Theological amnesia

It would be an understatement to say I’m taken with Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time. I’m positively obsessed. I’ve never read anything like it. I’m smitten with the prose and gobsmacked by the coverage. The man has read everything, or at least he makes me feel like I’ve read next to nothing.

One thing he hasn’t read, though, is theology. You might even say he hasn’t read Christians. Of the more than 100 authors and artists that he canvasses, mostly from the twentieth century, maybe five are religious, and their religion is not, in his view, part of their genius. Sure, he likes Chesterton and Waugh and Kołakowski. But those exceptions prove the rule. James cares (cared—he passed away at 80 the same month the first Covid cases began appearing in Wuhan, quite a time to lose such a vital voice in politics and culture) about influence, stature, prestige, literature, artistry, and above these and all else two things: style on the page and wisdom in the world. The latter, to James, meant a rejection of ideology—in twentieth century garb, fascism and communism in equal parts—without apology or compromise. He was a pure product of the postwar period; his heroes were the post-Left French who suffered for their apostasies, like Aron and Furet and Revel. He was right to honor them.

Right, I say, in what he honored, but wrong in what he ignored. Even on his own terms, James should have read, memorialized, and found profit in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Maritain, Eliot, Belloc, Knox, Greene, Undset, Bonhoeffer, Barth, Weil, Mauriac, Bernanos, de Lubac, Auden, Lewis, Tolkien, Fermor, Solzhenitsyn, Ratzinger, Percy, Illich, Berry, MacIntyre, Taylor, Levertov, and so many others. Instead, it’s as if religion in any form except the severely private disappears from the world by the end of the long nineteenth century. You certainly wouldn’t know that theists of any kind put pen to page in the twentieth, much less that it was good, sometimes, and that their words and deeds regularly made a difference on the public stage.

A writer like James, for all his erudition, has amnesia of his own, both in the immediate past and in the distant past. It’s a deficit common to most of his peers: highbrow journalists and elite critics who can’t bother to glance in the direction of the pious (at least, not without cringing). The deficit may be understandable, but it’s not defensible. It renders all that they write incomplete from the outset, by definition. Not just their knowledge but their love is circumscribed artificially by choice, and this alienates them from every human culture of which we have evidence. At one point James comments that humans wrote poetry before prose, spoke before they wrote, and sang before they spoke in sentences. He leaves the observation there, hanging, but he should have known better. After all, what did humans do both before and by means of song and speech and poetry and prose?

They prayed. Let the reader understand.

“Arbitrary”

A lexical nitpick.

In contemporary journalistic as well as postmodern academic writing, and various intersections thereof, there is a habit of using the word “arbitrary” to describe what is anything but. In its usage, it is intended to denote or connote something both random and irrational. But invariably the referent is neither. There are always “reasons why,” and almost never are the reasons self-evidently wrong or bad. The author simply doesn’t accept them as persuasive. That doesn’t render the phenomenon arbitrary, though. It just makes it conventional, or arguable. But what isn’t?

I’ve seen this trend applied to weeding treatments in one’s lawn; to the distinction between men’s and women’s sports; to clothing style; to rules in a game; to questions of propriety or decorum in public spaces and in online images; to methods in biblical interpretation; and to much more besides. It’s a weird trick and usually a cheap one. It’s often unclear whether the author knows the inapplicable unfairness of the usage, and both options are bad: either dishonesty or superficiality.

There’s something else going on, too. Typically the author makes clear how magnificently aware he is of the social constructedness of everything in our common life. This, that, and the other thing is a social construction; ergo, it’s turtles all the way down; ergo, it’s all arbitrary anyway—nothing but a choice of arbitraries: ecco homo, behold the human condition.

But that is either the wrong conclusion to draw, or the author hasn’t followed it to its logical conclusion. If the former, then what he means is that social and cultural and political life is unavoidably and essentially contingent—and that is true. But contingency does not mean arbitrary. Whereas if is the latter, then absolute and irreducible arbitrariness as a feature of every aspect of reality entails that the author’s preference for (non-arbitrary) X over (arbitrary) Y is a nonstarter. He’s sawed off the branch he was sitting on. There’s no longer any argument to be had. In which case, he should drop the rhetorical gamesmanship and accept that his opponent’s position is no more or less arbitrary than his is.

Unless he already knows that, and is using words as a mere means to the end of getting what he, arbitrarily, wants. No inconsistency there, albeit at the price of reducing language to power and exalting the ego’s desires as final. The price, in other words, is nihilism as a social, political, and rhetorical philosophy. Which, if we’re honest, is sometimes what lies behind the public writing of academics and journalists today.

Artists for friends

Should the artists you love love you back? I confess that this question never occurred to me when I was growing up or , as an adult, when I developed a taste for whatever art I happen to take pleasure in. As this question, or rather assertive expectation, hovers like a gibbering ghoul over all our aesthetic and pop-cultural conversations these days, and has done so in increasing emotional intensity with each passing year (or at least it seems so to me), I have found myself asking why it would never occur to me—apart from what I take to be later, more informed and reflective conviction.

I suppose much of the reason comes down to this: Growing up as a Christian in the U.S. means that if you like anything outside the sub-cultural bubble of kitsch and in-house “Christian” entertainment, you are forced to reckon pretty quickly with the fact that not only are the artists whose work you enjoy neither religious nor Christian; they are often actively hostile to the sort of Christian you are. More to the point, their words or images or themes make your faith and/or your community (i.e., your family) an object of critique, ridicule, or dismissal. Which means that, pretty quickly, you either accept this state of affairs and go on enjoying their work, or reject it in toto and return to the warm confines of the bubble. I opted for the former.

