PART II, ARTICLE III: AN UNFETTERED CRITIQUE OF ALL THINGS FICTION, SECTION XI

The following passage from Woolf’s sketch demonstrates what underlies this stubborn campaign of hers to bottle the magic that she bore witness to in the literature of others: “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth…But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.” She means here, I think, that form (of words, of music) is the truth and that artists who create form become gods of a sort. Artists are themselves ‘the thing’ that they are trying so desperately to describe. In any case, when she adds the exclamation, ‘certainly and emphatically,’ to the third denial in that excerpt, is she not betraying her desire that there be no God? “Certainly and emphatically there is no God,” she says. Should this not remind us of what the Bible says the fool declares in his heart (Psalm 14)? Writers, especially novelists, cannot help narrating their wishes in their writings. And so, of course, because she has made herself believe that words and writers are ‘the thing,’ Woolf feels that “by writing, I am doing what is far more necessary than anything else” (Virginia Woolf, A Sketch of the Past.)  

This arrogant mindset pervades whatever professes to be literary fiction today. And, because of the failure of novelists to nail ‘the thing’ down, or because of their persistence in trying to nail it down as well as, or even better than, they believe that has already been done, the pursuit must have no end; the vain pursuit leads to no end of efforts. When an absolute standard that is external to self is denied, it should be no surprise that the novelist (who creates his own worlds) will say, “And being a novelist, I consider myself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher, and the poet….” (D. H. Lawrence, Why the Novel Matters.) What the novelist is really looking for in the creation of his worlds is an absolute—even when, just as Lawrence does in this essay of his, he denies that he seeks one. He seeks an absolute, a fixed point of reference, a universal law, but what kind? “It’s no good inventing Thou Shalt Nots!” (Ibid.) He wants an absolute word that will redeem him and absolve him of guilt, but at the same time will let him go on sinning and not pressure him to conform morally. Since there is no such absolute, he is destined to be in as futile a quest as the imagined proverbial monkeys must be engaged in who are consigned to tapping on typewriter keys until they come up with a classic. Without absolutes, literature’s aims and ends become: pleasure; insincere questioning; endless, pointless description; and the attempted liberation from dissatisfaction and despair, as long as this liberation is not anything close to the redemption provided by God through Christ. Unrestricted freedom of expression is necessary when the non-condemnatory, non-judgmental absolute is always looked for but never found. Moral relativity: what is true for you is not necessarily true for me—is put forth as an excuse to justify describing without discretion and for practicing the sins that are narrated. This is coming close, perhaps, to the sort of liberation that is sought. Any absolute that might lessen pleasure or restrain liberation from morality, like a preachy proverb, must be forbidden. The nirvana that their literary redemption would bring them to would be a paradise fit for a libertine. The fairyland that they would be propelled to would have for its engine the subjective power of art; and this fairyland, if they could get themselves there, would be a carnal world where guilt, shame, fear, pain, and second thoughts no longer vex. But this world cannot be reached, for it does not exist; the only world where guilt and shame no longer disturb the soul is a holy one, not a carnal one. The morally permissive absolute, which is non-existent, must be arrived at through the existential leap; what these authors contrive is the form by which this unsuccessful leap is continually attempted; and when form is focused on at the expense of content, what is ugly, godless, and vile is apt to creep in. Novelists would like an eternity of youth and peace by which to reach for their chimerical beatitude, if haply they might seize the vision, enter into it, and enjoy a libertine’s unending paradise. But not exactly, for their paradisiacal dream come true would be to have an eternity to look for it. “The ‘brand of Cain’ business, don’t you see. That’s all right. I was ready enough to go off wandering on the face of the earth” (Joseph Conrad, The Secret Sharer.)

