Fiction writer Steve Almond is a master at combining eros, comedy and tragedy in such books as The Evil B.B. Chow. Venturing for the first time into this dangerous territory myself, I found his advice in this article from the Boston Phoenix newspaper quite helpful, and entertaining to boot. Along with specifics like “never compare a woman’s nipples to Frankenstein’s bolts,” he reminds writers that good erotica is about the ways in which sex reveals characters’ personality and emotions. A humanizing dose of comedy lends realism and sets your writing apart from mere porn.
Following Margaret Cho’s philosophy that the best thing to do with an embarrassing moment is to broadcast it over the mass media, I’ll share this incident from the writing life: Last weekend I finally forced myself to write the all-important first sex scene between my novel’s pair of male lovers. My longsuffering husband comes into our studio and begins asking me a home-repair question. “Not now, sweetie, I’m in the middle of a blowjob.” Adam says, “Uh, you know the guy from the roofing company is in the room, right?”
If this were my novel and not real life, an hour later we’d have gotten the shingles replaced for free…
Category Archives: Writer and Reader
Naeem Murr: “My Poet”
This surreal satire of the literati’s psychological foibles can be read in full at Poetry magazine. I may be a fiction writer now, but clearly I’m still a poet by temperament. Highlights:
I live with a poet. Her boyfriend before me was also a poet, and published a book called Crane, in which all the poems are about her. She looks like a crane—the bird kind. I often find her standing on one leg, leaning against our bookshelves, very still, staring into a book as if for a fish to snatch out. Crane upset her. I remember her tearing up one of the poems, shouting, “Want to publish a book: write poems about your goddamn miserable sex life!” The poem, titled “Interdiction,” was about him having a real hankering for all those things in the Bible you’re not allowed to eat—particularly bivalves. What this has to do with The Colonel and Mrs. Whatsit, I can’t imagine.
But then I’ve never understood poetry. You see, I’m a fiction writer. If my Poet ever appears in one of my books, she shall do so as a once-beautiful, but now tragically disfigured nun. We fiction writers are a different breed from poets—alert, happy, optimistic. If you want to find the fiction writer in a crowd, just pretend to throw a stick. He’ll be the one who looks around.
****
…As any true fiction writer knows, fiction writers don’t have time to read, since we’re always writing. Poets, on the other hand, read constantly. My Poet leaves books all over the apartment: in the kitchen, Emmanuel Lévinas (more like Icantunderstandasinglewordovinas); in the bathroom, A History of Bees (what is it with poets and bees?); in the bedroom, A Compendium of Shipping Terms (“fo’c’sle” slant rhymes with “asshole”); in the sitting room, the biography of some naturalist who was in Darwin’s shadow (poets love peripheral historic figures, without understanding that the person no one’s talking to at the party is dying to tell you all about his collection of Victorian hat pins). The reason poets are able to read so much is because they spend more time “waiting” than writing. Waiting! What a bizarre concept. Reading, taking walks, debating whether an autumnal oak leaf is really red ochre or more a perinone orange, all the time twisting the miserable wire coat hanger of their souls this way and that in the hope of becoming receptive.
****
…My Poet loves words in a way that I feel is quite unhealthy and unnatural. She owns a dictionary decades old and so large she uses a small buffet cart to wheel it around our apartment like some invalid relative. For true fiction writers, words are just a kind of filling for the plot. A novel is like one of those mock apple pies made with Ritz crackers and cinnamon—and anyone who claims he can tell the difference is a damn liar!
Today she’s suspending her crane-like attention above this dictionary.
“You need to get rid of that old thing,” I say.
“Henry James used this same dictionary.”
“Is he a relation or something?”
“Henry James,” she repeats, looking up, as if I might not have heard her properly.
“Henry James?”
Letting out a wounded, whimpering sound, she sinks her face into her hands.
I’m just teasing, of course. I’m fully aware that Henry James is probably some important poet, or maybe one of our presidents.
