Riddles in the Dark

I’ve previously mentioned here the precise moment I knew I loved The Hobbit—reading “Riddles in the Dark” in the car on the way to the MLB Home Run Derby in Atlanta, July 10, 2000. I had just turned 16 the month before and The Hobbit was my first Tolkien, picked up on a friend’s recommendation and read with uncertainty. That car ride made me a devoted fan.

It’s unusual to be able to date one’s love for a favorite book so precisely. The special event associated with this one helps it stick in the memory, I’m sure, but it’s that chapter specifically that is so powerful. Up to Bilbo’s riddle game with Gollum I had enjoyed The Hobbit, but that chapter was a revelation, the moment I became aware that I was reading something great. To this day, rereading that chapter brings back that feeling of breathless anticipation.

The special character of this chapter has been on my mind this week because I just read “Riddles in the Dark” aloud to my kids. I’ve read The Hobbit to them once before, a few years ago. They enjoyed it, but, being much younger, I think what they enjoyed most was simply that I was reading to them.

This time through has been different. From beginning to end of “Riddles in the Dark” they showed the same breathless anticipation I felt as a teenager. They were scared for Bilbo, creeped out by Gollum, wanted to guess the answers to the riddles, and thrilled with suspense as Bilbo finally made his escape, minus his brass buttons. They loved it, and it’s been one of the best bedtime story experiences I’ve had with them. I’ve also enjoyed the excuse to reflect on one of my favorite passages in one of my favorite books.

So: Why is “Riddles in the Dark” so good? A few thoughts:

• After several chapters with a crowd of dwarves, Bilbo is alone. The reader can focus on the protagonist again, and because he finds himself alone in a dangerous situation it is up to him to get out. For the first time since Bag End, he cannot simply (and literally) be carried along by the others.

• Kids can identify with Bilbo. Put-upon, scolded, not often understanding what’s going on, ordered around by seemingly everyone, he now finds himself alone in the dark, and it’s a rare child that doesn’t mind that.

• Further, this chapter confirms every child’s fear—there’s something in the dark! And it turns out to be one of Tolkien’s greatest creations.

• Bilbo and Gollum’s encounter, a surprise followed by mutual curiosity, need, and hostility, feels exceptionally real, especially in the way it moves from one mood into another.

• Games are great to read about if they’re well written and used as extensions of character—even games we don’t understand, like all the baccarat in James Bond—and Tolkien makes the riddle game instantly clear, engaging, and reflective of Bilbo and Gollum as characters.

• Often overlooked, I think, is that despite the atmosphere and the threat posed by Gollum, this part of the story is funny. The tone is perfectly balanced.

• Structurally, this chapter is a perfect story within the overall story.

• Narratively, Tolkien uses omniscience with great skill, shifting back and forth between Bilbo and Gollum so that the stakes of the riddle game are raised and the reader feels tension through dramatic irony, knowing before Bilbo does that Gollum means to eat him.

• I’m not usually one to talk psychology in fiction, but Bilbo and Gollum’s personalities are sharply realized and believable. I’m not sure Tolkien gets enough credit for the truthfulness of the people in his books. A line that stood out this time, when Gollum returns to his island and searches with increasing desperation for the ring: “Utterly miserable as Gollum sounded, Bilbo could not find much pity in his heart, and he had a feeling that anything Gollum wanted so much could hardly be something good.” So simple, so much going on.

• I’m also not one to invoke “character arcs” or the dreadful “Hero’s Journey,” but Bilbo’s experience in “Riddles in the Dark” is noticeably transformative. As I noted above, it’s all on him. He has to stick up for himself both through force of arms and his wits (combining the strengths of the warlike dwarves on one hand and the intellect of Gandalf on the other). In the next chapter we learn that he’s earned the respect of the dwarves for the first time and—again, something a child will understand—that Gandalf sees through at least part of his version of the story.

• The whole thing is just brilliantly written, down to the basic level of word choice and sound. Tolkien manipulates both for maximum atmosphere. The darkness of the tunnels, the weight of the stone above, and the cold and damp of Gollum’s cave are tactile.

• Related: last night, after finishing the chapter with the kids, my wife complimented my voices. I couldn’t take credit: reading Gollum’s dialogue aloud almost creates his voice on its own. Tolkien loads it with sibilants, most obviously, but also lots of breathy, open-throated sounds. And unlike the smooth, respectable Bilbo, Gollum speaks with a jarring, sprung rhythm that reads naturally as disturbed and aggressive.

I should make a more formal study of Tolkien’s work in this chapter here sometime. In the meantime, the short version: This chapter of The Hobbit is the work of a great writer at the peak of his imaginative powers and technical skill. A model worth studying—and enjoying for many years.

The Great Books Podcast, RIP

A serious bummer this week: National Review is discontinuing both of its podcasts hosted by John J Miller, namely The Bookmonger and The Great Books.

The former is a long-running short format show—usually no more than ten minutes—featuring interviews with current authors about new releases. I subscribed but didn’t listen to every episode, dipping in when an interesting title or a favorite writer came along, and I found out about a number of good books this way. The latest and final episode, titled “Farewell,” dropped a few days ago.

The latter, however, The Great Books, was a favorite. I subscribed as soon as National Review announced it and I enjoyed and appreciated it for years. It got me through many a long commute through the South Carolina countryside. I have fond memories of misty early morning hayfields whizzing by as Eleanor Bourg Nicholson discussed Dracula, and of driving home some other day, that same landscape now bright and hot in the late afternoon, to the sound of Bethel McGrew praising Watership Down.

