Thesis tangents

Any day I get to reference the Divine Comedy in a paper is a good day. Initially, I was interested in the passages surrounding this for their discussion of Dante's treatment of the Christian life. But then Beatrice came up and I had to repeat it here and everything happened so quickly:

When Dante and his poem venture, as best they may, into the world of Reality, his guide is Beatrice, who represents his own personal experience of the immanence of the Creator in the creature. In her he had seen, in those moments of revelation which he describes in the Vita Nuova, the eternal Beauty shining through the created beauty, the reality of Beatrice as God knew her.

(From Barbara Reynolds' introduction to Paradise, p. 20)

This is why I love Dante.

On O'Connor (on Easter weekend)

"O'Connor's stories are about people struggling with one another, trying to wrest victories from the recalcitrance of love and fate. They are about the triumph and failure of the will, the divine and the human, and about the tragic consequences of our flawed perceptivity, which quietly stalk us all, like age and death. In spite of the brutal fates that so often befall her characters, O'Connor possesses a genuine sympathy for them, even as she modelled the majority after the secular humanists and materialists she so vehemently decried. This sympathy is born from a common humanity, the awareness on O'Connor's part that all of us share in concert the fundamental condition of sin and the possibility for spiritual advancement once we recognize the devil's hand within our own.

Flannery O'Connor remains one of the most difficult writers of the modern period, not because her tales are necessarily more complex than another's, but because her sensibilities and values are so foreign to her era. O'Connor's literary vision comes burning out of a distant time and place; it slashes like a demon's talon, repudiating modernity's complacent conviction that God had died a Victorian. To appreciate fully O'Connor's art, we must accept it in the religious context from which it was written. To do so requires the type of struggle that virtually forces the reader to identify with her own children - Francis Tarwater or, better still, her uncle Rayber. The secular reader wrestles with O'Connor in a manner similar to a willful child who is forever testing his parents' authority. The child may well become an adult with his own values that differ greatly from those of his parents, but in the end he will somehow show the influence of his parents' vision. He has to: it is in his blood."

Tony Magistrale, "'I'm Alien to a Great Deal': Flannery O'Connor and the Modernist Ethic" (97-98)

The penultimate book in my 20th Century class is Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood. Up till this point, the only other piece I had read was A Good Man is Hard to Find, but her reputation for strong Christian themes had left me interested in reading more. I'm about 3/4 the way through, and it has been one of the most difficult books I've yet read. Very dark, very bleak, very off-putting.

Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights"

Even though I don't enjoy reading the novel, it's a fantastic piece of literature. I think the above quote is key to "getting" O'Connor. The characters/stories are distasteful on purpose; O'Connor is demonstrating for us the horror of a godless, thoroughly-secular life. I admire her for her willingness to stand alone amid the dogmatism of mid-century modernism.

I like the last few sentences of the quote's first paragraph as well. As a great supporter of the liberal arts as a way to unite - rather than divide - humanity, I have often struggled to reconcile the humanism of such a worldview with the reality of Christian theology. The talk about "celebrating the human experience" etc. makes me nervous, because while humanity does have great potential (we are image-bearers of God) it will never be able to fulfill this potential on earth. I appreciated the alternative perspective O'Connor brings to the conversation: We do indeed share many qualities in common, but rather than puff us up, this knowledge ought to lead to humility, because ultimately, we are all united in our fallen need for a Savior. Our common humanity is both beautiful and broken. O'Connor demonstrates the world's vital need for the promise of Redemption.

On Isaiah 55

“Ho! Every one who thirsts, come to the waters;
And you who have no money come, buy and eat.
Come, buy wine and milk
Without money and without cost.
“Why do you spend money for what is not bread,
And your wages for what does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good,
And delight yourself in abundance.
“Incline your ear and come to Me.
Listen, that you may live;
And I will make an everlasting covenant with you,
According to the faithful mercies shown to David.
“Behold, I have made him a witness to the peoples,
A leader and commander for the peoples.
“Behold, you will call a nation you do not know,
And a nation which knows you not will run to you,
Because of the Lord your God, even the Holy One of Israel;
For He has glorified you.”