While I’m not sure if this is what my professor friend means by “the real thing,” one thing I’ve learned from living with a poet is that a passionate antagonism with language is what defines them. As many alcoholics are said to be those who have a kind of allergy to alcohol, so a poet with language—compelled and ruined by it. The secret to a poet’s soul lies somewhere in the little cells of that dungeonish dictionary, in the slow languishing of those old, mad, forgotten words. It’s also in the very particular kind of art she—and every poet—seems to love. Joseph Cornell. I guarantee you will not find a single poet who doesn’t start rubbing herself against the furniture the minute you mention Cornell and his little boxes full of human residue, the pleasures of the miniature.
[After the Poet has read some review copies by more famous authors:]
…These books have clearly very much upset my Poet, who lies sputtering, raging, and roiling about on the floor, shouting, “The agony! The agony!” (I should warn you that she’s not a very happy drunk.)
I can’t say anything for a moment because, in truth, I’m deeply moved by how beautiful and young these writers are, and because I realize, all at once, that both will be characters in my next novel. The girl’s mother—no, her father—no, both her parents die, and she turns to writing poetry, her beauty wasted in brainy pursuits until her hair catches fire on the candle by which she writes at night and she’s horribly disfigured! And then she writes about her lost loveliness in a way that’s so touching that her old high school boyfriend, who is now blind, marries her and reads her scarred skin like Braille! Oh, why would anyone be a poet and roil around on the floor at bad poetry by troubled, sensual, pre-Raphaelite infant theorist prodigies when one can write such stories! I want to tell my Poet this. I want to tell all poets this, but in truth I find it quite sexy when she roils about on the floor wearing nothing but a T-shirt and a pair of boxers.
“There, there,” I say, “it’s not all that bad is it? You’ve got to let young people have their ideas. Young people love their ideas.”
“Idiots!” she shouts.
“Well, hardly,” I say, and to prove it I read out the author bio for the beautiful young girl: “Masters from Princeton, Ph.D. from Yale. She was awarded an NEA, as well as Stegner, Fulbright, Bunting, Guggenheim, Lannan, and MacArthur fellowships. She’s spent the last two years modeling in Milan, and has a rare blood disorder that means she will never visibly age or feel pain.”
Read the whole thing here.
Good News for My Imaginary Friends
Various chapters of my novel-in-progress have received honors over the past couple of months. I was waiting to announce them till I had an online publication to link to, but none yet, so here’s the tally so far:
“Pura siccome un angelo” was a runner-up for the Andre Dubus Award in Short Fiction sponsored by Words + Images, the literary journal of the University of Southern Maine, and appears in their beautifully illustrated 2007 issue, available here. This chapter finds my pair of gay lovers facing some bad news for their relationship.
“Julian’s Yearbook,” about one of those characters during his high school years, won an Honorable Mention in the E.M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award from Writecorner Press. It’s been rumored that this story has been/will be broadcast on a radio station in the Berkshires; if I get any more info on that, I’ll post the MP3.
“The Albatross,” in which my sarcastic ten-year-old heroine gets saved and then un-saved by her evangelical BFF, won an Honorable Mention in the spring 2007 Fog City Writers Short Story Contest.
“Grateful, Thankful” won second prize in the 2006 Literal Latte Fiction Awards and will be published on their website when its redesign is complete. In this chapter, our girl, growing up in the shadow of her bohemian mother, navigates the conflicting messages of feminism and popular culture en route to her first sexual experience.
This is all very exciting since I had never published any literary fiction before beginning this novel last year. I do recommend sending out stand-alone excerpts while working on a longer project. It can provide encouragement for the long haul, as well as publication credits that make the complete book more marketable. For me, though, the biggest reward is that my characters become just a little more real when other people believe in them too. (Kind of like Tinkerbell.)
Christian Wiman on Illness, Love, and Rediscovering Faith
This beautiful essay from Christian Wiman, editor of the venerable journal Poetry, describes how falling in love and diagnosis with a fatal illness revitalized both his poetry and his faith. Wiman writes:
If I look back on the things I have written in the past two decades, it’s clear to me not only how thoroughly the forms and language of Christianity have shaped my imagination, but also how deep and persistent my existential anxiety has been. I don’t know whether this is all attributable to the century into which I was born, some genetic glitch, or a late reverberation of the Fall of Man. What I do know is that I have not been at ease in this world.
