So what do simple tales of adventure and romance, such as those penned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and deeper tales that provoke the conscience, such as those penned by Charles Dickens, have in common? What is the diversion?
I suggest that if we look at the very greatest of literature we will see the answer. The Odyssey of Homer has enough monsters and derring-do to satisfy even the most demanding of childish tastes, but it is a poem that even millennia of study have not exhausted. The war in heaven occupying the middle books of Milton’s Paradise Lost, or the battle scenes in Tolstoy’s War And Peace also do not exhaust the examination of those works and the profound points the authors address. The same is true for the love story between Odysseus and Penelope, Adam and Eve, Natasha and Pierre. Nor is the pity felt for Oliver Twist or Little Nell and their troubles any less than is felt for Odysseus or Andrei or Adam, because the act of waking the conscience to support, say, compassion for the poor, is not different than, except that it is smaller in scope, waking the conscience to the issues of loss and love and war and peace and justifying the ways of God to man.
If we divide books into the lowbrow, the middlebrow, and the highbrow, running from shallow and popular books concerned with parochial things, to sober books concerned with deeper things, to books that earn eternal fame and plumb the deepest, we will see that a common current runs through all the branches of the great river called literature, the shallow currents as well as the deep. They all run to an ocean.
The great books are great because they are better than the good books and much better than the crappy guilty-pleasure books in the one regard of how well they treat with the great ideas of Western literature.
For those of you unfamiliar with these great ideas, Mortimer Adler was kind enough to compile them into a handy list: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, Love, Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny and Despotism, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World.
What makes a simple adventure yarn or love story simple is that it treats with these profound matters in a simplistic, unoriginal, and unexceptional way. John Carter dies and comes to life again on Mars and then cuts and carves his way across the face of the bloody planet of the wargod to win the hand of his true love, the princess Dejah Thoris. The book does deal with issues of life and death and love and honor. But it does so in an utterly unexceptional way — I say this as an avid fan and partisan of the book — because it does not say anything about life and death and love and honor a schoolboy does not already know, nor does it correct any false ideas a schoolboy might have. John Carter neither pauses to wonder about the widows and orphans of the men he’s killed, nor is the romance between man and Martian shown to be an act of will, a divine grace, something to sustain the couple through everything from domestic squabbles to disease and death. What Dickens or Milton has to say about death and love is deeper and therefore, at least to mature tastes, more interesting, but it is still on the same topic.
At this point we can answer an earlier question adroitly. Why are we science fiction buffs offended if the watchdogs of public taste treat us lightly? We are not, (I hope), offended because someone says Synthetic Men Of Mars is inferior to The Brothers Karamazov. In such a case we have no claim, and any feeling of offense would be mere partisan emotion or fannish loyalty. But we are, (I hope), deeply offended because someone says Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings is inferior to Sartre’s No Exit on the grounds that Tolkien’s work involves fairy-tale creatures like Sauron, Gandalf and Saruman, angelic powers, (fallen and unfallen), who walked the earth, who do not really exist, whereas Sartre’s masterpiece of existentialist drama concerns Garcin, Inès, and Estelle, three ghosts in hell, (all fallen), who do exist.
An honest observer will note that there is no great idea addressed by No Exit, or, for that matter, The Odyssey, which is not equal in scope to the great ideas addressed in The Lord Of The Rings.
The reason why to this day, (albeit, thankfully, less than had been), the watchdogs of literature scorn Professor Tolkien’s work is twofold: one is the matter of setting. Tolkien’s work is set in a make-believe past roughly as historically accurate as Robert Howard’s Hyborian Age. It is set in Elfland, where foxes talk and so do trees, and magic is real. This is a setting that the sons of Dickens and servants of Marx, each one eager to be more relevant and more realistic than the last, consigned to the children’s nursery.
But many an opera or work of epic poetry, from Das Rheingold to Dante’s Inferno is set in places beyond the fields we mortals know, sometimes far beyond: the sheer unfairness of ignoring a great work for the shallow and trivial detail of its setting justly offends our sense of right and wrong. Would anyone dismiss Moby Dick as a famous work of American letters because the setting was a whaling ship? This would be like dismissing Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness as a mere childish adventure tale on the grounds that it takes place in the same continent as Tarzan Of The Apes.
The second is more sinister: Tolkien’s work is deeply anti-modernist. It is not the friend of progressive ideas at any point, but portrays life in Middle-Earth with a typically Catholic melancholy, as if history is one long ebbing tide of sorrow and loss that will only be amended at the Last Judgment.
Now the nihilists among the Watchdogs like the idea that life is melancholy, but they do not want any hint of final joy: Frodo should have gotten seasick on the last boat to Elfland out of the Gray Havens, and fallen overboard, and been eaten by angry krill. That would have satisfied their taste.
