Wed 16 Feb 2011
Judging the Literary Experience – Embracing Truth, Rejecting Error
Posted by Mathew Block under Christianity & Literature Series, Literature, Main
[2] Comments
I had originally intended to post today the next article in my recent series on Christianity and literature. Today’s was supposed to be about the good of beauty in literature (as opposed to the good of experiential wisdom which I discussed in the previous post). But a friend of mine leveled some criticism at my previous article, and so I think it a good idea to deal with it now. There, I suggested that one of the principle purposes of literature is that it provides us the opportunity to “enter into” the thoughts and experiences of authors and their characters (which I shall collectively call “the Experience” henceforth). My friend Karl countered: “Vicarious literary experience for its own sake seems to me rather dangerous; even experience is accountable to the lordship of Christ and the church, which is his body.” (To see the comment in length, visit the post here and scroll to the third comment ).
Let me be clear that I similarly believe “vicarious literary experience for its own sake” to be dangerous. I certainly never intended to suggest that this is what Christians should enter into literature hoping to gain – though I must admit that, rereading my own post on Bunyan, I can certainly see how one could draw that conclusion from my words. I fear that, focused as I was with demonstrating how literature acts on the reader (ie, by drawing them into the Experience), I failed to indicate what I believed to be the proper response of the reader to that Experience.
I hint at that proper response in the first article of this Christianity and Literature series. There, when I suggest that we ought to read literature because God can work good through the vocation of human writers, I include the caveat that we must not “do so indiscriminately,” quoting St. Paul’s advice that we “test everything; hold fast what is good.” It is clear to me now that I should have expanded upon this in the article on Experience. What literature does is draw the reader into the Experience; what the reader must do in the midst of that Experience is Judge it to see whether it be good.
The Experience, as I attempted to demonstrate in my previous post, refers to a text’s “capacity to reveal truth.” In other words, the purpose of the Experience in texts is the bestowal of wisdom – or rather, the reader has the opportunity to access wisdom and knowledge s/he might otherwise not encounter by means of the Experience. But if we say that Experience is an attempt to reveal truth, we must further acknowledge that those truth claims may fail to correspond to reality.
Sometimes literary Experience is crafted in such a way as to be deliberately false. An obvious example occurs in the character of the “unreliable narrator,” to borrow Wayne C. Booth’s words. Consider Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Throughout the tale, Gulliver informs of us his opinions on his adventures. But we as his audience need not (and indeed, should not) agree with all of his conclusions. While not always wholly in error, he certainly diverges from Swift’s own explicit opinions on a number of things. Swift no more wishes us to despise humanity, as Gulliver does at the end of the tale, than than he wants us to eat babies (as Swift’s narrator in “A Modest Proposal” suggests). These characters and narrators are unreliable, and we are not expected to trust them. Indeed, Swift presents us with false Experiences in these instances precisely so that we might disagree with them – and so gain wisdom through the Experience by rejecting the Experience.
While we are occasionally expected to reject an Experience at the author’s own (unstated) request, we must also sometimes reject Experiences against the author’s (unstated) wishes. Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials take the reader on a quest to overthrow God. And while Pullman earnestly desires that the reader take the Experience to heart and use it to shape his or her own life, Christians must of course reject such “wisdom”. It is error, and must be recognized as such. And yet, we must admit that even in calling it error, we learn to articulate more clearly what we believe. While we as Christians are not limited to negative theology, we can nevertheless use it when the occasion serves: by saying what truth is not, we can come to understand more clearly what truth is. By rejecting one Experience, we may learn more truly what Life should be.
