The Letters of C.S. Lewis

 On December 27th, I finally finished the third volume of The Letters of C.S. Lewis (Walter Hooper, ed.). I bought the Kindle versions in January 2023, so I've had a yearlong journey in this work alone. I'm going to have to write another blog about the rest of the year with Lewis, but I also set myself to read all of Lewis's book-length literary criticism that I haven't read, so I've read through the OHEL volume, The Personal Heresy, A Preface to Paradise Lost, The Discarded Image (again), An Experiment in Criticism (again), and am finishing up Arthurian Torso and Studies in Words. Earlier I'd also read The Allegory of Love and Spenser's Images of Life.

But back to the letters: I feel as though I have immersed myself in a sprawling autobiography. Since I've spent the last year, off and on, reading through the volumes, I have, I believe, a sense of the more personal Lewis behind the published persona. That's not to say that the letters are not rhetorical, but they are more individualized. Here are some preliminary observations:

1. The early letters point the centrality of Lewis's relationship with Arthur Greeves, a relationship that continued throughout his life. The pre-Christian Lewis was warm and open to Greeves, sometimes in ways that are disturbing. The general warmth of letters to friends throughout his life, however, is prefigured in these early letters.
2. He seems (from a contemporary American perspective) to be unfailingly polite, even to his father (though, given that he was being supported by his father during the period of his higher education while he himself was secretly supporting Mrs. Moore and Maureen with those resources, there is a high degree of rhetorical hypocrisy in those letters, of which he repented later). I may, however, be misreading a kind of crisp "businesslike" tone with his father as polite, when it was actually more distant and disconnected. (In fact, after also immersing myself in English TV and contemporary fantasy over the past year and a half, I've come to realize the high degree of icy politeness in many exchanges is actually aggression. If anyone ever says, "May I have a word?", it's never good.) Very soon after his father's death, Lewis begins to confess his guilty feelings about his treatment of his father, and ultimately writes to correspondents evaluating his behavior as instances of sinfulness.
3. The recorded correspondence does little to dispel the mystery of his early relationship with Mrs. Moore, nor does it clarify elements of his relationship with Arthur Greeves. [Greeves apparently censored some of Lewis's letters that he (Greeves) gave to Hooper for the first volume]. The letters do make clear, however, that as the 1940s progressed, Lewis wrote publicly about Mrs. Moore as "his mother." In the same way, he often characterizes his brother's troubles in the letters as "illness." Is this prevarication or a strong wish for privacy? By the late 1950s, however, he was beginning to speak publicly about his brother's alcoholism to some correspondents.
4. As Lewis was writing apologetics for publication, he anticipated and rehearsed many of the arguments he would put more formally in published works in his letters to various correspondents, most specifically Dom Bede Griffiths, and occasionally to Owen Barfield (outside of the "Great War" correspondence). His "apologetic" correspondence continues even after he transitions from published apologetics to children's fiction.
5. His long-term warm correspondence with Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Pitter, and Sister Penelope belie any real deep misogyny. It is clear that he seems to have had a sense of "gender" as a spiritual category, rather than a social construction; I do remember reading that Sayers had made at least one response to his statements about gender before her death in 1957.
6. He had a significant correspondence with many of the literary figures of his generation, including T.S. Eliot, but also Sayers and even E.R. Eddison, whose fantasy novel, The Worm Ouroboros, he highly praised. In fact, he carried on a relatively lengthy correspondence with Eddison in a stylized version of fifteenth-early sixteenth century English. He corresponded several times with Arthur C. Clarke, not only about science fiction, but about the place and role of science and scientists in modern thought (of course, they strenuously disagreed with each other). When Clarke published Childhood's End in 1953, Lewis highly praised it, both to Clarke personally, and to Joy Davidman (before she became his wife). Clarke's publisher used a passage from one of Lewis's letters to Davidman about the book as part of a blurb in a later edition. It's probably significant that Lewis's earlier fictions were in the genre of science fiction/fantasy, which explains the more frequent correspondence with other writers of science fiction and fantasy.
7. His early correspondence, especially, gives many clues about the kinds of works he did like (medievalist fiction and historical fiction, as well as novels, dominated his earlier reading for pleasure). He also read in a specific way (or for a specific purpose) that foreshadows An Experiment in Criticism.
8. I was, however, completely startled by the literally hundreds of thank you notes he wrote in response to the Americans who donated so much food to him and his circle during the postwar years (1946-the early 1950s). Just a few further observations about these letters and the donations: my impression is that he must have received hundreds, maybe a thousand or more (!) pounds of American food and other items over the years of rationing in Britain; he is conscientious to answer with a thank-you each parcel (which he seems to have kept numbered records of in most cases); these answers were invariably graceful and often quite witty, as he struggled to find fresh ways to communicate his gratitude. There's a noticeable shift in his attitude toward the U.S. in these postwar years. Circa WWI, he and his correspondents are relatively dismissive of Americans and the U.S. After the outpouring of American generosity, he often comments that he would gladly visit America, except that Mrs. Moore needed relatively constant care.
9. I noted a progression in Lewis's attitude towards T.S. Eliot in correspondence between the early post WWI years and his work with Eliot on the Prayer Book revision of the 1950s. I'd been struck when reading the Personal Heresy that Lewis's comments about the "subject" of an author's writing and the relationship between that "subject" and the individual author's life paralleled in many ways Eliot's assertions in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." It is clear that it's literary modernism (the literary movement) and "modernism" (the intellectual movement) that Lewis objected to. What Lewis seems to have objected to most in literary modernism was the lack of poetic form, and the aesthetic unpleasantness of many of its characteristic images.
10. In The Pilgrim's Regress, Lewis had much to say about the reductionism of the Freudian view of the human personality, but he also had several things to say in the letters (not all of them negative) about Jung and archetypes (which he spells "archtypes"). Given Lewis's views on myth, it's not surprising that he might have had some affinities with Freud's erstwhile disciple.
11. Whatever one might say about Joy Davidman's motivations for marrying Lewis, it is clear that from his perspective, they enjoyed an amazing few years of marriage. Lewis mentions their happiness and compatibility in many letters, and in one letter calls this the happiest period of his life.
12. The timetable of Lewis's writing of A Grief Observed was also a revelation. After Davidman's death in mid-July of 1960, it was barely 2 1/2 months later that Lewis showed a draft of the book to Roger Lancelyn Green under pledge of secrecy.
13. It is clear that from about the mid-1950s, Lewis's books, but especially his children's books, began to make significant money. His primary publisher, Jocelyn Gibb, began to collect the multitude of essays Lewis had written for some collection volumes after the success of an American-published collection.
14. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s Lewis gained an understanding and appreciation for some existentialist thinkers (Buber and one French thinker), though he claims to have read little of Kierkegaard and understood less. In the early 1960s, he begins to mention Thomas Merton with appreciation, and is reading him.