And the modernists among the watchdogs don’t like any problems which are not caused by and cured by Man. Social injustices can be perhaps cured by a renovation of laws and customs, but innate existential sorrow caused by the nature of mortal life — that, they will hear no part of, unless of course there is a human solution to it, such as being kind to your neighbors, telling stories, staying in school, and other such mind-explodingly stupid trivialities. Of course I am using the examples taken from the ending, such as it is, of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a book which the watchdogs heaped with praises and glory utterly disproportionate to the trilogy’s modest craftsmanship.
Pullman’s book took place just as far beyond the fields we know as Tolkien’s but Mr. Pullman expressed ideas and attitudes that were all safely politically correct and hence craven and parochial and trite. The Watchdogs were not challenged on any of their ideas about God and Man any more than the schoolboy in my example above is challenged to think deeply about love and chivalry, honor and death by reading about a clean-limbed fighting man from Virginia sword-fighting Martians.
Here the injustice is galling precisely because of the unfairness, the partisanship, of the Watchdogs. It is not the craftsmanship of the author, nor the beauty and depth of his inspiration, nor again the elevation of his theme, nor the profundity of the great ideas being addressed, nor the adroitness of his execution, nor the re-readability, power, and relevance of the art. No. One man writes a shallow book which echoes the conformist ideas of the watchdogs, and so they celebrate him; another man, using the same materials, writes a profound book whose ideas rear a shocking challenge to the comfortable untruths the Watchdogs would prefer to believe, and th
ey are dismissive.
And puh-lease let no one intimate to me that writing an atheist book is brave but writing a Catholic book is conformist. I have been both an atheist and a Catholic, and written both kinds of books. The only time I have ever been savaged, (a situation I assume conformists would find trying on their reserves of courage), was when I wrote things along the second line, not the first. You may have your own opinion: here I speak from experience.
I do not say Mr. Pullman is a coward and Professor Tolkien is a hero. I know nothing of the men personally, and I have neither the skill nor the right to judge men’s hearts. But I do say that Mr. Pullman wrote a cowardly book, and Professor Tolkien wrote a heroic one, since the first book repeated in the stale quest-trilogy formula all the pious and trite platitudes of the modern day, ('Be kind to people! Stay in school! Have lotsa great sex!'), and the second was a book that challenged all the conventional wisdom and the conventions of literature, and met, and overthrew them.
So the answer about what is the nature of the indignation when a book is slandered when it merits praise can be easily seen: when a profound book is called shallow, or vice versa, something burns in the indignant heart more than the emotion for which it might at first be mistaken.
If we are indignant because another man’s taste in some trivial thing differs from our own, if, for example, he actually likes Kyle Rayner more than Hal Jordan, our indignation has no right to exist. We are just playing around.
Again, if we are indignant out of partisanship or party loyalty, like fans of a ball team who root for their hometown, that is merely parochial loyalty, and is not the same emotion. If the rival team wins, they are not enemies. No injustice has been done us.
In this case, we are indignant at the injustice. Each man who has read deeply in great literature knows well that there are great books simply not to his taste: but if he is fair-minded, he can see the real merits that attract the candid judgment of his fellow men, whose tastes are just as refined as his own. An injustice is not a lapse of judgment but an offense against it, when some lesser thing, such as party politics, is placed above the highest thing, which is right judgment. A literate man would be just as offended by a Catholic who despised Milton’s work on the grounds that Milton was a Puritan as he would be by a Puritan who despised Dante’s: and he would not consult his own sentiments in the matter of religion rather than his judgment about what makes great literature great.
In my case, I rightfully acknowledge Flannery O’Conner as a profound and great writer, worthy of public honors. But I hate her work. It is not to my taste.
What duty do authors owe literature? That we can now answer in a word. Authors serve the Truth. Not the truth as they see it, not their truth or my truth or your truth. They serve Truth. There are those who betray that service. This makes them traitors, but does not make them discoverers of a new truth.
What duty do authors owe society?
Lowbrow authors — and this includes the vast majority of genre writing — are supposed to entertain, that is, divert their audience from the dullness and horror of life and show them how things ought to be, more romantic, more heroic. They are escapist, and are meant to show the imagination that a world that should exist or that does, a world higher and finer than this valley of tears in which we are exiled.
Middlebrow authors, dealing with an audience slightly more mature, deal with an audience in no danger of dullness, but it may confront a danger of smallmindedness. Novels by Jane Austen and Charles Dickens have the advantage of being written with some human insight, so that we can be distracted and diverted from our own egotistical selves, and learn to see the world as if other people are real and their sorrows worthy of balm. They are not escapist but immersive, and offer escape from our own selfishness.
Middlebrow books, if well done, allow us to meet the saints and sinners we would not meet in real life, and refresh our souls to deal with our fellow man with clearer insight. It is still entertainment, as refreshing as a dip in the pool, but this does not mean a little dirt does not get washed out of our eyes and off our souls.
