Polarization

Chapter 8 of The Holy Roman Empire: A Short History, by Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger describes how rivalries and warfare between the Empire’s members (most importantly Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, and Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, Habsburg rulers of Austria), philosophical trends like Enlightenment liberalism, and external events like the French Revolution fatally atrophied the Empire, turning its institutions sclerotic and captive to the ulterior interests of its own elite.

The chapter is called “Political Polarization.” Here’s Stollberg-Rilinger’s concluding paragraph:

With the deaths of Frederick II in 1786 and Joseph II in 1790, the political situation in the Holy Roman Empire became thoroughly polarized. The Austrian-Prussian dualism affected every aspect of the Imperial constitution, and its opposing gravitational pulls, combined with the cynical confessional politics of both sides, tore apart the Empire’s institutional fabric. The weaker Imperial members could not extricate themselves from this polarization and had to choose sides. The powerful Imperial members had long ceased to base their authority and legitimacy on the Empire and consequently had no interests in the Empire as such. Thus, when the continuing existence of the Empire served their particular goal, they supported it, but when it did not, they showed no qualms in attacking or abusing it. At the end of the eighteenth century, all that was needed for the ultimate collapse of the Empire was one final external push.

Let the reader understand.

Andvari's ring vs Sauron's ring

A happy coincidence: Yesterday morning saw the arrival of the latest episode of The Rest is History, in which Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook talk through Tolkien’s life and work. This was the morning after I read my two older kids the story of the cursed ring and the tragedy of Sirgurð and Brynhild in Roger Lancelyn Green’s Myths of the Norsemen.

So I was primed to think about magic rings. (Not that it takes much.) Holland and Sandbrook’s discussion is excellent and thought-provoking, especially as they point out the ways in which Tolkien was essentially modern. Tolkien came of age among the World War I generation, and Holland and Sandbrook point out some interesting resonances of his work with that of more obviously modern writers like Eliot and Joyce, with whom Tolkien shares some surprising interests, sympathies, concerns, and suspicions—not least his suspicion of technology. That suspicion permeates Tolkien’s work but he articulates the dangerous allure of technology most fully and clearly as the Ring, and thanks to Green the original was already on my mind from the night before. That’s Andvaranaut, the cursed ring of the dwarf Andvari.

In the Volsunga saga, Regin relates a story to the hero Sigurð regarding the origins of the treasure guarded by the dragon Fáfnir. Having unwittingly killed Ótr, one of the three sons of Hreiðmar, the god Loki agrees to pay Hreiðmar for the killing and funds the repayment by stealing it from Andvari. He captures Andvari and will only ransom him for his entire hoard. Here’s the key moment in Jackson Crawford’s translation:

Loki saw all the gold that Andvari owned. And after he had taken all of it, Andvari still had one single ring, and Loki took that from him as well. The dwarf then hid inside a stone and said that this ring and the gold would cause the death of everyone who owned it.

In Reginsmál, a poem in the Poetic Edda, Andvari utters this in verse:

This gold
that Gust used to own
will cause the death
of two brothers,
and cause grief
for eight kings.
No one will enjoy
my treasure.

True to Andvari’s curse, the ring immediately works its baleful magic upon Loki, Óðin, and Hreiðmar and goes on to cause, in Green’s phrase, “ruin and sorrow” for many more.

This may be the original inspiration for Sauron’s One Ring, but, as I noted recently, Tolkien was annoyed by suggestions that his ring was merely the sum of his inspirations. (Per Tom Shippey, “People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases.’”) These passages highlight the key difference.

Both rings work evil: Andvari’s ring because it is cursed and Sauron’s ring because of what it is—what it was designed and made to do. It is an instrument, a technology designed to achieve certain ends. And like any technology, its relationship with its users is not one-way. As all technologies subtly warp their users’ needs and preferences to conform to what the technologies can provide, Tolkien brilliantly depicts the way the ring foreshortens and limits the options of those who use it, so that they only begin by using it and end up desiring it. As he wrote in 1944 regarding the methods used even by the Allies during World War II: “[w]e are attempting to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And we shall (it seems) succeed. But the penalty is, as you will know, to breed new Saurons, and slowly turn Men and Elves into Orcs.”

Technologies are not neutral. The danger of technologies to all who use them rather than the danger of a curse—this insight is both the most modern thing about Tolkien and among the greatest lessons he can still teach us.

You can read some related thoughts—on the possibility of using Twitter for good—from back in the spring here, and here’s an excellent essay on Tolkien by Sandbrook at UnHerd. Here’s a seven-minute summary from Crawford of the whole complicated Andvari incident. And Roger Lancelyn Green is, for my money, the most underappreciated Inkling and his Myths of the Norsemen has been the ideal bedtime read for my seven- and five-year old. Do check it out.

The senses, "preferably all of them"

This week I’ve been reading Butcher’s Crossing, a great Western by John Williams. This novel tells the story of Will Andrews, a young dropout from Harvard College who takes part of his fortune West, where he expects, being a wealthy New Englander and fan of Emerson, to find himself in nature. That’s the big picture.

Last night I came across this paragraph describing a party of snowbound hunters’ long-overdue trip back down from the Rockies with a wagon overloaded with dried buffalo hides:

Before midday they found a level plateau that extended a short way out from the mountain. They took the bits from their horses’ mouths and unyoked the oxen and let them graze on the thick grass that grew among the small rocks that littered the plateau. On a broad flat rock, Charley Hoge cut into equal portions a long strip of smoked venison, and passed the portions among the men. Andrews’s hand received the meat limply, and put it to his mouth; but for several minutes he did not eat. Exhaustion pulled at his stomach muscles, sickening him; tiny points darkened and brightened before his eyes, and he lay back on the cool grass. After a while he was able to tear at the tough leather-like meat. His gums, inflamed by the long diet of game, throbbed at the toughness; he let the meat soften on his tongue before he chewed it. After he had forced most of it down his throat, he stood, despite the tiredness that still pulsed in his legs, and looked about him. The mountainside was a riot of varied shade and hue. The dark green of the pine boughs was lightened to a greenish yellow at the tips, where new growth was starting; scarlet and white buds were beginning to open on the wild-berry bushes; and the pale green of new growth on slender aspens shimmered above the silver-white bark of their trunks. All about the ground the pale new grass reflected the light of the sun into the shadowed recesses beneath the great pines, and the dark trunks glowed in that light, faintly, as if the light came from the hidden centers of the trees themselves. He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth. A light breeze rustled among the boughs, and the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together; from the grass came a mumble of sound as innumerable insects rustled secretly and performed their invisible tasks; deep in the forest a twig snapped beneath the pad of an unseen animal. Andrews breathed deeply of the fragrant air, spiced with the odor of crushed pine needles and musky from the slow decay that worked upward from the earth in the shadows of the great trees.

This is an extraordinarily rich and beautiful description, and it is impossible to read through it without sensing the place where Andrews and company have come to rest.

About a month ago I wrote in some detail about John Gardner’s concept of the “vivid and continuous fictive dream” as the thing that makes good fiction work. In that post I quoted a passage from The Art of Fiction in which Gardner describes how the writer “gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths.” Emphasis mine. I wrote at some length about the vivid, closely observed, concretely described details that make good fiction absorbing in the way that Gardner describes, but glided over that key phrase: “preferably all of them.” That is, our senses.

Incorporating details that play on all of the senses can be tricky, and most writers fall back on one or two that they are good at conveying. But that paragraph from Butcher’s Crossing is a small masterpiece of exactly what Gardner calls for. Go back and reread it with Gardner’s “preferably all of them” in mind.

Here are a few things I observed:

• Sight—Williams presents specific visual details from the beginning (the layout of the plateau where the team stops) to the end (“the shadows of the great trees”). Note especially the many gradations of spring color in the middle of the paragraph, and the play of light through the trees so that it seems to come from everywhere at once. And through Andrews, the novel’s protagonist and viewpoint character, the reader gets the subjective sight of “tiny points darken[ing] and brighten[ing] before his eyes” in his pain and exhaustion.