Poetry, for me, has always been bound up with this unease, fueled by contingency toward forms that will transcend it, as involved with silence as it is with sound. I don’t have much sympathy for the Arnoldian notion of poetry replacing religion. It seems not simply quaint but dangerous to make that assumption, even implicitly, perhaps especially implicitly. I do think, though, that poetry is how religious feeling has survived in me. Partly this is because I have at times experienced in the writing of a poem some access to a power that feels greater than I am, and it seems reductive, even somehow a deep betrayal, to attribute that power merely to the unconscious or to the dynamism of language itself. But also, if I look back on the poems I’ve written in the past two decades, it almost seems as if the one constant is God. Or, rather, His absence….
four years ago, after making poetry the central purpose of my life for almost two decades, I stopped writing. Partly this was a conscious decision. I told myself that I had exhausted one way of writing, and I do think there was truth in that. The deeper truth, though, is that I myself was exhausted. To believe that being conscious means primarily being conscious of loss, to find life authentic only in the apprehension of death, is to pitch your tent at the edge of an abyss, “and when you gaze long into the abyss,” Nietzsche says, “the abyss also gazes into you.” I blinked.
Wiman came alive again when he fell in love and got married, but then, on his 39th birthday, was diagnosed with a rare and incurable cancer of the blood.
If I had gotten the diagnosis some years earlier — and it seems weirdly providential that I didn’t, since I had symptoms and went to several doctors about them — I’m not sure I would have reacted very strongly. It would have seemed a fatalistic confirmation of everything I had always thought about existence, and my response, I think, would have been equally fatalistic. It would have been the bearable oblivion of despair, not the unbearable, and therefore galvanizing, pain of particular grief. In those early days after the diagnosis, when we mostly just sat on the couch and cried, I alone was dying, but we were mourning very much together. And what we were mourning was not my death, exactly, but the death of the life we had imagined with each other.
Then one morning we found ourselves going to church. Found ourselves. That’s exactly what it felt like, in both senses of the phrase, as if some impulse in each of us had finally been catalyzed into action, so that we were casting aside the Sunday paper and moving toward the door with barely a word between us; and as if, once inside the church, we were discovering exactly where and who we were meant to be. That first service was excruciating, in that it seemed to tear all wounds wide open, and it was profoundly comforting, in that it seemed to offer the only possible balm. What I remember of that Sunday, though, and of the Sundays that immediately followed, is less the services themselves than the walks we took afterwards, and less the specifics of the conversations we had about God, always about God, than the moments of silent, and what felt like sacred, attentiveness those conversations led to: an iron sky and the lake so calm it seemed thickened; the El blasting past with its rain of sparks and brief, lost faces; the broad leaves and white blooms of a catalpa on our street, Grace Street, and under the tree a seethe of something that was just barely still a bird, quick with life beyond its own.
I was brought up with the poisonous notion that you had to renounce love of the earth in order to receive the love of God. My experience has been just the opposite: a love of the earth and existence so overflowing that it implied, or included, or even absolutely demanded, God. Love did not deliver me from the earth, but into it. And by some miracle I do not find that this experience is crushed or even lessened by the knowledge that, in all likelihood, I will be leaving the earth sooner than I had thought. Quite the contrary, I find life thriving in me, and not in an aestheticizing Death-is-the-mother-of-beauty sort of way either, for what extreme grief has given me is the very thing it seemed at first to obliterate: a sense of life beyond the moment, a sense of hope. This is not simply hope for my own life, though I do have that. It is not a hope for heaven or any sort of explainable afterlife, unless by those things one means simply the ghost of wholeness that our inborn sense of brokenness creates and sustains, some ultimate love that our truest temporal ones goad us toward. This I do believe in, and by this I live, in what the apostle Paul called “hope toward God.”
