Pentecost reverses Babel. Whereas once language divided humanity, the words of the Apostles, spoken in the Spirit, unite humanity. Peter’s speech in Acts 2 causes people to repent, and the newly repentant form a new community where they share with each other and praise God. In other words, Peter’s speech helps to create a community of love. Until today, I hadn’t thought of Dante as a Pentecostal, but the title fits. Above all, Dante’s Commedia celebrates the interdependence of language and love. Although human language falls short of the perfection of God’s love, without language human beings would have no access to that love.

The Paradiso hits its crescendo in the final four cantos, and as it hits its crescendo, Dante’s words increasingly stretch their meanings. Before he meets St Bernard, Dante describes what he has learned from Beatrice. Dante writes,
When she who does imparadise my mind (’mparadisa la mia mente)
had revealed the truth against
the present life of wretched mortals,
then, as one whose way is lit by a double-candled lamp
held at his back, who suddenly in a mirror sees
the flame before he has seen or even thought of it
and turns to see if the glass is telling him the truth,
and then sees that it reflects things as they are –
as notes reflect the score when they are sung –
just so do I remember having done,
gazing into the beautiful eyes
which Love had made into the snare that caught me. (Par 28:1-12)
Of course, “to imparadise” is not a verb in English or Italian, but even though Love’s snare can catch Dante, it cannot be caught in human language.  We see this again the first time he sees St Bernard’s flame.
And that one least removed from the blazing point of light
possessed the clearest flame, because, I think,
it was the one that is the most intruthed by it (però che più di lei s’invera) (Par 28:37-39)
Again, Dante’s words reach beyond themselves. He knows full well that his Italian begins to creak here, but there is no other way to describe how God’s truth penetrates Bernard. Read the rest of this entry »

A friend recommended Ali Smith’s Artful, commenting on its ease of style and sharpness of perception. The novelist, he told me, had taken on serious topics in this work, a published version of a series of lectures, and that she had somehow made theory a pure joy as well as a “pure good.” Circularity takes over now: our library had the book but could not locate it; as an alternative I took out Smith’s Booker Prize Nominee, The Accidental, thinking to acquaint myself with her work. Within two pages of reading, I realized that I had read the novel soon after its publication some years ago. But then, I found the experience of rereading in itself a curious critical phenomenon. By this time, the library found its misfiled copy of Artful which I began, only to find a section on the necessity of rereading. The sense of cycles coiled itself as if a reminder around a finger.

First the rereading of The Accidental: what I found odd was the patchiness of my recollection. The pretext of the plot, an apparently benign summer (rental) house invasion by an enigmatic and haunting young woman, I remembered immediately, but not the interlinking stories. The troubling young woman affects deeply, and for the good, the lives of the adolescent children. I recalled little of this, and with the revelations forgotten and rediscovered, there came the odd sense of assurance, almost a form of relief. I’d forgot how the philandering husband is continually rebuffed by the guest, and so forced to face his myriad infidelities.  Again the fraught encounter and then conflict with the writer/mother of the household almost completely eluded memory; the uncertain resolution to that conflict remains, I fear, deliberately unexplored. Perhaps I had not even faced the implications of that incident in the previous reading. The visitor comes, works both good and ill, and then disappears: and in her aftermath the family finds itself reduced to a new beginning in finding, upon return to the city, their home completely emptied of its contents.  What is the connection of this theft to the summer guest/intruder?

Here is what strikes me as odd: the wife, partly in shock and partly in need of self-discovery, unexpectedly hurries off to America to locate the home of her bigamist father – whose second family he kept in New York State. The abandoned house of the father’s other family, her search for signs of her kin, and her peculiar encounter, replicating virtually that of her own summer intruder, with a country society matron – all of this I recalled in detail, with striking “visual” confirmation as the events re-screened in my mind. I had trod these paths mentally before. This was something like a homecoming.

I cannot but reflect on the uniquely uneven pleasure of re-acquaintance with The Accidental.  I enjoyed the book more because I could only partially remember it. The effect was a bit like that of an eye examination, when the optometrist moves different lenses before the patient’s eye asking if one lens or the other is sharper, clearer. And then the binocular clarity of the correct prescription plays into the sudden comprehension of what was blurred before.

But then Artful lay before me, offering in its oblique way, chapters on time, form, and reflection in works of art. I am still coming to terms with the book’s effect: I think of holding some creature, alive and squirming in my hands, full of energy – a force that wishes to take itself and me off in directions it finds compulsive – as is its invitation to the holder. I am trying to indicate that the book does not rest with itself, its allusiveness, the collection of images in its appendix, and the strange appearance of the ghost of the writer’s dead partner make a reader stop, in reading, to consider that nature of the work in hand – but more, to be thankful for the work’s existence.  It is difficult to imagine the book as a series of lectures: hearing Smith’s unique tones, her playful confrontation of grief and the structures of art. I should like to have heard her speaking. And as Smith suggests, I am bound by the necessities of art to reread Artful.

Choosing a favorite canto in the Commedia is an impossible task. I can say, though, that Canto 23 in the Paradiso always takes my breath away. It’s appropriate that a canto devoted to the beauty of Beatrice and the flames’ love for Mary reaches such poetic heights. Here Dante sees Beatrice as she is. Here he notes the impotence of his words. Here he witnesses the heavenly host surrounding Mary. Sometimes the best we can do when commenting is get out of the way. In that spirit, here are my favorite lines from that canto:

Beatrice said: “Behold the hosts
of Christ in triumph and all the fruit
gathered from the wheeling of these spheres!”
It seemed to me her face was all aflame,
her eyes so full of gladness
that I must leave that moment undescribed. Par. 23:19-24

O Beatrice, my sweet belovèd guide!
To me she said: “What overwhelms you
is a force against which there is no defense.
Here is the Wisdom and the Power that repaired
the roads connecting Heaven and the earth
that had so long been yearned for and desired.” Par. 23:34-39

“Open your eyes and see me as I am.
The things that you have witnessed
have given you the strength to bear my smile.”
I was like a man who finds himself awakened
from a dream that has faded and who strives
in vain to bring it back to mind
when I heard this invitation, deserving
of such gratitude as can never be erased
from the book that registers the past.
If at this moment all the tongues
that Polyhymnia and her sisters nurtured
with their sweetest, richest milk
should sound to aid me now, their song could not attain
one thousandth of the truth in singing of that holy smile
and how it made her holy visage radiant.
And so, in representing Paradise,
the sacred poem must make its leap across,
as does a man who finds his path cut off.
But considering the heavy theme
and the mortal shoulder it weighs down,
no one would cast blame if it trembled with its load. Par. 23:46-66

And, like a baby reaching out its arms
to mamma after it has drunk her milk,
its inner impulse kindled into outward flame,
all these white splendors were reaching upward
with their fiery tips, so that their deep affection
for Mary was made clear to me.
Then they remained there in my sight,
singing Regina celi with such sweetness
that my feeling of delight has never left me.
Oh, how great is the abundance
that is stored in granaries so rich above,
that down on earth were fields ripe for the sowing!
There they live, rejoicing in the treasure
they gained with tears of exile,
in Babylon, where they spurned the gold.
Beneath the exalted Son of God and Mary,
up there he triumphs in his victory,
with souls of the covenants old and new,
the one who holds the keys to such great glory. Par 23:121-139

I can’t believe we’ve almost made it through the entire Commedia. I’ll post again on Sunday, and I’ll try to tie things together.

Jonathan Franzen and others on how important “likeability” is in fiction.

I hate the concept of likeability—it gave us two terms of George Bush, whom a plurality of voters wanted to have a beer with, and Facebook. You’d unfriend a lot of people if you knew them as intimately and unsparingly as a good novel would. But not the ones you actually love.

The reading habits of Hilary Mantel:

Sad to say, I do like a bit of action. I get impatient with love; I want fighting. I don’t like overrefinement, or to dwell in the heads of vaporous ladies with fine sensibilities. (Though I love Jane Austen because she’s so shrewdly practical: you can hear the chink of cash in every paragraph.)

Have you seen Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby yet? Here are five English professors on the most recent film adaptation.

Separating the teacher-scholar in me — especially one who specializes in American literature and adaptation — from the reader–moviegoer is tricky. Yes, Luhrmann’s Gatsby is dynamic, loud, different, and vibrant. It changes scenes and language, leaves out some, and adds others. It’s also brilliant.