This experience has given me a new perspective on Lewis's life, and unsettled my perceptions of his career and motivations for writing. Lewis certainly seems to have made a careful distinction between the kinds of writing he did: poetry, allegory, science fiction, supposal, apologetics, myth, children's fantasy, and literary criticism, but outside of the children's fantasy, which had a definite beginning and and end (that is, the first and last books of the Chronicles of Narnia), he wrote all of the other kinds pretty much throughout his life. He often talked about the genesis of his books in biological terms (he called it "being big with book") and their occasions, and continued to do a kind of pastoral apologetics until the end of his life in his correspondence. It is as though writing was a labor that became completely natural for him. He was also a quick and prodigious writer, judging from the volume of letters, diaries, lectures, books and essays of all kinds that issued from his pen.

Review of C.S. Lewis and the Middle Ages

I had written this review for Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, but it turns out they had already published one. So . . .

Robert Boenig, C. S. Lewis and the Middle Ages (Kent, OH, 2012).  Viii + 181 pages.  ISBN: 9781606351147.

Norman Cantor, in Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), takes an outsider perspective on the careers of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, painting them as nostalgic for the zenith of the British Empire, and seeing their primary importance to medieval studies as their fiction.  Robert Boening, by contrast, takes an engaging insider’s view of C. S. Lewis’s personal and professional relationship to the medieval world.

