Words cleverly set can produce atmosphere. Atmosphere can be affecting. Persuasion can affect the will. Content can transmit a message that can change lives. But language does not have power in and of itself. Composition is a mode of communication that is used to inform, entertain, uplift, and convince. But no matter how well a book is composed and no matter how magnificent it is, it does not possess, and never will, an ambition of its own. The author is the ambition. Through exquisite phrasing, some writers try to infuse composition with power. That this or that person’s words are powerful is a rhetorical truth, not an actual one. If an argument convinces, if a story moves, if a phrase lifts or thrills, it is the writer that has done it. Composition is impersonal. The craft is impersonal. Secular authors, however, do not reason this out. Many of these authors treat writing as worship; and entrancing composition may cause a reader, they think, to be redeemed, liberated, or saved in some way that is never defined. Their works cannot save any more than they can, though. It is certain that, because words are impersonal, the composition (idol) that authors worship will never actualize a metaphysical salvation for the soul—the only salvation, in the end, that matters. If that could have been done, it would have been done, and someone would have convincingly testified of it being done. Even the word of God is not a power unto itself. When something is accomplished by God’s word, it is because God has spoken it and because God has willed to cause something by it. Creation was spoken into existence by a word from God. The word of God is called ‘thy’ word. It is the word of God that is quick, powerful, and sharp. It is ‘thy’ word. Psalm 119 is an exultation on ‘thy’ statutes and ‘thy’ judgments. The Bible is holy because it is God’s word. The emphasis in the ‘word of God’ is God—on what he says or reveals. A word, even from God, has no inherent, independent life, will, or strength. Otherwise, every eye that has ever read a word from the Bible would have been opened in a spiritual sense. Any person reading ‘be ye holy’ would instantly be holy. “The Scriptures, without the Spirit, are at best only a dead letter, unefficacious and unanimating” (Thomas Charles, Spiritual Counsels, p. 62.) Or, as Thomas Boston puts it, the word of God must be ‘impregnated’ with the Spirit of God in order to be the means of regeneration (Thomas Boston, Human Nature in its Fourfold State, p. 204.) Since Jesus Christ, who is the Word incarnate and who had the Holy Spirit in all his fullness (John 1; 3.34), did not convert everyone he preached to, it is easy to understand that the word of God, on its own and without the Holy Ghost, will convert no one. Myriads of writers of mortal words are in a vanity quest to do what even God does not do with his unerring word and what Jesus Christ the Word did not do by his flawless preaching. Literature is often an end unto itself; certain of its authors try to provide for the reader an admission into a higher plane of experience through it, which effort comes down to a presentation of literature as religion. We should beware that the next text that we read might be nothing less than an essay to rise higher by a written word than the ceiling that God has set for his own.
The emphasis on form is on the decline, and may die out entirely on account of the progressive identity agenda, which ethos has come about through busybodies looking for meaning on the heels of their being sated with hedonism. The literati highbrows have been trying for decades, and on into the 2020s, to keep only that fiction in view that is written to permanently erase white men from the scene and from memory. Writers who are male, white, and even moderately virtuous are persona non grata; and characters that are white and male must be depicted as malevolent, whether through misogyny, homophobia, racism, or even xenophobia. These are the rules to which authors looking for recognition more than anything else, conform. Form is giving way to tone. The staccato form of an Ondaatje is about the last wry face that form can wear. It is time for tone to have its way—to fill up its measure of iniquity. Every identity, be it biological, geographical, or imaginary, that is not male and white is elevated, pointed at, and bowed to: women, blacks, Indians, foreigners, immigrants, aliens, and persons of non-existent genders. This is what the CBC’s Writers and Company is about week after week, and it has been progressively like this for years and years, maybe from its beginning. Pulling the pin from the white masculine tractor that has pulled literature up the hill since the time of Chaucer or before, has already resulted in a ditched wagon though. Literati socialites will not achieve lasting fame as long as they create narrative worlds that are without truth and goodness or as long as they continue to peck away for the sake of flat-line form or hostile tone; it won’t help them establish fame because that which is unreadable is irrelevant; thus, their books, although still in infancy, are almost never read. Those of us who still believe that truth, goodness, and beauty are always relevant and must always be connected—we have been writing our own narratives, and we will continue to do so, drawing on the examples of writers who composed masterpieces long prior to the madness that contemporary prigs pretend, maybe even believe, is normal, or innovative in some good sense. If our narratives will not cut the mustard, we will still know that the postmodern scythe will not cut a single dandelion, and that we can all go back to the 19th century and before to see how acres of mustard are swathed by the Paul Bunyans of literature.
Whatever it is that we read, we must read heedfully; and to be able to read heedfully, we need to read first what is most worth paying attention to, and then some of the rest. The infallible Bible is the judge of theology and philosophy; conservative literary criticism, informed by faithful theology and Christian philosophy, is the judge of all literature; and the fiction classic is the judge of what aspires to displace it or be equal to it. The fiction classic, however (like Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter), because of its subtlety and poignancy, is more dangerous, if subversive, than today’s literary fiction (like the stories of Alice Munro) and pulp fiction (like Harlequin romances, Westerns, and Stephen King novels) can ever be. And that is, mainly, what should be remembered from this unfettered critique of all things fiction.
No comments:
Post a Comment