PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION IV

The Emersonian intelligentsia would smile to discover such remarks made by a man so hardly acquainted with Emerson and what he wrote. But who can draw inferences too extreme from an author who wishes history would dissolve and who doesn’t care that his verdicts about it might be taken advantage of by future disciples who would then treat history as a ball of clay to be molded into the story that they wish history revealed? It is writers like Emerson who are to blame for that deceitful genre called ‘historical fiction.’ It is writers like Emerson who are responsible for the rewriting of history in our universities. It is because of writers like Emerson that the past is looked at through self-centered microscopes like ‘black history’ or ‘gender studies.’ When a literary pundit wants to put a writer on a pedestal, he has only to speak of him as being ‘Emersonian.’ By that single move, the writer who is likened to Emerson is elevated to the pretentious status that Emerson accords to the legendary gods that he praises so embarrassingly often. Then, some ignorant listener or other, upon hearing the word ‘Emersonian,’ marches like a drone to the bookstore to acquire the latest book that was written by the newly minted genius. After reading just one essay by Emerson, however, a reader may conclude, and should conclude, that both Emerson and his disciples do not transcend anything except knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. As empty as their writings are, they cause a lot of trouble by mistreating history, which they commonly do from the windows of their ivory towers or the turrets of their visionary castles. Besides the Bible, itself largely historical, there is nothing that we need to understand more than history. The past may or may not be about what our present grievance is; and the past can never be about what we wish it to have been.   

Having said all of that, the style of Emerson’s essay is attractive. It appears at a glance that the same could be said about his essays generally. The structure, though not the content, always tends toward clarity. The sentences feel short even when they are long because words follow words in proper order. And because places, characters, and even groups like Magian, Brahmin, Druid, and Inca (p. 20) occur with such frequency, the reader is kept in a sort of breathless expectation of what he might encounter next. But alas! one soon begins to feel disappointed after fancy word after fancy word comes up empty of content. You get to big, shiny presents only to discover that they are as empty as the Christmas boxes the department stores put out in December just for show. Incidentally, it is my opinion that Emerson might have borrowed his listing technique from Robert Burton’s once popular Anatomy of Melancholy, which is partly why Burton’s oeuvre is so often arresting. (Burton probably borrowed the technique from the Bible, as in Romans 1.29-31.)  

I agree somewhat with Andrew George in his Biographical Note that in these writings there is ‘diction at once so rich and so homely’ (p. xxiv.) But what are rich and homely words worth unless they’re packed with meaning? The following caused me to have an existential, ontological quiver: “Who knows himself before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thousands in a national exultation or alarm?” (p. 28.) One time I gleaned a moral: “We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual” (p. 26.) This is a decent, articulate thought as long as it’s not informed by all that Emerson defined as good, beautiful, unjust, and sensual. And once, though in a passage that is mystical in the bad sense, I got a shiver of excitement from being reminded of what it feels like to come upon a scene that was waiting to work something extraordinary into my experience: “A lady with whom I was riding in the forest said to me that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabited them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer had passed onward” (p. 13.) But these attractions are too occasional to commit the picky reader to these essays when better books may be bought for just a few dollars. Sainte-Beuve includes among his criteria for defining a true classic—that which has caused the human mind ‘to advance a step’ (p. xxv.) This is what Emerson’s History failed to do for me. And I have no faith, and no reason to believe, that his other essays or writings will do it. In his day most readers were ‘those who would not give themselves the trouble of comprehending him’ (p. xxii.) Not much has changed, I think. If we hear anything of Emerson, it is because of the voices of the overly tolerant few or because certain persons want to be regarded by their peers as well-read. In light of all that we have from the 19th century that is wholesome and worthwhile to read, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is not worth the time; his writings are wholly unnecessary. Except for the princely style of his prose, he is, in fact, the epitome of Unrequired Reading.

PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION III

Emerson would make the hourglass of history disappear if he could because the grains that have fallen through that hourglass have not fallen into the kind of heap that he likes to look at. He fears that the next heap of grains will look the same as the last heap, and so his solution is to make that first heap disappear so that what happens has nothing in history to reprove it. That’s my theory. His paradise is a world in which whatever one does will not effectuate its natural results; or if it does, recourse to history for the purpose of admonishment will not be adverted to. But he cannot entirely believe in his wish. Who can be fully convinced that a worldview can prevent facts from causing logical, inexorable effects? Or that history can be so effaced that no one brings it forward to censure someone? A kind of nirvana is needed to leap into. This is why Emerson tries to transcend. By the style he employs, he tries to infuse power into his words to convince himself and others that transcending is possible to do. Poets like Wordsworth have tried, by the use of sheer style, to transcend. Even contemporary 21st century musicians have admitted trying the same. They try to believe that Art is capable of accomplishing some sort of Redemption from whatever it is they shrink from or tremble to think about, be it present personal unease, or the unhappy future that impenitent sinners suspect might be their lot to one day endure forever. On page x of the Introduction we read, “We are now men and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.” The Emersonian Man is just another breed within the species of Humanistic Man, advancing in his private effort to redeem himself from the upshot of history. Not only by his cryptic communication does Emerson try to transcend. He tries to do it by well placed capital letters on certain words. The same thing may be observed in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. Some Christian writers use capital letters for emphasis and beauty. But that is not the same thing, for their compositions point to an actual redemption for man and an extant transcendent Godhead to make it happen. Emerson eggs himself on in spite of gnawing doubts that God has not and will not give to man the superhuman capabilities that are necessary for self-transcendence. The truth is that man stays inside his little bubble of life and reaps repercussions from history until God calls his soul to eternity to wait and see what the final judgment has in store, which will be based on nothing less than history and man’s reaction to it. In other words, that Jesus died a satisfactory death for the sins of others is a historical fact; whether the sinner has faith in him or not will decide whether the sinner will be judged or not for unbelief and sinful deeds. “History does have meaning; the past brings forth the present and the present influences the future. Something happens in history because of a previous effect…Cause-and-effect does exist, not only in science but in meaningful, significant human events…Just as Joshua stood in judgment against the Amorites when their iniquity was full, Jesus will come in flaming judgment on the world when the iniquity of the era of the Gentiles is full” (Francis Schaeffer, Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History, pp. 148, 151.) This, mainly, is what Emerson tried to believe was ‘alien to the spirit of Christ.’ This is why even the Trinity-denying Unitarian Church was too ‘creed-oriented’ for him. The man did not like the flow of biblical history: how it had flowed from the past into the present, and how it was about to flow from prophecy into the future.   

Emerson’s capitalization convinces me that in his essays he is trying to believe, and trying to make us believe, in his unbelievable postulate concerning the ability of man to be his own and sole solution.  Capital letters to begin key words do not always evince the hubris of an outrageous proposition, though, as I have already alluded to. Take James Killen, for example, Emerson’s contemporary scholar on the other side of the Atlantic, a man who truly deserves to be republished and read: “It may be that the complex mechanism of Jehovah’s Providences can only be rightly appreciated by those Seraphic Spirits who have had long experience of the Almighty’s proceedings” (James Killen, The Inhabitants of Heaven, p. 303.) This much can be said from reading both the immediate context and Killen’s book at large, as compared with Emerson’s History: Killen’s capitals are used to embellish substance; Emerson’s capitals are used in place of or even as substance. The writings of Octavius Winslow and Beilby Porteus could be quoted to shame Emerson some more and to the same purpose.

PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION II

Emerson belittles history into meaning nothing but what suits the reader’s biography, which approach is nothing less than denying that history contains the facts that it does contain. But why does he do this? Ralph Waldo Emerson was of strict Puritan stock. Many of his forefathers were ministers. He too became a minister for a period of time. Will not the facts dogmatically passed down from the Puritans to their successors become the worst thorn in the side of that descendent who has decided against the implications and conclusions of these facts? What better way to deny God his right to rule over the soul than to dismiss the wheel of Providence that rolls through the history that all souls are born into at his own prerogative and for his own purpose and pleasure? Emerson must have been nagged by the history that his eminent Christian ancestors bequeathed. Rebelling against reality, he must have felt the need to throw this history off his conscience. It seems that by the impulse of his temperament and the use of his talent, he dreamed up an esoteric view of history in order to evacuate it of facts, which is a process, I guess, of making history transcendental. Emerson was a transcendentalist and an idealist. Transcendentalists posit that ultimate reality is either not knowable and/or that through self-generating insight man may determine or discover his own higher reality irrespective of evidence that may be gathered through experiment or experience. As for idealists, they believe that only what is mental is knowable; they may go so far as to deny the existence of material bodies; and they attempt to view the world as they think it should have been and should be instead of what it has been and is. These philosophies are, then, nearly synonymous; they are Platonic, or impractical; and they are inimical, or hostile, to a historical view of the world. So Emerson’s method of treating history is to orate whatever he does not like about it into oblivion through an opaque communication. “Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact” (p. 6.) Are these words not full of hope that the future will not be similar to the past that he hates? Did the mores of the times he lived in prevent him living like he would or from pursuing the future that he wanted to indulge? It sounds like it. Apart from how history affected him personally and how history turned out, what could he have had against history being told except that the teaching of it might result in, or at least hint at, a future that he dreaded?

PART II, ARTICLE IV: EMERSON AS UNREQUIRED READING, SECTION I

Ralph Waldo Emerson is widely regarded by secular academics as a sage. For this reason, his name is uttered by them with awe. His writings have a mystical feel. But their sense is as misty as their style is solid. Knowing this already through radio hosts, their guests, and from former attempts to read his material, I nevertheless was, because of the otherworldly, archetypal character of his composition, determined to try reading him again. 