Boenig’s introductory overview attempts in miniature what Cantor attempts in a mid-length volume, and does an excellent job of explaining the milieu of medieval studies from the mid-sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, to contextualize Lewis’s career.  His description of the initial interest in the Middle Ages by the early English Reformers (resulting in the preservation of many Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts) connects Lewis’s religious concerns to the field of medieval studies itself.  His explanation of the roots of the current academic discipline—its origin in Victorian cultural and literary fashion, and the political appropriation of the Middle Ages by some of the authors Lewis appreciates (especially William Morris)—contextualizes not only Lewis, but also the vogue for medievalism that animated Lewis’s early reading.

Chapter one, “Lewis the Medievalist,” focuses on Lewis’s academic career and activities relating to the Middle Ages.  The point of the chapter can be summed up by saying that Lewis’s scholarship attempted to colonize the Renaissance with the Middle Ages.  Boenig makes the case that Lewis found a great worldview affinity with the Middle Ages, and took as his scholarly project the contemporary explanation of the worldview itself for his contemporary audience, showing the interpenetration of the Renaissance with medieval modes of thought and literary expression.

The subsequent chapters connect Lewis’s understanding of the medieval worldview with his notion of Joy, and with both the images and structures of his fiction.  One of the most fruitful insights of these chapters is that Lewis conceived of medieval creativity as dialogic, in which an author appropriates and remakes prior texts.  One sees this most easily in such works by Lewis as The Pilgrim’s Regress and The Great Divorce, but Boenig makes the case that medieval modes of creativity permeate Lewis’s creative writing in a variety of ways, which he describes in detail.

The comprehensive discussion of this mode of medieval creativity provides the reader with an important support for the arguments of Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia; one problematic element of Ward’s argument involves his assertion that the medieval cosmological pattern that he sees was intended by Lewis.  Since Ward himself makes the point that Lewis never explicitly mentioned such a pattern, one might ask whether the pattern resides in the mind of the reader only, rather than the author’s intention.  Boenig’s discussion provides a context to argue that Lewis’s mode of creativity could easily accommodate an implicit “dialogue” between Lewis and medieval cosmology in terms of his Narnian fantasy world.

The book is well-structured and written, engaging to both the layperson and the academic with an interest in Lewis.  It paints an excellent portrait of Lewis as a medievalist and an appreciator of the period.  Boenig’s conclusions and analyses are fruitful to further scholarship on Lewis’s relationship to the medieval period and are interesting in themselves, making this volume well worth reading.

Cycling Books for Father's Day (1)

My daughter and her boyfriend (both competitive cyclists) bought me two books for Father's Day:  Pro Cycling on $10 a Day (Phil Gaimon) (PCO$10), and Land of Second Chances:  The impossible rise of Rwanda's cycling team (Tim Lewis) (LSC).  Both are great reads, and both raise some interesting questions.  (I noticed that this is getting long, so I'll just talk about Gaimon here and save LSC for later.)

Gaimon's memoir is alternately funny and inspiring, in a post-modern sort of way:  got to love the grossness and obscenity of some of the stuff that goes on among the riders in practice, races, and training, and it's interesting to see Gaimon work through his emotions about the injustices that necessarily attend when someone is pursuing a labor of love in the context of a money-making sports environment. (Of course, ultimately he is on the cusp of getting what he set out to accomplish.  Uplifting.)

But it's most interesting to see a young one with postmodern ethics attempting to navigate the moral ambiguities of the cycling scene.  Gaimon has one ethical principle that comes to the fore:  ride clean (of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)).  So, we get a lot of Lance lancing (don't read this book, Armstrong, it'll make you mad).  Lance is Satan.  I understand this issue, to a point:  certainly the sport of cycling has lost much of its popularity in the U.S. thanks to this, and, to be honest, for me it's not so much Lance's actual drug use (I'm willing to give him a pass to an extent on it anyway; EPO was a survival tool during his treatment).  Instead, it's the bullying, the stonewalling, the abandonment of friends and subordinates, and the cultivated cult of personality that are ultimately the most off-putting, for me personally.  Lance's (can I say tragic? Professionally fatal?) flaw (and he has been capable of great good with the Livestrong foundation) was thus interpersonal and not behavioral.