Seek the Lord while He may be found;
Call upon Him while He is near.
Let the wicked forsake his way
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
And let him return to the Lord,
And He will have compassion on him,
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts than your thoughts.
“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
And do not return there without watering the earth
And making it bear and sprout,
And furnishing seed to the sower and bread to the eater;
So will My word be which goes forth from My mouth;
It will not return to Me empty,
Without accomplishing what I desire,
And without succeeding in the matter for which I sent it.
“For you will go out with joy
And be led forth with peace;
The mountains and the hills will break forth into shouts of joy before you,
And all the trees of the field will clap their hands.
“Instead of the thorn bush the cypress will come up,
And instead of the nettle the myrtle will come up,
And it will be a memorial to the Lord,
For an everlasting sign which will not be cut off.”

I was reading Isaiah 55 again, and there are several reasons why I love it:

1. I think it's important to look at the Gospel from the vantage point opposite of us today. We look back, but the believers of the Old Testament were looking forward. Tasting the longing and anticipation in OT prophecies gives us a sense of how precious our salvation is.
2. The language of the goodness of God's covenant with us is reassuring. Membership in His family is a life-giving thing. We are partakers of God's lovingkindness.
3. It reminds us that the call of the Gospel is not something that is only relevant when we are on the road to regeneration. After we are converted, we need to be reminded of it just as much as before. We become tempted to spend our "wages for what does not satisfy." Things like grad school. As awesome as it can be.

"For in Him we live, and move, and have our being." Acts 17.28

"Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You." St. Augustine

Richard II has an Ecclesiastes moment

Reading the play in class at the moment. This passage reminded me of a similar scene in Beowulf. The Great Conversation strikes again.

Let's talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;
Make dust our paper and with rainy eyes
Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth,
Let's choose executors and talk of wills:
And yet not so, for what can we bequeath
Save our deposed bodies to the ground?
Our lands, our lives and all are Bolingbroke's,
And nothing can we call our own but death
And that small model of the barren earth
Which serves as paste and cover to our bones.
For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison'd by their wives: some sleeping kill'd;
All murder'd: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life,
Were brass impregnable, and humour'd thus
Comes at the last and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence: throw away respect,
Tradition, form and ceremonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while:
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

Richard II 3.2.150-182

Creation narrative literary theory

Amid the reckless academic decisions I have made this semester (including applying to only one grad school.....the fallout from that is another post, though), I found myself taking six classes, plus unofficially "auditing" someone else's independent study. That's 21 credits. I was slightly terrified going into it, but SO FAR it hasn't been too bad. I just slavishly keep on top of my homework every night. (In an ironic twist of fate, my completely neurotic fixation on homework this semester has made me the most productive I have yet been, and I actually have more free time* than I did before.) 

All of this is a really long-winded lead-up to the subject of this post - the aforesaid independent study audit. Another irony, despite being the class I didn't need to worry about, it was actually the one that made me the most nervous, because of the subject matter: Postmodern Semiotics.

Now, here, if you're like me, you're wondering: WHAT THE HECK IS POSTMODERN SEMIOTICS?

Semiotics is the study of how we assign things meaning and the relationship between symbols and the ideas they represent. A "famous" example of the idea behind contemporary semiotics is the painting by Rene Magritte called "The Treachery of Images":

Translation: "I am not a pipe"

Magritte is making both a joke and a statement on semiotics. The painting depicts a pipe, but the image we see isn't actually a pipe. It's only a picture of one. Ferdinand Saussure, one of the founders of modern semiotics, made a distinction between the "signifier" (in this case, the picture/painting) and the "signified" (the concept of a pipe itself). The strong Postmodernism comes in when Saussure claims that the connection between these two concepts is largely arbitrary. In language, this plays out in the way that not all words in one language directly correspond to similar words in another. One of my friends is a German major, so most of the examples I'm aware of are between English-German: We don't have a word for "schadenfreude" (pleasure in another person's pain), and apparently German has no equivalent for "creepy." Saussure and his followers would argue that different languages contain different ideas; we create words and assign meanings to them.