My title is borrowed from Irwin Edmon’s Introduction to a collection of Emerson’s Essays. From reading the first essay alone and from seeing that the others show the same lack of substantive content, I think the title may be taken seriously instead of rhetorically and that the writings of Emerson may be neglected without any material ignorance being sealed to one’s fate. By neglecting Emerson, there would be the prospective loss of some commentary that we might add, in some conversation that we might have, about an influential writer. We could humbly leave such commentaries to others, however, and then recommend instead, by the occasional remark, authors who provide more substance in their matter, and who are, therefore, more deserving of time and notice. 

The essay that I chose to read among the twenty in the collection is the first one, called, History.  

What was Ralph Waldo Emerson like? He did not like doing math or geometry; he found his Unitarian church too creed-oriented for his taste; and, most informingly, he regarded any adherence to form as ‘alien to the spirit of Christ’ (p. xviii, Biographical Note.) He was an Idealist and, weirdly but compatibly, a Transcendentalist. Knowing even this much—which is a lot—about his nonobjective propensities could never prepare the reader for an essay on history that is a polemical exercise against its existence. He is subtle about it; but that is his thesis. He wants history entirely out of mind. A thesis such as that is nothing less, almost, than stupor mundi (the marvel of the world.) This ‘historical’ essay is no more about history than fables are actual accounts. He names many places where pivotal events of the first rank took place. On just one page he mentions Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Rome, Gibeon, London, Paris, New York, Egypt, Gaul, England, Greece, Palestine, Italy, Spain, the Islands, and even the Garden of Eden. But all we are told about these places is that they ‘are passing already into fiction’ and that history is a subjective matter that is in ‘our private experience…only Biography’ (p. 6.) What he means by history becoming biography is impossible to fully tell. But the statement is a disdainful remark against the facts of history as they stand—facts that tend to make an individual uncomfortable. He says that the student of history should “esteem his own life in the text…not suffer himself to be bullied by kings and empires…He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense” (pp. 5, 6.) Emerson wants all students to read history with a selfish eye—to read history as if the only thing that should be learned from it is something about the reader. 

His view of history is conditioned by his transcendentalism and idealism. From his towering, condescending perspective, history is both looked down upon and reconceived. And is this not what students are being taught to do in the 21st century by their activist professors? Writers like Emerson are responsible for generating this negative education. His approach comes down to looking at history through the prism of private experience, or scruples and dreams, and thereby dismissing some facts and twisting others in order to make history serve whatever worldview the reader, or the teacher of readers, prefers.  

One gets the impression by all the places mentioned in the essay that Emerson must have been a great traveler. He must have been a great reader too. Just on page 27 are found the names of Napoleon, Talbot, Henry VI, Columbus, Newton, Laplace, Davy, Gay Lussac, Handel, Watt, Fulton, Whittemore, and Arkwright. But all we learn from all of this namedropping is that Columbus must have been an explorer; Newton and Laplace, astronomers; and Handel, a composer. By the little bit of intelligence that is communicated, we suspect that some of the others might have been physicists and builders. But the information that is proffered is made so ambiguous that we cannot know for sure what the remaining persons did unless we look up the facts of history for ourselves. It may be that the essay is a demonstration of Emerson’s transcendental approach to history. There is good reason for the reader to doubt that the author of the essay is in possession of any worthwhile knowledge since he teaches nothing by his namedropping except how worthless his approach to history is. It is likely that Emerson knew next to nothing about the persons mentioned and the events that redounded to make their names memorable. Why believe a theory of how history should be interpreted (supposing we could grasp more than mere slivers of said theory) when we have a reasonable suspicion that the theorist does not know any more than the reader does about the subjects that he applies his theory to? I counted sixty-nine names in the space of thirty pages, but learned virtually nothing about anyone. Because of this vacuous recitation, anyone newly acquainted with Emerson must regard him as a writer who took no time to learn about any of the topics or persons that he subjected to his inscrutable theory. Many of the historical characters that he recites the names of have had nothing at all to do with any outstanding event. Is it perhaps because Emerson too busily consumed the empty additives of Hercules, Phoebus, and Orpheus that we find no speck of riboflavin in his History? No wonder his writing is called ‘mere spirit’ in the Bio (p. xxiv.) It never touches ground and it never materializes into thoughts that may be carried away. Is a philosopher not supposed to be something of a historian when philosophizing about what history is and means? If he gives us no good reason to trust his opinions, no knowledge or insight concerning noteworthy events and the personalities responsible for making them so, should his work be highly esteemed, scarcely regarded, or else brushed aside? Emerson knew just enough about history to make him detest the fact that history contains facts. Because he speaks of facts encumbering, tyrannizing, and dominating (p. 24), it is clear that he detests history. He is not enigmatic enough to be misunderstood on that point. “I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is,” he complains. Then further on, “How many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople!” (p. 29.) Mr. Emerson must think that the French Revolution, which centered in Paris, is nothing but ‘a shallow village tale.’ How wretched to have to mention it! There can be no doubt that his objections are rants against the existence of facts, for the man who wants history written in such a way that facts may be reduced to symbols (p. 29) must hate what literally happened. “What is history good for?” he seems, with sophisticated scorn, to ask. “I hold it to be the especial office of history, that virtuous actions be not buried in oblivion, and that men feel a dread of being deemed infamous by posterity for their evil words and actions” (Tacitus.) This is what history is good for. But history is good for even more than this: “We have heard with our ears, O God, our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old” (Psalm 44.1.) Spurgeon calls this ‘the story of God’s mighty acts.’ That is what history, at its best and highest, is good for. From that sermon: “Turn ye back then, to ancient records, and remember what God hath done. Will ye not remember what he did at the Red Sea, how he smote Egypt and all its chivalry, and covered Pharaoh’s chariot and horse in the Red Sea?” Anyone who undervalues history is a fool; and he who doesn’t read it is ignorant, as well as, in effect, ungrateful. Emerson’s detestation of history makes him dislikeable. Knowledge of history is a necessary pursuit. It is for avoiding past mistakes and for learning what to imitate in order to improve, succeed, and glorify God.