• Touch—Note not only the “cool grass” but “the tiredness that pulsed in his legs” and the entire description of Andrews eating, in which we feel not only the texture of the venison but how Andrews holds (his “hand received the meat limply”), chews, and swallows it. More on this below.

• Taste—Again, most obviously the description of eating the venison, through which this category will also overlap with touch above and smell below. But note that this sense does much of its work indirectly; we never get adjectives to describe the precise taste of the venison. Andrews in his exhaustion is beyond that.

• Smell—The paragraph concludes with a sentence almost totally devoted to smell, invoking “fragrant air” that is “spiced” and “musky,” a word I also find strongly tactile. (Describe a basement as “musky” and I can feel the air down there.) But anyone with experience of smoked meat and venison in particular will be able to smell Andrews’s meal as well as feeling and tasting it.

• Hearing—Williams gets especially creative here. Rustling leaves and whispering pine needles are unsurprising, but the “mumble” of insects in the grass is inventive and just right. And Andrews hears not only small, nearby sounds but the faroff (somewhere, a twig snaps) and the borderline metaphysical (“He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth”). This sense more than anything conveys the space that Andrews and company occupy, high and remote and empty in the mountains.

These are just the most obvious things, but one could examine that paragraph in considerably more detail. I think it might be a good exercise to go through it merely cataloging sensory words. But there are three ways Williams uses the senses, as a matter of technique, that I think give this passage its potency.

First, onomatopoeia. This includes not only auditory effects (the bugs in the grass “rustled secretly”) but control of the rhythm of the sentence to suggest Andrews’s tiredness and the languor of slowly coming to rest in a quiet place (look at how Williams drops the word faintly into his description of the light in the trees). Writers of prose fiction should absolutely read poetry for training in the use of tools like this.

Second, as I’ve already hinted above, Williams overlaps these sensations. One can see this most obviously as Andrews eats his venison, but many other details simultaneously involve multiple senses. Consider this: “the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together.” That’s not only about sound but touch. In nine words the reader not only hears the pine needles but feels the minute friction beneath the sound.

Third and closely related, Williams creates many of these effects through precisely selected verbs—verbs that carry some suggestion of sensation. I’ve already mentioned the rubbing of the pine needles, but look back at Andrews’s unsatisfying meal again. Andrews has to “tear at” the meat and then let it “soften,” twice suggesting its texture, and does not swallow but “force[s] most of it down.” These three verbs do as much to tell the reader about what eating the venison is like as the adjectives bluntly describing its texture.

The result of all of this detail—so carefully arranged and presented and, per Gardner, appealing to all five senses—is a beautiful but unshowy paragraph of immediately involving and vivid description and action. And Butcher’s Crossing is full of passages like this.

You can read that piece on Gardner and the fictive dream here. For more on the important role vivid sensory verbs play in action and description, see here. And it occurs to me that this is the second time the noble bison has been the thumbnail for a post here; so, speaking of verbs and buffalo, here’s the first time both showed up on this blog.

Tolkien and true tradition

Jackson Crawford’s video on The Hammer and the Cross yesterday morning got me leafing back through my Tom Shippey, and having recently reread the Nibelungenlied got me looking for it in the index of The Road to Middle Earth. The most interesting reference to the poem in this particular book came in an appendix, “Tolkien’s Sources: The True Tradition.”

Shippey begins with a caveat:

Tolkien himself did not approve of the academic search for ‘sources’. He thought it tended to distract attention from the work of art itself, and to undervalue the artist by the suggestion that he had ‘got it all’ from somewhere else.

This is exactly right. Understanding the sources, inspirations, and influences behind a work of literature can be instructive, but the Quellenforschung too easily turns from an inquiry into the past of a living specimen to the dismemberment of a corpse. The once-living creature—not to mention its creator—is often lost from sight in the process.

Before turning to the sources, inspirations, and influences of Tolkien’s work, Shippey elaborates upon the difference in Tolkien’s attitude toward the use of sources for modern retellings and the way he used them for that work:

He was also very quick to detect the bogus and the anachronistic, which is why I use the phrase ‘true tradition’. Tolkien was irritated all his life by modern attempts to rewrite or interpret old material, almost all of which he thought led to failures of tone and spirit. Wagner is the most obvious example. People were always connecting The Lord of the Rings with Der Ring des Nibelungen, and Tolkien did not like it. ‘Both rings were round’, he snarled, ‘and there the resemblance ceases’ (Letters, p. 306). This is not entirely true. The motifs of the riddle-contest, the cleansing fire, the broken weapon preserved for an heir, all occur in both works, as of course does the theme of ‘the lord of the Ring as the slave of the Ring’, des Ringes Herr als des Ringes Knecht. But what upset Tolkien was the fact that Wagner was working, at second-hand, from material which he knew at first-hand, primarily the heroic poems of the Elder Edda and the later Middle High German Nibelungenlied. Once again he saw difference where other people saw similarity. Wagner was one of several authors with whom Tolkien had a relationship of intimate dislike: Shakespeare, Spenser, George MacDonald, Hans Christian Andersen. All, he thought, had got something very important not quite right. It is especially necessary, then, for followers of Tolkien to pick out the true from the heretical, and to avoid snatching at surface similarities.

This is a remarkably insightful passage, and helped give me the language for something I’ve felt within myself for many years: that same irritation with modern reinterpretations that “get something important not quite right,” that are “failures of tone and spirit.” This might as well be the thesis statement, for example, of my review of The Green Knight a year ago, and it also helps me understand why despite my love for Tolkien I’ve hardly ever liked any other fantasy fiction I’ve read. The few I have—The Lord of the Rings, The Prydain Chronicles—are animated by at least something of a discernible “true tradition.” The ones I have not—A Song of Ice and Fire, The Wheel of Time—have the trappings but not the tradition, the form but not the spirit. If only Tolkien could see the use his work has been put to, now.

Devotion to a true tradition demands hard work and a lifetime of dedication, but it’s worth it. Food for thought.

If you want to dive into some of Tolkien’s true tradition, the version of the Nibelungenlied I just reread is the verse translation of Burton Raffel. I also recently read the prose translation of William Whobrey, which was quite good and included excellent scholarly apparatus. And the two translations of the Elder or Poetic Edda, also mentioned by Shippey above, that I have most enjoyed are those by Carolyne Larrington and the aforementioned Jackson Crawford. These are good places to start in the tradition that informed Tolkien.

I posted a meditation on the perversion of virtue in the Nibelungenlied two weeks ago here. And as it happens, I wrote something about misleading “surface similarities” just yesterday.

Elementary historical mistakes

Anthony Hopkins, Danny Huston, and Disney with wildly different takes on King Richard I

During the spring semester I picked up a used copy of John Gillingham’s Richard the Lionheart, the first of his two biographies of the great English king. Gillingham engages vigorously in the many debated aspects of Richard’s reign—among them, a few I’ve blithely assumed in that opening sentence: In what sense was this French-speaking heir of the Angevin throne English? Was he great? And was he homosexual?

I don’t intend to answer the first two questions here, but for the last the short answer is No. Gillingham notes that “the earliest reference to Richard’s homosexuality dates from 1948” and, despite this suspiciously recent vintage, had within thirty years (Gillingham’s Richard the Lionheart was published in 1978) become “generally accepted as fact and often referred to in passing—as though it were common knowledge—by historians,” including many prominent ones who should have known better but simply picked up and repeated this salacious new tidbit. “[S]uch thoughts did not occur to earlier generations of historians—though they knew the evidence better than anyone else.”

If it isn’t true, then where did this idea come from? In digging into the historiography of this controversy, Gillingham not only debunks the myth but also makes broader points about mistakes in the study of the past.

The primary piece of evidence presented for this relatively recent interpretation is the alliance and friendship Richard formed with Philip II, King of France in 1187, while Richard’s father Henry II was still on the throne. Here’s medieval chronicler Roger of Howden reporting Richard and Philip’s public procession to Paris:

Philip so honoured him that every day they ate at the same table, shared the same dish and at night the bed did not separate them. Between the two of them there grew up so great an affection that King Henry was much alarmed and, afraid of what the future might hold in store, he decided to postpone his return to England until he knew what lay behind this sudden friendship.