But what Phil focuses on is the drugging.  I understand this, I understand the soap tattoo, I understand the problems of being an effective teetotaler in the company of the addicted.  And he HATES the hypocrisy of the main user pontificating self-righteously.  I get it--hypocrisy is the worst.

Phil is an example of the uniquely American moralist; American moralists run the gamut from social liberals to conservatives (and have, through American history), some tied to traditional religion, some not.  The Puritans get a bad rap, but primarily because we don't believe in the specific moral principles that they are aggressively forwarding.  But their primary moral characteristics, collectively--censoriousness and legal perfectionism--are mirrored in the discussion of almost every social issue of the last two hundred years in the nation.

This is an accident of history:  it so happens that we had a supreme and heinous evil woven into the fabric of the nation before nationhood--slavery.  That monstrous evil was fought from a moral perspective by Abolitionists of all stripes, who all tied themselves to this principle: that slavery is wrong and must be abolished.  Their methods differed:  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book, Thoreau wrote an essay, harbored fugitive slaves, and spent a night in jail, John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry and was hanged.  That was the great moral principle that divided the nation, and led to 620,000 soldier casualties, besides the unrecorded number of slaves and civilians who died in the war and the centuries of slavery.  Rightly, it is a watershed moral issue, and those on the wrong side of it were (and are) vilified as monsters or despicable.

Of course, we did that with alcohol too (Prohibition), and women's suffrage, and civil rights, and gay marriage, and drugs, and speech, and names, and feminism, and smoking, and global warming (climate change?) . . . and the list goes on.  Feel free to add your own items.  One might be forgiven for thinking that some of these causes are more important than others.

But in every case, there's what I guess I'll call the rhetoric of censoriousness and dismissal.  Just think about how people talk about smokers and tobacco companies, and you get my point.  (It is, of course, the unpardonable sin [registering irony here; I have smoked a bit myself]).

Oops.  Anyhow, back to Phil:  he spends most of the book in the moralist position, but at the end is forced to confront the fact that those who were fighting alongside him on the PED issue were themselves often implicated in PED use.  I would say (as Greg Lemond has said, I think) that it was impossible to remain at the top levels of cycling any time between the mid 1980s and pretty much 2013, and not be involved in the doping scandal somehow.  I applaud Gaimon for his final reflection on the issue.

But I'm old; I was inspired by Lemond, and by Jock Boyer, Lon Haldeman, Susan Notorangelo, and others in the '80s.  I've seen a lot of ups and downs.  But that's grist for my next review.

Mea Culpa Disney

This is to Mike Brooks and Bruce Bennett--I now have a Mickey Mouse watch.  It's tasteful, with understated mouseheads etched in orange, and a black band.  But it's been a very different trip with Chris this year than last year.  First, always see Disney with one you love, especially if it's someone who has a good history with Disney.  Yes, the shuttles are still a little slow, and yes, you still can't get anything but Disney coffee within five miles.  But--props to Bruce--you can still get that $14.95 mug that you can keep refilling.  With two (who actually drink from each other's cups), that's even better.

Now, a little Orwell Disney--as we entered the Magic Kingdom yesterday, they had a fingerprint machine on the turnstile (right forefinger only, in the interests of fairness).  Uncle Walt is watching you!

But I now understand the attraction better.  None of the rides were actually cheesy at the Magic Kingdom, and there's a real idealism about the characters that Disney has created.  It's an interesting (and megalomaniacal) goal to create a new and better reality, but the Disney parks really do a good job.  The irony involved in most of the exhibits created a pleasing po-mo feel most of the time.  The only irony-free show was the Hall of Presidents, and the Carousel of Progress was a nostalgic look back to Disney's (relatively) irony-free take on progress (interesting idea, that you could chart the progress of the 20th century through household technology), circa the 1965 New York World's Fair.