Or perhaps it was Robin Lane Fox discussing the Iliad, or Matthew Continetti talking about The Bonfire of the Vanities, or Barry Strauss on Josephus’s Jewish War, or Holly Ordway on The Hobbit, or Brad Birzer on all three volumes of Lord of the Rings, or Nicholson again on Tim Powers’s Declare, or Christopher Scalia on Scoop, or Cat Baab-Muguira discussing Deliverance or quite rightly bringing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket to more attention, or Michael Ward talking about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and That Hideous Strength—and on and on.

The show ranged incredibly widely and Miller got great guests, who spoke eloquently about what made these books—everything from Gilgamesh to Casino Royale—great, and made the case for continuing to love and enjoy them.

There was nothing else quite like it in tone, approach, range, earnestness, and simple joy. Through it I revisited old favorites and discovered some great new books, both classics I hadn’t read (or heard of) as well as books by the guests Miller brought on. A Bloody Habit and Poe for Your Problems are two I’ve mentioned here.

I got into podcasts through The Christian Humanist Podcast, a three-man show that ran for over a decade before fizzing out a couple of years ago. Every episode featured sharp, brilliant, thought-provoking discussion, and David, Michial, and Nathan made it fun. It set my standard of comparison long ago. Miller’s Great Books is one of the few other shows that has come close in quality and enjoyment. With its passing, it feels like the true end of an age. At least for me.

Miller stated in his farewell to The Great Books that he may revive the show on his own. I hope so. In the meantime, the 371-episode archive is still on National Review (albeit paywalled). Hopefully it will remain there.

In the meantime, Miller announced that he can be reached through his website, which includes his contact information. I plan to write a thank you note, something I don’t typically do. If you’ve enjoyed his show in the past, let me encourage you to do the same.

The illusion of insight

A quick follow up from last week’s post about the overemphasis on “themes” as part of English education.

People may rebel against their middle- and high-school English classes out of frustration with things like themes and symbols, but the same oversimplifying impulses are alive and well in pop culture. Where the wannabe intellectual discussing his favorite books online might still talk about themes, the more populist, mystical type will gravitate toward “archetypes” and, the thing that has introduced legions of precocious readers to this kind of talk, the Hero’s Journey.

I don’t know enough about Jung qua Jung to judge the validity of his ideas as an approach to psychology, but I abhor the Jungian “archetypal” approach to literature, and for the same reasons I abhor overemphasizing themes.

An example, and one of the things that alerted me to and turned me against archetypal readings:

Years ago I read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, a book on “the masculine archetypes” recommended in a blog series at The Art of Manliness. The authors, Jungian analysts, use the four titular archetypes to develop a taxonomy of the male personality and to examine the ways deficiencies and excesses—to put it in Aristotelian terms—warp it. Where the “mature masculine” balances all four, too little or too much of any of the archetypes result in various forms of bad character. The king, if insufficiently strong, becomes a weak puppet; if too strong, a tyrant. The warrior must use the wisdom of the magician to balance his propensity for violence, lest he become either a cruel sadist or a passive masochist. And so on.

All well and good. What has always been most interesting and appealing to me about Jungian archetypes is their usefulness in taxonomy—in sorting and categorizing. (There’s the Aristotelian in me again.) But the authors of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, in their effort to support their thesis, plunder history and world mythology for examples and badly misuse the ones that aren’t flatly wrong or made up.

Thus, in discussing the “generative,” fertility-related traits of the lover archetype, they give us Abraham and… Zeus. The father of two nations and the ravisher of mortal women and, in at least some traditions, little boys. Sure, both fathered children, but focusing on that similarity and ignoring the differences between these two “generative” archetypes is morally incoherent.

Which brings me to Jungian archetypes in literature and to the Hero’s Journey specifically. (Somewhere inside me I have a 5,000-word essay called “Against the Hero’s Journey,” but until I find the time and patience to write that, a post like this one will have to suffice.) There are plenty of problems with the Hero’s Journey—not least its artificiality, oversimplification or misinterpretation of other myths, and its rarity in the wild—but my primary objection to it is the temptation to treat an observation about structure as some kind of insight into content. Time and time again, I’ve seen stories dissected as examples of the Hero’s Journey and its characters labeled with various archetypes as if this says anything at all about them beyond pointing out the shape of their plots.

I can provide a very direct example. A few years ago I was surprised to see a new review on Goodreads for my first novel, No Snakes in Iceland. The review was fairly positive but what stunned me about it was seeing the author label No Snakes in Iceland an example of the Hero’s Journey. Is that actually true? I wondered. I had a good, long think about it and had to conclude that, yes, it mostly fits the shape proposed by Campbell.

But does that actually say anything about the story? No.

Borrowing from John Gardner and others, I’ve emphasized over and over and over particularity—the preeminence of concrete specifics—as a creative principle. It seems to me to be a good interpretive principle as well. So, to look at just one element of the Hero’s Journey with that in mind, the hero himself, what is this comparison ignoring that matters to the story?