PART II, ARTICLE III: AN UNFETTERED CRITIQUE OF ALL THINGS FICTION, SECTION X

But how is it in the life and occupation of the writer? If a writer were to discover that sense of transcendence that he or she had been striving to cause by form, would the discovery satisfy? The experiences of ecstasy and rapture that are related by Virginia Woolf in A Sketch of the Past are natural parallels to the supernatural experiences of Spirit-filling and Spirit-Baptism. They are not wrong, only qualitatively inferior: earthy more than heavenly. She came by them through nature, or by the divine footprint in nature. They are not mystical in a bad sense. When she declares her inability to adequately describe experiences of being (her ecstatic experience and then her experience of rapture) and of non-being (the mundane part of each day), she means that she is unable, especially, to convey experiences of the former category. She acknowledges that Austen, Trollope, Thackeray, Dickens, and Tolstoy have probably conveyed both. In a chapter called The Stream of Consciousness in Forces of Modern British Literature, William York Tindall speaks of Woolf’s estimate of Joyce and his Ulysses: Joyce reveals the ‘flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain.’ But, according to Tindall, Woolf thinks Joyce’s ‘light is too brilliant, its focus too precise’ (p. 199.) Joyce ‘deals in flow, to be sure,’ continues Tindall in his interpretation of what Woolf thought of Joyce and his craft, “but he lays pipes for it. Avoiding the plumbing, she will make use of his stream” (pp. 199, 200.) Does all of this not tell us, if Tindall is trustworthy, that Woolf granted that the apotheosis had already been achieved by several writers, and that she saw it at least falteringly in Joyce too, except that in his case she resorted to accusing him of faults in order to justify her leaping into his stream to try and complete what she believed he had at least begun to swim in? What is secular redemption through fiction good for since Woolf committed suicide in despair? What actual redemption is there for Virginia Woolf if her suicide led to abiding anguish in hell? She had the impudence (in her essay, I am Christina Rossetti) to criticize the strict faith and pious life of that good Christian poetess; but then she drowned herself in a fit of despair. Virginia Woolf is still remembered and read, but she is not getting anything out of it—not, certainly, the joy of having been redeemed to receive a promise of eternal life, which is precisely the portion bestowed upon the Christian faithful, of whom Christina Rossetti is one. And here is what Virginia Woolf has on earth, according to Byron’s poetic paraphrase of something that Persius wrote: “To have, when the original is dust,/A name, a wretched picture and worse bust.” (D. L. Macdonald, Poor Polidori, p. 158.) Her original frame has gone to dust, and the picture that is usually chosen to represent what she looked like is less than a pretty picture. Polidori, incidentally, is an almost entirely forgotten writer, and another suicide.

PART II, ARTICLE III: AN UNFETTERED CRITIQUE OF ALL THINGS FICTION, SECTION IX

Style, or form, not content, is acclaimed today, at least by whoever is in charge of declaring what is and is not literary fiction. It is poor form; but we are, after all, enduring the tackiest epoch in history where novels are concerned. Through form, the attempt is made to write above the level of plot-driven narratives, which ends up being a futile effort resulting in ambiguity. This endeavor to be groundbreaking and transformational requires a style that our present writers of ‘literary fiction’ haven’t got. So instead of being transformational, they end up being inconceivable and preposterous, and also gone sideways from a stream of consciousness track when that’s the target. For his own reasons and in his own way, William Makepeace Thackeray transcended plot in Vanity Fair. But without plot and without Thackeray’s talent, our social climbing writers of fiction can only slip and fall below the level of verisimilitude and acceptability. By form they mean something approaching to formlessness, like when Yann Martel, in his Life of Pi, injects paragraphs that are about nothing connected with the rest of the book, in order, probably, to be a cutting edge novelist. Their form is the absence of predictable content; it is also formlessness through hazy structure, structure being an element of style. And all of this is done to somehow dazzle the reader with whatever tone their slipshod methodology produces. Form is their thing, no matter how bad at it they are. Form as ‘the thing’ is easily discovered. Witness the remark by Christopher Hitchens about Nobel Prize winning writer Doris Lessing: “Some writers really do live for language and are willing to take risks for it…there is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words” (National Post, October 17th, 2007.) See the theory employed by Tom Griffiths in his narrative on Antarctica: “What historians and writers can do, Griffiths suggests, is to create a story, which itself ‘creates an atmosphere in which truth becomes discernible as a pattern’” (The Globe and Mail, Jean McNeil’s review of Slicing the Silence, November 3rd, 2007.) When a historian ‘creates’ (forms) a story that will cause atmosphere (tone), we should question his concern for facts and truth (content.) We should question the use of form (style) as chief. Rick Groen: “When his (gifted writer) flair for a great sentence fuses with his honest measuring of the human pulse, magic happens.” The emphasis here is on form, which is a synonym for beauty, or style.  That plot (content) was still considered essential in the 19th century does not mean that form (style) has not tried to steer the ship before the 20th. We can dogmatize only generally. Instances of a venture to supplant content are quickly and effortlessly found, not only in the writings of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) but of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and others. Neither is the undertaking limited to just one philosophical school of thought. William Faulkner (1897-1962) says that language ‘might reveal something of man’s soul, his divinity’ (Gary Geddes, The Art of Short Fiction, p. 140.) This is the tail wagging the dog, as it were, form wagging content. He does not mean that the ability of linguistic communication reveals the image of God in man, which is another matter, but that man’s divinity may manifest through his choice of words. In The Rebel, Albert Camus states that even if literature “describes nostalgia, despair, frustration, it still creates a form of salvation. To talk of despair is to conquer it” (Ibid., p. 46.) ‘Description’ and ‘talk’ are form, or style. According to Faulkner, then, linguistic form, not content, might discover the answer to man’s plight. And according to Camus, the answer is in describing the problem! When a solution is found, however, it amounts to little. Think of the secular redemption that is communicated through the antihero’s loss at the end of Rocky. The secular story can redeem no more than to give the spirit a momentary lift. It can give a temporary boost by the description of loss; its redemption is the feeling of solidarity among graceless losers.

