© Edward Moore 2015
Someone -- I can't remember who, for the life of me -- once wrote that all novels are really letters aimed at one person. As it happens, I believe this.~ Stephen King
Several times I have tried, and failed, to write a novel. The reason is not for lack of an idea, nor for lack of facility with language. My problem is my inability to use language to show, rather than merely to tell, a story. Having spent the greater part of my life in the field of philosophy and related studies like patristic theology and textual criticism, my method has been to unravel knotted threads of discourse and lay them out straight for my reader. My work has been the telling of the various tales of Platonism, Gnosticism, the more problematical thinkers among the Church Fathers; in this, I did not show but told -- for every philosopher knows that language is the house of being, as Heidegger once said, and that a definition that is not rigorous and precise is no definition at all. And if one is a Platonist, one will avoid degrading the noetic realm by dragging its concepts down to the realm of re-presentative material. So, whenever I set out to write a novel or a short story, I soon become aware that I am explaining every character's actions, providing detailed analysis of motivations, and never permitting my characters to come to life and to act. What I love most about fiction -- the creation of atmosphere and personality -- I have not been able to achieve. The magic that I admire in writers like Tolkien, Somerset Maugham, Isaak Dinesen, Huysmans, and Donna Tartt (to name a few), which consists in drawing characters and scenes so vividly that unique faces appear in the mind, scents and sounds enter the olfactory sphere without any conscious conjuring on my part. In the works of these writers, the people and worlds being described are already there, and I am encountering them, instead of being told about them. I would revise Gore Vidal's statement that a story is what it tells and no more, by repacing "tells" with "shows." For the background of the characters, their motivations, their emotions, their vices and virtues, only become effective as art when they do not come alive for the reader, but rather enter the reader's mind as already existing. Lovecraft wrote, in "Some Notes on a Nonentity," "[I] insist on reproducing real moods and impressions. ... I never write when I cannot be spontaneous -- expressing a mood already existing and demanding crystallisation." This is precisely what I, as a trained philosopher and theologian, am unable to do. Yet this literary handicap of mine is useful, I think, when it comes to that most problematical of literary genres, criticism.
"Uncanny" critics, according to J. Hillis Miller, engage in a fair amount of eisegesis that is sufficiently grounded in the text to lend an authoritative air to the interpretation, and then permit the criticism to take flight, barely tethered to the text. As I have discussed at length in my essay on Lovecraft, "A Nighted World As Mad As I," works of fiction that encourage the reader to bestow meaning by a co-operative or "demiurgic" manner of interpreting the various tropes -- a style of reading / interpretation / criticism that permits the reader a creative, as opposed to a merely receptive, role -- occupy a higher literary sphere than those barely readable or unreadable texts comprised of authoritative narration. The general subjective / objective dichotomy, manifested particularly in the author / reader distinction, is blurred and smudged by the moist finger of the creative reader. "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts," wrote Emerson in Self-Reliance, "they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." In this context Emerson noted the works of Plato and Milton, and the Bible. Yet how is one supposed to relate to and provide a proper critique of works that are not simply second- or third-rate, nor even poorly composed to the point of distraction, but to works that are so bad that they are, literally, unreadable? Should the conscientious critic ignore such works? Or should she take on the unpleasant task of discussing such works for the sake of an effort to correct what is wrong with so much contemporary -- and near-contemporary -- 'literature'?
Arche-centrism, or giving primacy to the prime -- that is to say, the belief that by returning to origins one has a chance of grasping the essential -- may be outmoded in philosophy and critical and cultural theory, but it still aids us, I posit, in the effort to rid our multifloriate language of obfuscating accretions. It is with this end in mind that I have translated some Anglo-Saxon, or "Old English," poems into modern English: the Wanderer, Wulf and Eadwacer, Waldere, and Deor (available at http://steliasseminary.academia.edu/EdwardMoore). Pleased with the manner in which our language lends itself to imitation of the ancient verse forms, I set myself -- in the case of the Wanderer, which I re-titled "Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider" (after a passage in the original) -- the challenge of rendering the translation in a modern verse form. As I explain in the introduction to the translation:
I have rendered [the Wanderer] in a verse form of my choosing; one that neither attempts to reproduce the original alliterative half-line (impossible for contemporary uninflected English) nor to imitate it in some sort of hybrid concoction that would likely be an assault on the ear. Instead, I have relied upon the old faithful loose iambic -- agreeing with Robert Frost that "in our language ... there are virtually but two [meters], strict iambic and loose iambic" ("The Figure a Poem Makes") -- arranged in stanzas of five lines with one concluding half-line (more or less). This is an unabashedly modern structure, unknown in the Anglo-Saxon world, but done for the sake of art. I believe (I hope!) that I have succeeded in achieving the only purpose of meter: to make one want to read the poem aloud (as all ancient poetry was).