Read the whole essay in The American Scholar here.
Book Notes: The Fall of Interpretation
The thesis of Christian philosopher James K.A. Smith’s The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic is simple and revolutionary: The necessity of interpretation — the impossibility of unmediated, perspective-free experience of a text or an event — is not a tragedy nor a barrier to truth, but an acceptable aspect of being a finite creature. Complete interpretive agreement, which history shows us is impossible, is not the only way to maintain the authority of a text such as the Bible or the Constitution. Smith argues that giving up the ideal of total, self-evident consensus will not lead to chaos because tradition and real-world experience constrain the number of interpretations we will actually find useful.
Hermeneutics is the branch of philosophy dealing with theories of interpretation. From Plato to today’s evangelical scholars and deconstructionist philosophers, there’s a common assumption that the necessity of interpretation is a fall from grace. In a perfect world, the theory goes, everyone would clearly perceive reality in exactly the same way. There wouldn’t be this diversity, uncertainty and incompleteness of interpretations.
Postmodernism contributes the insight that there is no pure encounter with the text, no alternative to our responsibility to choose among a plurality (though not, as Smith argues, an infinity) of plausible interpretive filters. So are our only choices a naive inerrancy or a despairing relativism? Not unless we are comparing our actual hermeneutic situation to a false ideal of perception unbounded by time, space, or the gap between self and object — in other words, measuring our perspectival knowledge against the direct knowledge available to an omniscient, omnipresent God.
Interpretation exists because we are finite creatures who cannot get completely beyond the space-time position where we find ourselves. Finitude creates a gap between two communicating individuals, and between myself and the object I communicate about. This gap produces the risk of mis-communication, and ensures that the sign can never capture the entirety of the signified.
Smith argues that the link between interpretation and fallenness contradicts the Christian belief that creation was originally and essentially good. To blame humans for not having a God’s-eye perspective is to say that finitude itself is fallen. In other words, we’re saying God made a mistake by creating individual humans with a diversity of cultures and experiences, instead of one undifferentiated God-being. This is unbiblical and, since it doesn’t fit reality, unhelpful. It produces hermeneutics that avoid self-awareness about their own limitations.
But wait, doesn’t the Tower of Babel story imply that linguistic diversity is a punishment for human pride? Smith daringly contends that God was restoring His intended diversity and squelching early humans’ totalitarian impulse to impose a monoculture. It makes a peculiar sort of sense: what would ever motivate God to make it harder for us to know Him? The fact that He brought pluribus out of unum suggests Smith is right that Christians should celebrate the polyphonic quality of human discourse.
Smith notes that “to say that everything is interpretation is not to say that all is arbitrary.” (p.163) The hermeneutics of the culture wars present us with a false choice between a single reading (of the Bible or the world) and an infinity of equally valid readings. Neither is actually an option for us. Interpretation isn’t infinite because reality pushes back. Our common experience in a shared world sets interpretive norms that “resist capricious construal.” (p.174) In other words, you can’t interpret your fist through a brick wall. Or, to use an example from Wallace Stevens, there may be 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, but there is also a real blackbird for comparison. “The blackbird is involved in what I know.”
Most of Smith’s book is taken up with tracking the false ideal of un-interpreted text through the writings of Augustine, Gadamer, Pannenberg, Heidegger, Derrida, and sundry other philosophers and theologians. If this is too “inside baseball” for you, I recommend Smith’s shorter and more readable Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?
Like many books that debunk a widespread belief, this one could have used less de-construction and more re-construction. The final section describing Smith’s alternative “creational hermeneutic” is tantalizing but too brief. The book would have vaulted from good to great if it had analyzed controversial Bible passages to show how his method can help the church live with diversity of opinion. The Anglican Communion needs you, Jim! Call your office!