PART II, ARTICLE III: AN UNFETTERED CRITIQUE OF ALL THINGS FICTION, SECTION VIII

Groen’s three points about why literary fiction must be the master art come up again and again in statements and declarations made by persons betrothed to the genre. His point of view amounts to this: literary fiction, by which is meant quality fiction, is its own proper end; and quality fiction is whatever the elitists decide it is. If ever a need for something greater than mundane mortal life is sensed by the elitist author, however, then his fiction will be to this the means, and the something greater will not have anything to do with the traditional God in heaven, much less resemble, or remind one, of sinners being redeemed from iniquity by that same God who must finally judge hardened sinners who are found, in the end, irredeemable on account of their refusal to repent. A leap of faith to a non-judgmental god, or else a libertine’s utopia, is the highest religion that such an author will admit or allow. This existential vault is attempted through the use of grandiose verbiage that often borders on grandiloquence. For some—for persons who value art for the sake of art—literary fiction is the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega, the All in All. It is used and treated like that, not so much by what is said, but in how the word is spoken. The form is what matters. As Eudora Welty puts it, “Form is the work” (Gary Geddes, The Art of Short Fiction, p. 316.) It was to make the short story respectable and in accord with current tastes that critics insisted on plot in the 19th century, Ian Reid says (Ibid., p. 335.) This is not true—at least it is not the whole truth. Plot points to meaning and purpose, which factors were still in vogue, if not required, because in that century, truth was believed extant or at least possible to find. Postmodernism, which followed the Victorian era, and not even immediately, sees no reason to seek after truth and no possibility of discovering it. It is then—after Victorianism gassed off into the ether of history—that plot began to give way to form as the main thing. If what is spoken can do nothing for us, then it must be in how we say it that matters. This is the prevailing situation in literary fiction today, pulp fiction and Christian novels excepted, of course. The irony, but more the poetic justice, is that while form is the only thing that pretentious writers think they have to learn and get better at, their form is worse than form has ever been. The reason is: the more truth and goodness are set aside, the less of what’s valuable does the writer have to work with, and therefore the uglier his word becomes. Truth and goodness cannot be set aside without detrimental loss. Only insofar as truth, goodness, and beauty are present does the word make sense and have value. In a more enlightened milieu, it would be said that only insofar as truth, goodness, and beauty are present in a high degree, can a book qualify as literary and be in the running to become a classic. I judge books on the basis of content, tone, and style, which rubric comes down roughly to the same thing as judging on the basis of truth, goodness, and beauty. If by ‘form’ is meant the strategic ordering and make-up of what makes a story beautiful, pleasing, or desirable, then form comes close to being synonymous with ‘style’ considered in its broadest sense. Form, in literary criticism, can mean a variety of things. To some, it has less to do with strategic order than spontaneous development. Indeed, to make stories up from thoughts that pass randomly through the mind (though sifted through ideology) is the preferred mode of operation amongst our 21st century CBC-courting, gala-going novelists. Again, by form, some novelists mean the genre. But whether by form is meant the syntax of the parts of speech, a predetermined design, an impromptu approach, a certain genre, or a blend of some of these things together, the form comes down to style. It is unlikely, moreover, that by form the highfalutin novelist means the genre known as