Personal Narratives

The blog Findings, written by a fellow former Wesnothian, had a post today about narrative which ties in nicely with something I’ve been thinking about myself: perhaps, just as that post implies that we are each trying to write our own narratives, we could say that the world is a grand story composed of the multitude of personal narratives we are all crafting, and which cannot be reduced to a simpler form, and it is impossible to understand the world entirely, because we can never fully understand another person…

Of course, this isn’t a fully thought out idea, but I want to post that link before I forget about it. Perhaps I’ll come back to this when I have a fuller description of what I mean. Incidentally, this is a thought I had after reading Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov; if I end up able to draw a coherent concept out of this mess, I’ll have to revise my opinion of that book upwards.

Lyric and Emotional Sincerity

Everyone, I hope it can be safely assumed, has strong, deeply felt emotions that they occasionally feel an intense desire to share with someone else. They can be feelings of love, hope, anger, despair; which exactly doesn’t really matter. But they must be overpowering. They have to make you want to announce to the world, “I love ___!” or “I believe in God!” or “I have been wronged!” or “I feel so alone!”

The thing about emotions like this is: usually, you can’t tell anyone about them. Unless you’re amazingly good friends with someone, going up to him and saying “I feel so alone” will just result in a moment of extreme awkwardness. This is where poetry comes in.

Poetry (among many other things it does) takes those emotions and captures them in language that by will make the reader feel those emotions, rather than just intellectually realize that the writer felt them at one point. Take an example from the life of (you guessed it) Gerard Manley Hopkins. In 1884, he wrote in a letter to his friend Robert Bridges “WHAT DOES ANYTHING AT ALL MATTER?”. So: what is the reaction of the reader to this? Perhaps pity that someone could be so distressed at life, but probably no more than that.

But look at a one of the “Sonnets of Desolation” that he wrote around that time. I’ll pick “No worst”, as that’s one of my favorites.

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing—
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

For me at least, these lines do not just convey the idea that Hopkins felt great despair at this point in his life; they force my entire consciousness to, for a few moments, try to take on the emotion that Hopkins felt when he wrote them. The last two lines, especially, echo powerfully in my mind; they express the emotion, one that I have had myself occasionally, better than I ever could.

That brings me to something that I find somewhat odd about poetry, and which I haven’t really formulated an opinion on yet. Namely, the emotional power of the poem is based on how well-written the poem is. More broadly, we demand that what a person says be well-crafted before we will believe what they say. Or perhaps “believe” is the wrong word – “care”, maybe. We don’t care about other people unless they can express their feelings in powerful poetic language. Does this not strike anyone else as odd?

Book Review: The Brothers Karamazov

So, this last week and a half (starting basically when I no longer had to do a bunch of work for Junior Poet) I sat down and read The Brothers Karamazov.

Verdict: It’s amazing, but I just don’t get it.

That is all.

Dies Irae

Today I went to an All Souls Day Requiem mass. In an interesting coincidence, that mass opens with the Latin hymn “Dies Irae,” and my “exemplary poem” for Junior Poet, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves,” draws its title from the hymn’s opening stanza: “Dies iræ! dies illa / Solvet sæclum in favilla / Teste David cum Sibylla!” Thus, I will endeavor to give a reading of it now, while the coincidence is still interesting.

The poem itself, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (full text here), is a fascinating look at three of the four last things: death, judgement, and hell. One of Hopkin’s darkest poems, it does not speak about heaven; the reasons given for this vary, among them that it is a pre-Christian poem in content, that it stemmed from an Ignatian meditation on hell, and that logically it ends by rejecting poetry while it is meant to aesthetically, through the music of the words, redeem poetry.

In any case, whatever caused Hopkins to write the poem, its substance is him confronting the fact that all life boils down to a choice between good and evil. The octave presents the world disintegrating, the image being one of the sun setting, the stars rising, and, while in the heavens the stars are fixed, stable, below on earth, everything succumbs to entropy. Here we find such great lines as “womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night” and “her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height / Waste”; these descriptions blend the distinction between symbol and what is symbolized, and we feel that the nightfall is the Apocalypse.

In the sestet Hopkins turns inward, seeing that now that the world has ended, the dappled and pied beauty of things is irrelevant. It begins with the cryptic but evocative line “Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,” going on to explain the threat implied there as one of morality: now that the world has come to an end, the only distinction that matters is “black, white; ‘ right, wrong.” Aesthetics no longer matter, Hopkins fears; even as he strives to assent to it. In a sense the poem is about poetry, and whether it is worthwhile to write beautiful poetry about the beauty of the world; Hopkins concludes that it is not, unless that beauty serves a moral purpose.