The hero of No Snakes in Iceland is Edgar, a middle-aged Anglo-Saxon nobleman and close associate of King Æthelred, who has served the king for years as gofer and chronicler. Edgar is educated, intelligent, dutiful, and brave, if self-effacing and preferring to work behind the scenes. He is also bitter in the extreme at the loss of his only child to an accident and the loss of his wife in a Viking raid a few years before. He is in Iceland by the order of an archbishop as an act of penance and longs for home. Edgar’s story then—if you’re looking for a theme or character arc—is one of repentance.

Compare him to the specifics of a few other purportedly Campbellian heroes:

• Luke Skywalker—a young single man in an out-of-the-way place with no prospects and apparently undistinguished background. He is brave but petulant and ignorant of the world and mostly wants to get away from the family farm and make something of himself.

• Harry Potter—a child of exalted background who has been orphaned, deprived of his inheritance, and kept in total ignorance of who he is. Longsuffering and not ambitious, he is rescued from his predicament rather than escaping from it and placed in a situation where his natural goodwill can develop.

• Bilbo Baggins—a comfortably situated middle-aged bachelor who enjoys a quiet, undistinguished rural life in his ancestral home. Unambitious to a fault and utterly unaccustomed to danger and hardship.

• Neo—a twenty-something cubicle drone by day and computer hacker by night, who lives in total isolation and with no apparent drive and no prospects of improvement. He is ignorant and apathetic and important mostly by dint of being “chosen.”

• Hamlet/Simba—an actual prince who is deprived of his inheritance by his uncle and actively and knowingly avoids his calling until confronted by his father’s spirit.

Are there points of similarity? Yes! But focusing on these obscures more than it reveals. The dissimilarities matter immensely, not only in terms of the specifics of each story but for message, moral import, and, yes, theme. Does it actually mean something that these heroes’ stories play out in a similar structure? No, I don’t think so. Does it mean something that Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter are young and undistinguished while Bilbo and Edgar are older, successful, and well-connected? Yes. So why don’t we focus on that instead? Similarities might draw your attention but you’ll get more understanding from looking at dissimilarity.

As I hope I’ve suggested above, there’s a place for archetype talk in the discussion and study of good stories, but more often than not, without a counterbalancing focus on the particulars of a given story, it offers only the illusion of insight.

Stories or themes?

Eric Ambler (1909-98)

I’ve wondered for some time whether stories are studied and taught the right way. I’ve been thinking about this more lately as I’ve read a lot of critiques of the modern literary establishment and English education, especially at the college level, and I’ve come back again and again to an approach that has bothered me for years: the emphasis on “themes” in fiction.

A few years ago, in reflecting on my first reading of Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, I quoted a PBS documentary’s summary of the story: “a dark maritime adventure that ends in a violent battle between blacks and whites in the South Seas.”

“Well,” I wrote, “that is kind of what happens.” Kind of. But not really. Not if you’ve read the story Poe actually wrote, all the complexity and horror of which is here reduced to a talking point.

I had a similar experience this week as I looked for articles on the great spy novelist Eric Ambler. One that I turned up, an introductory guide to Ambler’s life and work, should prove genuinely helpful to the newcomer, but when it recommends six “key” novels it includes the following “themes” for five of them:

• Epitaph for a Spy: “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world.”

• Cause for Alarm: “The dangers of apolitical individuals in a politically charged world.”

• The Mask of Dimitrios: “The intersection of crime and politics, and the corrupting power of ambition.”

• Journey into Fear: “The thin line between courage and fear, and the impact of war on individuals.”

• The Intercom Conspiracy: “The futility of espionage in an increasingly chaotic world.”

Well… that is kind of what those are about. Kind of.

You’ll have noticed a few things about these themes. First, they are formulaic. Three of the five fall into a “the _____ of _____ in a _____ world” pattern, like a Mad Lib. These are all rich, complex, intricately constructed novels that place their characters in crises that admit of no easy answers. Boiling these stories—or any stories—down to something as simplistic and digestible as these themes should arouse our suspicions. Already particularity and nuance are being sanded off and forgotten as we prepare to slot each story into a pre-prepared box.

Second, these themes are vague. As it happens, I’ve read three of these five novels and started one of the others yesterday, and just about any of these “themes” could be applied to any of the novels.

Granted, all of this comes from one internet guide to a single author’s work, but based on my own experience and reading they are broadly representative of the way theme is extracted from story in textbook after textbook, class after class, essay after essay. The complex, diffuse, and imaginative is reduced to the simple, comprehensible, and ready-made. The narrator of Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart” disturbs us, but we know what to do with “fear” or “guilt” or even “insanity.” Treasure Island is a rollicking adventure, but that’s not enough to make it an important book, so it becomes primarily a depiction of the danger of greed. This is also simpler, easier to understand, and—not insignificantly—to test.

More perniciously yet, at the college level the hunt for themes tends to mean subjecting stories to ideological scrutiny in order—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—to extract political messaging from them via liposuction without anesthesia. Thus assertions like this, which I once saw online: “The Last of the Mohicans is about the taboo on sex between whites and Native Americans.” Most of the time this comes from an overtly left-wing “tenured radical” perspective, but there is a right-wing version of it, too. Just this week a random stranger on Substack, commenting on something I had shared, wrote that Blood Meridian “depicts the southwest as irredeemably corrupt” and is therefore “a wokester wankfest.”

Again—is that really what The Last of the Mohicans or Blood Meridian are “about”? These books aren’t adventures set in particular times and places and happening to specific characters? Is all that matters the barely hidden pathologies or the political messaging?