the novel because the highfalutin novelist does not esteem novels that are not ‘literary’; and if he means by form the literary novel, well, that kind of novel is a sub-genre (of novel in general) that is too indistinct to admit of any agreement among secular critics as to where the dividing line between it and pulp fiction is. Anyhow, the value of a work of art depends on the level that is achieved in the categories of truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth has to do with the story that is told, or content; goodness treats of moral quality, including tone; beauty is about style, or form; and this form concerns the ornamental element, including the logical cohesion of the whole. A judgment of content, tone, and style is something that a reader will intuit as familiarity with literature is gained. This is as true for non-fiction as for fiction. For example, the sermons of R. M. M’Cheyne score higher in content and tone than style, though their style is still higher than sermons being written nearly two centuries later evince. The short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne score higher in every way than short stories being written a century and a half later. No critic who is both informed and honest would put the short stories of the twentieth century onward on the level of the stories written by him. Why does a demand for the writings of M’Cheyne and Hawthorne persist? It is because their writings are highly valued for content, tone, and style. Readers do not consciously judge according to this gauge; unless they are inveigled to believe that judging is wrong and that texts cannot be measured for quality, they do it instinctively. Not every writer who scores high on truth, goodness, and beauty will continue to be read. But no writer who scores low on all three counts will be treasured for long. This is why almost no one reads award-winning Canadian fiction; it is the reason why authors like Margaret Atwood and Carol Shields have been given nods, nominations, interviews, and awards time after time to keep their entropic brands alive. Elitists never come by their status through merit; it’s about, as F. Scott Fitzgerald puts it in his Gatsby, the ‘gonnections.’ The ‘gonnections,’ in turn, are about recognition that results in praise and profit. It may be that publishing houses believe that it is easier to maintain the popularity of a brand that they are responsible for creating than to start from scratch with an unknown, even an able unknown, writer. And this would be one reason why the same nominees reappear in awards for writing. It is worth mentioning how the media and the professors help this along. It is a network of profit and persuasion. For example, consider the collusion: the same authors reappear on the CBC year after wearisome year; therefore the same publishing houses get mentioned along with the authors’ titles; the professors invited to speak on the CBC always agree that these authors are brilliant; and both the authors and their hosts at the CBC are invited to speak at universities, where envelopes full of cash (typically called ‘a nominal fee’) are handed out for speeches, which money comes from government subsidies and the tuition fees of students.

PART II, ARTICLE III: AN UNFETTERED CRITIQUE OF ALL THINGS FICTION, SECTION VII

Not all contemporary novelists intend readers to interpret their visionary expressions and words like ‘hope’ and ‘faith’ in a mystical sense or try to convey to readers an alternative reality that is loftier than their present prosaic one. Most of them, maybe, are happy to make money, attain modest fame, and provide a few transient thrills. They aim no higher than to please, and are guilty of enclosing their stories in a vacuum where nothing higher than the mortal world is ever hinted at. Novelists of neither camp—existential or skeptical—care to make it appear that there is a heaven from which a knowable Divine Being governs the universe—a knowable God who will hold moral agents responsible for their beliefs, deeds, words, thoughts, and motivations.