Aha! a prurient modern cries. Richard and Philip spent all their time together and slept in the same bed! But this, Gillingham notes, was clearly political theatre: “Gestures of this kind were part of the vocabulary of politics.” Richard was actually fighting a war with his own father at the time and the meaning of this public display—the King of England’s eldest and most warlike son allying with the King of France—was abundantly clear to Henry, as Roger himself indicates. Further, it was not at all uncommon for people of the same sex to share beds in the Middle Ages (Gillingham also points out that Henry II and William Marshal are known to have slept in the same bed when staying together), and Roger would have “had no fears that his audience would misunderstand him” on this point. .

The other bit of evidence also comes from Roger, in a story he relates about the visit of a hermit sometime around 1195. The hermit rebuked Richard, now King of England, for the childlessness of his marriage to Berengaria of Navarre, admonishing him to “[r]emember the destruction of Sodom and abstain from illicit acts, for if you do not God will punish you in a fitting manner.” Aha again! Sodomy, plain as day! But what the medievals meant by sodomy was far broader than modern legal definitions (as John Ciardi writes in his notes to Inferno, Canto XV, Dante “would probably have classed as sodomy oral and anal sex between heterosexuals”), and note as well that the hermit invokes not the sin of Sodom but its destruction.

Gillingham elaborates on the reception of such a warning by a medieval rather than a modern mind:

[T]he magnificent maledictions of the Old Testament prophets are rarely complete without a reference to the destruction of Sodom and, more often than not, this phrase carries no homosexual implications. It refers not so much to the nature of the offences as to the terrible and awe-inspiring nature of the punishment. The picture which chiefly interested the prophets and preachers who followed in their footsteps was the apocalyptic image of whole cities being overwhelmed by fire and brimstone. In the days when people read their Bible all the way through and when they appreciated the value of a good sermon no one understood the hermit’s words to mean that Richard was a homosexual.

The source of Richard and Berengaria’s childlessness, as far as the hermit was concerned, probably owed more to the frat house than the bath house. Richard had at least one bastard son, and Gillingham notes near the end of his book that he had women brought to him on his deathbed (dying of an infected crossbow wound on his neck!) against doctor’s orders. Richard’s appetites were well known, and so, Gillingham writes, “Thirteenth century opinion was in no doubt that his interests were heterosexual.”

And there are other yet weaker bits of circumstantial evidence: the childlessness of Richard’s marriage per se (as if infertility is not a thing), or his male-only coronation banquet (the usual form for such things in England up to that time).

Looking over the errors that led to and sustain this spurious story about Richard, one notes several recurring tendencies:

• Ignorance of or indifference to the ideas and attitudes of medieval people

• A reading of medieval sources through strictly modern interpretive schemes

• Interpretation of medieval customs and gestures based on false modern equivalents

There’s a lot of overlap between these items. All of them prove a judgment on the modern historian and his own society rather than the historical subject. “In the last thirty years,” Gillingham notes, “it has apparently become impossible to read the word ‘Sodom’ without assuming that it refers to homosexuality. This tells us a good deal about the culture of our own generation: its unfamiliarity with the Old Testament, and its wider interest in sex.”

But the thing that most clearly connects and unites these errors and fuels stories like the one in question is superficiality. Such an interpretation of these sources (n.b. two short passages in one chronicler, a problem of its own) is only possible through a shallow, surface-level engagement with the past. In relation to the last of the three items I noted above—the kisses, affection, ceremonial processions, and shared beds of the young Richard’s trip through France with his new ally Philip—Gillingham writes:

“It is an elementary mistake to take it for granted that an act which has one symbolic meaning for us today possessed that same meaning eight hundred years ago. ”

This superficiality is not a technical or even ideological distortion of the evidence, but an elementary mistake, and either because of or despite this it has become an exceedingly common one. Precisely the same accusation based on sharing a bed has been made about Abraham Lincoln, for instance. Ideology only makes it easier to make this mistake. Why bother understanding context when you have an ideological framework that will make sense of a few pieces of evidence for you?

Witness the persistent attempts of moderns to read Joan of Arc—a fervently religious Catholic peasant girl who sometimes attended Mass multiple times daily and, as a general, banned blasphemy among her men, expelled prostitutes from her camps, and even threatened to attack the Hussites for their heresy, sacrilege, and vandalism—as a gender-bending warrior against not England but the patriarchy. The most recent manifestation is a play to be performed at the Globe in London in which Joan uses they/them pronouns and appears in a chest-binder. All of which should be an obviously inappropriate imposition of the modern on the pre-modern, and all of which, presumably, rests upon Joan’s practicality in wearing men’s armor, something she insisted she was commanded to do by God. It would be easy to populate a very long list of such elementary misinterpretations. You can find just such a sample list here.

The point of all of this should be pretty clear. Think of it as a hermit’s warning. If historical difference is to matter, if it means anything that “the past is a foreign country,” a certain humility and openness is required of the student of history. The key is to avoid superficiality, which in history as in anything else is the death of understanding.

Drink deep, or taste not.

More if you’re interested

Gillingham’s biography of Richard is good—now over forty years old, but excellently researched and well-written. More recent is Thomas Asbridge’s Richard I: The Crusader King, a concise biography for the Penguin Monarchs series (for which Gillingham wrote the entry on William II, another English king commonly accused of homosexuality). Asbridge offers the same answer to the question of Richard’s sexuality as Gillingham. Both are good historians, and I strongly recommend their books.

I’ve been fiddling with this post since February, and the play I, Joan is a recent development that paralleled some of what I’d been sorting through in this post. Regarding the Globe’s new play, this week I read two interesting pieces by quite different writers—Madeleine Kearns and Victoria Smith—both of whom arrive at similar conclusions about the the play, its ideological motives, its elementary historical mistakes, and what it means for women. Also, I’ve been dipping into medieval military historian Kelly DeVries’s Joan of Arc: A Military Leader this week, which is an excellent look at Joan in her own terms: as a devoutly religious soldier.

And I’ve written before about the way even elementary mistakes about historical figures can enter the popular consciousness and become ineradicable thanks to pop culture. You can read that here.

De Maistre on the fog of war

In a short break from my fall semester prep this morning I went back over my Goodreads highlights in The Executioner, a small selection from arch-conservative reactionary Joseph de Maistre‘s St Petersburg Dialogues. I’d love to run down a complete edition of this late work someday, as in addition to its central subjects de Maistre, the original Trad Chad, also makes characteristically trenchant and incisive remarks on a host of tangential topics.

Here’s one that I’d forgotten about. How, I don’t know, as it’s an observation very close to my personal, artistic, and academic interests:

“People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like.”

— Joseph de Maistre

People talk a lot about battles without knowing what they are really like. In particular, they tend to consider them as occurring at one place, whereas they cover two or three leagues of country. They ask you seriously: How is it that you don’t know what happened in this battle, since you were there? Whereas it is precisely the opposite that would often have to be said. Does the one on the right know what is happening on the left? Does he even know what is happening two paces from him?

De Maistre takes a moment to imagine what it was like:

On a vast field covered with all the apparatus of carnage and seeming to shudder under the feet of men and horses, in the midst of fire and whirling smoke, dazed and carried away by the din of firearms and cannon, by voices that order, roar, and die away, surrounded by the dead, the dying, and mutilated corpses, seized in turn by fear, hope, and rage, by five or six different passions, what happens to a man? What does he see? What does he know after a few hours? What can he know about himself and others? Among this crowd of warriors who have fought the whole day, there is often not a single one, not even the general, who knows who the victor is.

Compare Sir John Keegan’s observations throughout The Face of Battle on the experience versus the reconstructed God’s-eye view of combat, or David Howarth’s imaginative reconstruction of what command and control, much less communication, must have meant during the Battle of Hastings:

How could [Harold Godwinson] have controlled a line eight hundred yards long and eight men deep? How much of it could he have seen, over the heads of the crowd? How long would an order have taken to reach the ends of it—an aide on foot shoving his way through the ranks to search for some captain who was also on foot? Could even a bugle call in those days . . . have carried such a distance among the other sounds of battle?