Not only did I succeed in adhering, with seeming effortlessness, to the loose iambic structure -- keeping hypermetric lines to a minimum, and then often intentionally, to vary the rhythm -- but I also managed to imitate, without sounding silly, the alliteration of the original.
Thus spoke the earth-strider, ever mindful
Of merciless slaughter, dire destruction
And the downfall of his dearest kinsfolk:
A tally of my cares I often recount
In solitude before the rising sun.
Such is my lot.
("Thus Spoke the Earth-Strider," II. 7-12)
This type of historically conscious, and conscientious, discipline for the sake of our common vehicle of expression has led me to a renewed appreciation of the powers of the English language and of those who draw upon its full potential in their novels, short stories, essays, and poems. Yet I have also grown increasingly sensitive to writing that is labored and repetitive, disordered, inarticulate (unintentionally mixed metaphors, convoluted syntax), lacking originality or that is the result of the writer simply trying too hard (absurd or overused analogies, humorless clichés, excessive name dropping, et cetera). While my ultimate goal is to aid in the proliferation of the former, it is with the latter -- what I am calling unreadable writing -- that I will concern myself here.
Fortunately, unreadable texts often announce themselves early, in some cases, as early as the epigraph. On the front page of her unreadable novel Carthage, Joyce Carol Oates includes an hubristic if predictable quotation from Crime and Punishment, and a statement from an "American Iraq War Veteran." So we learn two things, before we even start reading the novel: 1) Oates still has Dostoevsky on her mind (and has the balls to place the Mad Russian alongside her own dubious novelistic self in the reader's mind); 2) Here is yet another novel attempting to cash in on the public affection for "our heroes." Already, at that point, I did not feel like reading the book. But I did. And I discovered something about unreadable books -- they truly are unreadable! This is not just hyperbole on my part. My mind actually shut down, completely, in authentic zombie fashion -- and I was stone cold sober! -- at approximately page 60, after seemingly endless pages of repetitive, italicized emotion busters that seemed to have been copied directly from Oates's notebook. Here is a representative sample (note: this is the fifth time in nine pages that the italicized phrase "missing girl" has been used):
Kincaid was a friend of the Mayfield family, or had been. Until the previous week he'd been engaged to the missing girl's older sister. The father had tried to see him: just to speak to him! To look the young corporal in the eye. To see how the young corporal looked at him. The father had been refused. For the time being. The young corporal was in custody. As news reports took care to note No arrests have yet been made. How disorienting all this was!
Indeed. Diorienting and annoying. And it goes on for 482 pages. As every writer knows, maintaining interest in a third-person narrative is difficult; in the wrong hands, the tale easily degenerates into a journalistic style account. A writer who wants to be read and remembered must not simply tell a tale, he or she must show the reader the persons and events that make up the story (I realize that I am repeating myself here, and italicizing; but this is not a novel, and I am the only character speaking -- and I've renounced any claims to the title novelist.). One of the "don'ts" in this regard is authorial intrusion into the narrative. Quite simply, to maintain the effect of immediacy -- and showing not telling -- the only voices that should be heard in the narrative are those of the characters. Now apart from the annoying repetitive italicized phrases and telegraphese prose style, Oates's Carthage simply does not contain any likeable characters. It is not sufficient for an author to tell us that so-and-so is a stand-up guy, or that such-and-such radiates warmth and happiness; we must see these things, these people, for ourselves. I never cease to be amazed at the manner in which morals and ethics retreat when faced with an authentically drawn fictional character. Consider Alex in A Clockwork Orange. If he had been presented by any other method than first-person narration, he would not have come across as morally equivocal -- indeed, we would never have been able to like him. Oates's Cressida is at best an odd young woman -- at worst, sinister -- with no real positive qualities to make one care, one way or the other, if she lives or dies. So Carthage is not only an annoying novel, written in bad, quirky prose; its main character is dispensable.