Daniel Mendelsohn on the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Greek tragedy.

It was hard not to think of all this—of the Iliad with its grand funereal finale, of the Odyssey strangely pivoting around so many burials, and of course of “Antigone”—as I followed the story of Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s unburied body over the past few weeks. I thought, of course, of canny politicians eyeing the public mood, and of the public to whom those politicians wanted to pander. I thought even more of the protesters who, understandably to be sure, wanted to make clear the distinction between victim and perpetrator, between friend and foe, by threatening to strip from the enemy what they saw as the prerogatives of the friend: humane treatment in death. The protesters who wanted, like Creon, not only to deny those prerogatives to an enemy but to strip them away again should anyone else grant them—to “unbury the body.” I thought of Martha Mullen, a Christian, who insisted that the Muslim Tsarnaev, accused of heinous atrocities against innocent citizens, be buried just as a loved one might deserve to be buried, because she honored the religious precept that demands that we see all humans as “brothers,” whatever the evil they have done.

Genealogy plays an important role in the Commedia. We spent a good amount of time discussing how Dante has chosen his poetic fathers. His relationships with Virgil and Statius are central to the narratives of the Inferno and the Purgatorio. And some of the most interesting moments in those poems occur when Dante speaks with poets whose work has informed his own: his interactions with Brunetto Latini or with Guido Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel. We also see the importance of Florence as the land of Dante’s fathers. Of course, all discussions of fatherhood take place in the context of the fatherhood of God. In cantos 11-20 of the Paradiso, fatherhood moves from the metaphorical to the literal because we encounter Dante’s flesh-and-blood ancestor Cacciaguida.

The discussion of fatherhood begins in Canto 13 with the first human father. There Thomas Aquinas explains to Dante that God made Adam and Christ directly, and so “human nature never was – nor shall it be –/ what it was in these two creatures” (Par 13:86-7). In canto 14, Dante moves from the creation of Adam and Christ to the state of risen human bodies after the resurrection. Solomon says,
When we put on again our flesh,
glorified and holy, then our persons
will be more pleasing for being all complete,
so that the light, granted to us freely
by the Highest Good, shall increase,
the light that makes us fit to see Him.
From that light, vision must increase,
and love increase what vision kindles,
and radiance increase, which comes from love. (Par 14: 43-51)

Dante notes that the choirs of souls around Solomon quickly shouted “Amen” after Solomon’s words to express their “desire for their dead bodies.” The flames in paradise don’t desire their own bodies so much as they desire bodies,
for their mothers,
for their fathers, and for others whom they loved,
before they all became eternal flames (Par. 14: 64-66)
That is, to love another human being is to love an embodied human being. The love the flames have for their families “will be more pleasing for being all complete” when the flames are once again embodied.

I have no doubt that Dante’s discussion of the first ancestor Adam in Canto 13 and the flames’ desires for their mothers and fathers in Canto 14 leads up to Dante’s encounter with his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida in canto 15. The interactions with Cacciaguida in cantos 15 through 18 are some of my favorite lines in the entire Commedia. Part of what I find so moving is what Dante can understand and what Dante decides not to disclose. When he first meets Cacciaguida, he cannot understand everything his ancestor says. Read the rest of this entry »

While you’re queueing for a copy of Dan Brown’s latest blockbuster novel, don’t miss Michael Deacon’s tribute to the renowned wordsmith in the Telegraph.

Renowned author Dan Brown got out of his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house and paced the bedroom, using the feet located at the ends of his two legs to propel him forwards. He knew he shouldn’t care what a few jealous critics thought. His new book Inferno was coming out on Tuesday, and the 480-page hardback published by Doubleday with a recommended US retail price of $29.95 was sure to be a hit. Wasn’t it?

I’ll call my agent, pondered the prosperous scribe. He reached for the telephone using one of his two hands. “Hello, this is renowned author Dan Brown,” spoke renowned author Dan Brown. “I want to talk to literary agent John Unconvincingname.”

Looks like all you Dante fans will have something to move on to when you’ve reached the end of your journey through the afterlife.

(Previously in the Telegraph: this list of Brown’s twenty worst sentences, which you may have read about at dotCommonweal.)

“Heaven is won-der-ful, isn’t it?” That was the answer one of my students gave when we began our class discussion of the Paradiso a couple of years ago. Thinking about what heaven is like turns out to be a more difficult exercise than you might have expected. My students expect people in heaven to be happy, and they imagine that heaven is a place where “everything works out in the end” (or something like that). Sometimes they mention harps or clouds or people in white robes. All in all, it’s a rather inchoate picture, which makes reading and discussing and writing about Dante’s Paradiso all the more challenging and fun.

Part of the challenge is that of the three poems in the Commedia, the Paradiso is the most philosophically and theologically dense. The shades Dante meets, although they are important, are less important than the theological points Dante makes with them. Unlike the shades in the Inferno and the Purgatorio, the shades in the Paradiso are in harmony with themselves and God’s will. The only thing they lack is their bodies (which is a big deal, to be sure), but they know their souls will join with their bodies at the day of Judgement.

Another part of the challenge is that most of the narratives we read have character development. Character development is what makes a narrative a narrative. In Inferno and Purgatorio, the development came from the vices or virtues of the shades he encountered. These vices or virtues progressively moved away from or toward the love of God. This led, of course, to greater despair or greater hope. But, as I mentioned in my last post on the Purgatorio, the shades we meet in the Paradiso are already perfectly attuned to God’s will. As Piccarda explains to Dante
“Brother, the power of love subdues our will
so that we long for only what we have
and thirst for nothing else
…
And in his will is our peace.
It is to that sea all things move,
Both what His will creates and what nature makes.” (Par. 3:70-72; 85-87)

If the essence of narrative is personal struggle, Dante has written a narrative in which the people no longer struggle. The only real precedent for the Paradiso is Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, a poem Dante didn’t know. Only Lucretius dared to put a philosophical system to verse in the way that Dante has dared to put theology into verse. Lucretius’ goal was to make an unpalatable philosophy palatable. He uses the metaphor of putting honey on a wormword cup. Dante’s goal is to convey the joy of heaven in human words. As Charles Martel says to Dante, “All of us desire to bring you pleasure/ so that you may in turn delight in us” (Par. 8:32-33). Read the rest of this entry »

Today is the 200th birthday of the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard. Kieregaard is famous for many things: being a forerunner of existentialism, his concept of the “leap of faith” (a term he never actually uses), and his attacks on what he saw as the lazy Christianity of his day, which was all too attached to “Christendom,” to name but a few. What always interests me about Kierkegaard, though, is he deep attachment to Jesus Christ. For Kierkegaard, human life does not make sense without Christ as its center and guide. Every self, to be a self, must see itself in relation to Christ, who in himself combines the eternal and the temporal, God and man, Creator and creation.

In Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Kierkegaard writes,

Each man himself, as an individual, should render his account to God. No third person dares venture to intrude upon this accounting between God and the individual. Yet the talk, by putting its question, dares and ought to dare, to remind man, in a way never to be forgotten, that the most ruinous evasion of all is to be hidden in the crowd in an attempt to escape God’s supervision of him as an individual, in an attempt to get away from hearing God’s voice as an individual. Long ago, Adam attempted this same thing when his evil conscience led him to imagine that he could hide himself among the trees. It may even be easier and more convenient, and more cowardly to hide oneself among the crowd in the hope that God should not be able to recognize one from the other. But in eternity each shall render account as an individual. That is, eternity will demand of him that he shall have lived as an individual. Eternity will draw out before his consciousness, all that he has done as an individual, he who had forgotten himself in noisy self-conceit. In eternity, he shall be brought to account strictly as an individual, he who intended to be in the crowd where there should be no such strict reckoning. Each one shall render account to God as an individual. The King shall render account as an individual; and the most wretched beggar, as an individual. No one may pride himself at being more than an individual, and no one despondently think that he is not an individual, perhaps because here in earth’s busyness he had not as much as a name, but was named after a number.

Because it is Kierkegaard’s birthday I thought of these lines along with Dante’s confession in canto 31. Unlike Kierkegaard’s picture of the solitary individual, Dante renders an account of himself with Beatrice’s help. After Beatrice tells Dante to confess, he notes,

Confusion and fear, mixed together,
drove from my mouth a yes—
but one had need of eyes to hear it.
As a crossbow breaks with too much tension
From the pulling taut of cord and bow
So that the arrow strikes the target with less force,
Thus I collapsed beneath that heavy load
And, with a flood of tears and sighs,
My voice came strangled from my throat. (Purg 31:13-21) Read the rest of this entry »

[For part two of our discussion of the Purgatorio, see here. For part one of our discussion see here, with links to discussion of the Inferno.]