It seems to me that the dangers of overemphasizing theme in the study of literature are:

• Gnosticism, by which I mean the suggestion that the “real” meaning of the story is hidden behind the words and events of the story, which leads students to either ignore the particulars or be frustrated with literature in toto.

• Didacticism, especially through the implication that good stories must have some broad meaning that should impart a lesson, describe life, or otherwise be useful to the student. If they cannot detect such, it must not be a good story.

• Political hijacking, which is easily the most high-profile, outrageous, and abominable form of this but is therefore also the easiest to identify and resist.

• The aesthetic smoothie, in which students are taught to look for big themes so thoroughly that all literature eventually loses its particularity and runs together into a bland abstraction puree. Last of the Mohicans and Blood Meridian are apposite here; one could say that both are “about” something like “the violence of whites and Native Americans on the frontier,” but are these books really as similar as this suggests?

This is by no means exhaustive, just the things that occur immediately to me and that I have found most frustrating.

But the final result of all of these is boredom. This is a boring, dull way to study fiction, especially when you’re introducing the young to great stories, and risks leading them away from simply enjoying reading. Great storytellers and their stories are powerful because they are specific. “Themes” are not.

Note that we don’t recommend books to each other this way. To return to one of my original examples, Epitaph for a Spy, would you rather read a book about “The vulnerability of the individual in a bureaucratic world,” something that could as easily be said of Kafka, Max Barry, or a one-star Google review of the local DMV, or a book about “A teacher on vacation who is mistaken for a spy by the police and forced to help catch the real spy”?

None of this is to say one shouldn’t look for, study, or teach themes in stories. Sensing and understanding a story’s theme is an important part of interpreting it, but themes should arise from the specific, concrete, particular details of the story, and placing as much emphasis on theme as we tend to do inverts that, elevating broad, big picture abstractions above the particulars that make a story what it is. Until we can treat stories as stories first again—and until we can just enjoy them—I think we should downplay theme.

On the need to be “deeply grounded”

I don’t pay as much attention to YouTuber Critical Drinker as I used to, especially since, over the last year or so, he aggressively crowdfunded a short film based on his line of action thriller novels starring agent Ryan Drake. A trailer for Rogue Elements looked indifferently produced, with a lot of the typical limitations of low budget action shorts. The finished film—rebranded as a TV show “proof of concept”—was only made available on his Patreon at first, pushing it even further back in my mind and priorities. When it was finally posted to YouTube I didn’t bother to watch it.

It turns out that Rogue Elements wasn’t very good.

This in itself shouldn’t be so surprising. I’ve watched a lot of short films in my time and most of them are embarrassing in one way or another. But Rogue Elements took a lot of flak because, after years of the Drinker smack-talking Hollywood not only for its woke politicking but also for its incompetent, incoherent storytelling, he had attempted to show the bigwigs how it’s done, offering Rogue Elements up as the antidote to modern Hollywood and calling a lot of attention to the project along the way, and failed spectacularly. Among its shortcomings, viewers have griped that is poorly produced, badly written, and simply repeats many of the tropes and cliches the Drinker himself regularly complains about.

Apparently some of his enemies—especially enemies on political grounds—have used this to dunk on him. The accusation of hypocrisy provided an especially juicy opportunity to twist the knife. I’m not interested in any of that. I was indifferent, at best, to his project, and take no satisfaction in its lack of success. Anything tempting us into the poisonous Schadenfreude of the modern world is to be shunned. In fact, I only found out about this whole mess because of Substack.

Having just launched Quid, my Substack digest, I’m still figuring out a lot about how the platform throws essays and notes my way. Somehow I came across some post mortem discussion of Rogue Elements, and one interesting sympathetic take on the Drinker’s failure was best summarized by its title: “Art is Hard.” It is one thing to sit back and critique—whether drinking or not—and another to make. (As it happens, at least one good movie has been made about exactly that.)

But the most incisive response came from Librarian of Celaeno, an anonymous classics teacher and fellow Southerner, who offered up this response to that essay:

The problem [the Drinker] has, one that a great critic like Poe would never have had to worry about, is that while he gets what’s off with modern storytelling, he’s unfamiliar with any other kind. He’s never shown any evidence of being deeply grounded in his own culture, even when he’s aware that others are, as when he references Tolkien. Having no real background in myth or older literature or religion, the best he can do is to try to make a good version of the bad stuff he decries.

This is spot on. The Critical Drinker can see clearly the problems with modern movies (and he focuses almost exclusively on movies) but, lacking deep roots in older stories and forms of storytelling, can see no way out but to rearrange the inferior materials available at present. No wonder the results are disappointing.

Way back in the early days of this blog, I reflected on this passage in a letter by poet Donald Hall about the self-inflicted limitations of mid-century modernist poets:

You must understand that art is nothing to these men, nor history. The penalty for ignoring two thousand years is that you get stuck in the last hundred. They have the specious present of the barbarian. Art in this century demands a sense of the tragic dignity of history. These poor bastards are stuck in the last third of the 19th century and I swear they don’t know that anything happened before that.

In the last year, I’ve talked with a successful sci-fi/fantasy author about up-and-coming sci-fi writers who haven’t (or won’t) read Asimov or Heinlein or Philip K Dick, and with an English teacher about young poets who haven’t (or won’t) read the classic English language poets or anything that rhymes. What fruit do they expect to bear, cut off from the roots? Thus also the YouTube critic, whose chronological range is even narrower—not centuries, but decades or years.