If critics are anything to judge the currents by, novelists have become less comfortable with the word, or concept, of ‘redemption,’ and more comfortable with the word, or concept, of ‘liberation.’ If this is so, it is no surprise because the former word connotes more biblical theology than the latter word does. A word that is less suggesting of a ransom from the bondage of sin is desired, for the word that educes more than mere liberty is less tolerated by publishing houses. Rick Groen is an award-winning film critic. His three reasons for literary fiction as the chief art to indulge are: (1) for the aesthetic pleasure derived; (2) for its tragic realism, by which he means: the strain between good and evil from which more questions than answers are raised; (3) for its liberating factor. He enlists the help of Jonathan Franzen for this threefold division, who speaks of a kind of ‘redemption’ through an ‘aesthetic rendering of the human plight.’ A redemption such as that, however, is of no practical or permanent benefit. What effect can a portrayal of plight produce? There cannot be a heavenly redemption in a plight for which no answer is given, only a transient one. This redemption is nothing but a good feeling or a sense of wonder through an ornamental presentation of the author’s, or the character’s, plight. This sense may come about, not only through reading superlative passages of literature, but by identifying with a man on the losing side in a book or movie. The best example that comes to mind is Rocky Balboa in Rocky 1. He loses, but we are lifted up anyway. At first, his loss causes us a sinking feeling. Then we are relieved that he lost, for we cannot help but feel that the fighter is more like us by losing than by winning. Subsequent to our initial letdown from seeing the man we love, lose, we experience a kind of redemption through the vicarious loss. Such is our identification with the character’s unexpected denouement. Notice how minimal and insignificant this redemption is compared to redemption of the biblical kind. In the fictional case, we have a temporary sense of ambiguous redemption from losing vicariously. In the biblical case, we have a definite redemption from the curse of the law through a Saviour suffering in our stead, which redemption, in its fruition and future aspect, entails our resurrection from the grave, which in turn leads to our permanent settlement in heaven instead of the awful hell that we had been condemned to prior to our faith in Jesus Christ.     

Though the word ‘redemption’ is usually made to mean something less, to say the least, than what redemption in God’s Revelation is, it is common to never mind the meaning of the word and to preach it as if it means nothing more than to liberate. This is the norm in black churches and among black ministers, where, and from whom, redemption is preached as nothing more than liberation from circumstantial (often lied about or exaggerated) oppression by capitalist white folks. For example, about four girls killed by a bomb in the basement of a Baptist church in Alabama in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city” (Phyllis Theroux, The Book of Eulogies, p. 147.) So Martin Luther King means political liberation here, not saving redemption. He means ‘liberation’ even when he uses the word ‘redemption.’ His meaning is that the death of these girls could be the impetus to progress in civil rights. And ‘redemption’ is often, if not usually, used inferiorly just like that, even when the subject is Jesus Christ. 

To ‘liberate’ is less offensive to obstinate sinners than to ‘redeem.’ Liberation does not communicate a redemptive ‘price,’ and therefore doesn’t suggest a need to be bought from the bondage of sin—sin that must be quit and turned away from. In the Bible the word ‘liberty’ means to ‘release,’ to ‘forgive,’ or to ‘pardon.’ To be ‘set at liberty’ comes closer to encompassing what the word ‘redemption’ imports. But to ‘redeem’ is something more. In the Bible this word means to ‘buy back,’ to ‘purchase,’ or to ‘ransom.’ Even if it is not known (and it is seldom known these days) that to ‘redeem’ is to ‘buy back,’ the Bible has been so influential for so many centuries that the very word ‘redeem’ casts too much light for some committed sinners and authors to tolerate, notwithstanding its use in black churches to speak of liberation from social injustices. The word ‘liberate’ avoids the associations that the word ‘redeem’ continues, after all these years, to cling to. It avoids alluding to the salvation of being set at liberty from the curse of the law—which, in the Bible, is by the bloody ransom provided by Jesus through his death on the cross. Though the word ‘redemption’ fits into his theory somewhere, Groen cannot mean much by it, considering his first two reasons for consuming literary fiction: for pleasure and to raise questions about the stress between good and evil. If his theory is that readers ought to read in order to raise questions instead of nail answers down, his point about reading for the liberty factor (his third reason) means nothing much at all. If raising questions and deriving pleasure are the reasons for literary fiction to be indulged, this fiction is for nothing but maintaining ignorance while being entertained. It is true that he says that ‘more’ questions than answers should be raised, which seems to imply that some answers are okay. But his partial allowance, I think, is rhetorical, not actual. And to raise questions, in literary circles, means to discuss without driving at a satisfying answer. Critics, philosophers, and professors are too much like the Athenians in Acts 17, who spent their ‘time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing’ (verse 21.) Regrettably, I have lost my note respecting what work Mr. Groen’s theory was culled from, though I did find some frame of reference to the words that he borrowed from the aforesaid Franzen.