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

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.

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

The overvaluation of form is not confined to the boundaries of any one epoch or any one philosophy. It is not confined to existentialism; neither is it limited to any one century, though the overreach came into its own in the twentieth. The temptation to use style and the atmosphere produced by it as the end was keenly and fearfully felt by certain 17th and 18th century Christians. From a thick dictionary on poetry that I have retained a photocopied page of, I read this on the right hand column: “The Puritan plain style—in lit. as in architecture, dress, and worship—bespoke a deeply ambivalent suspicion of art as false, deceptive, seductive: an appeal to the carnal and the irrational, a portrayal of a fiction as a truth. In Of Poetry and Style, Cotton Mather could still inveigh in 1726: ‘Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages. Let not what should be sauce, rather than food for you, engross all your application…Let not the Circean cup intoxicate you. But esp. preserve the chastity of your soul from the dangers you may incur, by a conversation with muses that are no better than harlots.’ The ‘food’ was the nourishing meat of Scripture and nature, the ‘sauce’ the steamy smothering of style and artifice, meter and metaphor. What the Circe-muse fed you could turn you into a swine.” No one familiar with Puritan literature can have failed to notice that the Puritans—these holy geniuses—were the masters of metaphor and rhythm. It is well-known that because of their giftedness they were often admonished by their professors and peers to crucify their style on the cross of content. This did not mean that they were to shun the use of art. It is obvious from their sermons and treatises that they did not do so. What they did was subject every artistic device to the purpose of showing up Scripture Truth. They did not suspect art ‘as false,’ but guarded against a false use of art. To fulfill their commitment to God, they molded each figure of speech into a homely dialect that even the milkmaid and the chimney sweep could understand. Every bit of composition was drafted for the sole purpose of illuminating objective truth. Form was allowed its part, just as color is permitted by the painter to beautify the subject on the canvas. Color alone should not be suffered to stand for content, as in works of modern art. Unless a literary work is made to serve a noble cause, which can only be done by making form the handmaiden of content, the author commits a form of idolatry. 

Some authors even confess their idolatry of literature. Katherine Mansfield’s (1888-1923) avowal of her pursuit after perfect composition is the spookiest that I have ever read: “Lord! Lord! It’s my only desire—my one happy issue…Work. Shall I be able to express, one day, my love of work—my desire to be a better writer—my longing to take greater pains. And the passion I feel. It takes the place of religion—it is my religion—of people—I create my people: of ‘life’—it is Life. The temptation is to kneel before it, to adore, to prostrate myself, to stay too long in a state of ecstasy before the idea of it. I must be more busy about my master’s business” (Gary Geddes, The Art of Short Fiction, p. 226.) This is idolatry to a self-made world; more particularly, it is idolatry to the act of creating: it is idolatry to form. And since she is the former of the form that she speaks too highly of, then her idol, really, is herself. ‘My master’s business’ is just her turn of phrase for ‘my Father’s business,’ which is borrowed from the life of Jesus; and her Father is Art, the Artist, and Herself. Her master is herself as artist, though on a deeper level she is the devil’s child. And, as might be expected, her use of the word ‘Lord’ is a vain use. Biographical information reveals that this woman was elated at the increasing decadence of modern society at the advent of the 20th century. In the spirit of the ‘new morality’—which movement means ‘anti-traditional immorality’—she became pregnant by the man she cheated on her husband with, was comfortable as a lesbian; and, according to a site called Spartacus International, referred to herself as ‘very much a female of the underworld.’ I cannot find this last reference anywhere else but on that site. Whether she described herself as an agent of the underworld or not, it is an apt description of her, considering her illicit conduct. The stories that I have read by her are not cheap or vulgar. She wrote, however, during a time when England was still on the moral leash of Queen Victoria, which held on for many years past the queen’s death in 1901. The few stories that I have by Mansfield are not much more than relationship scenes or sad vignettes, which doesn’t say much in defense of content. Her overemphasis on tone and form is ahead of its time. It does not exemplify the 19th century that spawned her. Writers born near the close of that century usually carry into the next a moral burden. Her stories do not manifest this, though it should be conceded that Her First Ball can give rise to an awakening on the brevity of youth and that her craft surpasses that of writers who are being celebrated almost a century after her death.              