Marilynne Robinson on Poetry and Religion
Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson (The Death of Adam) reviews Harold Bloom’s new anthology American Religious Poems in the May 2007 issue of Poetry magazine. The book itself is merely the jumping-off point for an eloquent, original essay on how poetry and religion both need and exceed the boundaries of rational analysis. Some highlights:
Any reader of Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job is aware that the canon of scripture has room for thought that can disrupt conventional assumptions about the nature of belief, whether these assumptions are held by the religious or by their critics. Indeed, religion is by nature restless with itself, impatient within the constraints of its own expression….Any writer who has wearied of words knows the feeling of being limited by the very things that enable. To associate religion with unwavering faith in any creed or practice does no justice at all to its complexity as lived experience. Creeds themselves exist to stabilize the intense speculations that religion, which is always about the ultimate nature of things, will inspire….
There is every reason to turn to poetry in order to acquire a sense of the nature of religion. The two seem always to have been intimately linked. This deep and ancient affinity cannot be accidental. One does not “understand” what Aeschylus or Isaiah wrote, because poetry is not, in the ordinary sense, “understood.” If it is great, it is lived with over time by individuals and civilizations, interpreted again and again in its impact on language and thought and the arts, and on all those souls who are sensitive to its pleasures and sufficiencies. In just the same way, religion is not to be “understood.”
Again, poetry is best interpreted by poetry. William Carlos Williams tells us vastly more about Walt Whitman than the whole tribe of his critics and biographers can hope to tell us. Whitman made Emerson far greater than Emerson was on his own. Perhaps Sophocles did as much for Homer. Likewise, to the exasperation of those rationalists who wish they would just say what they mean, religions interpret themselves in religious terms. If the Gospel of Luke doesn’t make sense to you, Augustine and Luther won’t either. Those who look into this anthology are likelier than others to have some experience of poetry and to recognize the inadequacies of interpretation and paraphrase. But religion, not only in America, has been seriously distracted by the supposed need to translate itself into terms a rationalist would find meaningful. So liberals have set out upon a long, earnest project more or less equivalent to rewriting Shakespeare into words of one syllable—if such a thing can be imagined as an effort fired by moral passion and carried out by people who would themselves confess to a deep affection for Shakespeare. Fundamentalists have responded with a furious rejection of the very thought that the Bible might operate at the level of poetry, which amounts to a literalist insistence that the text is already available to understanding in the rationalists’ own terms and which yields endless futile controversy, notably about creation. This collaboration of supposed antagonists, liberals, and fundamentalists has meant that, for the moment, religion and poetry seem alien to one another as, historically, they have never been.
But the problem of paraphrase is deeper yet. Anyone, asked to give an account of her or his deepest beliefs, will experience embarrassment and difficulty. This is true because of the way belief lives in experience. By analogy, it is impossible to know how many nuances and associations a given word has until they are discovered in the use of the word, or in the recognition of a novel inflection given the word by another speaker. Even the most familiar words exist in us in a field of potentiality to which paraphrase can never be adequate. What but poetry could arrive at Wallace Stevens’s phrase, “the the”? On the same grounds, the expectation that a straightforward account can be made of any system of belief is naive, and attempts to accommodate the expectation are also naive. This is not to say that religion is closed against the inquirer. No more is poetry. However, like mathematics and music, they must be approached in terms that are appropriate to them. If the individualism and pluralism of American culture have indeed been especially friendly to the flourishing of religion, perhaps this is true because they discourage blanket statements about religious belief, which are always inadequate and disheartening.
Read the whole essay here.
Christ-Symbol or Christ-Substitute?
Today my Bible study group listened to a taped sermon on Romans 8 by the estimable Tim Keller, a Presbyterian minister in NYC, who mentioned how examples of self-sacrificing love in books or movies can help us emotionally understand Christ’s gift to us. For instance, Keller suggested we could view Sidney Carton in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities as a symbol of the substitutionary atonement.
This reminded me of an email discussion I had with Dr. Anthony Esolen at Mere Comments last year about whether Dickens’ novels were truly Christian. Do figures like Carton, or Florence Dombey (whose endurance of child abuse finally melts her father’s heart), point us toward the realization that we need Christ as savior, or away from the gospel and towards believing that we can be saved by human love alone?