But of course that is what all of Hopkins’ poems are about – his nature sonnets all begin with observing the natural world and move up to God. Some people think “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves” is somehow atypical of Hopkins; on the contrary, it perhaps best encapsulates his concerns: nature, the self, sin, and God. It is written in the Baroque style of earlier poems like “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and “The Windhover,” which he returned to with e.g. “That Nature is a Heraclitan Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” (these four poems I would say are Hopkins’ most important), but its darkness ties it in to his later sonnets of desolation, which are written in a more plain style.

What I’ve left out so far from my explanation of the poem are the last two lines – and indeed, those who want to place the poem as an extremity, not an example, of Hopkins’ poetry look to those two lines to make their argument. They’re difficult lines; they’re also what first turned me on to the poem, as I at first grew frustrated with Hopkins for not making any sense and then slowly realized the brilliance of them. They describe the damned souls after the Last Judgment, and their difficult rhythm – it is almost painful to put the stresses where they are marked, rather than where they would naturally fall – makes them sound like a drumbeat out of Hell. They’re not unmusical; it’s just a terrifying sort of music. Nor is it hopeless terror; the poem is a prophecy and a warning. “Teste David cum sibylla.”

—

So that’s my exemplary poem. With any luck, I’ve convinced you at least that the poem is worth looking at. It’s really amazing, in sound and sense (Hopkins is a master of combining form and content). I get to do a practice presentation of it tomorrow morning, then my panel’s Friday the 13th; I hope writing this out in the last half hour will actually help me with those (and the paper we have to write in a month) rather than prove a hindrance. We’ll see.

Done!

Today I finished the most important part of the Junior Poet project: an annotated bibliography of the criticism on Gerard Manley Hopkins (for which I read and commented on 6 books and 22 articles). It wasn’t actually that much work – maybe 2000 pages of reading spread across two months, plus writing a paragraph about each work read – and was certainly amusing at times. I do feel sorry, though, for those who are only halfway done, given that it’s due on Monday – that gives them four days to read 1000 pages. Doable, but not fun.

One strange fact: I actually enjoy reading deconstructionist literary criticism. It is often absurd, yes, but also often has fascinating insights; and they often talk about how language can convey meaning, a subject I find fascinating. Wikipedia describes deconstruction as “rigorously pursu[ing] the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible”; what exactly is wrong with that, done well? It can result in absurd theories, but is often more insightful than the other two main types of criticism I saw, those being “just read the poem and closely analyse the metaphor and language used so that we can rephrase the poem in philosophical language” and “look at the philosophical/literary/cultural influences on the poet and then try to find evidence of their having influenced the poet in the poems themselves.”

So, uh, yeah. Anyone else have anything insightful to say about different types of literary criticism? If not, you probably won’t be hearing about JPo from me until I get around to writing a post analyzing “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves.”

Educating a Wizard

More stuff about Harry Potter.

So, I agree with that article in almost every aspect, and I thik it makes mary good points. But the entire argument relies on the following:

I like to hope that if most of us were handed a magic wand (literally) that removed a lot of the drudgery of modern life, we’d use that extra time in cultural pursuits. We’d read more, write more, take a dance class, go backpack around Europe, etc. We’d produce magical three-dimensional movies, and paintings conjured out of our dreams. Magic would be a tool for knowledge and truth and beauty. And yes, I know that most of us would just watch more TV. But still: magic would (theoretically) give us the opportunity to devote ourselves to the liberal arts, or at least explore them more than our non-magical lives currently allow.

But for the wizards of Harry Potter, magic is an end unto itself.

So the question becomes – why? Why are all of those “cultural” things worth doing, if there is absolutely no drudgery to modern life? What point is there in leisure, if our entire lives are leisure? This is the question Harry Potter accidentally raises but refuses to answer, getting around it by having wizards spend all of their time working in cubicles. Essentially, Rowling turns their lives into drudgery even though there is no need to do so within the logic of the world. She does it anyway.

So what should we take away from this? That Rowling is a bad writer? (Perhaps. In certain respects, she certainly is.) But the other possible interpretation is, that human life cannot be made sense of if there are not certain things we must do in order to survive. If we have no duties, this interpretation says, our lives cease to have meaning.