This principle, evoking “the fog of war,” is applicable from the ranks of foot soldiers and company runners all the way up to commanders of corps and armies. Good histories, military or not, will at least suggest some of this. The most famous example may be Douglas Southall Freeman’s RE Lee, which narrates Lee’s command of the Army of Northern Virginia based only on what he could or did know at any given time. I’ve recently seen some writers criticize or even mock Freeman’s technique, suggesting it is… artificial? too forgiving? something?

I’ve honestly never understood this criticism. If history is to have any meaning or applicability, it needs an understanding of in-the-moment contingency as well as our later omniscience. This, as I posted last week, is the place of imagination in historical study. Fail to imagine how historical figures—whether a private in the front line or a commander at a map table—both did and did not understand what was happening to them, and you will ultimately fail to understand what did happen.

I read The Executioner in an inexpensive Kindle edition from the Penguin Great Ideas series. It’s worth checking out, especially as de Maistre’s work is so hard to find in affordable English editions.

Gilgamesh and Job

Sam Kriss, in an essay at The Lamp that is ostensibly a review of Sophus Helle’s new translation of The Epic of Gilgamesh but is really an extended meditation on death, summarizes the value of Gilgamesh’s 4,000-year old refusal to answer:

The Epic of Gilgamesh is here to confront you with the problem of death, not to solve it. It is not therapy. It was not written to make the world any less cruel. But this is precisely why, against myself, I do find it comforting.

This naturally brought to mind Chesterton’s most powerful and challenging paradox, from his “Introduction to the Book of Job,” the Old Testament book that is “chiefly remarkable . . . for the fact that it does not end in a way that is conventionally satisfactory”:

This, I say, is the first fact touching the speech; the fine inspiration by which God comes in at the end, not to answer riddles, but to propound them. . . . Job [is] suddenly satisfied with the mere presentation of something impenetrable. Verbally speaking the enigmas of Jehovah seem darker and more desolate than the enigmas of Job; yet Job was comfortless before the speech of Jehovah and is comforted after it. He has been told nothing, but he feels the terrible and tingling atmosphere of something which is too good to be told. The refusal of God to explain His design is itself a burning hint of His design. The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And I happened to read Kriss’s essay this morning before heading to church for a sermon from Ecclesiastes 3, part of an ongoing series about the book which, with Job, is my favorite in the Bible.

Less therapy. More ancient Near Eastern confrontation of enigmas.

Read both essays at the links above. They’re well worth your while.

On historical imagination

Aristotle with a Bust of Homer, by Rembrandt

As the summer semester wrapped up I came across this piece by James Hankins at Law & Liberty, a critique of American Birthright, a set of proposed standards and reforms for social studies education put together by the conservative-leaning Civics Alliance. Though sympathetic to the proposal’s good intentions and goals, Hankins finds that American Birthright is “not . . . beyond criticism.”

Let me note that this is, as far as I can recall, the first I have heard of the Civics Alliance and this project, so I can’t comment on that. But Hankins made some interesting and more broadly applicable points regarding the teaching of history in the modern academic environment.

First, on a neglected question—what is history for?

As an intellectual historian of the premodern world, what struck me the most, as I read through statement after earnest statement on the aims of social studies pedagogy, was the almost complete lack of interest today in what was always the chief rationale for writing and reading history from the time of Herodotus until the blessed advent of the Educational Testing Service in 1947. State departments of education, the National Council for Social Studies, and even the Civics Alliance speak of acquiring reading and writing skills; learning how interpretation is based on sources; learning how to summarize, analyze, and criticize historical accounts; how to gather evidence and evaluate it; how to assess historians’ arguments; how to ask questions, form hypotheses, and test them. All of these are immensely valuable skills, to be sure, but they sidestep the traditional goal of history in the premodern world: acquiring the virtue of prudence or practical wisdom—Aristotle’s phronesis. It’s worth asking why this is the case. After all, practical wisdom is the virtue we most need if our civic life is ever to be restored.

The disadvantage is that prudential judgements cannot be machine graded. This poses, first, a practical problem in that standardized testing is the great bronze image before which education bows down today—ignore it at your peril—and, second, a philosophical and ethical one in that teaching to an exam that tests only unambiguous right-wrong answers undermines the very purpose, “the traditional goal . . . in the premodern world,” of learning about the past: “the best [test] questions, to be ‘objective,’ have to be stripped of implicit moral judgements, contingencies, or imponderables—the very stuff of phronesis.”

Hankins offers a concrete example that couldn’t have been better calculated to get my attention:

Hence the Civics Alliance wants your child to know what year Robert E. Lee invaded Pennsylvania, who won at Gettysburg, and what Lincoln said after the battle. You can test for that. Progressive pedagogy will want your child to evaluate five different interpretations of why Lee invaded Pennsylvania and identify their ideological motivations. You can test for that too, though it’s easier to insert ideological messaging into the questions (for progressives, a feature, not a bug). A teacher concerned with phronesis, by contrast, will put you in command of the Army of Northern Virginia in the summer of 1863 and ask you whether, without benefit of hindsight, you would have invaded Pennsylvania and why. But your answer won’t be right or wrong; it will be wise or foolish. It can’t be machine-graded. It won’t produce metrics the Department of Education or ambitious parents can use to evaluate your teachers and your school. A wise answer won’t help you get into Harvard.

What Hankins reveals here is the place of imagination in historical study—imagining what it was like. This is “the inside of history,” as Chesterton put it, in a phrase that might as well be one of the mottos of this blog.

Imagination is severely underrated as a component of historical study—largely owing to the discipline’s scientific pretensions since at least the late 19th century—but that imagination should have a role should be clear, since history began as a literary exercise, was written almost exclusively as narrative, and, among Greek and Roman historians, written with a literal audience in mind. (The big difference between your textbook and ancient historians, I tell my students, is that ancient historians read their work to a live audience and were thus obliged to be interesting.) The fathers of history wrote so that their audience could put themselves in the shoes of the people they wrote about.

Hankins’s insistence on phronesis and wisdom is also crucial, as these virtues are impossible without imagination. A certain kind of killjoy uses “imagination” (perhaps overactive, vivid, or simply big) as a putdown, but we all intuitively recognize imagination’s practical, prudential value when we criticize someone as “unimaginative.” We recognize this not merely as a lack of appreciation for movies or fiction, but as a moral weakness.

To put my point in negative form, unimaginative people can be many things, but they are never wise.

But I’m finally putting these thoughts into some kind of coherent form because of David McCullough. McCullough died Sunday aged 89, a great loss to readers and lovers of history. I haven’t read nearly as many of his books as I’d like, but I have, God willing, years to fix that, and I regret that we’ll have no more from him.

So it was with great interest that I read a blog post by Samuel James entitled “What David McCullough can teach us,” which several of y’all sent my way this week. Let me commend the whole post to you. It’s excellent. But I want to highlight one paragraph that will tie my ramblings together, and that helped me think through yet more concretely some of what Hankins set in motion.

James contrasts McCullough’s work with the modish Jesus and John Wayne, purportedly an historical exposé of the role toxic masculinity has played in the rise of evangelicalism (I’m old enough to remember when the real culprit was The Corporations), and the exvangelical crowd’s biggest hit in the last couple of years. In this book, James writes, its author “wanted me to see the subjects of her history the way she sees them, not as how they saw themselves. How they interpreted their lives and beliefs was of little consequence. How the generations after them interpreted them was everything. This is the kind of history that gets people angry and eager to deconstruct whatever they sense is tainted by moral failure.”