Is the problem with the whole genre of the modern realist novel, in which God must remain an implicit presence and only human action is directly visible? Aslan can function as a Christ-symbol without misunderstanding because few people over the age of five will read the Chronicles of Narnia and literally think “I need to put my trust in a talking lion.” The risk is greater that someone will read A Tale of Two Cities and make an idol of romantic love.
I have a very personal stake in this question because one major theme of my novel-in-progress is how we mistakenly seek transcendence through Eros rather than God. If my playboy protagonist turns his life around because of his boyfriend’s unselfish devotion, instead of because he has an explicit conversion experience, does that make it less of a Christian novel? (Those of you who are stuck on the gay content of the previous sentence, substitute “girlfriend”.) By emphasizing the insufficiency of human love, am I setting up an opposition between God and His creatures that is stricter than the Incarnation warrants? How can I depict a marriage that is mutually self-giving and fulfilling, and yet points to something beyond itself? Should I just let my characters be as nice to each other as they want, and let God figure out the rest?
Comments, please! The salvation of my imaginary best friend may depend on it.
In Memoriam: Lloyd Alexander
I was saddened to learn today that Lloyd Alexander, the renowned author of fantasy novels for young adults, had died May 17 at age 83, from cancer. A good long life, to be sure, but one can only hope that a favorite writer will be as immortal as his books!
I grew up reading and rereading his Prydain Chronicles, a five-book series set in an imaginary kingdom inspired by Welsh mythology, which deserves comparison to The Lord of the Rings. Like that famous trilogy, it takes a humble protagonist (a likeable, gawky assistant pig-keeper) on a hero’s journey to defeat the lord of death.
Alexander’s other fine works include the Westmark trilogy and The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen. The former series (Westmark, The Kestrel, and The Beggar Queen), which takes place in an invented European country with an 18th-century period feel, is a dark and morally complex tale of republican freedom fighters against a tyrant. It’s really mis-labeled as a young adult book; more like a Victor Hugo novel with a length and vocabulary that a mature teen could enjoy, but substantial enough to captivate and inspire readers of all ages. Prince Jen is a witty, profound fable about a young Chinese prince who roams his kingdom incognito to learn wisdom.
One thing I loved about Alexander’s books was his wise, sassy and competent heroines, a welcome update to the classics of sword-and-sorcery fiction. They’re the foremothers of Harry Potter’s Hermione. His novels are works of philosophy embodied in a humorous and exciting tale. Alexander gave young readers a vocabulary to ponder the big questions, like “what does it mean to be human rather than animal” or “when does the end justify the means in wartime”. Thank you, Mr. Alexander. I’ll miss you.
Theory: Love It or Hate It?
Two of my greatest passions in life are creative writing and Christian faith, and I’ve been wondering what it means that I approach them in very different ways with respect to the role of the theoretical intellect. In fact, the first sentence of this post was originally “…creative writing and theology,” which I changed to “…and Christianity,” and finally to a more active and experiential phrase that is more of a goal than an honest description of my spiritual life. As a writer, I flee from literary theory like a helicopter escaping a war zone. As a Christian, I spend much of my time insisting on the importance of clear thinking about theology, and trying to provide a foundation for the same.
Does this discrepancy reflect a natural difference in subject matter, or is it a sign that my religious life doesn’t go deep enough, compared to my enjoyment of my own imagination? Is this related to the fact that I talk to my novel characters when I should be praying? Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be done hunting for idolatry in the corners of my mind, hidden under things that always seemed admirable before. It’s like my bedroom ceiling during ladybug mating season. Eventually I have to put down the Bugzooka (the Buddhist answer to flyswatters) and go to sleep, knowing that I may be sharing a pillow with a few spotty little friends.
So, some thoughts. What they add up to, I hope my loyal readers will tell me.