Many writers who are not as forward and honest as Katherine Mansfield are as guilty of worshipping their own works as Mansfield was of worshipping hers. Like her, their number one priority and chief end is to discover the how-to of transmitting the perfect delivery, which Mansfield calls, ‘my Eternal Question.’

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.

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

Today’s celebrated literary troop is not descended from the writers of classics. There is some resemblance in terms of posing and self-promotion. But our privileged progressives are not lettered individuals, really; it is no exaggeration to assert that their loose grip on the English tongue betrays an ignorance of the history of literature. They are elitists, which is as different from being elite as a global warming professor differs from Isaac Newton. They are frauds whose books are foisted upon us through state-run media and by agenda-driven publishing houses. In reading their works, there is more danger of being confused and contaminated than deceived through cunningly written prose. Writers of classics have written somewhat morally and quite compellingly, while our most acknowledged novelists write clumsily and have base morals or no morals at all. To show what I mean may be done with ease in few words. From a not-so laudable, indecent, and therefore soon to be ripped up book (of literary criticism?) by Alex Good, I quote what he quoted from the overrated, multi-prize winning Michael Ondaatje. Apparently, in point of fact, we read this in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost: “A leaf will come down. Its click of applause. The music continues furious like blood moving for a few more minutes in a dead man” (Alex Good, Revolutions, p. 68.) Does a leaf dropping evoke the sound of applause? And why compare music continuing ‘furious’ to blood moving in a dead man? This comparison could inspire us only if we had heard blood moving in a dead man before, which no one has because a dead man’s blood does not move. Has anyone even heard blood moving in a living man? To make matters even less literary, this macabre passage is somehow about Anil dancing. And we may even take issue with Ondaatje for writing sentence fragments instead of sentences and for using the word ‘furious’ where he should have written ‘furiously.’ Proper grammar should always be in vogue. (Not that I ain’t never made a mistake before.) Using an adjective where an adverb is called for should be regarded as a fault more than an elegant way of putting something. And while the sentence fragment is sometimes useful, it looks and sounds dumb when habitually resorted to. In one of his other books (who cares which one?) we read this: “They heard nothing, not the sterile thunder or the mock of the bird or the millions of insects carelessly yelling. Just their breath, as if they were dying beside each other” (Ibid., p. 135.) Why would thunder be sterile? And ‘the mock of the bird’ is poor enough, but ‘insects yelling’? and ‘carelessly’? Lovers are lying by each other, and the best the author can come up with is that their breath sounds like death? How intimate! This desperate clutching at style is like the effort of a young amateur who has not begun to read any of the masters in literature yet, but who has, instead, been attending local guilds to gather tips on writing. Ondaatje was in his fifties and sixties when he wrote these passages; and these passages are parts of books that have won major jackpots. He was fifty-six years old or so, to be more precise, when Anil’s Ghost came out in the year 2000. The nods in his favor are as merited as the applause by that leaf is believable. He is a Sri Lankan Canadian on the political left; this greatly helps to explain why the CBC has tried so hard to make him a household name. In Canada, identity is merit, unless you’re a non-hyphenated white male. If you are a non-hyphenated white male, you must pretend to hate yourself by preaching identity politics; then, if your self-hatred is shrill enough, you might get noticed and then maybe pulled up to join the others on the pedestal that stands on the sinking sand of miscarried composition. Michael Ondaatje is one of the elitists; no merit is required by him. Compare Ondaatje’s ‘prose’ to that of Bram Stoker, who’s best known book, I admit, is plodding in places, and mushy sometimes too: “No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and how dear to his heart and eye the morning can be. When the sun grew so high this morning that it struck the top of the great gateway opposite my window, the high spot which it touched seemed to me as if the dove from the ark had lighted there. My fear fell from me as if it had been a vaporous garment which dissolved in the warmth” (Bram Stoker, Dracula, p. 54.) This is meritorious fiction—elite fiction. Though the name of God is used unthinkingly in the book at times, it is theistic, and not only by biblical allusions. It is an unchristian book that a Christian may cautiously learn writing skills from and be moved to profitably meditate on. The danger is that well-written theism often passes for Christianity and that if we give it this pass, we lower the bar below what Christianity is. Then if we immerse ourselves in literature of this sort, to the neglect of theology, we are negatively influenced; and so not only do we lower the Christian standard below a passing grade, we begin to live a lower degree of faith, through our writing or what have you, than a Christian ought to live.    

My purpose in juxtaposing quotes from Ondaatje and Stoker is this. The faults in contemporary fiction are so easy to spot that we should instantly be provoked to shun it. Contemporary fiction, like that by Ondaatje, should not attract us at all because poverty of word and loose morals, especially when wedded together, are so obviously revolting. If a Christian reader is drawn to contemporary fiction, either he has not read better or he simply likes to read what is flat, indecent, or confusing. There is no danger of mistaking it for Christianity; its faults and dangers are plain.