McCullough, on the other hand,

doesn’t do this. McCullough clearly has positive feelings about John Adams, George Washington, Harry Truman, etc. But these are not hagiographies. One of the most memorable parts of John Adams is the way that McCullough fleshes out Adams’s penchant for vanity and insecurity. This shows up throughout Adams’ life and in his presidency, including, crucially, the ill-chosen Alien and Sedition Acts (that all but dismantled his friendship with Thomas Jefferson). McCullough is up front and lucid about how Adams’ personal flaws came out in his relationships and his policy. But McCullough is also extremely careful about letting Adams, and especially Abigail, live these flaws out themselves. We come away feeling as if we know about Adams’ vanity the way we know about the vanity of a close friend or even a spouse: that particular way we process the failings and flaws of people we nonetheless believe in. To reach this point with a subject of a biography is not just a wonderful reading experience. It’s an exercise that strengthens a Christian’s moral imagination.

I can’t put it better than that.

David McCullough, writer and historian, a model for the engagement of the heart and the strengthening of the imagination in a discipline of the mind, RIP.

Virtue twisted

Siegfried’s death in a promotional still for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924)

For the past several days I’ve been rereading the Nibelungenlied in Burton Raffel’s verse translation. This Middle High German epic, the story of the hero Siegfried, his marriage to Kriemhild and murder at the hands of her brother Gunther and his henchman Hagen, and her ruthlessly exacted revenge, is an adaptation of ancient Germanic legends for the age of chivalry. An earlier Norse version is preserved in The Saga of the Volsungs. But more on that below.

People rightly emphasize the roles of honor, vassalage, loyalty, and treachery when they look at the story of the Nibelungenlied. Knowing Siegfried’s fate from the beginning—the author makes heavy, Moby-Dick-style use of foreshadowing—it is easy to read Gunther, Hagen, and company as thoroughgoing villains, evil from the start. But what has struck me most on this reading are the admirable qualities of virtually everyone—at first. Even the awkward confrontation between Siegfried and Gunther’s court upon his arrival in Worms, when Siegfried greets the man whose sister he hopes to marry by asserting that he will take over his kingdom, is resolved without bloodshed. Game recognize game. Genuine friendship, celebration, and chivalrous and honorable victory over old enemies is the result.

Only later, when Gunther enlists Siegfried’s aid in a hopeless attempt to win Brunhild as his wife, do things start to go wrong. But what exactly, other than the famous hatred that erupts between Brunhild and Kriemhild, has gone wrong? And why do things continue worsening right up until the slaughter that ends the poem?

Here’s the passage that really got me reflecting, the opening quatrain of Adventure 16, “Wie Sîfrit erslagen wart”—How Siegfried was slain:

Usually bold, now brazen, Gunter and Hagen set
their treacherous trap, pretending a hunting trip to the woods.
Their knife-sharp spears were meant for boars and bears, they said,
and great-horned forest oxen. Clearly, these were courageous men!

“Usually bold, now brazen” is the half-line that caught my eye. It turns out to be Raffel’s gloss or amplification of the original (“Gunther und Hagene, || die réckén vil balt” is straightforwardly “Gunther and Hagen, the very bold knights”), but it neatly underscores the role of perverted—that is, twisted—virtue in the Nibelungenlied.

The villainy that runs through the poem runs through it from beginning to end, but only because the villainy morphs out of what begin as the characters’ virtues. When we meet them, Siegfried is powerful, courageous, and a loyal friend; Gunther is a generous and trusting (and trustworthy) lord and host; even Hagen’s bluntness is an asset. And all of them are mighty men, not only physically strong but vil balt, as they demonstrate over and over.

But these virtues, improperly subordinated, begin to twist and warp with the poem’s central act of deception—the winning of Brunhild. Gunther, like Siegfried, has heard of a beautiful and wealthy woman far away whom he desires to marry. Unlike Siegfried, Gunther has neither the confidence nor the abilities necessary to survive the warrior triathlon the superhuman Brunhild demands of all her suitors. And so he asks Siegfried for help, implying that he will allow Siegfried and Kriemhild to marry if he does. Once arrived in Brunhild’s kingdom, Siegfried pretends to be Gunther’s servant and dons his cloak of invisibility, beating Brunhild handily at all her games while Gunther pantomimes the actions required. An aggrieved Brunhild returns to Worms to be married to Gunther, and Siegfried and Kriemhild happily wed.

You can already see a downward spiral here, and, sure enough, this deception requires yet further deceptions—not only on Gunther’s embarrassing wedding night but for years to come. The heroes’ virtues buckle and twist under the pressure of their repeated bad choices until they become vices.

Thus Siegfried’s loyalty to Gunther and love for Kriemhild allow him both to exploit and to be exploited and end with him seeming, to us, hopelessly naïve, literally racing into the trap his enemies have set for him on that hunting trip. The prudent, generous, and courtly Gunther transforms into a cowed, easily swayed, guilt-ridden man willing to countenance murder to appease his wife. Kriemhild’s love for her dead husband leads her to abandon their son and to seek the utter destruction of her brothers’ kingdom. And Hagen’s intelligence and forthrightness twist into power-obsessed cunning and utilitarian cruelty. In the alchemy of the plot, boldness transmutes into brazenness and honor into brutality. The last casualty listed in the poem, even after Kriemhild herself has been struck down, is êre—honor.

The role of virtue, especially the destructive power of virtue twisted, is the thing that most substantially sets the Nibelungenlied apart from an earlier version like The Saga of the Volsungs. This stems from the circumstances of its composition. In The Mind of the Middle Ages, Frederick Artz describes how the anonymous author of the Nibelungenlied

worked over early Germanic legends and other tales about the Burgundians and the Huns of the fifth and sixth centuries and combined with these the style of chivalric romance newly introduced from France—a strange mixture. There is more here of court manners, of women, of love, and of Christian ideas than in Beowulf, the Norse stories, or the French chansons de geste. The poet was a man of genius and from these divergent materials he produced a masterpiece.

There is a lot to be said for this summary, but for the purposes of this post I want to concentrate on the role of “Christian ideas.” Where the Norse stories of Sigurð feature doom or fate, an unyielding destiny to which the heroes must conform and willingly surrender themselves when the time comes, the murders and climactic bloodbath of the Nibelungenlied are unambiguously the result of character and choice—of strong men and women whose virtues have been twisted out of shape by deception. pride, and hatred. This is a thoroughly and vibrantly imagined picture of a world that is itself twisted under the weight of sin.

The Nibelungenlied, viewed from this angle, can be taken as a thoroughly Christian synthesis of the old Germanic stories imbued throughout not with the fatalism of the Norns but with an understanding that the world is fallen and sin has tainted everything, even our virtues.

More if you’re interested

Raffel’s verse translation is good, not least since it is one of the only recent attempts to render the odd, complex verse of the original into an English equivalent. I first read the Nibelungenlied in AT Hatto’s prose translation for Penguin Classics, which is still worthwhile and has some good appendices. Most recently I read a new prose translation by William Whobrey for Hackett Publishing, which has more scholarly apparatus than either Raffel’s or Hatto’s and includes the Klage, a short sequel to the Nibelungenlied by another unknown poet.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Nibelungenlied, don’t rely on knowledge of the Volsungs or Wagner, both version of the story being quite different from this one, as I mentioned. You might check out this fun summary of the poem I discovered a few years ago, which reenacts the story 1) surprisingly thoroughly and 2) hilariously using Playmobil.

Old men shall dream dreams

Jacob’s Dream, by Jusepe de Ribera (1639)

Final exams have ended, final grades are in, and summer graduation was yesterday—a fast and busy capstone on a fast and busy semester.

Coincidental to completing and sharing my post on John Gardner’s “vivid and continuous fictional dream” last week, John Wilson had an interesting reflection on dreams and dreaming at First Things. He writes that, like me, he has had a peculiar “fascination” with dreaming since childhood and that, like me, on first encountering Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams he “digested his interpretations of dreams, and pronounced him ridiculous, a judgment I was never required to modify.” Hear hear.

What most interested me was the way Wilson, who is about twice my age, meditated on the way his dreaming has changed with the accumulation of years: he and his wife Wendy “seem to dream as much as we always have, so far as we can tell, but—as I reported—the quality of our dreaming is markedly inferior.”

