doctrine of predestination, emphasizing grace and undercutting human presumption. George notes the central focus of Robinson on Christ and so does Keith L. Johnson in a discussion of Robinson’s metaphysics. Here he teases out Robinson’s understanding of the significance of the cross as the demonstration of the love of God for us rather than on its sacrificial character, a focus Robinson engages and differs with.

Lauren Winner focuses on the preaching of John Ames–the 67,500 pages and 2,250 sermons in the course of his pastorate in Gilead and his conclusion that “they mattered or they didn’t and that’s the end of it.” One of the most intriguing essays for me was that of Patricia Andujo on the African American experience in Robinson’s works. She explores how these works reflect the attitudes of mainline white churches in the 1950’s, a kind of passivity in the face of racism, even while raising the uncomfortable issue of Jack Boughton’s inter-racial marriage, and the lack of response when the town’s black church burns down and the congregation leaves.

Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s essay on “Space/Time/Doctrine” raises the intriguing idea of the influence of Robinson’s understanding of predestination, and the shifts backwards and forwards in time in her novels. Joel Sheesley, a midwestern artist, focuses on the landscape of Robinson’s novels. In the penultimate essay Rowan Williams explores the theme of the grace that is beyond human goodness. He writes:

“Grace, not goodness, is the key to our healing. To say that is to say that we’re healed in relation not only to God but to one another. Without that dimension, we’re back with toxic goodness again, the goodness that forgets and excludes. Lila’s problem in the novel is that the instinctive warmth, the human friendliness, the humanly constructed fellowship that characterizes Gilead cannot allow itself to be wounded and broken open in such a way that the stranger is welcome, whether that stranger is the racial other, or simply the socially marginal and damaged person like Lila herself. But to be wounded in our goodness, to learn to have that dimension of our self-image and self-presentation cracked open, is the beginning of where grace can act in us” (pp. 163-164).

The final essay is Robinson’s on “The Protestant Conscience,” in which she defends not only the freedom of conscience of religious believers but argues that the Protestant idea of conscience defended the freedom of all rather than enforcing a Christian conscience upon all through means of the state. This presentation is followed by conversations with Rowan Williams, and an interview with Philip Ryken. In this collection, I found these diverting, but not nearly as substantive and satisfying as the various essays. Perhaps a highlight was the difference between Robinson and Williams on the literary merits of Flannery O’Connor, of whom Robinson is no fan.

This is a great volume for any who, like me, love the work of Marilynne Robinson. It helped make greater sense of some of the themes I’ve seen in her work, particularly her Calvinism. It served to invite me to a re-reading of her work in its exploration of themes of place, race, and grace. Robinson’s presence by no means muted the critique of her work, and yet I saw no defensiveness in her comments, which bespeaks the evidence of grace in her life. All in all, this is well worth acquiring if you have followed Robinson’s work. For those who have not, read the novels first, and then you will appreciate this volume!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.