Theory & writing: I get so discouraged when poets launch into jeremiads against literary movements that differ from their own preferred style. The world will not end because someone is writing free verse or using less than 17 syllables in a haiku. Poets whose writing explores problems at the boundaries of language despise poets whose work could be understood if you read it aloud on the bus, and vice versa. Poetry may be at special risk for this phenomenon because it’s already more meta-textual than fiction, more concerned with its own workings; also because the crumbs of academic security and public acclaim are so much smaller that the pigeons squabble over them more fiercely. Intolerance is never pretty, but the “One True Religion” attitude seems particularly absurd in creative writing, which is by definition personal, original and idiosyncratic.
I write to find out things I don’t already know that I know. Anne Lamott’s excellent book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life compares writing a novel to taking dictation from the little boy who’s playing in the basement of your subconscious. At least for the first drafts, you just listen in while he’s doing his thing; you don’t give him an outline of the themes his make-believe is supposed to embody. Theory would get in the way. By the same token, I’ve come to believe that I shouldn’t set out to write an “innovative” or “experimental” poem. Innovation, if it happens at all, arises naturally out of the need for a new form to express a new thought, and often isn’t crowned as a breakthrough till years later.
I love Bird by Bird mainly because it validates the novel-writing process I’ve discovered for myself as the most comfortable and productive one: namely, having absolutely no idea what I’m doing, but complete confidence in it anyhow. Other books by equally good writers would give the opposite advice. I don’t care. All I need to know is that someone did it my way and didn’t die. I have no need to insist that all writers go through my particular dharma door.
Theory & faith: In my religious life, what came first was my childhood sense of wonder and my passionate longing for something that lay just beyond the horizon of human perception. In that respect, it’s not unlike the leap of faith I take as a writer. The ineffable draws me onward. Only the desire implanted unshakeably in my heart tells me that my journey will lead somewhere worthwhile. The absence meanwhile is a bittersweet pleasure, a spur to forward motion, a space in which to embrace my role as lover and seeker.
One of the beauties in which I see God’s presence is the beauty of theology. Long before I found Christianity convincing, I fell in love with its harmonious intricacy, its ability to address life’s most important questions within a system that was satisfyingly complex yet coherent. Perhaps I don’t see the same beauty in a lot of literary theory because the latter is about second-order questions. Theology is not God, and isn’t always prayer, but it goes right up to the limits of the sayable. It knows where the action is. Literary theory is words about words, theology is words about Reality.
There’s also an anti-intellectualism in today’s religious climate that’s mercifully absent from how we think and talk about literature. Few people expect to become good writers without studying the thoughts and methods of one’s predecessors, and learning how to think critically about one’s preconceived notions. If the same level of intellectual seriousness was expected in our religious life, I wouldn’t need to spend so much time defending the very idea of the Nicene Creed, not to mention its content.
Writers are expected to master their shame and fear in order to learn from tradition. Though the diversity of acceptable techniques increases at the more advanced levels of the craft, there’s wide agreement on some basic standards that quality writing should follow. There are respected authorities in the field. A beginning writer who rejects the notion of authority, who feels invalidated by the suggestion that anybody has something to teach her, would be advised to get her ego under control.
The church, by contrast, too often coddles that kind of immature personality, either from a loss of belief that there are any standards for Christian faith, or from fear that doctrinal specificity will lead to fatal dissension. The stakes are higher, it’s true. The Thirty Years’ War wasn’t waged by rival MFA programs. Still, I think the liberal churches in particular could learn something from the self-discipline and detachment that their members expect from themselves when they’re wearing their “academic” hat instead of their “Christian” hat.
I care more about unity in theology than in literary theory because for me, religion is about describing our shared reality, while writing creates a multiplicity of alternate realities that reflect different small pieces of the human condition. Also, the church as community needs something loftier than the roof-repair fundraiser to unite around, while the writer’s work is solitary.
At a time when fewer and fewer Christians can articulate why the Trinity, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection make a difference in how God’s forgiving love transforms our lives, it’s hard for me to get past the task of rebuilding an intellectual foundation for belief. I need this foundation to create the community that will safely support me on my scary walk toward God.