So then, when Christians enter literary Experience, they must not do so as blind men willing to be led by the blind. They must hold up every word, every thought, every action to critical scrutiny to see whether it be true or not. But regardless of whether they find the Experience in question to be true or or false, there remains the opportunity to gain wisdom through it – be it through accepting the Experience as edifying or rejecting it as destructive. Or, as is more likely the case, recognizing elements of both in the text. Indeed, we would all do well to remember my friend Karl’s word on the subject:
“I personally do not have the luxury of approaching literature from an objective, God-like stance; I read literature because I need it in the thick of things, just as I need other humans, and I will hopefully treat it no better or worse than I would treat others (for it is the voice of others) – with the knowledge that it contains the potential to reveal the image of God, but also the knowledge that sin has corrupted it and that it is not above deserving blunt words of reproach at times.”
[This is the third article in a series exploring why and how Christians ought to engage in literary studies. You can see all the current essays in the series here.]
I must say, I rather like this post; it kind of reminds me a little of Milton’s Areopagitica, with its acknowledgment that one can even get something out of bad or untrue literature via negativa – I once used a quote from Areopagitica about even getting things from bad literature to justify reading Margaret Atwood to a class. I’m glad you mentioned Pullman, because he is just like Blake in that he gets things so very theologically wrong in such an interesting and dazzling way; I can’t wait to see what he will produce when he finally converts.
Also, I like what you say about unreliable narrators. I have encountered in varying schools of thought the idea that unreliable narrators are somehow deceptive, postmodern, and therefore not Christian; given my interpretation of Ecclesiastes and my interest in apophatic theology, I of course think otherwise, although I do recognize that an apophatic tradition must always be practiced under the aegis of a broader Christian community to ensure that incarnational presence is always the foremost message of God’s church. In any case, I agree that, by hearing unreliable narrators and rejecting their positions, we get a chance to work towards an answer that might actually be viable – the unreliable narrator and the absence of truth or God in his mouth exacerbates our restlessness until we find rest in God. You are of course quite right to point to Swift as an example of this; there has to be something up when an Anglican priest writes an entire satirical work without one mention of religion or God. My own favorite, though, is the Tale of a Tub, but maybe this is because I like my unreliable narrators writ large; one might be tempted to trust Gulliver at some points, but Tale makes it manifest that the narrator is quite mad.
To add a little bit about what I said about bluntly reproaching some art, I have noticed that there are in general two bad Christian response to art. One is, as you note in other posts, the idea that Christians should not pursue it at all. The other, though, is an exaggerated idealization of it. A few years back, I was told by someone that Vancouver had recently started a special church for artist, to which I responded, “That’s terrible.” I responded this way because one comes to church to be told that one is like everyone else a sinner in need of daily grace, and that Christ answers this need – not to be told that one is an artist. I worry that this kind of treatment makes artists somehow think that their artistic merits give them special access to grace, and I also worry that isolating them like this separates them from the very church they are supposed to serve – I worry that a church focused on Christian artists will forget to tell them first and foremost that they before this they are Christian humans. Which I suppose brings us back to your appeal for a renewed Christian humanism – Satanic art is incestuous, while Christian art looks outward.
Also, I was thinking of the scene in Rillian, in which Puddleglum snuffs out the incense with which the witch is trying to hypnotize them; I do like this as an image of what sometimes needs to happen to art, although I suppose I am more inclined to say it the university crowd rather than the Christian crowd – the latter needs to hear more about the goodness of art, as it already has enough bad things to say about it. But I sometimes think that the university can only tolerate all art forms by pretending that art has no power, which is not only untrue, but also a rather Pyrrhic victory in terms of engaging art. Anyway, I have no idea what the concrete correlative to such a snuffing of incense would look like, but nonetheless think that it gives a good image for talking about such things.
I wrote an essay a few years back on the relationship between “modernity” (in the late 17th century sense) and madness in the Tale of the Tub. If I recall correctly, madness, from Swift’s point of view, is a tendency towards excess – something the Moderns, with their excessive devotion to newness for the sake of newness, were clearly guilty of. Using such a definition, no one could doubt that a church devoted exclusively (and thus excessively) to artists is truly “mad”. It reminds me somewhat of the hand telling the foot he doesn’t need him…
I’ll have to read Milton’s Areopagitica when I get a spare evening.