From the earliest times, until recently, the main characters in works of fiction were aristocrats or warriors, often both. The epic of Gilgamesh; the Iliad and Odyssey; the great tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the historical books of the Hebrew bible; the Aeneid, et cetera -- all were concerned with the trials and tribulations of the high born. But when the modern era gained momentum, writers began to represent the lower classes, and the novel as we know it -- concerned with ordinary people, just like us -- was born. Alas, it has taken a long time for writers to realize that ordinary people are simply not all that interesting, and that fiction about vampires, werewolves, and zombies appeals to the contemporary mind more than fiction about construction workers, home health aids, and florists. F. Scott Fitzgerald's preoccupation with the American aristocracy of the early twentieth century, however, did not help him to produce likeable characters, nor to write readable novels. While it is fashionable, nowadays, to at least praise The Great Gatsby, I will stick to my rapiers and place Fitzgerald's entire novelistic oeuvre firmly in the unreadable category (I do like his short stories in Babylon Revisited). The novel that is the worst -- so bad it is painful -- is This Side of Paradise (1920). Opening the book to a page chosen at random, one is guaranteed to find a stilted, history book dry passage containing at least one ridiculous metaphor or analogy. Here it goes ... A-ha! Check this out:
Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory, and when faces of the throng turned toward him and ambiguous eyes stared into his, he assumed the most romantic of expressions and walked on the air cushions that lie on the asphalts of fourteen. (bk. I, ch. 1)
A simple exercise, to demonstrate the weakness of third-person narration in general, and the wilting badness of this passage in particular, is to re-write this inelegant sentence in the first person, sans the silly metaphor. Observe:
Strolling along the crowded thoroughfare, I put on my best romantic mask, and met the ambiguous eyes of the passersby. It seemed to me impossible that these people should fail to notice my light-hearted step and to conclude, Here is a young man marked for glory!
When the first-person narration is used, the reader is treated to a more intimate experience than is possible with third-person. Indeed, the main reason I seek out fiction is to get a break from the rigors of philosophy, history, and related disciplines, which form the bulk of my research.
The human sciences are, at the highest level, impersonal. Therein lies both their strength and their weakness. A philosopher composing a treatise is occupying the realm of concepts, and he sees the history of ideas laid out for him from the vaguest beginnings to the most bafflingly complex contemporary conclusions -- conclusions always ready to be superceded by new research. Yet when the philosopher wishes to express his or her deepest personal views, she will choose fiction. Of contemporary novelists, Donna Tartt is the most philosophical one that I have encountered. The finale of The Goldfinch -- when the main character, Theo, is reflecting upon the vicissitudes of the eponymous painting by Fabritius, the inanimate protagonist, as it were, of the entire novel -- is a chrysostom song celebrating personalism, and like a great symphony the entire novel was building up to that grand climax. Here it is:
[I]t is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time -- so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.
Of course, it is not only the painting that is being referred to here; "beautiful things" means also beautiful people, people capable of inspiring and experiencing great love. This is the core concept of personalist philosophy, and Theo's education in and by beauty and love is what raises him above an aristocrat, in every sense of that term. The themes of love and beauty in Donna Tartt's novel are painful, in the way that love of a beautiful person is painful -- one cannot seem to ever get close enough to the beoved, and the distance, however small, is the cause of seemingly infinite pain. The pain of longing. But this is healthy; the intensity of desire reminds the soul (metaphorically speaking) of its divine origin. We have lost our wings, as Plato said, and are seeking to re-grow them and fly once again to our true home: the realm of perfect beauty and love. I can think of no literary theme superior to this one. That being said, if one is going to write a novel about inferior experiences, one must create compelling characters and include some deep insight into areas of human existence that are not often illumined. Fitzgerald's major insight was that people with money are in fact different from those without it; but they have problems which, at the end of the day, are just as destructive of happiness as the problems faced by unmoneyed folks. Hemingway tells us that he was sad when he learned that Zelda, Fitzgerald's wife, had cheated on her husband with a French aviation officer. Hemingway couldn't understand how Fitzgerald could still share a bed with Zelda. Hemingway, for all his tough-guy posturing, was a sensitive soul, who cared about others, and considered infidelity a betrayal. Self-centered people, in my experience, do not have a problem with infidelity -- either committing it or being the cuckold -- for self-centered people live only in and for the present. To commit adultery is to live for the present; to be the cuckold is to be absent from the present. For the truly self-centered person, whatever happens in his or her absence is irrelevant, it is like it never occurred. The moral and ethical life of a self-centered person is rather simple, cut-and-dry. Of course, it does not offer much in the way of material for good novels.