A useful object lesson and an experience that, one hopes, thoughtful, driven, earnest, but shallow people like the Drinker can learn from. Because on the other side of such chastening is a rich tradition to explore, participate in, and enjoy.

You can read the whole of Hall’s letter at the Paris Review archives here. And if, like me, you’re new to Substack, subscribe to Quid and go explore some of the good and thoughtful writers who are on there.

Saving the world from the reading nook

Writing at Front Porch Republic in response to several recent news stories—like this one—that suggest our civilizational decline is further along than even the pessimists thought, Nadya Williams argues that saving and restoring civilization begins at home:

In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

The right domestic tone is key. So is opportunity. Williams continues:

When books are everywhere, they distract us with their presence in a good way—they demand to be read, shaping the people around them in small but meaningful ways, moment by moment, page by page. They send us on rabbit trails to find yet more books on related topics, to ask friends for recommendations, and sometimes just to sit quietly and reflect, overcome with an emotion sparked by an author who has been dead for centuries but one that expresses the state of our soul in this moment.

This combination—a mood at home that encourages reading and abundant opportunity to do so—reminded me of the early passages of Lewis’s spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy. Here he describes the home his family moved into when he was seven:

The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Lewis’ father, you see, had the same bad habit I do: he “bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.” Feel free to consult my wife for more information on me, but for the young Lewis this was the happy result:

There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

The results speak for themselves.

But of course opportunities have to be seized, and the decline of reading, at least among the American populace, is not for lack of reading material. Books are plentiful and cheap. Where a private library used to be a ruinously expensive luxury, the most precious resource of a monastery or the hobby of an aristocrat, Williams argues that “in this day and age, with periodic public library sales and book giveaways, one doesn’t have to be rich to accumulate an impressive home library.”

But that word accumulate my put off the more Marie Kondo-ish among us. Williams suggests we embrace the stacks:

[S]peaking of luxuries, let’s forget aesthetics at least to some extent. Does my home feature many cheap mismatched bookcases? Yes, it does. Do we have too many books for our little space? Most definitely. Are there too many books piled up on every desk, side table, coffee table, and even hidden under the covers in the five-year-old’s bed? Yes. Is everyone in this home living with the joy of books as their primary companions each day? Yes, and that is the point.

Our home library is several thousand volumes, now. I stopped counting at over 3,000 a long time ago. We have a stuffed home office lined with the IKEA Billy bookcases I recently described, three tall bookcases in the master bedroom and large bookcases in our kids’ rooms, shelves on the landing, baskets of kids’ books in the living room, and you can always find stacks here and there that Sarah valiantly keeps under control. Clutter is the danger, but we’re creating opportunity.

Lewis’s memories of tone and opportunity resonate with me. In the little house where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, my parents had one big white wooden bookcase in the foyer by the front door. It had a 1970s-era set of World Book, a big hardback book on the top shelf mysteriously emblazoned Josephus, and scads and scads of kids’ books: Value Tales, Childcraft, Berenstain Bears, Golden Books, etc. We were free to read any of it, any time. I certainly did.

As a high schooler with a taste for literature, I discovered that classics series were helpful. I started as cheaply as I could with Dover Thrift Editions, which at that time were mostly one or two dollars apiece. You got what you paid for, to an extent (when I took a bunch of these to college a friend started calling them “Dover Homeless Editions”), but they gave this hillbilly kid with little pocket change easy access to lots of great old books for very little money. From there, Signet Classics, mass market paperbacks that ranged from $5-$8 when I was in college, and finally the larger and marginally more expensive but better quality Penguin Classics beckoned. I have hundreds of the latter.

The rest of our library has grown up around these like an artificial reef. And I’m glad to say that our reef is now teeming with little fish, busily reading. It is sweet to see them nestled down somewhere with a book, even when they should be doing something like sleeping. For once, I am not so pessimistic about the future.

Read all of Williams’s essay here and be encouraged—and motivated. Relatedly, read this piece on moving a home library from my podcasting friend Michial Farmer, which posted at Front Porch Republic just a day or two after Williams’s. Cf. his thoughts on collecting and loving cheap paperbacks versus cultivating a perfectly matched room full of leatherbound hardbacks. And you can read more about Lewis’s bookish childhood here.

Vindicated by Dr Johnson

Back at the beginning of the summer I briefly meditated on great books that I’ve tried to read but simply can’t. I wrote in some detail about The Grapes of Wrath but also mentioned Paradise Lost, which I have started many times and never finished—a fact I always feel a little ashamed of.

Well, this week I started reading Joseph Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel, which is excellent so far, and in the introduction he included this passage from Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets:

“‘Paradise Lost’ is one of the books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”

This has been precisely my experience, and if Samuel Johnson could say the same—with much more besides—I can feel a little better about this gap in my reading.

Addendum: Having read the portion of Johnson’s life of Milton in which Johnson assesses Paradise Lost on the merits, I find some of his criticisms precisely accurate and insightful—the allegorical figures don’t work, Adam and Eve’s situation is literally unimaginable, and Milton has set himself the impossible task of describing at length things that can’t be described—while others are more specious. Maybe what will finally propel me through Paradise Lost is the need to make up my own mind about these controversies. To justify the ways of Dr Johnson, that is.