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

What is a classic in the world of fiction? My arbitrary rule is this: Generally speaking, classic fiction does not include literature that has been published after the year 1900. A good rule of thumb is that Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) marks the end of the fiction classic. Dracula is elite fiction still, as high beside present-day award-contenders as the stovepipe hat is beside the Irish cap of Joyce. James Joyce, by the way, is one of the authors that we are so often told to read, and who is not even read by the people doing the telling. Not reading his Ulysses is no cause for flagellation. His merit may be judged, and should be judged, by something that takes minutes to read, not dozens of hours; therefore one should read his story called Clay. Like real clay, Clay is grey and inert. Reading Clay is comparable to eating clay, I suppose; it is tasteless consumption. When snobs are being self-critical for having never read Ulysses, the reason must be that word has gotten around about how unapproachably boring it is. When the subject is about never having read Dickens, the self-judgment seems to whisper ‘really should,’ while for Joyce it’s ‘do I really have to?’

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

Classic fiction should be used by us as classical Greek literature was used by seminary professors and preachers of the 19th century and before: as a handmaid to Christian knowledge and rhetoric. These professors and preachers courted familiarity with the writings of the Greek masters in order to learn ancient history, hone their skills in New Testament Greek, broaden their understanding of literature and philosophy, and develop their rhetorical skills through the Grecian example. Aware that to ancient Greek writers, God usually was, at most, an impersonal absolute, an indefinite principle, or a pantheon, they read with caution. They knew that perilous bypaths and hazardous emphases would be encountered in these secular demesnes; and they were always on guard because of this. Just as theologians have learned from ancient Greek authors, we have much to learn from the modern classics that have superseded Greek literature. But there are dangers. Many readers—even readers who are treated as spokesmen for the Christian faith—commonly mistake theism for Christianity, and morality for a state of grace. This they do as they read classics like The Brothers Karamazov and Moby Dick. Then they pass their mistaken assumptions down to the students they lecture to. A piece of literature is not Christian even if it is a classic containing ethical overtones and even if moral lessons can be gleaned from it. Oliver Twist, for example, is not a Christian novel. Neither is The Scarlet Letter, though Puritan Christians are caricatured in it. Even Samuel Johnson’s History of Rasselas is not Christian, though it is about as morally flawless as fiction can be. A solid example of Christian fiction would be R. L. Stevenson’s Misadventures of John Nicholson. It parallels the Parable of the Prodigal Son so straightly that I have no doubt that this was one reason why Charles Neider excluded it from The Complete Short Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson was not a Christian; but that story is a Christian story. A non-Christian story is one which contravenes the Christian worldview: its presentation of the world. A story that does not contravene it, however, is not necessarily Christian.

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

 

Once in awhile it is interesting to grow an article by degrees and to allow it to branch off in various directions without worrying about it imparting anything more than a sense of the subject being considered. A thesis that is permitted to gnarl and curl might produce some admirable effect that a methodical arrangement is incapable of. The reader of a discursive article has the advantage—if told beforehand of the article’s discursive character, that is—of being relieved of his duty to pinpoint each and every connection that the loose-jointed article sketchily exhibits. By a relaxed hold on the article, moreover, the reader’s mind may be eased into that elastic humor from which musing prompts follow-ups if not projects of one’s own. This article came to be as I began to muse on common dangers that I noticed among sophisticated writers and critics of fiction. It is more academic than I am in the habit of writing. Despite this drawback, the dangers pointed out in it require me to extract it from my cabinet and include it as one of my installments on cultural criticism. Though ‘classic fiction’ and ‘literary fiction’ may be used synonymously, for the purpose of this essay my categories are these: classical fiction (ancient Greek or Roman), classic fiction (modern classics), literary fiction (post-classic highbrow), and pulp fiction (lowbrow.)  

Recently an excellent discussion came over the radio about how the Hindu religion is introduced into communities where other faiths predominate. One method is to offer seemingly innocuous Yoga classes. This brings Hinduism in gradually and by stealth. Mantras are assigned for new clients to repeat, the true meanings of which are withheld or lied about. Thus, unsuspecting newcomers who have adopted Yoga for no other reason than to unwind are tricked into worshiping false gods. Once the connection to the spiritual world has been made in this way, forces have begun to exert their pull; subsequently, these new enthusiasts are drawn to continue what they had never started if only they had known that Yoga is a conduit to Hinduism. 

Just as Yoga is a channel to Hinduism, classic fiction is an avenue leading to more sophisticated compromises. The hook is not a mantra in an unknown tongue, but a tongue well-spoken in a handsomely bound book. 