The End of Borders

Last Saturday, Chris and I went to a dollar theater at Superstition Springs mall in Mesa Arizona. As we were leaving the theater, we noticed that the Borders Bookstore in the mall was still open. Most of the other Borders in town are shuttered, so we went in.

Signs everywhere--fixtures being sold, but shelves and shelves of books, most 30% off. We wandered the aisles doing a last check of a store that at one time or another had been a big part of both of our lives. I read that Borders was founded in 1971, in Ann Arbor Michigan. When I arrived in Ann Arbor for graduate school in 1979, I found the store immediately. In a town full of bookstores (new and used), Borders was the best. Wikipedia says that the company tailored its inventory system to fit the needs of the particular communities in which the stores were located (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borders_Group). Certainly, my ex-wife's employer, the Christian book distributor Spring Arbor, envied their inventory system. But that's beside the point. Over my decade in Ann Arbor, I must have spent several thousand graduate student dollars at that store, and hundreds of hours just roaming the shelves. I think I've said somewhere else on this blog that I had the idea of melding coffee and books while browsing at bookstores in A-squared (as we used to call it). But I'm lazy, and it took Borders itself to actually do it in the 1990's.

When I got to Tempe Arizona in 1990, the alternative bookstore Changing Hands was still on Mill Avenue, and still collected and posted bookmarks from quality bookstores across the country. They had an old Borders bookmark up (as the developers got to Mill Avenue and a Borders moved in down the street, Changing Hands was forced off the street and into South Tempe In an interesting irony, though the Mill Avenue Borders has been closed for over a year, the Changing Hands has flourished, as have other independent bookstores).

Anyhow, the tour through the aisles of the Superstition Springs Borders prompted a wave of nostalgia that left me verclempt. Chris and I had spent many happy hours in the Borders near Fiesta Mall in Mesa, and had bought several gallons of coffee there. As we wandered, we bought a C.S. Lewis Bible (apologies to Lou Markos), two books of travel writing, a video, and (for me) a book of Arizona bicycle tours. Interestingly, the prices still weren't that low. And that got me thinking--the first time I'd ever bought something on Amazon was about 1999, when it wasn't clear that online retailing would even survivie. But even then, one could hear the faint tolling of the death knell. You could find anything, new or used, on Amazon or their partners. Now, I buy almost all of my books on Amazon, bypassing even the publishers. Chris just bought me a Kindle for Father's Day, and I've been buying $10 books for it, and have been looking for PDFs for it too. We've still got shelves and shelves of books in our house, but I see the world changing ("I can feel it in the air"--Galadriel, LOTR movie, Fellowship of the Ring). I don't know what will happen over the next few years, but I'm also assembling electronic anthologies for our literature classes offered online.

Tolkien and Borders

On September second, 1973, the day J.R.R. Tolkien died, I was "sitting here on a mountain top in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I can hear the wind sighing through the trees, sounding like the distant ocean as it breaks upon a sandy beach. The clouds are red with the light of the sun, which has not risen above them yet, and the carpet of green trees spreads out in a rolling expanse that looks like an endless sea of forest. The light fog has lifted just enough to show the blue streak of distant mountains on the southwestern horizon. This lichen-covered rock on a half-bluff rising from the Ontonagon River is part of a large grey rock face that stretches brokenly from east to west. The ferns, grasses and delicate purple blossoms wave gently in the breeze, giving the impression of the last wavelets of a breaking sea of forest foliage which has dashed itself against this lonely outcropping of rock. I feel insignificant here, but I feel good."

I was beginning my freshman year of college, on the seventh day of an ultimately-16-day Outward Bound style experience. I'd been introduced to The Hobbit as a fourth-grader, when an otherwise-hated teacher read the story aloud; I must have been taken with the story, since my mother has saved a picture I drew at the time, of the dwarves and hobbit being led in chains by goblins. In 1970, a friend introduced 9th-grade me to The Lord of the Rings. By the time of this program, I'd probably read the trilogy through four times, en route to the more than 20 times I must have read it through now. Eight or nine years later (1980 or 81, I can't remember which), I taught Tolkien to undergraduates for the first time, as a teaching assistant in a large class led by a linguistics professor at the University of Michigan. In it I met people more immersed in Tolkien than I was--I received essays written in Elvish, and got a glimpse into the (then new) world of Dungeons and Dragons.