The desire to escape. At its best, fiction takes us out of this world, places us in a realm either better or worse than this one, and dazzles us with persons and events so far beyond our ordinary run of experience that we forget time and place and responsibilities and merge with the fictional realm. If the writer is especially astute and capable, we may even be treated, unwittingly, to some type of moral lesson or perhaps simply a re-affirmation of what is essential to us as human beings. Tolkien's magisterial Lord of the Rings is the finest example of responsible escapist fiction. A goodness and beauty that is meant to be shared by everyone but owned by no one is the theme of the great trilogy. The glory of Middle Earth, under attack by a malignant entity seeking to control everyone and everything capable of goodness and productive of beauty, is familiar to us, for it is the undying realm of childhood, effortlessly populated by all that we hold dear. There are many levels on which to read Tolkien's masterpiece, but the most timely is, in my opinion, the ecological level. Without being didactic, Tolkien inspires us to be good stewards of nature. Everyone who has read the books, or seen the films, will remember the Ents. Although I had been raised to have a deep concern for the environment, when I first read LOTR at age 14, I was inspired with a renewed zeal for protecting all plant and animal life. There are, of course, many other moral and ethical "pieces" in LOTR, not least Gandalf's eloquent anti-death penalty statement and Sam's moving encouragement to Frodo to endure in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, for we are all part of a story, and the story will only continue if we endure -- and prevail. William Faulkner said much the same thing in his Nobel Prize speech. Other excellent writers of fantasy include Wiliam Morris, E. R. Eddison, and Lord Dunsany. It would be helpful, here, to distinguish fantasy, as practiced by these classic writers, from utopian fiction, which I will get to in a moment. Thomas More coined the term, utopia, and it does not mean "good place" -- rather, it means "no place" (from the Greek). There is irony in the very term, and it is frequently lost on people with little or no literary background, especially a dunderhead like George Lucas with his "Edutopia" initiative (I'm angry at him for giving Star Wars to Disney) or Wawa with its "Coffeetopia." Before discussing utopian fiction, and one of its unreadable practicioners, we would do well to spend a moment on horror, or dark fantasy.
The supreme master of horror -- or the weird tale, or dark fantasy -- is Howard Phillips Lovecraft. To the left and right of him, and each just barely a head below, stand Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Ligotti. There are many reasons for Lovecraft's supremacy, not the least his philosophy of composition, so difficult for a lesser writer to put into practice.
Spectral fiction should be realistic and atmospheric -- confining its departure from Nature to the one supernatural channel chosen, and remembering that scene, and phenomena are more important in conveying what is to be conveyed than are characters and plot. The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law -- an imaginative escape from palling reality -- hence phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes'. (Lovecraft, "Some Notes on a Nonentity")
This is precisely what Lovecraft accomplishes in his best tales, and Poe and Ligotti rise to this level occasionally as well. For all of his archaisms and unabashed displays of linguistic virtuosity, Lovecraft is capable of weaving a very homely tale of terror. In The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, for example -- a novella that I consider to be his masterpiece -- Lovecraft sets the scene in his beloved hometown of Providence, RI, and begins by describing the nestled tree-lined streets, steep to the point of near verticality, and the antique houses settled comfortably on plots of what was once colonial farmland. The increasing age of the town, as one proceeds from the top of the Hill down toward the ancient waterfront, seems quaint and even cozy at first, but Lovecraft gradually unsettles his reader, by revealing, in slow deliberate stages, the dark primal secrets of a man who once called Providence his home -- and is returning to do so again. I recall, as if it were yesterday, my own trek down the precipitous hill to the waterfront, where I thrilled to discover dark and narrow Doubloon Street and then, watching as the setting sun worked its faery magic on the hillside, turning the Christian Science dome into "a miracle of rare device," I suspended all disbelief and reflected upon the career of Joseph Curwen and the choking mystery of necromancy. There is no moral or ethical lesson or affirmation to be drawn from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, or indeed from any of Lovecraft's works; for his concern was with atmosphere and phenomena -- and with what he called an "indifferentist" philosophy. This intellectual dimension is what places Lovecraft on a higher plane than most practicioners of escapist fiction. Neither aristocrats nor dairy farmers interested Lovecraft, not even when they are engaged in adulterous affairs. "I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them," he wrote.
Without interest there can be no art. Man's relation to man does not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos -- to the unknown -- which arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric [sic] pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. (Essay from 1921)
As an atheist, Lovecraft did not believe in supernatural entities. The horrors of his mature tales were aliens, beings more highly developed than humans, but still perfectly natural, in the wider, cosmic scheme of things. As an atheist myself, I can attest that while I -- like every so-called normal human being -- am subject to the buffetings of emotions and sensations like love, anger, joy, sorrow, fear, arousal, et cetera, I remain, at the rational level, fully aware that these are but bubbles in the vast sea of humanity, and that humanity is a tiny evaporating puddle in the infinite desert of nonbeing. Lovecraft knew this well, and he knew that an authentic response in the face of nothingness was fear. Like Poe before him and Ligotti after, Lovecraft knew that the philosophical limit of art is nihilism -- and the supreme form of nihilism is decay in the face of the insupportable knowledge that we are ontologically nothing. So why bother with an utopia?