Because the novel is usually about characters moving toward the end of a storyline, fiction is more apt to addict readers than non-fiction. Add a literary aesthetic, or an ornate style, and the appeal is enhanced even more. Some readers are hooked on fiction of an inelegant sort, which, invariably, is contemporary if not scatological as well. If such persons were to develop a taste for genteel composition, they would soon be, unless grounded in something more beneficial and satisfying than fiction, prostrated before the 19th century classics. Should their palates be made sensitive enough to savor refined productions, their attachment would be more decided than their former obsession with baser material because that which is more beautiful more strongly attracts and holds. This attachment would be more hazardous because the better written word may be so adorned with beauty, that sin gains, with little protest, the approbation of the reader; furthermore, because of its ingenious presentation, the reader can be hoodwinked into falsehood. When it comes to books, delicacies are more dangerous than common fare. C. S. Lewis, though not in the same league as John Bunyan, nevertheless exhibited more panache than most famous authors of the 20th century have. There is no doubt that the man was too fond of fiction, and that, because of this love, he did not adequately ground himself in theology; therefore and thereby, his theology, informed and influenced by mythology, accidentally endangered his readers. C. S. Lewis was influenced to a fault by the literature of the fabulous. This is evident in the way spiritual realities are sometimes described in his writings, like when (I can’t remember where) he speaks of Jesus heaving sin upon his shoulder, which reminds us, not of what literally happened, but of something that a mythological god might do. This is dangerous to the reader, for it can induce him to romanticize the cross. C. S. Lewis was the victim of fiction; his readers are victims through his non-fiction, notwithstanding his valuable contributions. Is it extreme to assert that his non-fiction is jeopardous? Well, he says this in his essay, Christianity and Literature: “I am not here supporting the doctrine of total depravity, and I do not say that the New Testament supports it.” How wrong is C. S. Lewis on this point? How total is man’s depravity since the Bible says that the sinner is ‘dead in sins’? (Ephesians 2.5.) Man is totaled; this is why he must be born again. The reason why C. S. Lewis made this fundamental trespass in theology was because he was a man of fiction more than non-fiction. It is anecdotal that he read the works of Shakespeare in the space of just one year. That is misdirected dedication.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION X

Poetry like Two Ghazals falls under the category of ‘vain imagination’ (Romans 1.21.) This conduct follows from suppressing the truth of God’s eternal power. And this power the revelation of nature gives us an abundant witness of. The ‘foolish heart’ can become darkened so much that a ‘reprobate mind’ is the end result (verse 28.) John Thompson suffered from mania, depression, and paranoia before he died of drugs and booze (and suicide) in 1976 at the age of thirty-eight. After an unnamed illness (probably a stroke) Patrick Lane, his servile critic, lost his ability to think clearly enough to write, having attempted suicide several times throughout his life. He did put a novel out in 2018 before turning eighty. So recovery, this time and for awhile, was granted by the God of grace. But the God of grace is also the God of wrath. God is also like this: “According to their deeds, accordingly he will repay, fury to his adversaries, recompense to his enemies; to the islands he will repay recompense” (Isaiah 59.18.) The heart is darkened by vain imaginations; and, if persisted in, the practice of vainly imagining, or playing with ignis fatuus (foolish fire), leads to delusional thinking, abandonment, and, finally, the wrath of God (Romans 1.) The doltish fabrications of a postmodern poet are like these vain imaginations that are cursed by the Creator of man’s mind—our fearsome Creator who must be sought and found before the billows of death discomfit the mortal body to its core. Writing like in Two Ghazals is literary leprosy; every reader who comes across it should declare it to be unclean, and then walk away. This aberrant brand of writing, which is an insult to language and the image of God in man, should, for the sake of one’s mental wellbeing and ever-living soul, be abandoned speedily without looking back. 

Writing dissonant verse might be fun for persons who do not highly aspire or who want to fit in somewhere. Coming up with words that clash instead of contribute is like a game without a goal. An aimless practice is bad enough. But like a woman counting calories or a man counting his ‘gains’ from weightlifting, writing discordant verse can become an obsession through the praise received for participating. Weightlifters are praised by other weightlifters in spite of hazarding their bodies through steroids. Anorexics are praised by other anorexics in spite of endangering theirs. Iconoclastic poets are praised by their likeminded, empty-headed brethren for wasting their minds inventing dissociative things to say. And all self-harming persons have enablers among non-practitioners.  Who wants to hurt the feelings of a bodybuilder by telling him his muscles look grotesque? Who wants to sadden the calorie-counter by telling her she looks like a victim straight out of Auschwitz? Who wants to tell the proud poet that his poetry is illiterate madness? It is tempting to overlook the behavior, feign praise, and change the subject.

Any writer hoping to be noticed can get caught up in the vain practice of far out forms and techniques. Even way back in 1897, it could, with good reason, be asserted that: “The subject-matter of the art of the upper classes growing continually more and more limited, it has come at last to this, that to the artists of these exclusive classes it seems as if everything has already been said, and that to find anything new to say is impossible. And therefore, to freshen up this art, they look out for fresh forms…As soon as ever the art of the upper classes separated itself from universal art, a conviction arose that art may be art and yet be incomprehensible to the masses. And as soon as this position was admitted, it had inevitably to be admitted also that art may be intelligible only to the very smallest number of the elect, and, eventually, to two, or to one, of our nearest friends, or to oneself alone” (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? pp. 73, 80.) Gibberish, like amnesia or senility, leads to isolation. We are one step further, even, than the author’s art being intelligible to ‘oneself alone.’ Even the author, now, doesn’t know what his poem means. 