Highbrow authors, dealing with the most mature audience, speaking to generation after generation, deal with an audience in no great danger of lacking human understanding, but in very great danger of lacking a proper emotional response to the highest things. Intellectuals tend to lack intellectual structure, to be ignorant of philosophy, or to treat it like a game.
Books that treat the great ideas in the deepest way are both escapist and immersive, since they offer escape from our own worldview, and into a larger one.
All these authors, from least to greatest, from the most idle of idle entertainments to the most profound of life-changing works of great literature, are all created by one great secret. It is ironic that some of them do not know the secret, or would react with disquiet or disgust to hear of it.
The secret is that we are exiles here on Earth. This is not our home. We do not belong here.
If the readers and authors did not feel that way, if we did belong on Earth, and if we loved mortal life and mortal suffering, and if we desired nothing more, we would read newspapers for the news and engineering reports for discoveries of useful tools, and gossip about real people and histories of real events, and we would never, ever, ever desire something more. We would never dream of adventures on Mars or read about the lives of make-believe people in Russia during the Napoleonic Wars or about a poet descending through the core of the Earth and climbing a mountain in the southern hemisphere to ascend the seven spheres of heaven to see Our Lady and Our Lord. We would not care about Long John Silver or Scarlet O’Hara or Ebenezer Scrooge; and the fate of Aragorn, son of Arathorn, heir to the fallen kingdom of Numenor would be meaningless.
If we were just beasts like other beasts, we would never raise our eyes from the troughs of temporary pleasure, and crane back our heads, and stare at the stars, and wonder, and imagine, and seek to feed not just our bellies but also our imaginations.
If we were happy here in our world, we would not dream of other worlds, and if we are not happy here, then this is not our home.
The role of the poet, aside from recalling with glory the deeds of our ancestors, or telling us to love what is lovely and hate what is hateful, is to keep alive that spark of haunting recollection.
This is done in two ways: one is the tragic mode, where the poet with lamentation pricks open the wounds once more of all the evils that this exile imposes on us, and makes us ill-at-ease and discontented with this world and its vanities.
The other is the comedic mode, where the poet tells us of the other world, the world as we all know it should be, the one where beauty triumphs rather than strength.
You can see why I rejoice that Gene Wolfe is now recognized as a grandmaster, I hope. If not, look at Adler’s list of great ideas, and pick up a copy of Wolfe’s novels or short stories and see how many of these themes he touches on.
And he is a member of that secret Catholic conspiracy. If you find some of the melancholy of J.R.R. Tolkien in his works or the grotesquerie of Flannery O’Conner, that may be why. So I was afraid that our own smaller pack of watchdogs of good taste guarding science fiction would snub a man whose worldview is alien to their own, and superior. But then, good artists, as I mentioned above, are subversive, and can lure an audience into a larger world before they notice it.
What duty do authors owe the Truth? Why, everything! We serve beauty. Beauty is truth.
Those who believe otherwise write crappy books.
Storytelling is the Absence of Lying
The worst attempt at Science Fiction addressing religious issues it has ever been my misfortune to run across is by a brilliant up-and-coming author named Ted Chiang. If you haven’t read his short stories, you are doing yourself a bit of a disservice. You might want to rush right out and buy a copy of Stories Of Your Life And Others.
But don’t tell him I sent you, dear reader, because I must now criticize his most famous story from
that collection in the harshest terms. Since he is a better writer than I am, this exercise cannot be taken too seriously: a slow man is telling a fast man how to run a race.
Of course, even a slow runner can tell when a faster one has gone seriously off the track.
The satire “Hell is the Absence of God” reads like it was written by someone who never met a Christian, or read anything written by a Christian.
In this tale, those who see the light of heaven are grotesquely disfigured, (their eyes and eye sockets are removed), and lose free will, and become perfect in faith, so that they are automatically assured of entrance into paradise. The main character, mourning after the death of his wife, seeks to find a spot where an angel is leaving or entering the world, so that he can, if only for a moment, glimpse the light of heaven, so that he can lose his eyes and his free will, but be assured of meeting his wife again in heaven. All goes as planned, but God capriciously sends the man to Hell in any case. Hell is not a place of torment, but a bland area much like earth, merely separate from God, peopled by Fallen Angels whose sin was not rebellion, but free-thinking. Hence, out of all created beings, only the main character is actually suffering in Hell, since he is the only one who longs not to be there, and, thanks to his free will being destroyed, is the only one who loves God wholeheartedly. All efforts of the main character to rejoin his wife are futile. There are secondary characters whose lives are also ruined, and for no particular reason.
This story is seriously off track for what a story should be. It is, however, note-perfect as a piece of cheap agitprop.