When Dante reaches the Garden of Eden in Canto 28, the as-yet-unnamed Matelda describes the two rivers Dante finds there:
On this side it descends and has the power
to take from men the memory of sin.
On the other it restores that of good deeds.
Here it is called Lethe and on the other side
Eünoè, but its water has no effect
Until they both are tasted. (Purg. 18:127-132)
The River Lethe is well known from classical mythology. Plato famously describes it in his Myth of Er at the end of his Republic. Dante is the first to mention the River Eünoè, whose name means “good thought.” How fitting it is to find these two rivers at the threshold between Purgatory and Heaven. There’s one problem. The book of Genesis, from which Dante – and the Christian and Jewish traditions – learned of the Garden of Eden describes neither Lethe nor Eünoè. Instead, that book lists four rivers in Eden: Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates (Gen. 2:11-14). Is Dante deliberately misremembering? Has he seen something on his journey that contradicts the Biblical witness? Has his trip across Lethe caused him to forget, and if it has can we take anything else he has written seriously?

Another way to ask any of this is to ask how Dante sees his own relationship with the various traditions of literature and theology and philosophy that came before him. Needless to say, this is a vast topic, and I won’t even pretend to do it justice here. Instead, I’d like to focus on Dante’s relationships with his fellow poets in these cantos of the Purgatorio: Statius, Bonagiunta Orbicciani, Guido Guinizelli, and Arnaut Daniel. Through these interactions, Dante shows himself to be both thoroughly traditional and thoroughly revolutionary. And he offers a model for thinking with and shaping the tradition he inherits. Read the rest of this entry »

The news that one of the last two free-standing newspaper book reviews will be edited by someone with no book-review experience to speak of—and not that much of a literary or journalistic resume either—has led to renewed handwringing about the state of book reviewing itself. Is the form a vital art or artifact of a more “literary” time? An underperforming, insufficiently monetizable product in the print-and-digital portfolio, or a kind of “experiential” content easily repurposed for the lifestyle section–“how reading this book reminded me of that summer on the lake and made me a better listener/cook/parent”? 

And are book reviews even necessary, when prospective readers can scan Amazon comments, listicles, or tweets that sum things up in less than a hundred-and-forty characters? 

Michael Bourne at The Millions sidles up to that last question without engaging it as thoroughly as he might, but he at least reveals his sympathies in proposing a different approach to reviewing. He says abandon the familiar formula—what he calls the “play-by-play” style: eight- or twelve-hundred words summarizing plot, describing characters, and issuing a verdict—in favor of a deeper, conversational take, which he likens to “color analysis.” The sports-announcer metaphor is a bit more than strained, but Bourne makes a reasonable point: the basic information on a book is already out there, available in a million different places, so give us something we don’t know. He helpfully supplies examples of the kind of thing he has in mind (the writing James Wood does—surprise), and what he doesn’t want at all (“pedantic know-it-alls lecturing their readers on the history of the modern novel and spouting a lot of French critical theory”—fair enough). At the very least, he says,

anyone hoping to be heard above the digital din needs to approach each review not as an exercise in personal taste – I liked/didn’t like this book, and here’s why – but as a mini-essay using the book under review as the focal point of a larger, more interesting story. In a great many cases, this will mean reviewers having the sense to shut up when they have an opinion about a book but have nothing to add to the conversation beyond whether they liked or didn’t like it.

Different readers will identify different examples of reviews that meet Bourne’s criteria. I think of William Pfaff’s recent review of Garry Wills’s Why Priests? in The New York Review of Books, or Wood’s piece on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (collected in The Fun Stuff), which gets into questions of theodicy, global warming, and American realism, not to mention consistency of language and character (talk about a conversation). But that’s me; what kind of “conversation” would other readers seek? Something lighter, or heavier? Longer, or shorter? Will the mobile-device reader stick with or scroll through a two-thousand-word piece? Should the general-interest, budget- and page-constrained print publication be obligated to run one? Or will the kind of conversation Bourne calls for generate, by virtue of its asserted superiority, market demand for the “real intelligence” needed to cut through the surfeit of mere information?

Answering “yes” to that last question assumes there will be an audience able to discern the difference, and interested in doing so. Michael Woolf says simply that “neither books nor criticism count for much anymore,” and from what D.G. Myers reports, there’s maybe not so much to hope for in the future:

It’s not merely that undergraduates arrive at American universities notoriously ignorant of their cultural heritage—in my freshman honors seminar this term, only three students had ever heard of William Faulkner and none had read him—but also that no other conception of literature, if it is to be studied as literature, has any standing. …

The earliest students of English, when the first departments were founded in the nineteenth century, complained that they were tired of lectures about literature: they wanted to read the literature itself. I suspect that my undergraduate students would be happy to sit through a series of lectures about literature—just as long as they didn’t have to read any of it!

Is there any reason to think they’d be more interested in reading about it, even if presented as a conversation?

[For part one of our discussion of the Purgatorio see here, with links to discussion of the Inferno.]

Now that we have reached the middle of the Purgatorio and, therefore, the middle of the Commedia as a whole, I can’t help but marvel – again – at how miraculous this poem is. It would be one thing to spin the story Dante spins, another to blend theology and philosophy and political history with narrative the way he does, yet another to mix – without confusion and without syncretism – the sacred and profane, the Christian and the pagan, as he mixes them, and still yet another to maintain a rhyme scheme and structure of the poem. Yet he does all this at the same time. I fear, of course, that I’m simply enthusing here, but I can’t help but think such enthusiasm is the only proper response. And I also fear that Dante would only appreciate my enthusiasm if it led to repentance and prayer, to rightly ordered loves. As I read these last few days, I couldn’t help thinking: only Dante can make James Joyce look sloppy.

Dante reminds us that order is necessary for delight. The more we recognize how deeply ordered the Commedia is, the more we enjoy it. I can’t help but think that Robert Hollander has not wasted a minute of his scholarly life by working on Dante the way he has. Hollander makes explicit what Dante leaves implicit. The scholar uncovers the poet’s order. I want to explore that order a bit here because reading the Purgatorio right after reading the Inferno has helped me notice things I hadn’t noticed before. Most importantly, I’ve come to realize that the order of the Commedia has moral as well as an aesthetic goal.

For starters, let’s stick with the punishments the shades suffer in Purgatory. As Dante and Virgil climb the mountain, the sins the penitents committed become increasingly less severe. Thus pride is worse than envy, which is worse than wrath, which is worse than sloth. The punishments are less severe as well. The proud, who in their earthly lives held their heads high and never deigned to look down to the level of others, must spend the time until the Day of Judgment with their books stooped looking down. The envious, who constantly gazed on others and wished bad for them, must await the Day of Judgment with their eyes sown shut. The wrathful, whose anger separated themselves from others, must pray unceasingly in community. And my favorite is the slothful who, because of their laziness in life, continually run on their level of the mountain! The point of all of these, of course, is to correct the behavior of the penitents. The shades in Hell continue in their sins because they did not accept God’s love. The shades in Purgatory repent from their sins because they did accept God’s love. Read the rest of this entry »

[For links to our discussion of the Inferno see here.]

This weekend has been crazier than I thought it would be. Even though I’m up to date with the reading, I haven’t had time to put together a post on the beginning of the Purgatorio. I wanted to write about Cato, Virgil, and Sordello, and how each of them carries themes we have seen in the Inferno into the Purgatorio. Dante’s journey through Hell was marked by fear and despair. His journey thus far in Purgatory has been marked by hope.

Instead of putting all my thoughts together, I’ve decided to quote two scholars whose insights far exceed mine. My friend Grace sent me the following paragraph from Dorothy Sayer’s 1957 introduction to her translation of the Purgatorio.