The fastest track to popularity is to write what the doorkeepers of literature want to see. But at what cost is it to write like a man gone mad? Should a writer sacrifice his intellect and soul by writing balderdash just because the dandies have decided that balderdash is the new genius? “This wretched brain gave way, and I became a wreck at random driven, without one glimpse of reason or of heaven” (Thomas Moore.) Write one poem that makes less sense than a few phrases of prose cobbled indiscriminately together, send it to a highbrow hipster whose platform sets the fashion, and you might be, on account of irresistible pride and magnetic fame, set on a path to invent crazy verses to the end of your sorry, unsaved life. Go down a road that you should never travel on, God might leave you to it, you will fill up your measure of iniquity, and it will make an eternity of difference. 

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION IX

Our society was in a shabby state already when experience presided over essence, when ‘eat, and drink, and be merry’ mattered more than who you were and where you came from. But this practical atheism leads to existentialism or nihilism, or to each one of them back and forth. So people commonly go from trying to hope in, or experience, something above what they believe in (existentialism) to feeling hopeless and acting like it because they find no reason to believe that life is meaningful (nihilism.) Not only are words dead; Western civilization is dying. It could live; but it doesn’t have the will. When rationalist man becomes too proud to rely on the God of the Bible, he seeks truth without God’s revelatory help. Finding no truth, he quits looking for it, and tries to be satisfied with eating, drinking, and making merry: drugs, drinks, cars, traveling, sports, sex, or what have you. After this fails to satisfy, existential angst takes over and wins out. So he seeks a grandiose experience to have faith in or he falls into a condition of hopelessness. Seeking no more the truth because they think it can’t be found, the rationalist philosopher and the postmodern poet go about killing off communication; and the lost society that they exhibit goes about dismantling or demolishing everything that a belief in God’s truth once built. “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation” (Matthew 12.25.) We need the power of God in Jesus to exclaim, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34.) But ignorance and impenitence may prevail in order to bring judgment down for sin. After Jesus rose from the dead, he stated, “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” (Luke 24.25, 26.) It may be that the epitaph of Western civilization will be, “Ought not it to have suffered these things, and to enter into bedlam and hell?” 

The condition of today’s poet is one of despair. He is as articulate as a ‘reconstructed ancyclical’ and as pointless as ‘a tin wing in the wind.’ Like in Two Ghazals, he ‘never sees the sun’ and always ‘looks for the darkest place,’ even when he speaks of ‘the Bread of Heaven’—the Bread of Heaven who is, the Bible says, ‘the light of the world.’ If he had ever eaten this Bread, there would be no despair, his darkness would be flooded with light and color, and poetry marked by entropy would die off. There is no coming out of this condition unless despair is not so far gone as to make dread impossible. Despair is to lose hope, maybe to the point of hopelessness; dread, however, may lead to hope through faith. The poet of our time is in a state of despair because his philosophy is not filtered through faith in a transcendent personality.

About John Thompson’s last book of poems, Patrick Lane says, “The poems are sometimes grim but they are by a poet writing at the farthest reach of his mind.” If the poems are like the Two Ghazals, they must be entirely grim and they must come from, not only the farthest, but the darkest and deadest part of his mind. The character in Two Ghazals, together with the author himself, is in a state of despair that was wrought from the philosophical belief that truth cannot be found and should not be sought. Each soul that has abandoned, is at odds with, or is distanced from, the truth wherein the remedy is for both despair and dread, must not dally with time. He has no time to waste on playing with words to form meaningless verse. Before despair becomes utter despair, it is possible for a sense of dread to lead to prayer, life, and relief. “I have not sought Thee, I have not found Thee,/I have not thirsted for Thee:/And now cold billows of death surround me,/Buffeting billows of death astound me,—/Wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see/Thy perishing me?” (Christina Rossetti, Love is Strong as Death.) The voice in this 19th century poem goes from dreading to seeking in an instant. Conversely, the distinguishing mark of postmodernism is resolute skepticism. If you believe that certain knowledge is unobtainable, and you are a writer, you might see no use for reason or rules and no rationale to make sense, much less to create beauty. It will seem reasonable, then, even though reason itself is not believed in, to despair. But if sin has not filled its measure to end in despair yet, the soul may reach up and out to the God that he has been told does not exist, and ask, even while ‘buffeting billows of death astound’—: “wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see/Thy perishing me?” The poet of this present age, like the people whose lives reflect the bleak world of the poet’s miserable verse, is fast approaching an irremediable, irredeemable end in the absence of God’s favor.