You'll notice i'm writing more than usual these days. Though the greater part of it has to do with needing the practice before school starts, you will be safe in assuming desire and boredom as part of the cauldron. For now, i'm going to skip over what i wildly suggested about the relationship between psychology and Orthodox, and save it for my next entry. A conversation yesterday reminded me of a theory on tragedy i've been harboring for a few years.
The short run of it goes as such: if we combine Murdoch's scandalous suggestion about tragedy to O'Conner's use of the grotesque, thus formulating an anti-thesis to Tolkien's eucatastrophe (‘good’ catastrophe), i think we may find a Christian aesthetic appropriate in an age where indifference rules. O'Conner's literary theory stands unequivocally at the top of modern Christian aesthetics. In her stories, reality barges in on our minds with violence, forcing and ravaging us with fact instead of distorted fantasy. She uses the grotesque as a tool to awaken us from distractions—Pascalan distractions (in my mind) taking the form of literary entertainment. She pummels her characters either by killing them or attaching some concrete aberration to our perception of them, and leaving things that way. The trouble with her story's characters, a trouble i think she would readily admit, is that we do not love them. The length of her stories inhibits character development. But what I like, what I especially want to keep, is the leftover tragedy. The cliff-hanger, non-redemptive end.
By 'love’ her characters, i mean something very specific. I mean what Murdoch says of love in general, and it's particular application to artistic tragedy. "Love," she writes, "is the extremely difficult realization that someone, other than oneself, is real." She insists, i forget where now, that only (or at least primarily) through tragedy can an external consciousness truly begin a process of literary empathy. It takes something very near what Kreeft calls an "empathetic imagination" toward alien philosophical positions to gather and feel and fear the object or person of pity Aristotle would say any drama needs to possess in order to remain tragic. Men and women do not identify with the ethereal, we identify with despondence. Three chapters read of Milton's Paradise Lost will positively demonstrate the point. On the sentimental level, we care nothing of Heaven; but of Hell, of Satan, and his pitiable condition, we squirm with familiarity. Oliver Twist has our sympathies, Frodo our admiration, Raskolnikov our affection because we get them. We are them. We love them. Art is a curious thing when broken down in the abstract. We find ourselves aligned with metaphysical pictures and events, and our sentiments attached to symbols.
And symbol, I would now contend along with Walker Percy, proves the engine behind the meaning in art. Naming, on his (and Noam Chomsky’s) view, means to be conscious of something, of a reality. You were not conscious of the “W” on your own keyboard until you read this sentence. Now that I’ve told you, you’ve had an expansion of consciousness—and it felt something very much like discovery. You did not ‘know’ it like you ‘know’ it now. Phenomenologists, Percy says, rightly point out that humans are not merely conscious, we are conscious of something.
This principle ties quickly and smoothly into Alexander Hamilton’s ‘Contemplated’ and ‘Enjoyed’ distinction that Lewis and Tolkien so appropriately applied to their aesthetics. To ‘Enjoy’ something in Hamilton’s terms is to engage a mode of consciousness distinguishable from the ‘Contemplative’ mode of consciousness. So we don’t have the normal unconscious and conscious dichotomy; we have the unconscious, Contemplated and Enjoyed. Take the “W” on the keyboard example again. While you were reading my sentence, there was a moment of conscious expansion; within that event, you were operating from within the ‘Enjoyed’ mode of consciousness. You were, for lack of better terms, unconscious of your consciousness. Now, however, at this very moment while you are looking back (via memory) into that same event (and only that event), you are Contemplating it. The object is not original, but a copy of the original experience out of which you abstract according to a specific set of questions (guided by your particular interests or hermeneutical preoccupations). For example, the second wave in the “W” is a property of that “W.” Again, you only have one object of concern, but the modes through which you attach your consciousness to them changes (with great rapidity) between the Enjoyed and Contemplated. It’s the difference between listening to your favorite song and talking about it.