“Of the three books of the Commedia, the Purgatorio is, for English readers, the least known, the least quoted – and the most beloved. It forms, as it were, a test case. Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at. Let no one, therefore, get away with a condemnation – or for that matter a eulogy – of Dante on the mere strength of broiled Popes, disembowelled Schismatics, grotesque Demons, Count Ugolino, Francesca da Rimini, and the Voyage of Ulysses, even if backed up by an erotic mysticism borrowed from the Pre-Raphaelites, and the line ‘His will is our peace’, recollected from somebody’s sermon. Press him, rather, for an intelligent opinion on the Ship of Souls and Peter’s Gate; on Buonconte, Sapia, and Arnaut Daniel; on the Prayer of the Proud, the theology of Free Judgement, Dante’s three Dreams, the sacred Forest, and the symbolism of the Beatrician Pageant. If he cannot satisfy the examiners on these points, let him be to you as a heathen man and a publican. But if he can walk at ease in death’s second kingdom, then he is a true citizen of the Dantean Empire; and though he may still feel something of a stranger in Paradise, yet the odds are he will come to it in the end. For the Inferno may fill one with only an appalled fascination, and the Paradiso may daunt one at first by its intellectual severity; but if one is drawn to the Purgatorio at all, it is by the cords of love, which will not cease drawing till they have drawn the whole poem into the same embrace.” Read the rest of this entry »

[For Part 4, see here. For Part 3, see here. For Part 2, see here. For Part 1, see here. For the introduction, see here. ]

I had hoped that I could tie things together in this post. I wanted to bring together some thoughts on Dante’s debt to Virgil both as a poet and a guide, on Dante’s poetics, on the fittingness of the punishments that Cassius and Brutus and Judas receive. But I’ve been rethinking that the last day or so, and now I think that the strength of the ending comes from the way it defers its own ending.* And I think Dante does that through his use of the word cammino.

Dante, of course, knows the importance of endings. He chooses not to end the Inferno with an image of Judas’s legs hanging out of Lucifer’s head. Dante doesn’t end with his own fear or even his own resolve to change his life. He doesn’t give Virgil the last word. Instead, Dante returns to the cammino with which he began the poem (Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.) Thanks to the excellent Princeton Dante Project website (which, as I’ve mentioned is the work of Jean and Robert Hollander, whose translations I use), I’ve discovered that Dante uses cammin or cammino fifteen times in the Inferno, and two times in canto 34. In other words, Dante constantly reminds us that he is on a journey.

In Canto 34, Dante and Virgil have passed Lucifer, and Dante becomes confused about where he is. As readers, we too are confused, although we shouldn’t be surprised that we are. Dante tells us as he enters the frozen floor of Hell in Canto 32 that “It is no enterprise to be taken lightly –/ to describe the very bottom of the universe” (Inf. 32:7-8). Although Dante has not taken the enterprise lightly, we cannot expect clear thoughts described in clear language in a place of such opacity. Virgil realizes Dante’s confusion and addresses him. The text reads:

The master said to me: ‘Get to your feet,
for the way [cammino] is long and the road not easy,
and the sun returns to middle tierce.’ (Inf. 34:94-96)** Read the rest of this entry »

A critic asking whether there is any good Catholic literature being written today? It must be a Tuesday. Over at the Millions, Nick Ripatrazone argues that those who can’t find a Catholic presence in contemporary literature just aren’t looking in the right places:

How to account for any possible perceived dearth of contemporary Catholic literature and art? I have learned the problem is one of definition. In the same way that paradox is endemic to Catholic doctrine, and that postconciliar Catholic writing is wrought with personal and parochial tensions, Catholic imaginative literature remains a conundrum to many critics, both Catholic and secular.

…

The stereotype of simplistic Catholic-themed or influenced writing is often earned by one-note spiritual narratives with no basis in the hard work of real faith. Have writers forgotten the narrative arc of Luke, the complexities of John? Christ suffered; salvation requires sacrifice. No easy redemption in life, so why expect it on the page?

…

Thinkers like Denis Donoghue, Mark Bosco SJ, James Martin SJ, and Peggy Rosenthal [...] allow the beauty of Catholic literature and artistry to shine without buffing away “all things counter, original, spare, strange.” It is time to be catholic in consideration of a literary Catholicism: such paradoxical inclusivity is in concert with the life, and mystery, of Christ.

For the full essay, go here. For more conversation on the topic, see here and here.

[For Part 3, see here. For Part 2, see here. For Part 1, see here. For the introduction, see here. I want to make this post specific to one passage in these cantos because it will enable people to comment even if they have not gotten through the Canto 28. On Wednesday, I’ll post again on Cantos 29-34, which will finish the Inferno, and I’ll offer some thoughts to tie things together then.]

In Canto 26, in the eighth malebogia where false counselors suffer their torments, Virgil and Dante meet Diomedes and Ulysses. Dante would have known these Greek heroes through Virgil’s Aeneid, where they are involved with the plot for the Trojan Horse, which leads to the fall of Troy. The Horse in the Aeneid serves a role similar to the apple in Genesis. They are both felices culpae that lead to the salvation that comes from Rome and from Christ.

I think it’s fair to say that Ulysses is one of the most sympathetic figures in Hell, and I worry that if I find him sympathetic, I’m missing something. Perhaps Ulysses is tricking Dante and us in much the same way that he tricked the Trojans. By giving us a gift, he lulls us into thinking he’s our ally. But he can’t be, can he?

Ulysses tells us that he had “fervor” “to gain experience of the world/ and to learn about man’s vices, and his worth” (Inf 26:98-99). When he and his comrades reach the end of the Mediterrean Sea, he says to them,

“O brothers,” I said, “who, in the course
Of a hundred thousand perils, at last
Have reached the west, to such brief wakefulness
of our senses as remains to us,
do not deny yourselves the chance to know –
following the sun — the world where no one lives.
Consider how your souls were sown:
You were not made to live like brutes or beasts,
But to pursue virtue and knowledge.” (Inf. 26:112-120)

Here is where I wonder if I’m being tricked. Whenever we encounter Ulysses in literature, we connect him with knowledge and bravery. We see this when he is Odysseus in the Iliad and the Odyssey, when he is Ulysses in the Aeneid, as the narrator in Tennyson’s poem, as Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s novel. Of course human beings were made to pursue virtue and knowledge. An essential message throughout the Inferno is that the sin leads away from virtue and knowledge, and sinners, who have turned toward sin, live like brutes and beasts. (Dante captures this both beautifully and frighteningly in the metamorphoses of Vanni Fucci in canto 24, Agnello and Cianfa in canto 25, and Buoso and Francesco in canto 25. Serpents bite each of them continuously, which leads to a brutish metamorphoses that strips them of their humanity.) How can any of this be wrong? How could this be a trick? Read the rest of this entry »

Could a theatrical performance be a kind of prayer? At a pivotal moment in his life, Bill Cain sensed that it could: He went on to found the Boston Shakespeare Company and to become one of the more successful American playwrights of our day.

In 2011, Cain—who is also a Jesuit priest—became the first dramatist ever to win the American Theater Critics’ Association/Steinberg Award two years in a row: The judges honored 9 Circles, his play-of-ideas about an American soldier accused of war crimes, just a year after singling out Equivocation, his Stoppard-esque drama about Shakespeare, the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, and the writing of Macbeth. Cain has also racked up credits in television, serving as writer on the 1990s ABC series “Nothing Sacred,” among other accomplishments.

This month, Cain’s play How to Write a New Book for the Bible is making its East Coast premiere at Round House Theatre, in Bethesda, Md. On the occasion of the production—which runs through May 5—I spoke to Cain about the play, his career in theater, and how he negotiates the tension between his religious and artistic vocations.

How did you get into theater?

I grew up in New York City, so I saw a lot of theater when I was in high school. But it was just a hobby. When I was in college and in seminary, I did shows as a hobby. A friend of mine was working at a mental hospital, in an addiction ward. This was when addiction wards were still prisons. He challenged me: He said, ‘Forget this nonsense that you’re doing on the campus. Build a show and bring it to the addiction ward.’

So with a bunch of friends, we put together a really charming show, and we took it to Metropolitan State Hospital in Boston, which was terrifying. We were college kids; and it was a big prison. We had guitars, brass and all sorts of nonsense, and they let us behind these locked doors and said, ‘Do your show.’ And nobody came. The cast said, ‘What are we going to do?’ I said, ‘We’ll do the show!’

So we did the show to an empty room, and, bit by bit, the room filled with people, patients, inmates, the guards—who were very frightening—and the doctors and nurses. And as the show went on it became gloriously inappropriate. People got up and said, ‘I want to sing a song!’ Or, ‘I have a story to tell!’ And as the show went on, I realized that, in this moment, there were no differences among any of us. Nobody was a guard; nobody was a patient; nobody was an inmate; nobody was a performer. We were one thing.