Dramatic irony and plot contrivance

Bates and Anna in Downton Abbey and Abby in Blood Simple

Last night RedLetterMedia posted their review of the first season of “The Acolyte,” the latest Star Wars show. I have no interest whatsoever in watching “The Acolyte” but in the course of Mike and Jay’s discussion Jay specifically critiques it for an overused storytelling technique:

One of my least favorite plot contrivances that’s used for, like, lazy screenwriting is the misunderstanding and the not explaining to a character what is going on because the plot demands it. . . . the lazy contrivance of not knowing all the information and not being told the information because if you were then there would be no story.

I should say “misused” rather than “overused.” What Jay is describing is dramatic irony, a form of literary irony in which the audience knows more than the characters do. This can create tension and pathos as characters ignorant of the full significance of their own actions carry on, ignorant not only of what they’re doing but of the consequences they will face later. Shakespearian and especially Greek tragedy are rich in dramatic irony, as are modern horror and suspense movies—as exemplified by Hitchcock’s famous example of the bomb under the table.

But dramatic irony, as Jay suggests, becomes a plot contrivance when the ignorance of the characters is maintained unnaturally. The best example I can think of is “Downton Abbey.” Earlier seasons of the show produce dramatic irony much more organically, but as the show goes on and becomes more obviously a high-toned soap opera, characters get into increasingly melodramatic situations and increasingly refuse to talk to each other about them. Most of the show’s problems could be resolved with one conversation, a conversation the characters will not have.*

This is particularly the case with any plot involving Mr Bates, whose aloof taciturnity is taken to a ridiculous extreme when he is accused of murder—among other things. He has numerous opportunities simply to explain to someone else what is going on and why he is acting in the way that he is, and he doesn’t.** Over and over, “Downton Abbey” prolongs the drama artificially in exactly the same way.

For dramatic irony done not just well but brilliantly, watch Blood Simple, the Coen brothers’ first film. The film has four primary characters: Abby, the young wife of a shady nightclub owner; Marty, the husband; Ray, a friend with whom Abby begins an affair; and Loren Visser, a private detective. Briefly, Marty hires Visser to look into what Abby and Ray are up to and, when he finds out, pays Visser to kill them. Visser double-crosses and shoots Marty, and Ray discovers the body.

Without giving too much away, as the rest of the movie unfolds:

• Ray thinks that Abby killed Marty (she didn’t) and decides that he has to cover for her

• Abby thinks Marty is still alive and out to get her (he isn’t) and decides to fight back

• Visser thinks he has gotten away with his crime (he hasn’t) until he realizes he has left evidence in Marty’s nightclub, which he thinks Ray and Abby have (they don’t), and decides to eliminate them to cover his tracks

All of the characters operate in ignorance of the whole picture—with the possible exception of Visser, who makes mistakes despite knowing more than Ray and Abby—and make their decisions based on what they think they know, which is often wrong. This ignorance continues right up until the final lines of the film, following a climactic confrontation in which the two surviving characters can’t see each other. And it is unbearably suspenseful rather than, like “Downton Abbey” or “The Acolyte,” merely frustrating.

Dramatic irony is a powerful device, and it’s a shame it isn’t better used. Writers hoping to create tension in their stories through the ignorance or misperceptions of their characters would do well to revisit a movie like Blood Simple, some of Elmore Leonard’s crime fiction, or, even better, go back to Aeschylus and Sophocles.

* This is, I think, part of what makes Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess such a breath of fresh air whenever she appears, as she actually says what she means.

** My wife and I refer to these as “Shan’t” moments, as in “I could resolve this with a simple explanation, but—” turning one’s head away, “shan’t.”

Mr Bennet’s library

I’m currently reading Pride and Prejudice out loud to my wife every night before bed. Though I know the story well, this is the first time I’ve actually read it since college probably eighteen years ago. As much as you can appreciate Austen’s wit, goodness, and insight, there is nothing like actually reading her work to blow you away.

It’s also easy to forget, in a world full of imitators that feature the trappings of Austen’s world but not the wit, goodness, and insight—and are increasingly skanky, to boot—how fantastically funny Austen is. It’s hard for me to get through a chapter because I’m constantly laughing.

Last night we read some of the choicest early chapters featuring Mr Collins. After finding Mr Collins “as absurd as he had hoped,” Mr Bennet is stuck with a living, breathing, rapidly aging joke in his house. Specifically his library. This is bothersome to Mr Bennet, because, as Austen tells us:

“In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquillity; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there.”

Sarah and I agreed to have that made into a nice sign for our own office/library door.

Pilgrimage back to Bunyan

“Someday you will be old enough to read fairy tales again.”

— CS Lewis, in his dedication of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

I’m finishing work on a “life story” project for a church group today, which has got me in an even more than usually reflective mood as I consider family history, personal debts, and the things that have made me who I am. Among these are the books that have most shaped me. Ages and ages ago, sometime early in grad school, I wrote a multi-part series of blog posts on precisely this topic. One of the most important early books I mentioned was Dangerous Journey, a lavishly illustrated adaptation of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

This came to mind because just a few days ago Alan Jacobs wrote about teaching The Pilgrim’s Progress and the “great joy” it gives him—not only teaching it, but the mere fact that “so utterly bonkers a book was so omnipresent in English-language culture . . . for so long.” He goes on, in a strikingly incisive paragraph, to note how

One of the “tough” things about [The Pilgrim’s Progress] is the way [it] veer[s] from hard-coded allegory to plain realism, sometimes within a given sentence. One minute Moses is the canonical author of the Pentateuch, the next he’s a guy who keeps knocking Hopeful down. But the book is always psychologically realistic, to an extreme degree. No one knew anxiety and terror better than Bunyan did, and when Christian is passing through the Valley of the Shadow of Death and hears voices whispering blasphemies in his ears, the true horror of the moment is that he thinks he himself is uttering the blasphemies. (The calls are coming from inside the house.) 