This interpretation makes a certain amount of sense in a Christian light, actually. God cursed Adam and said he would have to work for his food. This is not just a change to the how easy man’s life is – it was easy, now it’s hard – it is also a change to how human life is correctly structured. In the postlapsarian world, we ought to do work; it is unnatural not to have to struggle to survive.

Any world in which no such struggle is necessary, then, will feel hollow – because that aspect of Adam’s curse has been lifted, but not the part that made it necessary. It’s just like how immortality, it is often said, would be tortuous – because, while in man’s unfallen state he is immortal, fallen man is not capable a good immortality.

In this interpretation, the world of the wizards in J.K. Rowling is somewhat hellish; the wizards have nothing to do, and so they have to occupy themselves with pointless work to distract themselves from how meaningless their lives are.

It would have been fascinating if the books had actually explored this question.

Ofermod

We recently read the Battle of Maldon in my Medieval Literature class. It’s essentially a narrative of a battle between heathen Viking invaders and the Christian Englishmen, resulting in the defeat of the English and tribute – “danegeld” – being paid to the Norsemen.

What people find interesting about the poem is the description of the main character. It portrays Beorhtnoth, the English thane, as a courageous, pious man, who is ‘tricked’ by the Danes into letting them cross a bridge, essentially giving up a defensible position and making it inevitable the Danes would win. By ‘tricked’, I mean the Danes asked him if they could cross and he said yes.

The poem is ambiguous as to whether this was a wrong action or not – the word used to describe his character at that point is “ofermod”. There are no other examples of “ofermod” in Old English, so we just don’t know what it means. It is literally “over-courage”, “over-heart”; but does this mean he has too much courage, i.e. is foolhardy, or that he has an impressive amount of courage, a good thing? No one knows. People read it different ways. (Incidentally, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a play, “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son”, about the aftermath of this battle, that addresses the ambiguity in question. It’s good, go read it.)

There’s a similar disagreement about the poem “The Windhover”, by Gerard Manley Hopkins (whom I’m studying for Junior Poet). The word is “buckle”. Does it mean that the thing buckling is collapsing? That it is being bound together, as in buckling a belt? Does it mean “buckle” as in “buckler”, a type of shield? No one knows, and which it is makes a huge difference in how the poem is read.

I’m not sure what to think of ambiguities like that. They are certainly interesting, and make possible multiple interpretations. To that extent, I like them.

But this might be just because I don’t like having a work of literature be too “preachy”, and having ambiguity makes it less preachy – but really, ambiguity only makes it seem less preachy, it doesn’t change the actual meaning of the poem, assuming there is one. After all, it seems like the poet himself knew what the poem ought to have meant, but that we cannot, which is immeasurably frustrating, and implies the poet failed somehow. Especially when which it is doesn’t determine just some nuance of meaning, but how to read the entire poem.

Which is it? Is ambiguity in literature desirable? If so, to what extent? This is a question I haven’t been thinking about for as long as I probably should have been, and I don’t really have an answer formulated yet. I have a gut reaction against books that try to preach a certain moral, and try to avoid doing so in my own stories, but then again most of my favorite books do have messages they’re trying to convey, and I don’t fault them for it. What’s going on here?

What Makes a Good Poem

I’m taking “Junior Poet” right now, and we’re starting off the semester reading a lot of more modern poetry. Particularly, we spent an entire day of class analyzing the poem “Persimmons”, by Li-Young Lee. There was much conversation about how great a poem it was, mostly based on the fact that he uses the poem to talk about the nature of poetry and sexuality in an interesting manner, and tells a somewhat interesting story.

I pretty much disagree with everything the professor had to say about the poem’s worth.

It’s not that I don’t think the poem is about the nature of poetry (it is), or that it doesn’t narrate a somewhat interesting story. It’s that all of those things are irrelevant if the music of the words themselves – the simple cadence of the phrases, regardless of the meaning – aren’t beautiful while still conveying meaning not through words, but just through the sound of the words, and if the inages used aren’t unusually evocative and memorable. If it doesn’t do those things, it seems to me, it’s really just a prose passage with funny line breaks.

But instead, the JPo class seems to go in assuming its a great poem, not looking at the form of the poem much at all. Because there’s really not much there – there’s a few tricky ornaments added, but that’s like having statues and stained-glass-windows propped up in midair without the cathedral holding them up. They fall down.

It’s not that I hate modern and contemporary poetry or don’t understand free verse. T.S. Eliot is an amazing poet who succeeds at what poets have to succeed at, as I outlined a few paragraphs up – Prufrock is actually the poem I was primarily thinking of when writing that. But many poets today seem to have forgotten what poetry is actually about.