I had been a Jesuit for five years, but I felt this was the first time I’d ever prayed. I felt that if I could only be close to this experience, I wouldn’t ask for anything else.

So the playing out of the rest of my life has been a playing with that experience: a roomful of people—or, when I work in television, a country—going through the same things together, and coming to a new understanding of who they are together. That to me feels to me very much like prayer.

We took the same show to other places. We played a leukemia ward at a children’s hospital, and it was the same thing: We walked in, and there were these kids with no hair—we couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls or how old they were. And there were these terrified parents, and doctors and nurses buzzing by. We did the same charming nonsensical show, and people transformed. There was this joy. I said, yeah: This is it!  There is a way to reveal that we are one thing!

That’s what I want shows to do: I want our surprising, common, glorious humanity to be revealed at every performance.

How did you become a playwright?

I was a theater director and a priest and was trying to put that together. I decided I didn’t want to interpret other people’s images any more: I wanted to try to interpret images that were closer to our own experience than the images we receive. So we can become closer to who we are.

Read the rest of this entry »

[For Part 2, see here. For Part 1, see here. For the introduction, see here. Please feel free to comment and join our discussion.]

This is only my third post on the Commedia, but already a little community has formed in the comments. (Of course, I encourage more people to share their thoughts!) To encourage this community, I want to build on two comments I found particularly helpful in my last post. These comments help set up a discussion of how Dante sees his own poetic work, which I think he stresses in these cantos.

In the comments to my last post, Flavia and Griffin Oleynick stressed the importance of structure in the Inferno. Flavia wrote, “I take Dante, like Milton, as sincere in his justification of God’s ways to men. But the poem seems unafraid to raise our own doubts by reminding us that, hey! It’s really hard to reconcile the idea of an infinitely-merciful God with one who is also infinitely just. We may believe it to be true, but human logic, like human emotions, just can’t grasp those simultaneous truths.” Griffin, in turn, extends Flavia’s discussion when he says, “Perhaps his poetry can be considered a personal response to excarnation and a call to build community!”

Since at least the time Adam named the animals, words have structured the way human beings have encountered reality. But words do more than that. For Christians, the Word doesn’t just structure reality, it creates reality. And if we read the first chapter of Genesis with the first chapter of John’s Gospel (and an assist from Eph. 1:10) we see that God is not content to be excarnate. God desires to pitch his tent among humanity by becoming incarnate (Jn 1:14). God enters into the structure his Word has created by becoming named himself. (Thus we should read Matthew 16:16 along with Exodus 3:14.)

We ought to think of such naming as a kind of poetry. The poets create worlds just as God does. And the challenge that the poet sets for himself or herself is to convey to his or her audience how those worlds make sense, how the various things in those worlds cohere. It is a particular difficulty, then, to make sense out of a world that is marked by incoherence. If mimicking the poetry of God through speech and action leads to coherence, the violence we find in the second half of the Inferno, a violence that mocks the poetry of God, must lead to incoherence. And here we see the particular difficulty that Dante sets up for himself: he must, as Flavia noted, present two truths that are difficult if not impossible to reconcile and he must, as Griffin noted, present these truths in a way that builds human community, that draws his readers in enough to warn them of the judgment that will confront them if they commit such violence. Dante must say “O vengeance of God, how much/ should you be feared by all who read/ what now I saw revealed before my eyes” (Inf. 14.16-18), but he must say this knowing full well that will be telling his audience things that, as Virgil says, “you will see things that, in my telling,/ would seem to strip my words of truth” (Inf. 13.20-21). Read the rest of this entry »

Once, reading a book on wildflowers, I learned that there was a plant called bastard toadflax.  In Brian Doyle’s Mink River, a flawed but  wonderful book,  the author disgorges such arcane information effortlessly and wholesale, and we learn perhaps more than we want to know about the flora and fauna of the Oregon coast.  Yet, Mink River is tender, hilarious, original, and outrageous; I loved it in spite of itself.  Mr. Doyle’s shameless love for humanity in all its particularity takes your breath away.

Neawanaka is an imaginary town bounded by the ocean, two creeks,  and the Mink River.  Its people are as ordinary and exceptional as people anywhere else, but Mr. Doyle’s enormous affection for them brings his characters to life.  Billy and May Mahon, a Native American couple, their daughter Nora, her Irish immigrant husband Owen Cooney, and their son, Daniel, are the central characters.  Billy, May, and Nora also have Salish (native) names: Worried Man, Maple Head, and No Horses.  They are a close family and closely tied to Billy’s best friend, Cedar, a war veteran with an unknown past who Billy saved from drowning in the Mink River.  Billy and Cedar comprise the town’s Department of Public Works, whose purview is not only repairing roads and trimming trees but also, in ways large and small, helping people to have better lives.  Help is needed in a town down on its luck: factories close, the logging disappears, fish are fewer and smaller, and it rains at least 280 days a year.

Mr. Doyle has an Irish lust for language that can seem to overflow the pages.  May and Billy sometimes speak and think in their native Salish; Owen speaks Gaelic, his own native language, to Nora and Daniel, so he can hear the beautiful sound of it.  And then there is Mr. Doyle’s passion for the natural world which provides one of the joys of the book: an almost liturgical litany of trees, shrubs, fish, flowers, birds, and animals with which he sees fit to randomly entertain us. If there is a native berry–salmonberry, salal berry, bearberry, shotberry, thimbleberry, snowberry–or bird–ouzel, skimmer, murre, grebe, nighthawk–that he omits to mention, I would be surprised.  Yet one of my quibbles with the book is that he sometimes goes overboard, as in a list of all the fish, birds, and animals consumed during the life of a three-year old bear.  I wish his editor had wielded a sharper pencil.

Mink River is much more about character and language than about plot.  In fact, the plot is a series of accidents and agonies: a death here, an arrest there, a town picnic, and no small amount of magical reality, which serve to gather us into the lives of the characters.  Moses is a crow who aids Billy and Moses in their do-good projects.  He fell from the nest as a fledgling and was rescued by a nun whose name we never learn; she not only taught him to speak, but over time she made him a boon companion.  Moses recalls their last meal together before the  nun’s death:  ”…they would always have this  bronze morning, the bronze triangles of toast between them, the bowl of bronze berries, her left hand on his right foot, his eyes closed, her body shivering, the burble of pigeons on the fire escape the only sound in the room.”  We hear the voice of Moses, more human than corvid, without skepticism.

In an interview, Mr. Doyle admitted to being “fairly accused of vast elephantine sentences” and “passionate overwriting.”  Even if true, these things only slightly diminish his achievement.  When the old nun dies, her soul on its way heavenward gets caught on the blades of a whirring ceiling fan.  The town doctor houses the sick and the dying in his own home. His twelve daily cigarettes are each named after one of the twelve apostles.  Owen Cooney tells his son heartrending tales of an gorta, the Great Hunger which changed the history of Ireland.  Billy and May tell their grandson tales of their Salish forebears.  Declan, a young fisherman, sets out to catch “a halibut as big as a door.”  Michael, the town policeman, loves opera and knows the lyrics to Tosca by heart.  Stella, the bar owner, dreams of having a vineyard.  A dying man dreams of going to sea.  When Daniel rides his bicycle off a cliff, a young she-bear carries his stretcher.  Mr. Doyle achieves this interweaving of the tragic and the mundane, the magical and the real, with great success.

There is a paternalism in Mr. Doyle, a desire to make amends for the suffering his characters endure.  They are his children, are they not?  So, at the end, the dying man dies at sea after catching a really big fish.  Everyone realizes at least a small piece of a dream.  Two or three bad apples are disposed of, but not without sympathy.  Mr. Doyle has been criticized for stitching together what appears to be a happy ending, but what he really did was to give people hope.  Like the people we love and hold dear, books that we love are often flawed but we love them still.

[For Part 1, see here. For the introduction to our discussion, see here.]