Now back to aesthetics. Though I think Lewis’ concept of subconscious preparatorio evangelica is questionable—based on unempirical theories concerning the sub/unconscious, and the fact that semiotics may provide a better model for explaining our psyche’s interaction with art—I think he had the right idea. People can in fact receive elements of the gospel without knowing it. Hence his and Tolkien’s obsession with mythopoetics—by creating self-sustained, independent worlds. We can ‘Enjoy’ The Lord of the Rings without ‘Contemplating’ its meaning, like we can ‘Enjoy’ kissing without ‘Contemplating’ what kissing is or who its with. So either the subconscious manipulates the realities inherent to the text, letting them boil over into the conscious realm (i.e the pity of Bilbo or the goodness of TLOR are adopted into our own worldview without us choosing it), or “Hom- symbolificus” is influenced by symbols more than he knows. Either way, Tolkien and tragedy now come back to the forefront.
The eucatastrophe Tolkien talks about in “On Fairy Stories” stands in direct contrast to the disacatastrophe. As far as his history of middle earth is concerned, I do not think Tolkien could have been a moral author if his story did not end in the eucatastrophe. He is not presenting this world, he is presenting a world in and of itself. But if it is to have any relation to our world; if it is to include humans at all on the axiological or eschatological level, it must conclude with redemption; it must end Christian-like; there must be hope. Likewise, it must have a similar beginning: i.e. a creation myth. The same, I think, goes for Lewis’ Narnia. And notice that they both do. Both Aslan and the Ainur sing their respective worlds into existence, implying creation and harmony, and both Narnia and Middle Earth end in eucatastrophe. (I have in mind the end of the first age of Middle Earth.)
What of it then? I think a moral Christian story must end in eucatastrophe but I believe in and wish to defend the disacatastrophe? I wish to combine a non-redemptive O’Conner ending to a Murdochian tragedy to accomplish a disacatastrophe? Why?
I want to limit what stories must have eucatastropheis and which ones don’t need to. Tolkien’s Middle Earth must, on moral grounds, end in eucatastrophe because he is putting forward an entire world; he is writing a history. Redemption is inherent to his project because it is inherent to human dramatic categories, and thus the human condition. To exclude it is to exclude reality. O’Conner, however, succeeds morally in an arena Tolkien only touches on in doses—most successfully his “The Children of Hurin” –because she does not have to end in redemption. She is not creating a world; she’s working with an already existing one in which redemption is already inherent. She succeeds entirely within the grotesque by sticking to disacatastrophe, and it is morally laudable because of her success at shoving the consequences of evil and sin into our face. After all, how are we to be saved unless we know we are lost?
But where she fails in character development, Murdoch, if she were a Christian, would have succeeded—at least in theory. The closest examples I can think of are Greek, Roman, and Shakespearian tragedies. The trouble with these, of course, is that they are not thoroughly Christian. If we’re going to be sneaking truth and goodness into the readers mind, we may as well make them Christian. I am ultimately after invoking Aristotle’s fear and pity categories toward Christian axiological and eschatological interests. Image a character with whom I identify and love, who, through a series of poor choices (due to character flaws) systematically ruins himself and those he loves. Now imagine that his choices are poor because of his pride, and his pride leads him to kill his own wife, and then, upon discovering his wretched state, kills himself. Even this rough sketch in the abstract shows quite simply that we fear his pride and pity the consequences of his actions. Put it in a story, make us love him, and what follows are the kinds of sentiments toward pride we want all people to have. In this sense, we would certainly succeed in a preparatorio evangelica, or even, within the believer, an appropriate unconscious and involuntary response toward pride. Fiction, like a knife, is a neutral object that can be used either for good or evil. We cut into the heart either to kill or to surgically repair.
Of course, art as valuable because it is useful is the wrong idea, and a whole other subject. All I will say here is that the Christian artist must balance his tastes and talents with reality.
the K.H.
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