The "problem of happiness" remains even if one accepts Lovecraftian nihilism or, better put, indifferentism -- the belief that the universe doesn't give a damn about us. Whatever the universe thinks or doesn't think about us, the fact remains that we give a damn. Construction of an ideal society in the face of cosmic indifference appeals to those who see such an act as hopelessly heroic. And who doesn't admire a tragic hero? Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World is justifiably and deservedly a classic, but its value is not literary but ideological. The world of this novel is not one in which a single cosmic law is violated, as in Lovecraft's tales, but rather the entire work is one nightmare vision in which human reason has turned on itself. Huxley wrote that "reality, however utopian, is something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays." Indeed, and one does not read utopian fiction in order to escape or take a vacation from reality; one reads such works for the sake of a preconceived notion, to experience the notion in action, so to speak. Conclusions logical and illogical are drawn, and one is left wondering if the exercise was worth the paper. Huxley himself, in his 1946 foreword to Brave New World, wrote that the novel's "defects as a work of art are considerable; but in order to correct them I should have to rewrite the book ... And so, resisting the temptation to wallow in artistic remorse, I prefer to leave both well and ill alone and to think about something else." If the author has so distanced himself from his work, how is the reader expected to approach the work with receptive mind. Of course, no amount of receptivity will permit one to remain warm and open when faced with identical eight-month-old babies being wheeled around on a dumb-waiter. But that is the point. The brave new world is sickeningly inhuman, as is so much of our own world. Which is why the novel is still considered timely by many readers. But the damned thing is unreadable. I've read as much of the thing as my mind permitted; the longing for a good human villain, however, was overwhelming. Give me Alexander De Large any day.
My happiness, or lack thereof, will inevitably affect my reception of a novel, or indeed any work of art. This is not a deep insight but a simple observation. When I write anything, be it a philosophical essay, a piece of criticism, or one of my many ill-starred attempts at fiction, I am conscious of writing with a particular person in mind -- a very special person who once upon a time broke my heart. When I read a work of fiction I seek points of similarity with my own exeriences. The closer the story is to my own life, the more I enjoy it -- or perhaps, if the story is not a happy one, if it conforms to some of my own sad experiences, I gain no small solace from the knowledge that others have similarly suffered. Lucian Taylor, in Machen's semi-autobiographical novel The Hill of Dreams, is a foredoomed young man who believed that he had found happiness in the ideal realm, and that the ever shifting realm of appearances held his beloved and him captive -- a state of suspension that could only be alleviated by and through the beauty of art and dreams. That the logical conclusion to this Platonic style of existence is inevitably death -- for which philosophy is but the practice -- is the tragic element in this tale. Not tragic, perhaps, for the reader with his or her mind firmly anchored in the becalming bay of the common. For better or worse, my life has been, from my well-remembered youth onwards, an endurance test that would make Beowulf and Breca look like chumps.
Castor and Pollux, presented musically by Jean-Philippe Rameau, serves as an apt segue from this piece to the next, which will be a reflection on The Arabian Nights and "orientalism." In closing this somewhat disconnected series of outbursts about unreadable writing and writers and the outstanding stuff that makes so many look so bad, I will simply state that my life has been, and remains, that of a mortal seeking immortal things. Precisely, a mortal seeking an immortal love, a changeless angel who will never turn on me, will never stop answering the phone or coming to visit -- will never tell me that she has met someone else. As the lush strings of the Orchestra of the 18th Century kindle the dead air left behind in my apartment after the exit of yet another promising goddess, I cannot help but reflect mournfully on the desperate nature of my quest. In my private tragédie lyrique I shall sing of her lush red hair, the arboreal brown eyes, exquisite lips and the delicate bones of her tiny lily-white and blue-veined feet ... I shall recall that I helped her dye her hair, lovingly massaging the red dye into her thick heavy hair; I shall recall gazing into those warm eyes as I gasped her name; I shall bring to my mind the taste of her ruby lips; I shall tremble at the memory of her low-toned laughter as I kissed the tender soles of her feet ... Does she feel loved? Even now, as she reclines in another man's arms? It is a terrible thing to have no memories of adorable women that are not saturated with pain.