In a recent post on dotCommonweal, Robert Imbelli discussed Charles Taylor’s term “excarnation,” which Imbelli glosses as “the avoidance or denial of those dimensions of humanity that threaten our sense of being autonomous individuals.” I have not read all of A Secular Age, but Imbelli’s discussion has helped shape my thinking on Inferno Cantos 7-12. After all, one way to think about the seven vices that chart Dante’s journey through hell is that each vice becomes progressively more “excarnated.” In the name of making us more autonomous, sin ends up dividing us from ourselves. Sin offers an ersatz autonomy that places human will over divine providence and the nature that God created. Sins make bodies less meaningful because meaning can only exist in community. And communities only exist through the interactions of embodied individuals.

There is no community in Hell because there are no bodies in Hell. Unlike the shades he encounters, Dante is embodied. His body still communicates meaningfully. In Canto 12, as Dante walks among the covetous and the wrathful, Chiron notices Dante’s footprints.

When he had uncovered his enormous mouth
he said to his companions: “Have you observed
the one behind dislodges what he touches?
That is not what the feet of dead men do.”
And my good leader, now at Chiron’s breast,
where his two natures join, replied:
“He is indeed alive, and so alone,
it is my task to show him this dark valley
Necessity compels us, not delight.” (Inf. 12:79-87)*

In this life, the more embodied we are, the less alone we are. Our bodies enable communication with others. We long to be “in touch” with our friends and loved ones. And “being in touch” is not a metaphor. But in Hell, no one can be in touch because there are no bodies to touch or to do the touching. (It’s an interesting and important question to ask how immaterial souls can suffer physical torment, but we’ll have to come back to that.) Therefore, because Dante is alive, because he is embodied, he finds himself alone in Hell. He can’t be in touch even with Virgil.** Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always worth thinking about context and expectation when we encounter books, especially books that our culture has deemed “important” or “great.” Reading Dostoevsky is something very different from reading a recipe. But I think reading Dante is more challenging even than Dostoevsky, even than Shakespeare, even than Lucretius or Vergil or Homer. Dante implicates his readers in his journey in way that few other books do. For me, only the Hebrew Scriptures or the New Testament or the Qur’an come to mind as books that are as challenging. Like them, Dante doesn’t let us off the hook. The Commedia is a mirror we hold up to ourselves as much as it is a pilgrim’s journey through the afterlife. In fact, that’s precisely why it’s a mirror we hold up to ourselves.

So if you’ll indulge me, I’ll offer a (very) brief rehearsal of my own encounter with Dante because it will help situate my remarks during this Easter season. I was 15 years old when I met David Lat, now a famous blogger on legal matters. At the time, though, he was an alumnus of my high school, and I met him at (of all things) a debate tournament. “Oh, you’re a freshman,” he said. “You should have Mr. Connelly do the medieval reading group with you.” When I asked Mr. Connelly (Robert Imbelli’s high school classmate!) about this, he raised an eyebrow, asked if I realized what I was getting into, and agreed. Along with five other students, we would meet at 7:30 am on Wednesday mornings. That meant waking up at 5:00 am, getting a train at 6:10, and getting to Regis High School by about 7:30, a full hour and twenty minutes before homeroom. In addition to our regular work load in our English and history classes, we read the Commedia and the Song of Roland and the Canterbury Tales and others whose names I’ve forgotten. And truth be told, I remembered little of even the Commedia except for Paolo and Francesca (which piques the interest of a 15-year-old) and Ulysses. I remembered Statius in the Purgatorio and Bernard in the Paradiso. I remembered the stadium and the lights and the picture of love. And I knew that I would have to read it all again outside an academic situation. Each fall at Villanova, I teach one of the parts of the Commedia, but here I am, almost 20 years after my first encounter with the text, not teaching part of it, but reading the whole thing, and fulfilling a promise I made to myself.

What I offer here, and what I hope to continue to offer, are simply thoughts on certain aspects of the text that strike me as I read. Needless to say, I don’t aim to be comprehensive, but I hope to be coherent. Read the rest of this entry »

Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan) in Season 3 of “The Walking Dead”

Last year while in graduate school, my roommate, boyfriend, brothers and close friends all incessantly tried to convince me to start watching “The Walking Dead.” Between them, every comprehensible reason was thrown at me. “The first season is only six episodes!” “It’s not really a zombie show, it’s more about how people would react in utter chaos.” “The special effects are amazing; it’s the most expensive drama on prime-time.” Having a full-time job and being a full-time student allowed me to cite time constraints as my main excuse for not drinking the “Walking Dead” Kool-Aid. In reality, I just didn’t care about another show about zombies.

I ended up conceding during Hurricane Sandy. With the storm in full swing, I was out of excuses—the office was closed, school was cancelled, and what, my boyfriend asked, would be more appropriate for the last week of October? Giving in, I watched the pilot. I was largely unimpressed with everything, except for Andrew Lincoln’s ability to put on a convincing Georgian accent. After all, what woman can forget him standing outside Keria Knightley’s apartment in “Love Actually” brandishing his “To me, you are perfect” sign? Well played, “Walking Dead.” You have appealed to your female demographic.

Since then, I have become just as addicted as the rest—so much so that I’m actually considering reading the graphic novels. The true appeal of the show lies in its realism. The special effects, props and sound effects are astounding (with some episodes costing as much as $3 million to create). More importantly, though, the show’s creators focus as much on the psychological effects of society’s destruction as on the challenges of fighting off zombies’ snapping jaws. Indeed, by the beginning of season three, the “walkers” seem to have become little more than furniture, background to the true conflict between rivaling groups of survivors. The decisions the groups are faced with are difficult, and the consequences are real. Nothing is sacred and no one is safe. The show has been simultaneously criticized and lauded for its ability to ruthlessly kill beloved characters. “My advice,” my brother said when I told him I finally started watching the show, “is do not become attached to any characters. They don’t stick around long.”

True, some don’t deserve to stick around, but others—like Daryl (Norman Reedus), Glenn (Steven Yeun), Hershel (Scott Wilson)—are all strong, well-rounded characters with sound judgment. What’s sadly missing is a dynamic and powerful female presence. Andrea (Laurie Holden), typically runs to the man (or woman, for that matter) who has the most influence. In recent episodes, she has been trying to do “what’s right,” but it feels too little, too late. Michonne (Danai Gurira), while clearly an able warrior, independent thinker and highly valuable, remains flat. She’s tough, but does that mean she has to be devoid of emotion? The only exception is Maggie (Lauren Cohan). Maggie is a smart, courageous fighter who, though she’s in a romantic relationship, does not hide behind it. So why, then, in a recent episode, was sex used against? If a woman becomes too strong, must her sexuality be made into a tool of humiliation? Still, she is the redeeming female character who, I would argue, does not get nearly as much screen time as she deserves. This may not be a sentiment shared by the show’s core demographic of men aged 18 to 49, but among the upwards of 11 million viewers per episode, I can’t be the only one who would like to see a woman take the lead.

Perhaps as season three comes to a climax, the stage will be set for Maggie to play a bigger part in the next season. The men in charge have made questionable decisions with calamitous consequences. The imminent threat of war promises loss on either side, and I’m anxiously wondering who will be there when the dust settles. Either way, despite my initial reluctance to watch, I will look for season four as ravenously as walkers look for the living.

The English pianist Stephen Hough is hardly unknown on the music scene; The New York Times gave him a full-page profile in advance of his Carnegie Hall recital earlier this month, and many of his recordings (including much-praised complete Rachmaninoff and Saint-Saens concertos) have been spectacular successes. As the Times story makes clear, Hough is a Renaissance man: not only an effortless virtuoso who seems to manage fiendishly difficult music without a sweat, but a composer, painter, poet, onetime MacArthur Fellow, and eclectic blogger for the UK Telegraph.

Hough converted to Roman Catholicism in his teens, attracted to the church in part by a performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (based on Cardinal Newman’s poem). On his blog, he reflects regularly on faith and the church from his perspective as a gay Catholic, and responds with exceptional calm and class to some of the combox flame wars that inevitably follow.

Recently Hough has been raising his profile as a composer: at his New York recital he gave the U.S. premiere of his Second Piano Sonata, notturno luminoso, a fearsomely virtuosic picture of sleeplessness and “night visions” that I can’t wait to hear again. But he has also been devoting attention to sacred music. His 22-minute Missa Mirabilis, written in 2007 for Westminster Cathedral, recently had its U.S. premiere and was also just broadcast on the BBC. Here’s the end of the Credo, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by David Robertson:

Listen to the whole thing here, but hurry if you’re interested: It’s a live concert recording that may disappear quickly from the BBC website. If you think you hear the influence of Francis Poulenc’s choral music, that isn’t an accident; Hough is a Poulenc admirer.

