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.