And what are they like? He offers “a few mostly firsthand reports”:

It’s interesting that in my dreams, I am never old (nor am I very young). I honestly can’t remember even a single exception. Rather, I am an indeterminate age, neither “old” (as I am now in truth) nor “young” (as I once was). Wendy [Wilson’s wife] says much the same, though now and then she has a dream in which she is a girl. My dreams now tend to be much more fragmentary, less “well-shaped,” than they used to be; often I can hardly remember them when I wake up, whereas in the past I could often remember them in some detail. I do not have as many truly “good” dreams as I used to, but blessedly they do come now and then, leaving a sense of great felicity and thankfulness.

There is more in this fun, thoughtful reflection (fun and thoughtful are the chief characteristics of most of Wilson’s writing, an admirable combination), and you should definitely read it. Having so recently written about the writer’s quest to create, to craft—with meticulous and exacting hard work—a fictional dream in the mind of the reader, Wilson’s piece turned me toward my own dreams. For whomever is interested (“we all know that sinking feeling when someone is about to recount a dream to us,” Wilson writes), I thought I’d work out a few firsthand reports of my own.

My own interest in dreams originates in personal experience. As long as I can remember, I have dreamed vividly and often, pretty much every night. I still remember a few from very early childhood quite palpably—probably because, like a good fictional dream, they included good sensory details to assure my mind that this is really happening.

Though I had nightmares often enough as a kid, I never experienced sleep terrors or sleepwalking, though my brother and sister did. I have also never experienced sleep paralysis and can only remember ever having one lucid dream.

Like Wilson, I’ve had a few dreams come true, though never any of consequence—though the accurately foretold death of my favorite goldfish hit pretty hard when I was ten.

Also: A song that used to play on our local Christian music station, late at night when I was trying to go to sleep (see below), paused between stanzas for a quotation from the Book of Acts: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.” Your old men shall dream dreams, among the most poetically rich and eerie lines ever written, has stuck with me ever since.

While I’ve never been an outright insomniac, I have often struggled to sleep. Dreaming seldom helps. As I’ve aged, I’ve dreamt more and more; while I know it’s an illusion, it sometimes feels as though I’ve dreamt all night and I wake up exhausted.

I have occasionally thought of keeping a dream journal. I never have because it would be too time-consuming.

That feeling of exhaustion, of having worked at something all night, occurs irrespective of what happens in the dreams. I seldom have real nightmares. When I was a kid, an episode of “The Real Ghostbusters” inspired one recurring one, and I had a few in high school and college that involved moments of pure, horrifying epiphany, which ended in trying to release a scream for which I could never have mustered enough breath. The last time I remember a movie or book affecting my dreams was in college, when reading Flags of our Fathers for a historiography project made me dream that I was walking around campus with my right arm blown off. The nightmares I have nowadays are exclusively about failing to protect my children.

But more often, my “bad” dreams are either work, or getting some concept stuck in an endlessly repeating loop—like a conversation that keeps coming back to the same thing, like one bar of a tune or half a line of a pop sung stuck in the head. When Sarah asks how I slept after a night like this, I always call it “busy busy busy.” Other times I dream of catastrophic disruptions to our household: flooding, storm damage, black mold, ineradicable weeds (that is, weeds), and, in one particularly vivid dream, fire ants fountaining out of the floor of our master bedroom, streaming clean through the carpet. One thing that hasn’t changed in the form of my dreams is that horrifying moment of epiphany I described above.

Back to the struggle to sleep. Getting hot makes me dream. So does having to go to the bathroom. So does soft ambient light shining on my face. (Once during college the blanket I had hung over my bunk fell during the night, and I woke from bad dreams to the soft green glow of the power button of my roommate’s desktop, beaming onto my face like a searchlight in the dark.) It is a commonplace in my family that the phase of the moon affects our dreams. It used to be full moons that had the starkest effects, but now, nearing forty, I seems to be full moons and new moons and most of the phases in between. I’m less sure of its role, now, but a full moon is still a virtual guarantee of weird dreams.

Did I mention I didn’t sleep well last week?

Regarding form: My dreams are rarely long narratives. More often they are snapshot moments with the backstory somehow built into my consciousness of that moment. Often they affect me deeply, though not necessarily negatively, and take a while to dissipate when I wake. This is despite often staggering absurdity. I woke the other night dreaming that a self-checkout card machine had declined a purchase with the onscreen note “It appears you have no money left.” This was the night after payday, and I nevertheless spent a while tossing and turning, fighting the urge to check my balances on my phone.

But every once in a while I have a continuous dream, which doesn’t have a story so much as an improvisatory complexity, continuously and spasmodically uncoiling into new phases that seem in the moment to relate to each other but disintegrate like a sandcastle under the high tide of waking.

Another recent one: There was a noted haunted house on my campus (which wasn’t really my campus). I and a colleague, a presence as indeterminate and generic as Wilson’s age in his dreams, opened the trap door into the tunnel with the intention of investigating but had to go away for something. Here there was an interval explaining the history of this house as the model home for some kind of old development planned by a famous industrialist. When we returned, students were lounging around the trapdoor and had broken the rungs off the ladder leading down. I reamed them out—something I would never do in real life and that stressed me out in the dream. We entered, climbed up into the haunted house (haunted houses apparently not having front doors), and on a second-floor landing I started hand cranking a Victrola-like record player that emitted either 1) old music or 2) the voices of the dead. It wasn’t even clear during the dream.

And it went on from there. Absurd in toto, but moment by moment real and believable and important and absurd. This is where my nights mostly muddle along, in dreams of this quality, much of the night (or so it feels).

All of which has influenced my artistic sensibilities about dreaming. I have a “writing notes” post on crafting dreams in fiction (as opposed to Gardner’s fictional dream) that I’ve been fiddling with for a year or so. Realistic, effective dreams in fiction are short, hard-hitting, emotionally simple but thematically complex. Here’s one I believe 100%, from eight hundred years ago:

Living surrounded by splendor Krimhild dreamed a dream:
she had trained a falcon, glorious, strong-winged, fierce, and wild,
and a pair of eagles tore it apart in front of her eyes.
No pain, no sorrow in all the world could be worse than what she’d seen.

That’s from the very first “Adventure” or canto of the Nibelungenlied, and turns out to be prophetic. I believe and accept this dream totally, as I do some of Winston’s pained dreams of Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Sheriff Bell’s dream at the end of No Country for Old Men. I do not believe or accept the long, complicated, coherent dreams, heavy on dialogue and obvious symbolism, of Robert Jordan’s Eye of the World.

Let me conclude with good dreams. Like Wilson, for me these are rarer and a real mercy when they come along, shining out in the middle of a crowd of busywork, annoyingly repetitive dreams, bad dreams, and a scattering of nightmares. They mostly have to do with home, or family. Contentment and relief are a recurring theme. Stillness is their motif. Here’s one for which I only changed the names and location (and century) before importing it into Griswoldville:

A dream worth recording last night: I was at home—both here and at the farm where I grew up, as is the manner of dreams—of an evening. I sat on the porch in the quiet watching the sunset and the younger children playing in the yard beside the shade tree, and was somehow aware of a get-together going on in the house. Eliza was there, and all our children, and James and Jefferson and Bit and their children, even Fayette. What is more, my mother and father were there, not as ghosts but as I recall them from my childhood, before the war, far younger than myself now—and finally my grandfather. After a time he came out of the house where the sound of cheer and fellowship was going on and joined me on the porch. We sat in the rockers Eliza and I used to rest in of an evening. It was, in the dream, not that strange that he should be there with us, these generations gathered from the quick and the dead of the better part of a century, but I nonetheless sat shamefaced for a time. For as long as I have missed him, as long as I have had to live without him, I could not now—with him here, with all the evening before us to converse and commiserate—find anything to say. Such, once or twice a decade ever since the war, have been my dreams of him. This one seemed no different, until at last he, seeming to know my thoughts, patted me on the shoulder with his warm earth-smelling hand and chuckled in his old raspy laugh, a sound I recall as if it were yesterday. My shame lifted in an instant.

The narrator, Georgie Wax, is an old man dreaming dreams. That’ll be me soon enough. I pray they are mostly good and restful ones.