PART II, ARTICLE III: AN UNFETTERED CRITIQUE OF ALL THINGS FICTION, SECTION VI

Not all fiction, obviously, is attempting to supply humanity with an alternative to Christian redemption and matter-of-fact eternity. Many novelists claim to possess no higher aim than to please. But an insidious ambition may crouch behind their professed aim; for certain, any author whose end goal is to please (besides generate income) is making pleasure in his art the end, which comes down to treating art as an idol of sorts; this is true whether the author is conscious of it or not. That which is designed for no better purpose than to furnish entertainment is itself the vision. Readers and writers have testified as much. Margaret Atwood: “When I finish a book I like, no matter what the subject matter, or see a play or film, like Kurosawa’s Ran, which is swimming in blood and totally pessimistic, but so well done, I feel very good. I do feel hope. It’s the well-doneness that has that effect on me. Not the conclusion—not what is said, per se…if you have those capabilities, and you see something done very, very well, something that is true to itself, you can feel for two or three minutes that the clouds have parted and you’ve had a vision, of something of what music or art or writing can do, at its best” (Gary Geddes, The Art of Short Fiction, p. 14.) Those of us who have heard Atwood in interviews know that she is not a person seeking after truth.  She wants to be pleased, not preached to. A book, to her, should be an end, not a means, at least not a means to what a conservative Christian would call good. She likes books that overturn traditions, though, or that at least run them down; those are the ones that she reads, and she writes them too. Therefore, she likes books that preach something, after all, as most readers do. If a book was ‘done very, very well’ but was optimistic and swimming in the grace of God through Jesus’ saving blood instead of ‘pessimistic’ and just ‘swimming in blood,’ would she praise it for its ‘well-doneness’? My guess is that she would object on the basis of the book being ‘preachy.’ What she is praising in Ran is a story that is pessimistic and gory but that has nothing but that for its end. The end is insular. By contrast, a redemption story that allegorizes what happened on the cross cannot be its own end because by its very character it points outside itself to a historical event. Once hope that is based in fact and history has been deemed unacceptable, pessimism is often accepted as the norm, pessimistic entertainment is often made the end, and the story is made to fit the situation outside the book: the author’s atheism. If such a work may be called beautiful in some sense, still it is like a statue that has no reference point.  It stands for nothing but to be looked at. In the closed, futile world of a skeptical nihilist, something well done, and in that sense, beautiful, merely on the ground of being true to itself, might cause a sense of wellbeing—even a kind of hope. This hope does not spring, much less leap, or if it does, it jumps into the black hole of the lost society that lies outside the book. 

A reader may get a feeling of hope through the recognition of beauty. But beauty by itself lacks the proposition of truth winning out, and therefore can only endow hope that will never arrive. I knew briefly an amiable man for whom Shakespeare was the bible; that is what he told me. He was a hippie with a PhD, and he wore large rings up and down his ears to signify how hip he was; hippie professors are dying out now, giving place to doctors who will not have as much as Shakespeare to look up to and depend on. How did the Shakespeare bible help that professor when he was in the hospital dying? Shakespeare was his bible, he said, and he was hoping for at least one more chapter in life. According to his wish, he did get another chapter. He attributed that grant to the bedside prayers of two Protestant Christians. He has since died, however, still believing, probably, that the Holy Bible is a book of fables. How merciful of God to show this unbelieving man the power of Christian prayer—and therefore, of God—before he died! Fancy a fabulous god answering prayer! He knew that the Creator of the World was responsible for the final chapter that he was given to live. He had to have known this; otherwise he would never have confessed to have gotten help through the prayers of Creationist Christians.