Imagine being a writer in a society where good books and bad ones were given equal and superficial respect, and reading too much of either type was suspect; where English teachers and literary critics were routinely mocked, in pop culture and within schools themselves, as crushing the natural beauty of creative souls with their arbitrary rules of grammar and exposition. Writers shouldn’t have to be that lonely; Christians, even less so.
Relevant Magazine on What Makes Art Christian
Relevant Magazine columnist Dawn Xiana Moon lays down a challenge to Christians about relevance, faith and art:
Many contemporary Christians tend to make one of three errors when dealing with art: One, we declare anything that doesn’t explicitly proselytize, anything that depicts brokenness without redemption to be depraved or unworthy of Christian notice. Or two, we decide that the secular world really does have better art, so we copy it, boldly and without apology or thought into our own creativity. Or three, we try so hard to be relevant that we adopt the attitude and worldview of the culture that surrounds us—instead of being the proverbial salt and light, we end up as dust with nothing to offer in the way of hope, because there is only a perfunctory difference between those of us who claim to follow Christ and those who don’t….I’m reminded of my visit to Wheaton College last week, where the main exhibit at their Billy Graham Museum was a selection of Warner Sallman‘s portraits of Christ. I found them sentimental and crude in a mass-culture, over-processed way, lacking both the subtlety and majesty of fine art and the unsettling individuality of “outsider” or folk art. The exhibit made me feel out of place there; was the church big enough for me and my novel? Reminding myself to be charitable, I reflected that millions of Christians had found Sallman’s work deeply meaningful. Were they wrong — was I the one with a prideful intellect and hardened heart? And still the paintings entirely failed to move me. Their power, perhaps, resides only in this: When you love someone, you cherish any picture of them, even one that doesn’t do them justice. Imagine being surrounded by people who love Christ that much. If only they had better taste…
Don’t misunderstand—there is a place for explicitly Christian art and age-appropriate material, and many of the masterpieces do focus on biblical themes. But to assume that all art must conform to this model is frustrating to artists who have an allegiance to Christ yet want to produce work that speaks to the entirety of the human experience. And it deadens the critical thinking capacity of people in the Church, deadens their ability to see and experience part of the nature of God. It also leaves many hurting, unable to ask for help or even admit their failings—what they see in the Church is happy music and people with seemingly perfect lives. Once a new creation in Christ, suffering and pain disappear, right? Wrong. Let’s be honest and admit it….
The last position is born out of frustration with the first (and sometimes the second). Tired of being marginalized in the Church and afraid they won’t be accepted in either a secular or religious world, artists disassociate themselves from the label and praxis of Christianity because their work is unacceptable by church standards—and in the mainstream, “Christian art” translates into “bad art.” Few empathize with this position on the fringe of two worlds, so they drift. Cynical from their past experiences with hierarchy and legalism, followers of Christ become reluctant to define their beliefs at all, leaving only spirituality with a vaguely Christian twist. In an effort to sound intelligent in a world that mocks supernatural belief, Christians downplay doctrine and theology….
Thomas Hallstrom writes, “Jesus told stories. Some were good and some were dark. Some ended with redemption and some ended with confusing questions. But He wasn’t afraid to tell stories that might turn people away. Many times people walked away after hearing the story, never to return (the rich young ruler who was told to sell all he owned). Other times, the story led the listener to an experience with the living God.” Art does not need to be didactic to be effective. In fact, as soon as it becomes didactic it often loses its effectiveness. It fails to communicate. The purpose of art is not necessarily to provide the answers—it’s much more powerful to ask the questions and allow an audience to seek the answers themselves. Jesus promised that those who seek will find, and we should trust him. He meant it when he said it.
If our art isn’t relevant to the entirety of our experience, the fullness of our lives—good, bad, scared, profane—then it cannot be relevant to the people around us. It will not be relevant to our culture. We need this art, need it desperately. In expressing our creativity, this piece of us that is also a piece of the character of God, we share in His nature. And that can only draw us closer to the One in whom our hope remains.