Book Review: Watership Down

I apologize for my lack of posting this last week; I’ve been busy securing an apartment to live in this coming semester and buying furniture to put in it. I’ll be doing that for another week, then I move in August 31st and the semester starts. Until then, though, I have a decent amount of free time.

Well. That said, even though I wasn’t posting, I found the time last week to read Watership Down, one of my favorite books from years gone by. The premise: a group of rabbits leave their warren on the basis of a vision of doom one of them had, and they set out trying to make a life for themselves on remote Watership Down. Once there, they realize their group is entirely bucks, no does, and so they try to find a warren that will give some females to them. Instead they find a warren led by the Nazi-esque General Woundwort. Meanwhile, a mythology is being built up of Elahrairah, the rabbit folk hero.

Anyway, I hadn’t touched it in over three years, and decided I needed to revisit it. Verdict: It is, as I remembered, awesome; it’s maybe even better than I remembered it being. (So, if you never have, if you get nothing else out of this post – go read it!)

But there’s an interesting caveat to this endorsement I want to explore. The book’s awesomeness is definitively not because of the characters. I like Hazel, and Fiver, and Blackberry, and Bigwig; General Woundwort is indeed a disturbing villain, for a rabbit; Elahrairah makes a cool folk hero, Lord Frith and Prince Rainbow are both well-done gods, and the Black Rabbit of Inle is awesome in its role as the Grim Reaper. But -

Those characters aren’t why the book is amazing. It’s rather how well the author, Richard Adams, paints the outlines of the rabbits’ world, making up his own “rabbit language” and convincing the reader that it is real (“silflay hraka, u embleer rah!” is left untranslated in the text of the book, but the reader already knows what it means by then, and using it doesn’t break suspension of disbelief at all), showing how differently they think about things (they don’t realize cars are machines; only the most intelligent among them understand floatation), in general presenting rabbitting society as alien and yet compelling.

And probably it’s that very achievement – the establishment of so alien a culture for all the characters to live in – that makes it so the characters are hard to relate to. In the end, Hazel’s a good guy, but he’s just a rabbit, and I could never have a conversation with him, even if we spoke the same language; we’d have nothing to talk about.

And because the lack of compelling characters is a direct result of the nature of the book as semi-anthropomorphic fiction, I doubt Adams could have done any better. It’s a problem with the medium he’s working in.

Magic as Mystery

You probably know about Clarke’s Third Law, which states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I would like to propose a related theorem, but one with a very different meaning:

Any sufficiently rule-bound magical system is indistinguishable from technology.

I’m going to explain what I mean by this, but be warned, it’s a long and convoluted post, one that makes many broad statements but does a poorer job of backing them up (though I believe every one of them).

So.

Consider any secondary world that has elements that would be described as “magical,” “mystical,” “faerie.” What we mean by these words, I posit, is incompatible with a system of pure cause-and-effect, codified rules, where A=>B is all you need to know about A and B. So any system of magic that is described as a system of cause-and-effect rules will not be truly magical, mystical, wonderful, faerie; it will come across, to the reader, as merely a technology specific to this universe. And while there are interesting things we can do with that, it’s not what magic is.

There are two things I’m trying to do here. The first, is to define a word – magic – that i believe has been misdefined. (From here on out, all mis-uses of magic will be in quotes – “magic” – and all valid uses will not.) To achieve that, I’m going to elaborate on two examples of fantasy universes, and explaining in what senses they are and are not magical. After that, I’m going to explain why true magic is probably best off being left mysterious.

First, for the two examples. Consider the universe of Harry Potter (much of what follows might not make sense if you haven’t read the books, but, you probably have, so I press onward). The so-called “magical” elements of that universe can, I believe, be divided into three categories: the whimsical, the scientific, and the truly magical.

The whimsical aspects are all of the oddities that Rowling throws in to make the universe seem more outlandish: the Every Flavored Beans, the pictures that move, the Monster Book of Monsters, etc. This stuff seems worthless to me, except for comedic value; it adds little to the magic of the setting, and completely destroys its believability. She includes it to make HP a children’s book; I think that was a mistake.

The scientific aspects are the rules for how “magic” works in the HP universe: some people are “magical,” some aren’t, and it is passed on genetically; if one is “magical,” one can say words and cause certain things to happen, each set of words with a specific result tied to it, including effects such as levitation, transformation, making areas larger on the inside than outside, mind-control, torture, death, etc; there are many more natural species than were previously realized, such as dragons, hippogryphs, leprechauns, mermaids, and some of these have powers that are not physically explicable but which follow a set of “magical” rules nonetheless.