This captures both the strangeness and the power of Bunyan’s book, as I’ve lately been rediscovering.

I grew up with Pilgrim’s Progress as a load-bearing component of my imagination. My parents had Dangerous Journey at home and I pored over the incredible, grotesque, beautiful, frightening illustrations (by Alan Parry in a style reminiscent of Arthur Rackham) over and over again. My friends and I read a children’s version—with an excellent map—in school. Another time we acted out Christian and Faithful’s trial at Vanity Fair for a school music program. (I played Lord Hategood, the judge.) Occasionally during our church’s summer Bible school the nightly story would be a version of Pilgrim’s Progress in five short installments. I taught this version of it myself once shortly after graduating from college. There was even a two-part “Adventures in Odyssey” adaptation I listened to many times on cassette tape.

I knew Pilgrim’s Progress thoroughly without ever having read it cover to cover.* But you know what they say about familiarity.

Then, late in high school, I discovered Dante. I was on my first medieval literature kick and wanted all the epic poetry I could get ahold of. Dante’s Comedy struck me as both 1) a proper classic, the kind of thing a kid like me should be reading and 2) lurid enough to be interesting and entertaining. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into—it blew my mind. I ended up reading Dante over and over again for several years straight, right through college, and Dante has been a profound influence on me ever since.

But discovering Dante also led me into an easy contempt for Bunyan. Dante, I thought, had fashioned a real allegory. Bunyan—in addition to his other faults, like his Calvinism**—seemed cloddish and simplistic by comparison. What were the ad hoc, making-it-up-as-I-go plot points and symbols of Pilgrim’s Progress worth when I had the masterful intricacies of the Comedy as an alternative?

It’s a typical fault of immaturity to set in opposition things that should really complement each other, but there I was, pooh-poohing Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m bothered even to remember this attitude. And yet, Pilgrim’s Progress stayed with me. And now I’m rediscovering it, having grown old enough to read it again.

Two things have helped rekindle my interest and reopen me to the story, which I freely acknowledged was fundamental to my imagination even when I was most disdainful of it. The first is John Buchan. Anyone who’s followed my John Buchan June readings will know that Pilgrim’s Progress was his favorite book, and that it informed and influenced everything in his fiction from his novels’ stern moralism, hardy sense of adventure, the fact that many of their plots are journeys, and even character names and motivations. Buchan’s love of Bunyan started to bring me back around, the same way a good friend might convince you to give one of their friends another chance despite having made an awkward introduction.

But more important has been revisiting Pilgrim’s Progress itself. A few years ago I broke out my parents’ copy of Dangerous Journey to look at with my own kids and, like me thirty-odd years before them, they found the pictures mesmerizing, horrifying, and impossibly intriguing. They wanted to know more, to find out what’s going on in the story behind these images. The pictures cry out for the story to be told.

And then, right now a year ago, I read Little Pilgrim’s Progress to them a few chapters at a time before bed. Little Pilgrim’s Progress is a children’s adaptation of Bunyan by Helen Taylor, first published in 1947, that abridges, simplifies, and somewhat softens some of the original. The edition I read was a new, large-format hardback illustrated by Joe Sutphin. In Sutphin’s pictures, the characters are all adorable anthropomorphic animals: Evangelist is an owl, Christian is a rabbit, Great Heart is a badger, Giant Despair is a genuinely terrifying hare, Apollyon—rendered “Self” by Taylor—is a wolf, and others are otters, squirrels, toads, dogs, and more. I was worried it would all be a little too cutesy, but I wanted to introduce this story to my kids and I was glad to find the pictures and the adaptation perfectly suited for their ages. It’s brilliantly done.

What I was not prepared for was the way Bunyan’s story, even filtered through an abridgement and fuzzy animals, would wreck me. I had to stop reading Little Pilgrim’s Progress several times—most especially as the characters approached the River of Death and their final, long-awaited but fearful entry into the Celestial City—because I couldn’t hold back my tears. The raw emotional and, as Jacobs notes, psychological power of Pilgrim’s Progress ambushed me. The fear, guilt, anxiety, doubt, grief, and—above all—hope were so real, so true to life in our fallen and wounded state, that the story cut deep. All the more so because I was so familiar with Pilgrim’s Progress that I was, ironically, unprepared to meet it again. I’m glad I did.

I’ve had a long history with Pilgrim’s Progress, a history I should cap by finally reading the whole thing. I think that will be a good post-Buchan summer project. Until then, check out Dangerous Journey and Taylor and Sutphin’s Little Pligrim’s Progress, especially if you have kids and you want something that will really shape their faith and imaginations.

* A lesson in just how literate people who don’t read a book can still be when they have a culture to support their knowledge and understanding of it, something I often think about with regard to medieval people.

** Thank you, I will not be taking questions at this time.

I’m just a Poe boy from a... chosen family?