I had no idea what most of this was until several weeks ago, but, thanks to the classical education I was given (shameless plug), I was able to recognize that this conversation about semiotics is not new at all. In fact, the very "postmodern" approach to the connection between words and ideas simply goes back to the Medieval debates over Nominalism and Realism.

• Realism affirms Plato's theory of universals and particulars. To go back to the Magritte painting, Realists would say that every concept exists in two ways: The overarching, universal idea (pipe-ness), and each particular time it is represented in daily life (all the various pipes in the world, though different, are still tied together by their conformity to "pipe-ness"). We call a pipe a "pipe" because it embodies the idea of "pipe-ness."
• Nominalism rejects the existence of universals. We don't have any abstract ideals of "pipe-ness"; we just have pipes. We call a pipe a "pipe" because that is simply what we want to call it. In other words, when we create the word "pipe" we are also creating the concept of a "pipe." There may exist similarities between one pipe and another - and that's why they share the same name - but overall, they are their own entities. From what I understand, Saussure &co. would be more closely aligned with this view, because both emphasize the arbitrariness of language/signs.

I have always been sympathetic to Platonism, and really can't get on board with Nominalism's outright rejection of universal concepts. I find a lot to agree with in Augustine, who argued that the ideas we experience in life - love, for example - flow from the mind and attributes of God.

And now, I finally make it to the point of my post: Today, I was reading the creation narrative in Genesis 1-2. It struck me that God first created things, and then named them. In other words, ideas/objects preceded words. I've spent all morning thinking about this and I still haven't arrived at a satisfying conclusion. Would this be an argument for or against Nominalism? At first, I thought it was clearly implying a more Realist approach, because it would seem to say that "lightness" preceded the word "light." But perhaps the fact that Adam was given the task of naming the creatures would suggest that he was given the opportunity to assign differences between the species. I'm still leaning toward the former, but I would be really interested in hearing arguments from both sides.

Going to need to email my professor.

*Free time is a completely relative concept, and in this case means the homework ends with just enough time for a potential of 8 hours of sleep a night, assuming I do not (gasp) do some personal reading or go out with friends.

A new author

My honors class this semester (alas, the last one...where has the time gone?) is dedicated to Twentieth Century culture. Going into it, I was - in my infinite, college-senior wisdom - thoroughly skeptical, resigning myself to a thankless five months of trudging through existential nihilism and general godlessness. While I can't say I personally enjoyed much of Kafka or Joyce, I'm glad for the experience, because I've been taught to at least appreciate them from an academic/artistic standpoint.

And then, after successfully finishing The Metamorphosis, Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a generally-good attitude, I was rewarded by being introduced to Borges. He has been a pleasure to read.

Borges is enigmatic but precise, metaliterary (shamelessly stealing words learned in class) but playful, and has the ability to create a whole world within the space of a few pages. His sense of humor is the most sophisticated I have yet encountered....getting the joke feels like an accomplishment. 

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is my favorite piece thus far: Borges creates an imaginary author from the turn-of-the-century who sets out to recreate Cervantes' Don Quixote verbatim - without ever looking at the original. Poking fun at the ivory tower of literary criticism, Borges throws in a lot of nerdy humor, adopting the tone of an infatuated critic as he describes the "differences" between the two versions of the Quixote. This passage, besides being hilarious, reminds me of C.S. Lewis's critique of the "chronological snobbery" of modern academia. New=better:

Cervantes' text and Menard's are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer. (More ambiguous, his detractors will say, but ambiguity is richness.)

It is a revelation to compare Menard's Don Quixote with Cervantes'. The latter, for example, wrote (part one, chapter nine):

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

Written in the seventeenth century, written by the "lay genius" Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history. Menard, on the other hand, writes:

...truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.

History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin. Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened. The final phrases - exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor - are brazenly pragmatic.

The contrast in style is also vivid.

(Labyrinths, "Pierre Menard...", pp. 42-43)

After the heaviness of Kafka and the egotism of Joyce, Borges's lighthearted-yet poignant reflections on the literary life have been a breath of fresh air.

I admit defeat. The Twentieth Century wasn't all bad.