I think of Tool and Rage Against the Machine, two bands I adored in high school. I saw them live. I owned all their albums, including the Napster-sourced live and hard-to-find stuff. I learned their songs on guitar and bass. I was willy-nilly radicalized politically. (RATM was my first real introduction to leftist thought. They were the reason I was skeptical, as a self-involved suburban high schooler, of the Iraq war.) And guess what? I knew they hated my guts. They hated where I lived, where I went to church, my house, my friends, my parents, my beliefs—all of it. They told me so, in no uncertain terms. And what did I do? I kept on listening. Not only did I not let their contempt for much of what made me me determine whether or not I could enjoy their art. It actually proved a significant moment, or development, in my intellectual and theological formation. It snatched me out of the bubble and put me face to face with the voices of people who’d been harmed by religion, or who found it repulsive, or who thought it an emotional and political sedative, or who saw through the lies of hucksters and frauds. That was (and remains) an important education. For much of what they had to say was true; and even when it wasn’t, it was worth listening to.

I think also of Christopher Hitchens, whose writing I found myself falling in love with in my twenties. Not his politics—though the fact that I feel compelled to say that is itself an indictment of those readers who loved Hitch right up to the point when he crossed an invisible line, whereupon his writing somehow proved no longer good—but his prose. I still marvel at the man’s ability to write interesting sentences, combined with or underwritten by masterly knowledge of Anglophone literature and global politics and history. Seeing his nearly-posthumous bullet-stopper Arguably show up in the mail was Christmas come early: every essay a feast.

As you well know, Hitchens, too, hated my guts. He thought religion poisoned everything, specifically my religion: Israel and Jesus and Paul and Rome and all that. To which I thought: So be it. Who cares? I returned his hate with affection. I thought he was wrong, naturally, and that he ought to turn down the volume every once in a while. But if his hatred was earned—if he truly believed that what I believe is toxic to human flourishing—then he ought to have said so, and with all the passion he could muster. It would never occur to me to be angry at him, certainly not for saying what he judged to be true in the most compelling manner possible. I would, and still do, keep on reading and loving him back.

To be clear, I don’t mean to universalize my own experience. I would never prescribe reading or viewing or listening to artistic content filled with genuine hatred for oneself or one’s community. Nor would I suggest that one ought to do so on principle.

But the general point stands. Artists aren’t our friends. Good art is not art that affirms me or who I am; good art is not art that is made by people who affirm me or who I am. The art stands on its own. It is good or bad in itself, on its own terms. And if you, or I, find joy in it, see the truth in it, delight in its beauty or wit or pleasure, then each of us is free to ignore whatever wise or foolish beliefs its creators hold. The joke’s on them if they would withhold their work for only the “right” sort of people. But if we withhold it from ourselves, for no other reason than an arbitrary (and, given the implications, ultimately indefensible and self-defeating) sense that artists ought both to like us and to say so, then the joke’s on us.

MZS on F9

Matt Zoller Seitz was put on this earth to write about film, but most of all about big-budget would-be brain-dead Hollywood blockbusters. The combination of highbrow (his eye, his prose) and lowbrow (in this case, the ninth entry in the Fast & Furious franchise) is always gangbusters. E.g.:

Diesel holds the thing together through sheer mopey majesty. His rumbling baritone and sad eyes have become intensely moving. He's a depressive he-man, a sad sack doom-racer, and Lin photographs him as if he's a posthumous statue of himself. It's startling to realize just how long Diesel has been playing Dom and how much the character has changed. Dom is Diesel's Rocky Balboa, his Indiana Jones. In the first movie, he was an antihero, a badass who was good when circumstances required it (like his other great recurring character, Riddick). At some point, though, maybe after the last film that he did with the late, lamented Paul Walker, Diesel started to seem both bigger and much older and more tragic, weighed down by Dom's responsibilities to his family and perhaps by Diesel's investment in a franchise that he has a financial stake in.

“Sheer dopey majesty” is imperishable, as is Lin photographing Diesel “as if he’s a posthumous statue of himself.” Read the rest here. See also Matt’s reviews of Godzilla vs. Kong, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Chaos Walking, among many others.

Genre criticism

I'm in a book club with some buddies in town, and as it happens I'm the only one who liked the latest book, a work of fantasy. Two issues with the book have come to the surface, and I've been thinking about their status for fiction more generally.

First, I've realized that I don't believe in "pace." Or rather, a book's having a slow or fast pace is at best a neutral statement that requires content to be filled in: was the slow pace done well, or was the fast pace rushed? More often, I think pacing is a cipher for other matters: whether the reader finds the characters, interactions, descriptions, and events engaging—or not. In that sense a reader might well say, "I found the pacing slow," to which the author could reply, "Yes, exactly, that's the idea," at which point the reader then must supply further reasons as to why the slow pacing was a problem. There may be good reasons to make such an assertion, but they involve reference to other features of the narrative, not the pace as such.

Second, all fiction, all storytelling, is responsive to other instances of the same art, indeed every other art form, and thus every novel is derivative in one way or another. So that tropes—particularly when speaking of genre fiction, given the more identifiable and delimited features of that sub-form—are always everywhere present; there is no storytelling, there has never been a novel, without tropes. Nor is a novel or story's success directly proportional to the minimization of tropes: the very worst fiction in the world might be the most original. What we mean by originality, at least when using it as a criterion in the right way, is that the author's handling of the story's tropes was deft, subtle, unexpected, masterful, funny, gripping, complex, pleasing, or otherwise well done. In which case, as with pacing, reference to tropes in critique of a novel is the beginning rather than the end of the conversation, since the proper response to such a reference is, "Indeed—go on..." At which point further reasons enter in to clarify the quality of the use of tropes, granted their inevitability.