Edgar Allan Poe was orphaned just a month before his third birthday, when his actress mother Eliza died in Richmond, Virginia. Her husband and Edgar’s father, David Poe, had abandoned the family some time before and died the same month in obscure circumstances. The three Poe children were divvied up: the eldest son, Henry, went to live with David’s parents in their hometown of Baltimore. The youngest, Rosalie, was adopted by a Richmond family. Edgar, the middle child, was fostered but never adopted by the wealthy John and Frances Allan, also of Richmond.

Edgar’s relationship with his foster father was famously volatile, at least once Edgar reached adolescence and especially after the death of Frances. Eventually, John Allan cut Poe off from all contact and assistance and did not even mention him in his will.

I note all this by way of introducing this passage from A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe, an otherwise good Poe biography by Mark Dawidziak that I’m currently reading. Here the author quotes the director of a Poe museum to illustrate the important changes brought about by Poe’s relocation to Baltimore after having left the army and intentionally flunked out of West Point:

“The idea of your chosen family is a more modern idea, but you see that with Poe. . . . In Richmond, he ultimately finds rejection. The message is, ‘You don't really belong here.’ Then he goes to Baltimore and finds the family that says, ‘You’re one of us.’ He finds his chosen family here. This is the house where Poe sought refuge. Maria, no stranger to poverty, welcomed him into her household. He goes dark here and begins to write those short stories. This tiny little house is where a huge literary career has its real start.”

This is a truly bizarre bit of sentimentalism since Poe’s “chosen family” in Baltimore is, in fact, his actual family.

Poe—as the author describes immediately before that paragraph—moved in with his paternal grandmother, his aunt (the Maria mentioned above, his father’s sister), his older brother, and two cousins, one of whom, Virginia, he would eventually marry. “You’re one of us” is not just a statement of group affinity, it is literally true. If anything, Poe’s return to Baltimore and the love and support he found among the Poes there shows the power of real blood relation rather than the self-fashioned groups championed by so many in this atomized age.

To be fair to the person quoted here, the passage above comes not from a scholarly article or a book but from a taped phone interview, so it’s likely she was speaking off-the-cuff and blundered in trying to make Poe’s changing fortunes relatable. But it’s still a good object lesson in the danger of letting twee modern sentimentality color your view of history.

Literary cameos

Yesterday Alan Jacobs posted a longish recommendation of Francis Spufford’s latest novel, an alternate history detective noir titled Cahokia Jazz. I’m intrigued. But I especially enjoyed this minor note from the end of Jacobs’s post:

At one point, late in the story, our hero is at Cahokia’s railway station and happens to see a family, “pale, shabby-grand, and relocating with their life’s possessions”—including, curiously enough, butterfly nets: “white Russians on their way to Kodiak, by the look of it.” One of them, “a lanky twenty-something in flannels and tennis shoes,” is called by his family Vovka, and he briefly assists our hero. Then off they go, leaving our story as abruptly as they had arrived in it. Assuming that they made their way to Kodiak—or, more formally, as our map tells us, NOVAYA SIBIRSKAYA TERRITORII—it is unlikely that their world ever knew Lolita or Pale Fire.

This is “one of several delightful cameos” in the novel, and Jacobs’s recommendation and praise got me thinking about such cameos in fiction.

I haven’t read Cahokia Jazz yet, though I intend to, but I’m willing to take Jacobs at his word that Spufford does this well. The example he cites certainly sounds subtle enough to work. But done poorly, such cameos awkwardly shoehorn a well-known figure into the story and call unnecessary attention to themselves. Think Forrest Gump in novel form. They can also, if used to denigrate the characters in the story, turn into the kind of wink-wink presentist authorial irony that I deplore.

I think the best version of the literary cameo functions much like a good film cameo—if you spot the cameo and know who it is, it’s a nice bonus, but if you don’t it doesn’t intrude enough to distract. And, ideally, it will work with and add to the story and characterization of the main characters.

A good and especially subtle example comes from Declare, which I’m almost finished reading. Early in the novel we read of protagonist Andrew Hale’s background, specifically where he was in the early stages of World War II before embarking on his first espionage assignments in occupied France:

In November he successfully sat for an exhibition scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, and in the spring of 1941 he went up to that college to read English literature.

His allowance from Drummond’s Bank in Admiralty Arch was not big enough for him to do any of the high living for which Oxford was legendary, but wartime rationing appeared to have cut down on that kind of thing in any case—even cigarettes and beer were too costly for most of the students in Hale’s college, and it was fortunate that the one-way lanes of Oxford were too narrow for comfortable driving and parking, since bicycles were the only vehicles most students could afford to maintain. His time was spent mostly in the Bodleian Library researching Spenser and Malory, and defending his resultant essays in weekly sessions with his merciless tutor.

A Magdalen College tutor ruthlessly grilling a student over Spenser and Malory? That can only be CS Lewis.

They’re not precisely cameos, but I have worked a few real-life figures into my novels in greater or lesser supporting roles: David Howarth in Dark Full of Enemies, Gustavus W Smith and Pleasant Philips in Griswoldville. I’ve aimed a little lower in the name of realism, I suppose. But the precise dividing line between a cameo of the kind described here and a real person playing a serious role in a story is something I’ll have to figure out.

At any rate, a well-executed literary cameo is a joy. Curious to see who else might surprise us in the pages of Cahokia Jazz.