And for those who have never heard Hough play, here he is with a Chopin waltz:

Marilynne Robinson on her reading habits (her favorite genre is non-fiction), the gap separating Housekeeping from Gilead (it was a period filled more with productivity than despair), and the literary character she’d most like to meet (Ishmael).

A great tradition: the Morning News Tournament of Books, in which the best books from the past year square off against one another, March Madness-style.

Teju Cole, author of Open City, has posted a series of tweets in which the opening of a famous novel is interrupted by a drone attack. A typical example: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.”

Francine Prose on dreaming in literature.

I’ve been rooting for Ben Fountain ever since Malcolm Gladwell profiled him in a 2008 New Yorker piece on late-blooming talent. That’s when I learned that Fountain was forty-eight when his first collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, appeared. Anyone who’s seriously tried (with minimal to middling success) to write, much less sell, a serious piece of fiction can’t help but like the story of a guy who never gave up, first while toiling at a job he loathed (lawyer) and then while rededicating himself for several humbling years to the hard work of craft. Brief Encounters arrived to great reviews and in 2007 won the PEN/Hemingway award for fiction.

I loved the stories in Brief Encounters. What I didn’t love so much was Fountain’s debut novel in 2012, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I even had a brief Verdicts piece about it ready to post last summer, but being then brand new to Commonweal felt a little nervous going negative so soon, and I buried it in my hard drive instead. Soon enough, Billy Lynn won the National Book Award. Now, it’s also won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award (announced last week). I heard somewhere else it’s also going to be a movie.

Good for Fountain! I mean that. Success is no reason to begrudge good fortune, no matter my (legitimate) gripes about the book. But success should have nothing to do with what someone says about a novel (or painting or song or TV show), especially when someone is paid for his considered opinion. Which leads me to Alexander Nazaryan’s confession in Salon this week:

I had started reviewing books, a dangerous occupation for an aspiring novelist, sort of like inviting an arsonist to join the fire department. As my own rejection letters piled up, it became unbearable to stomach the notion that others — many of whom seemed, from their biographies, to have sacrificed much less than I had — were being celebrated while I lurked in the byways of the literary world.

Consequently, the reviews I wrote came to bear a stench of bitterness, none more so than one I wrote for the Village Voice in 2008 in which I took on two debut novelists, Keith Gessen and Nathaniel Rich. After comparing them to James Joyce and Ralph Ellison, I proceed to snidely savage their work. It is true: I did not like their novels. But my dislike was set aflame by jealousy of young men whose profiles were similar to mine and who had managed to do what I had not. I remain more embarrassed by that piece than by any other. Keith, Nate: I am sorry.

Apologizing isn’t a bad move, and not just because it’ll help get your essay some attention. But Nazaryan might not have wished to seek the scrutiny of D.G. Myers. Paraphrasing won’t do Myers justice, so:

Don’t misunderstand me. I am as beset by small-mindedness as any other critic. But I have never written a review out of jealousy, and cannot really understand what it would mean to do so. I have abused my share of bad books … but never out of the fear that their authors’ success magnified my own failure. …

I am not bitter that some writers have succeeded where I have failed; I am angry that they have settled for such a measly simulacrum of success. Consider Nazaryan’s own literary ambitions: “Allow me to be immodest: I would like to write the best thing about Brooklyn since William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice and a campus novel to rival Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” William Styron and Donna Tartt? Really? That’s your idea of literary greatness, is it? Now imagine a young actor’s announcing his “immodest” ambition to do community theater.

Like Nazaryan, I too wanted to be a novelist once upon a time. (Till I admitted to myself that I lacked the talent.) My thwarted ambition to write fiction did not leave me jealous of published novelists, though. It gave me a specialized knowledge, an insider’s vantage—the same way an amateur tennis player can see things at the U.S. Open that escape those who have never tried to master the difficult game. But an amateur who is jealous of Roger Federer isn’t particularly interested in tennis; he is engaging in a narcissistic fantasy.

“Things that escape those who have never tried to master the difficult game.” That’s why I like Myers (not because his opinion of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk just happened to validate mine). But it’s also why I’ll probably always like Fountain—he tried, and tried, because he was interested in the writing. 

Fans of rock music and fans of fantasy literature, rejoice!

The Hold Steady will follow the National’s lead and do a song for the upcoming third season of HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones,” Entertainment Weekly reports. They’ll perform a song called “The Bear and the Maiden Fair”, with lyrics from Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin and music by Ramin Djawadi, who does the music for the show. The Hold Steady will release the song on a 7″ on Record Store Day on April 20, backed by the new track “Criminal Fingers”.

I’ve written here about the National before, and Eric Bugyis has written here about the Hold Steady. No one, to my knowledge, has written here about George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. That’s a shame, since Game of Thrones is probably the best fantasy series of the past 15 years or so (imagine Lord of the Rings crossed with House of Cards), and the HBO adaptation is enjoyable, if not quite as good as the books. The band and the show seem a perfect fit:

“We wanted our rendition [of 'The Bear and the Maiden Fair'] to be bawdy and a little sloppy– drunken musicians getting up on the table and jamming while the rowdy party continues around them,” showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss explained toEntertainment Weekly. “There was no one better for the job than the Hold Steady.”

Joseph Frank, biographer of Dostoevsky and a brilliant literary critic, died on Wednesday. Perhaps Frank’s most influential argument was that modern literature was defined by “spatial form.” Frank showed that modern novels like Ulysses and Nightwood regularly favor simultaneity over sequence, asking the reader to, as he puts it, “suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of individual reference can be apprehended as a unity.” In other words, to read the modern novel, you must read it like a poem–which is to say, you must re-read it (and then re-read it again).

Frank is most well known, though, for writing his epic, five-volume biography of Dostoevsky. I know, every biography is described as “magisterial,” but this one really was: deeply researched and endlessly rich in its readings of Dostoevsky’s life and work. Frank’s biography also served as the starting point for one of David Foster Wallace’s greatest essays, appropriately titled “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky.” The piece ends with Wallace calling for contemporary writers to reclaim the seriousness of Dostoevsky’s vision, a vision that Frank elucidated as powerfully as anyone:

So he [Wallace means the contemporary writer]–we, fiction writers–won’t (can’t) dare try to use serious art to advance ideologies. The project would be like Menard’s Quixote. People would either laugh or be embarrassed for us. Given this (and it is a given), who is to blame for the unseriousness of our serious fiction? The culture, the laughers? But they wouldn’t (could not) laugh if a piece of morally passionate, passionately moral fiction was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction. But how to make it that? How–for a writer today, even a talented writer today–to get up the guts to even try? There are no formulas or guarantees. There are, however, models. Frank’s books make one of them concrete and alive and terribly instructive.

What is to be gained by showing the apparent theatrical mechanics of stage production in a film adaptation of a novel? Joe Wright’s direction of Tom Stoppard’s screenplay of Anna Karenina asserts repeatedly that the social life of late 19^th Century Russia is a spectacle. They achieve this by “breaking the frame.” The camera shows us a theater, and upon the stage, as well as in the wings and in the galleries, and on catwalks above the stage, the characters make their entrances and exits. Interludes in particular offer us no doubt that what we are watching is staged, a world of appearances. We watch as the toy train changes into one with “real” carriages and as sliding stage flats open out of Moscow interiors on to country harvests .The titled folk and landed gentry are on stage, and their scripts have rules. Audience and actors change roles easily; people in the cinema seats join those in the camera frame, and we are reminded that to view is to be viewed. To break the rules is to entertain either tragedy or removal from Society; both involve judgments about the game played and how it is played out. The cinema viewers are both excluded from the game and invited to be judges of the players’ fates.

Oddly, the theatrical trope does not lead to the sense that indeed all the actions of the principals are scripted, that they are determined in some way by the invisible hand of the author/director. The emphasis shifts to that of involvement in drama, and frequently to the characters’ awareness of the personal being played out in public. Anna and Vronsky pursue their ends as their intimacies alternate with sliding backdrops and overhead camera shots.