PART II, ARTICLE III: AN UNFETTERED CRITIQUE OF ALL THINGS FICTION, SECTION V

Joseph Conrad, as compared with Bram Stoker, may with even more justification be placed amongst the masters of fiction. In the front rank beside wordsmiths, his narrative is never far from a compelling word. “What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth!…The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires” (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.) This passage is an example of what I call the ‘existential aesthetic.’ Here the author is attempting, through superlative speech, to connect the reader with something higher than himself. By linking nature to splendiferous phrasing, the author hopes to confer an unearthly experience. By the use of word and world together, he reaches for something beyond both. His highest aim is to bestow an impression that will be a ‘moment’ or some sort of psychological launch for the reader. Conrad’s use of imagery, Gary Geddes tells us, ‘reflects his view of art as a sacred trust, a religious commitment’ (Gary Geddes, The Art of Short Fiction, p. 78.) This, I think, is true. In a footnote to a recently written though already forgotten book about Byron’s physician, John Polidori, I came upon the following thought: “The Romantic quest for origins is profoundly connected with the Romantic quest for originality.” The book, then, that I found this cryptic footnote in is called, Poor Polidori, authored by D. L. Macdonald; the footnote is on page 285. The origin of the quote is Paul A. Cantor’s Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism; and Cantor may have gotten it from someone else. Regardless, whoever coined this thought is responsible for identifying the mission of avant-garde novelists. “The Romantic quest for origins is profoundly connected with the Romantic quest for originality.” What can be meant by this, more particularly? The context (p. 224 of Poor Polidori) reveals that the quest which is spoken of is the search for a different option for what unfolds in the first pages of Genesis, which prologue has to do with creation and responsibility: man becoming a sinner against his Creator, and passing that sin nature down through posterity, along with both guilt and curse. These florid passages in classic fiction, then, that attempt to disengage from the chains of a fallen world do so in response to the moral predicament that their authors do not want the proffered solution for; which solution: fear of, and faith in, God, runs through the whole of the Bible.        

The diction in that extract from Conrad’s story does not insinuate a theistic worldview, but a world undiscovered or a history not yet told. It alludes to the hazy, arcane philosophy of existence that the stories of Conrad evoke. Even the presence of words like ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ in classic fiction, moreover, should not fool us into assuming that a Christian, or even theistic, philosophy is being hinted at. Redemption, to secular writers, is nothing more than what a materialistic or evolutionary worldview allows. Their highest end is to provide some alternative to literal redemption. This is done because while they eschew the biblical redemption and hold the materialistic worldview, the craving for redemption remains. The materialistic worldview will not bear a real redemption, only a blind leap into an uncharted firmament. But, in the words of a Puritan: “Is salvation per saltum (obtained with a leap)?” (Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance, p. 100.) The biblical redemption involves the holy making contact with sin: Jesus taking on sin, what the Bible calls Jesus ‘becoming sin’ to save sinners. Faith in this is that which saves. The blind leap, contrariwise, is made by persons who would rather take a chance trusting in something less convicting, which something is always undiscoverable; the existential leap is attempted when the closed universe of atheism becomes intolerable. The authentic redemption is convicting because it reminds a sinner about the cross where sin was paid for with the blood of a sinless Saviour who, though born of a woman, is nevertheless from heaven. Even if the impenitent author has gotten only a vague impression of this through his acquaintance with the word, or account, of redemption, it may be enough convicting information to put him off. So he is careful to compose an alternative form that will be something less than an allegory, or even reminder, of the authentic historical redemption. This is what Conrad commonly does. Here, in contradistinction, is a specimen of sublime composition which does not reach up into a void: “Before the first morning of creation dawned, ere ever eternal silence was broken by the angel’s song, or primeval ether had been fanned by the seraph’s pinion, God was the supremely Blessed One; and this blessedness of His nature, by the Beatific Vision, He will impart unto His children” (James Killen, The Inhabitants of Heaven, pp. 54, 55.) Unlike the high-flown prose of Joseph Conrad and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Killen’s exalted utterance is grounded in biblical divinity, and thus, eternity. Objective truth has influenced his message. The tone is Psalm-like; the content, even without context, makes us suspect that its author’s thoughts are tethered to the cross—to where the only bona fide redemption has taken place; and the style is as luxurious as, if not more luxurious than, anything that Conrad was able to compose. When classic fiction is read, it is well to keep in mind that the mysterious worlds that we are led into by it are often varieties of never-never lands that do not parallel the metaphysical reality that Christians believe in. It is not wrong to write a narrative like that if it is made clear that a biblical worldview stands apart from it as the standard by which everything is judged. The fiction of Joseph Conrad is instructive, especially for atmosphere and style, or tone and eloquence; but its worldview is mystical in a dangerous way. His kind of fiction contains gins and snares that we are apt to step into.