If you overmastered that “sinking feeling” Wilson so aptly described and put up with me, the “tedious person” from my post on the fictive dream, thank you for reading. This won’t be my last reflection on dreams and dreaming. Perhaps soon I’ll dust off that note on crafting dreams in fiction.

Notes on the fictive dream

John Gardner (1933-82)

After mentioning James Dickey’s Deliverance here last week, I decided it was finally time to reread it. I’m glad I did. Not only is it a great and challenging story—both harrowing and rich, absolutely dripping with menace and meaning—Dickey wrote it brilliantly. Rereading proved not only enjoyable but instructive.

When I read Deliverance, both twelve years ago and last week, I was absorbed. Utterly. Each time I finished a chapter I felt as though I were not simply setting a book aside but returning to the real world, like swimming up from a deep green pool in the Cahulawassee. And if you regularly read this blog, you might recognize that I’ve had this rare experience several times this year. I’ll return to the other books that have given me this sensation, but Deliverance is the one that got me thinking more specifically and precisely about this feeling. How did Dickey achieve it?

I don’t like calling stories “immersive,” since dunking something isn’t particularly hard, and instead prefer older terms of praise like “involving,” “engaging,” and especially “absorbing” that suggest the work behind creating such a state. The image of absorption works particularly well for a good story; like a sponge taking in water, a good story absorbs the reader’s imagination quickly and gives it shape and color (and, if you have one in mind, a purpose), and can hold onto it quite a long time. But there’s an even better metaphor for the writer’s goal.

The dream

The effect I’ve been describing here is what John Gardner called “the fictional dream” or “the fictive dream,” and creating a fictive dream was for him the ultimate, overriding goal of the fiction writer. In The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Gardner gives one of his most detailed explanations of the fictive dream:

The most important single notion in the theory of fiction I have outlined—essentially the traditional theory of our civilization’s literature—is that of the vivid and continuous fictional dream. According to this notion, the writer sets up a dramatized action in which we are given the signals that make us “see” the setting, characters, and events; that is, he does not tell us about them in abstract terms, like an essayist, but gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths. In bad or unsatisfying fiction, this fictional dream is interrupted from time to time by some mistake or conscious ploy on the part of the artist. We are abruptly snapped out of the dream, forced to think of the writer or the writing.

The goal: create a dream. The two guiding principles: vividness and continuity. These are important for the writer first. Elsewhere in The Art of Fiction, Gardner describes the way a writer, when everything is going well, becomes so enraptured by the dream he is creating that he becomes unconscious of the physical process of writing. The writer can’t depend on these moments to come, of course, but when they strike they are important: not only for the writer, who “when the dream flags . . . can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again,” but, once the story is finished, for the reader. The dream is contagious.

Waking the dreamer

But in this post, and as a result of experiencing several such fictive dreams this year, I’m more concerned with the dream created on the reader’s end—which is the decisive end. If the dream doesn’t work here, the story will fail on some level. Possibly totally.

The long passage from The Art of Fiction above introduces a chapter called “Common Errors” in which Gardner outlines a number of ways the writer can inadvertently awaken the reader from the dream. Among them:

• Lack of concrete detail (the fundamental requirement for vividness according to Gardner)

• Abstraction instead of specificity or concreteness

• Basic mechanical mistakes or overreliance on weak sentence structures (e.g. passive voice, participle phrases)

• Faulty, distracting, or inappropriate diction

• Needless explanation or “cloddishly awkward insertion of details”

• “Faults of soul,” i.e. in the attitude of the writer toward his subjects, including the opposing extremes of frigidity and sentimentality

Fiction characterized by these errors only ever works in spite of them. Avoiding these errors—which, again, are common—is partly a matter of taste and instinct, but also a matter of discipline: of the training of the writer’s taste and instinct and most especially the discipline of sharp-eyed and exacting revision. The writer needs his tastes and instincts trained in order to notice these errors and be unsatisfied until they’ve been corrected; he needs discipline to actually do it, and to continue the training that will sharpen his eye and his craft.

But if these are the ways in which the writer, as a builder of dreams, can fail, how can he succeed? This is both easier and more difficult to say. The best answer is to learn by example.

Exempli gratia—four good dreams

One of the things I’ve appreciated most about Gardner’s Art of Fiction, as well as On Becoming a Novelist, which is also excellent, is the way he both sets stringent standards for writers of fiction and refuses to give hard and fast rules about writing. His counsels are demanding but flexible. What matters is constructing the vivid and continuous fictive dream, and any rule that stands in the way of creating that dreamlike state must bow to this greater purpose.

This flexibility of means can be seen clearly in the books I mentioned near the beginning of this post. These are the novels I’ve read this year that created exactly the kind of fictive dream Gardner describes, that totally absorbed me into their dreams, that vividly and continuously sustained their dreams to the point that I really felt as though I were waking up when I set them aside. They were:

• Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—A searing highbrow postmodern Western about American scalphunters in Mexico in the early 19th century. Bleak, often accused of nihilism. Third person, told in what Gardner would call a “mannered” style.

• John Macnab, by John Buchan—An adventure novel in which well-to-do politicians challenge themselves to poach deer and salmon in the Scottish highlands without getting caught despite telling the landowners what they intend to do. Serious and suspenseful but fundamentally lighthearted, appreciative of the outdoors, and life-affirming. (Full review here.) Third person, unflashy but rock solid diction.

• Sick Heart River, by John Buchan—An adventure novel in which one of the characters from John Macnab sets out on a final adventure in the Canadian wilderness following a terminal diagnosis. (Full review here.) Elegiac and melancholy, meditative, deeply but not obviously religious. Third person, with passages of first person presented as found documents.

• Deliverance, by James Dickey—A survival novel about a bunch of middle class suburban businessmen and their ill-fated canoe trip through the north Georgia mountains, during which the narrator must shed the trappings of civilization in order to survive. Both introspective and physical, beautiful and shocking. First person, lushly and poetically descriptive (but never purple).

Despite a shared vague outdoor adventure motif, these novels differ quite strikingly from each other, and their authors’ sensibilities diverge even more sharply than their stories. So after finishing Deliverance, I reflected on what these four actually had in common, writing-wise, that made them so totally absorbing.

First, there are the essentials of fiction:

• Masterful control of the language; no mechanical errors whatsoever regardless of style.

• Good characters vividly realized regardless of the size of the cast (from Deliverance, which has four central characters and only a handful of others, few of whom appear in more than one scene or even have names; to John Macnab, which has dozens of named characters).

• Solid, well-constructed plots with interesting complications. (Possible exception: Blood Meridian, which is more of an open-ended quest as befits a story based on real life, however loosely, but never feels directionless.)

• Related: good pacing, introducing the story quickly and steadily escalating in intensity. Buchan is exceptionally skilled at this, though Deliverance is the most obvious example to read for this technique.

As I said, these are essential to all good fiction, but it is possible to have these without conjuring the vivid and continuous dream in the reader’s mind as these four novels did. So what distinguishes these four from others I’ve read that had the same mastery of the fundamentals but not their powerful dreamlike quality? I kept returning to the following four traits:

• In narration, not only error-free mechanical control of the language but a musicality and tone that complemented the story. This is what the poetry of Deliverance, the byzantine and operatic diction of Blood Meridian, and the strong, straightforward narration of Buchan’s novels have in common despite all their superficial differences. Their narrative voice—regardless of perspective—creates atmosphere.

• Carefully and precisely described action. Throughout these novels, all of which feature complex dramatic action, often with multiple sets of characters operating parallel to or at odds with each other (e.g. the scalphunters’ pursuit by Indians at multiple points in Blood Meridian; the converging of friends, hostile gamekeepers, and others on the poachers in John Macnab; the terrible wait for help during Deliverance’s rape scene), the action remains comprehensible. The reader is never left trying to figure out what’s happening, who is doing what, or what he’s supposed to be seeing.

• Precisely described sensory details. When Gardner writes above that the writer should engage the senses, “preferably all of them,” he could have been writing with these novels in mind. The reader feels the heat of the desert and recoils from the noise and smell of combat and gore in Blood Meridian; he labors for breath in the snow alongside the protagonist of Sick Heart River; and, most vividly for me, having experienced this firsthand back home, he feels the chill and damp of the river in Deliverance and the otherworldly coolness and lightness of his own flesh after stepping out onto solid ground again.