No more brilliant union of the real and make-believe (worked out on the screen of illusions) occurs then in the dancing at the grand ball. The waltzes are choreographed with elaborate and sinewy hand movements; the dance partners offer a stylized grace that in its artfulness approaches the ritual movement of courting birds. What indeed does lies behind passion? Instinctual drives mediated through the artifice of dance? Yet obviously, as the camera tells the viewer in response to the reactions of those watching the dance, this is courtship ritual.

Stoppard’s selection of scenes, the necessary paring down of the lengthy text, works to cast Karenin in an altogether more favorable, indeed noble, light. The concluding scene, in which he sits in an idyllic rural setting, reading while his and Anna’s child and Anna’s bastard daughter play under his protection, suggests the positive effect of suffering upon him. The novel is scarcely so generous. The scene happens, oddly, “off” in so far as it is removed from the mechanisms of the theater.  Perhaps another and significant  use of the trope.

The film is very much Anna’s story; Levin’s passion, growth, idealistic commitment, and ultimate happiness are more suggested than dramatized. It is he who gets short shrift in the adaptation. This is not to assert uselessly that the film is not the book, but rather to admire the effects of the change in medium: page to screen, author’s vision and director’s cut. The theatrical trope stands as a reversal of Chorus’s appeal to the audience at the beginning of Henry V: the “unworthy scaffold” does “bring forth/So great an object.” The “cockpit” holds in abundant ways the cities and the fields of Russia.

Terrence Malick’s latest film, To the Wonder, still hasn’t been released in the United States. I’m a huge Malick fan–see my earlier post on Days of Heaven–so I was already excited to see the new movie, which features Ben Affleck, Rachel McAdams, Olga Kurylenko, and Javier Bardem.

After hearing how Malick asked his actors to prepare, though, I’m even more excited:

To the Wonder had no actual script; to prepare for the film, Kurylenko was asked to read Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, and The Idiot

That Malick would himself be interested in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky isn’t all the surprising: he studied with Stanley Cavell at Harvard and has published a translation of Heidegger’s The Essence of Reasons. That he’d see reading the Russians as adequate preparation for a feature film, though, is pretty wild. Who says that reading literature can’t help you professionally? Long live the humanities.

Mater dolorosa is certainly a title that can be applied to the Mary of Colm Toibin’s Testament of Mary, but the sorrow in her voice rests on a fulcrum of anger and fear. Permit, please the metaphor, to let me say the balance tips towards rejection, and the traditional role she rejects rises away, almost thrown from her grasp. Her novelistic end weighs heavily towards escape, if only imaginary, into a sensuous human realm: “a city filled with wells and trees.” “The world has loosened, like a woman preparing for bed who lets her hair flow free.” Of that other world, of the death of her son, of his crucifixion she says, “I can tell you now, when you say that he redeemed the world, I will say that it was not worth it. It was not worth it.”

Of course, much meaning lies with the “its” of “It was not worth it.” This is the judgment offered by Mary as she approaches not a meeting of those who follow The Way but a Temple of Artemis. She rejects her son’s career and death, denies its supposed meaning, and questions the whole notion of redemption. The directions she favors she summons in the very last words of the book: “And I am whispering the words, knowing that the words matter, and smiling as I say them to the shadows of the gods of this place who linger in the air to watch me and hear me.” All that is the good news of the gospel, she turns from for the humble consolations of this pagan life.

Toibin, in an NPR interview last year with Terry Gross, explained that he had approached the story of Mary as a novelist, and that as he began to inhabit her consciousness, he let the character develop in its own idiosyncratic ways. A reader has to take the unconventional portrait for what is suggests about the traditional Marian narrative.

From the start Mary is defensive of her son, worried over the rag-tag group who follows him and who appears to second the increasingly wild claims he makes for himself. Her mother’s gaze is simply unable to penetrate the life her estranged son is living. “When I rose to embrace him, he appeared unfamiliar, oddly formal and grand, and it struck me that I should speak now . . . ‘You are in great danger,’ I whispered.” She knows that the authorities, Jewish and Roman, are tracking his every movement, but her sun refuses to pay her heed.

She has a close informer and protector, Marcus, who relates to her the summoning to life of Lazarus, the miracle hardly provoking her wonder: “the world around remaining stilled and silent, and my son too, I am told, stilled and silent, as Lazarus began to weep.” She comments further, “They felt, as I felt, as I still feel, that no one should tamper with the fullness that is death.” Jesus’ miracles are signs of power, but of a disruptive sort that Mary sees as violating the processes of nature.

The estrangement is furthered; Mary declares to Marcus when he tells her Jesus is to be crucified and that she, as his mother, is also in danger,” I am not one of his followers.” He replies that she will be sought out no matter what, and he gives her a means of seeing Jesus before his Passion. She lives his coming ordeal in anticipation on her journey south to Jerusalem and once in the city finds her son already in custody and she housed with his followers, a group she distrust and fears. She witnesses with them the trial of Jesus from the square below Pilate’s place of judgment, and finally, stands at the cross, awaiting his end.

Here Toibin makes most clear her demarcation from the Passion of her son: she flees from Golgotha, aware that her life is threatened because of her association with Jesus; she makes this confession: “I will say it now because it has to be said by someone once: I did it [fled] to save myself. I did it for no other reason.” She asserts that she has dreamed that she stood by the cross, held him in the traditional pieta, doing all that is demanded of a mother. But here, she makes the assertion that, in effect makes the novel, “I tell the truth not because it will change night into day or make the days endless in their beauty and comfort they offer us, we who are old. I speak simply because I can, because enough has happened  and because chance may might not come again.”

Toibin’s Mary asserts her self-knowledge, of her weakness, of her unease over her son’s extraordinary life and mission, to separate herself from any distortion of her truth in her anticipation of what will happen to her life’s history. She will not be subsumed into a pattern; she does not believe in what her son has done, nor does she want to be part of such a working out of a plan which she rejects.

“This is over now, The boy became a man and left home and became a dying figure hanging on a cross, I want to be able to imagine that what happened to him will not come, it will see us and decide – not now, not them, And we will be left in peace to grow old.”

The abstraction of the sentence, “became a dying figure,” denies Jesus even his crucified humanity. His mother longs for what is normal, for a life of human generation, linked to the children of women who shuffle of to their deaths having led lives as the gods let them live.

There is an affront in this portrait, surely; but the writing is such, as I hope that the excerpts show, that we go beyond confrontation with an alter-Mary, into the plethora of responses that Jesus in his manhood must have evoked. We have here the gospels at a slant, and the perspective fascinates by way of an invitation to reread and rethink the impact of one who said, “I come not to bring peace but the sword.”

It’s better in Greek. Isn’t it always?*

In English, we have the adjective “bittersweet.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word can be both a noun and an adjective, although it is primarily used as an adjective to mean, “Sweet with an admixture or aftertaste of bitterness. fig. agreeable or pleasant with an alloy of pain or unpleasantness.” But, to continue the metaphor, the bitter taste remains in our mouth far longer than the sweet taste does.

Sappho must have known this. She uses the word γλυκύπικρον, which literally means “sweetbitter.” In one of her most famous fragments, she writes,
Ερος δαὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνει,
γλυκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπετον. (Fragment 40)

Anne Carson, in her collection of Sappho poems If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, translates the fragment this way:
Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me—
Sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in

It’s a beautiful fragment, and its beauty derives, in part, from the fact that it is a fragment. We have a metaphor, but we have no context with which to make sense of the metaphor. Eros melts our limbs. It “steals in.” It stirs us. It makes us sweetbitter. If we translate γλυκύπικρον as bittersweet we miss something. Sweetbitter and bittersweet. It might just be the difference between a dactyl and an anapest. Maybe if we had more than two lines we would be able to tell.

I’ve been thinking about Sappho for two reasons. First, in January I taught a month-long course at my undergraduate alma mater, in which I paired ancient readings on love with readings from the early modern and modern period. We read Homer together with Montaigne, Sappho with Shakespeare, Lucretius with Hobbes, St. John with Pascal, and St. Paul with Kierkegaard. All of the readings were brief selections. (The only two complete readings we did were Plato’s Symposium and the Song of Songs.) In fact, I constantly worried that these selections were too brief, too fragmentary.

The second reason I’ve been thinking about Sappho is that I’ve been reading Daniel Mendelsohn. I’m reviewing his excellent collection of essays Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture for the print edition of Commonweal. In the collection, Mendelsohn has a review of Carson’s volume of Sappho, in which he criticizes the way she deals with the fragmentary nature of Sappho’s text. Read the rest of this entry »