These aspects are interesting and not out-of-place in a magical literary universe, but they’re not what’s essential to magic, and I often think they’re overused. It’s possible to have too much of this stuff. And if some of this is going to be used, the author has to be careful to actually follow the rules to their logical conclusions (one of my major complaints with HP is that the Weasleys shouldn’t be poor).

The truly magical aspects are the ones that don’t seem exactly rule-bound, but not illogical either; they follow a set of not-exactly-rules and are integral to the moral fabric of the universe. The best examples of this in the HP universe are: the wands, how each wizard is “meant” for a certain wand; the Sorting Hat, Goblet of Fire, and other such mystical selection processes; the Higher Magic (or whatever Rowling called it) that protected Harry through his mother’s love; whatever the hell it is that happened when Harry and Voldemort’s wands clashed in the graveyard in book 4; how created a Horcrux “tears your soul in two”, whatever that means.

These truly magical elements, I believe, all stand out when reading the books; they seem somehow more magical than the “magic” itself, more magical than “say Expelliarmus => their wand flies out of their hand.” That’s not magic, that’s technology.

That’s it for Harry Potter for now. We move on to considering the Star Wars universe. There are three different “magical” elements of the SW universe I want to talk about, though they don’t really correlate with the above three. These are, the actual technology, the Force used as a tool, and the Force as a moral, uh, force.

The actual technology is, according the Clarke’s third law, “magic”; they have laser guns, FTL travel, protective energy shields, etc. These are functionally little different from Avada Kedavra, apparating, and protective charms. Clarke says this is because the technology is so fanciful as to be essentially “magic”; perhaps so, I say, but another way of looking at it is that the “magic” in HP is just an attempt to cloak technology in fantastical trappings. The flavor of a universe with laser guns is different from that of a universe with Avada Kedavra, but that’s the same thing as saying a universe with swords has a different flavor than a universe with light sabers. There’s nothing metaphysically different about them. Technology is “magic”; “magic” is technology; rules of cause-and-effect are rules of cause-and-effect, however you disguise them.

The Force used as a tool, then, is functionally the same as HP universe “magic,” or SW universe technology; it’s just another way of getting stuff done. Does the fact that it’s restricted to some people mean it’s magical? Does the fact that only some people in HP universe have “magic” mean it’s magical? I don’t see why. This isn’t to say you couldn’t write interesting things about a universe where some people had telekenesis and some didn’t, but there’s nothing particularly magical about the setting.

But then we consider the Force as a moral, uh, force. The Light Side and the Dark Side, the Force as somehow in all living beings (ignoring that mitichlorian nonsense), the business about one coming who will balance the Force which is currently unbalanced, etc. There does seem to me something magical about that.

I’m going to try to cast in terms of Aristotelian metaphysics. Things have four kinds of causes: the material cause, the formal cause, the efficient cause, the final cause. (If you don’t know what these are already, read the Metaphysics, it would take way too long to explain them here.) The rule-bound “magic” systems I was talking about are cast entirely in terms of the material and efficient causes; the actual magic, as I’ve described it, seems related to the formal and, even more so, to the final cause.

—

So now, for why magic ought to be a mystery. This question, I believe, comes down to ‘why can’t actual magic be integrated into a “magical”/technological system that humans manipulate?’ Phrased like that, it answers itself. If humans control it or understand it, becomes a tool, a system of cause-and-effect; it is no longer magical. The wands destined for their owners, the Hat and the Goblet, the Love magic, the Force as moral arbiter, are all things we can’t really wrap our heads around.

And they would (except for the wands destined for their owners) work just as well if the technological/”magical” trappings of their universes – the spells, the light-sabers, etc – were removed entirely. I find that rather interesting.

True magicians, I think, are in the end never characters we can relate to or understand, not just by how they are presented to us, but by their very nature. Gandalf is the classic example of a fantasy literature wizard; what most people forget is that he’s not even human, or elvish; he’s one of the Istari, essentially an angel. It is that distance that makes us accept his ability to seemingly understand magic when we ourselves cannot.

There’s a reason that witches, warlocks, sprites, and pixies are never the main characters of fairy-tales. The magical, mystical, wonderful, Faerie is that which is beyond, that which we cannot understand, that which is mysterious; by trying to make it immediate, we destroy it.