• Last, most obviously and strikingly—and, I think, most importantly for the sake of the fictive dream—a pervasive, uninterrupted, sensuous, tactile sense of place. The geography of these books, their authors’ descriptions of location, are among the best I’ve ever read.

I think setting may be the most important of these for three reasons. First, in our own experiences of actual nighttime dreams you’ll have noticed that when you or some tiresome person (me, all too often) insists on describing a dream you usually begin by setting the scene: “I was in the airport, sort of” or “I was at church, but not really” or “I was in the hallway at school and then…” This should make clear to us the fundamental role of setting in storytelling, even the literally unconscious kind.

Second, by way of a negative example, I’ve noticed that poorer quality fiction—not only obviously bad airport thrillers and ponderous wannabe literary fiction but even otherwise clever, inventive novels—suffer from a lack of a sense of place. When a novel tries to get by on its action, theme, or ideas without dramatizing them in a believable place, the dream it creates will fail either the vividness or the continuousness test—if it creates a fictive dream at all.

Third, setting unites all of the other points in that bullet list: it provides the scene of the action, many of the sensory specifics, and, through the way the author describes it, a great deal of the atmosphere of the story.

And atmosphere is everything in a dream. It’s the difference between a sweet dream and a nightmare.

The life blood of fiction

You’ll have noticed that my four major points above overlap pretty generously. If you imagine them as a Venn diagram—four circles labeled The Language or The Atmosphere, The Action, The Sensory, and The Setting—the point at which all four overlap could be labelled The Details.

As I mentioned near the beginning of this post, the details are, for Gardner, the fundamental element in creating the vivid and continuous fictive dream. From earlier in The Art of Fiction:

In all the major genres, vivid detail is the life blood of fiction. Verisimilitude, suspension of disbelief through narrative voice, or the wink that calls attention to the yarn-teller’s lie may be the outer strategy of a given work; but in all major genres, the inner strategy is the same: The reader is regularly presented with proofs—in the form of closely observed details—that what is said to be happening is really happening.

This doubles as a pretty good description of dreaming.

Again, one of the hallmarks of Gardner’s teaching on writing is his steadfast avoidance of ironclad rules. Notice that he does not say how much detail the writer should include—a vexatious point. That’s where the writer’s training in taste and artistic sensibility should come in. The rules can be bent or even broken according to the well-trained writer’s judgement; what matters is whether it helps create and sustain the fictive dream. Hence Gardner’s reference to the writer’s “outer” and “inner” strategies above. The outer can differ dramatically from author to author and even from book to book—which is the point of my examination of those four novels—but the inner must not deviate from the goal outlined by Gardner.

The writer ignores Gardner’s advice at his own peril. If you’d like to see the results, there are plenty of bad books out there. But if you want to know how well the conception of fiction as dream can work, or why and how the books that have affected you most strongly—the books that absorbed you—did so, I recommend any of the four novels that prompted this post.

They absorbed me, to my great benefit and enjoyment. I hope they’ll do the same for you.

More if you’re interested

I call longish posts like this one “writing notes,” and I do them as much to work through aspects of craft for myself as I do for anyone who may chance to read them. If you’ve stuck with me this long, I hope you’ve found these reflections helpful. I’ve written briefly about Gardner and the use of details before, in this post about vividly realized minor characters. If you’d like an example of how faulty, unimaginative diction in the form of weak verbs can fatally wound the fictive dream, you can read about that here.

Finally, Gardner himself is worth your while. Check out The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist if you have any interest at all in the craft of writing fiction (and On Moral Fiction if you have any interest in what good fiction should do). And while they’re vanishingly rare online, interviews with Gardner are like a splash of icewater to the face. Here’s a good one from the mid-1970s in which the interviewer can’t quite bring himself to believe that Gardner means what he says.

Y'all. OMG. Not okay. I can't even.

This short piece from Kit Wilson says a lot of what I’ve been thinking about the shallowness and especially the infantilization of modern political discourse for a long time, and much more.

Have you noticed that strange new verbal tic going around: that everything we once considered “wrong” or “evil” is now simply “not okay”?

Spend an hour online and you’ll see what I mean. Overturning Roe v Wade was “not okay”. Church sex abuse scandals are “not okay”. Body-shaming is definitely “not okay”. The more somebody disapproves of something, the more “not okay” it is—perhaps warranting a firm “Not Okay” or even, under exceptional circumstances, “NOT OKAY”.

Yes, I have noticed. He also invokes “Normalize X” and “Do better” (both, tellingly, imperatives) from the nearly infinite supply of available clichés.

Welcome to the new, strange, mealy-mouthed vocabulary of true emotivism. All of the above, you’ll notice, deliberately avoid communicating any kind of moral content whatsoever—they could, indeed, be talking about anything. It’s “not okay” to jaywalk in certain American cities. I can “normalise” a snazzy new hairstyle. You can “do better” at throwing socks into your clothes basket blindfolded.

Wilson’s piece is not only funny but insightful. He chalks this decay in our language up to the triumph of ethical emotivism, to the hollowing out of the idea of objective moral truths that can be invoked, argued about, and even occasionally agreed upon. Believing that all ethical judgments are “mere personal preferences” eliminates the ability to talk about good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lies, and leaves one attempting instead to impute negative connotations or “emotional association[s]” from one concept to another (as in “such-and-such is violence”), a sloppy process, or to dig through the pockets of dead ideologies looking for useful rhetorical bludgeons (as in “fascist,” every time). The result is,

perhaps, a more appropriate form of morality for an age in which we no longer believe we have souls, but like to think of ourselves as rational biological computers. Notice that “not okay”, as the negative form of “okay”, suggests a binary switch that can only ever be on or off—just as there are only two options between legal and illegal, acceptable and unacceptable, or permissible and impermissible. We reduce the messiness of morality to simple 1s and 0s. It isn’t surprising that our behaviour towards one another follows suit. People are simply “okay”, or they aren’t. And if they are “not okay”, that’s the one strike—they’re out.

Wilson invokes AJ Ayer, logical positivist, as one of the roots of this trend, and Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe as important but unsuccessful countervailing forces.

I think there’s a lot to this, and you should certainly read Wilson’s piece. But I also think there a lot of other, simpler culprits. I’ve already used the word infantilization. You could also call it memeification. It used to be called shallow, dumbed down, childish. I recall the time someone I know called an argument against certain gun control measures “weak sauce.” In all caps. And I’m struck that the people I’ve most often seen lament “adulting” are the most vitriolic in their reaction to Dobbs.

Memeified discourse is marked by (simultaneously) sloppiness and staggering oversimplification, expressed through the most ephemeral, unserious, and substance-free set of formulae and clichés on offer. Being bite-sized, it lends itself readily to incantatory repetition and achieves through repetition—the blunt force trauma of argument—what actual reasoning can’t. And it is almost always purely declaratory and often hyperbolically emotional, as in the title of this post.

Let me offer both an aside and an example: Y’all. My dialect is not your slang. #culturalappropriation

Repeat ad nauseam.

This is the language of memes, but it was the language of AOL Instant Messenger, and talk radio, and televised presidential debates, and bumper stickers, and the commercial before that. Did Ayer and emotivism cause the rise of not-okayese, or simply prepare the minds of people to be degraded by technological developments like Twitter? Probably both, with a host of other contributing factors like laziness, as a generalized sloppiness of rhetoric and argument is useful cover for both bad ideas and bad thinkers, who thrive upon imprecision.

Final notes:

Here I have to invoke Orwell again, specifically his remarks on carelessness of thought and language: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” I blogged about this long ago here.

And the results of Ayer’s approach to ethics, framing ethical judgements as nonbinding statements of preference, were anticipated if not outright predicted in CS Lewis’s critique of The Green Book, his lectures published as The Abolition of Man.

You can read all of Wilson’s excellent short essay at The Critic here.