In the meantime, during my undergraduate experience, I would meet Clyde Kilby, who had attempted to help Tolkien arrange his Silmarillion material close to the end of his life, and who would help establish the Wade Collection at Wheaton College.

I'm not sure where this is going, except to say that I'm teaching the works of Tolkien again, and am now reading up on Tolkien and the Inklings, having just finished Colin Duriez's Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. It's a nice, readable piece of popular literary history and criticism, with some interesting insights about influence and the importance of literary groups. It's also got me thinking about my connections (indirect) with Tolkien the human being.

I remember when we hiked out of the woods after 16 days away from any media but print and handwriting. At some point almost immediately upon reaching civilization, I heard of Tolkien's death. I (with apparently every other hippie in the world) had been eagerly awaiting the Silmarillion. Now it would never appear (I thought). The disappointment of that realization is one that has been mirrored a number of times since, in much the same way--whenever one hears of the death of a favorite author (one that a person reads over more than once), the first thought is--"Now there's no more about . . ." (The death of Tony Hillerman also hit me this way.) But I reckoned not with Christopher Tolkien, and now we have a plethora of continuing Tolkien material. The flow has almost stopped now, 10 volumes into the history of Middle earth, and The Children of Hurin later. This will be a literary conundrum for the next century: how to deal with this close posthumous collaboration of father and son.

Also today (and somewhat related), in the Arizona Republic, Laura Trujillo published a poignant look back at Borders Bookstore, most locations of which are closing soon. She remembers it as a gathering place, though a huge chain. During my time in Arizona, I also remember it this way (Chris and I being the bookworms we are), but I remember it as something more.

When I moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1979, Borders had maybe three total locations in the Detroit metro area, the flagship being on State Street in Ann Arbor. At the time, it was unique--a spacious bookstore, with a good booklist inventory in almost every area, and benches. At the time, expresso drinks were just catching on (Cafe Expresso was just opening [early 1980s] on State Street just south of Borders), and I remember thinking that the pairing of books and coffee would be perfect--prescience without action. But I'm certain to have spent several thousand graduate-student dollars and weeks of hours in that store, just perusing books over lunch hours, and in the intervals between and after classes. When I got to Tempe, AZ in 1990, Changing Hands bookstore was still on Mill Avenue, and still collecting bookmarks from specialty bookstores, which they mounted on their walls. There was an Ann Arbor Borders one up.

But that counter-cultural graduate school version of literary bliss was gone by 1995, after Borders went corporate. That booklist and inventory-shipping system served them well for as long as distribution remained physical, but I heard the death knell when I bought my first book on Amazon in the late 1990s. Amazon always had any book in stock, and even had a rare and used volume search. My book-buying habits changed. Now, my reading and buying habits look to change again--as soon as there's a color screen I can read in daylight (and there is--Pixel Qi) on a tablet, I'm reading electronically. But there are still yards and yards of bookshelves in my home.

The SNL University of Westfield Online sketch

Unfortunately, Blogger can't load the link (or I can't figure out how to load it) that will take you to the Saturday Night Live "University of Westfield Online" sketch of two weeks ago. It's a thinly veiled reference to a university that you may recognize.

The fake advertisement says or implies a number of things about online education: that one can get one's degree in one's pajamas, that employers are not keen to hire graduates of an online college, that what one "learns" there is how to cover up one's education, and that it only takes four months to graduate.

As friends of mine have pointed out, none of these statements is necessarily true. But that's not the point, any more than CNN fact-checking SNL's sketch about President Obama's lack of accomplishment is relevant. It's not the truth of the statements, but the perception that they represent that should interest us, and that we should listen to.

Basically, why people laugh is because they tend to believe that 1) online education is easier, 2) online education is less rigorous, and 3) that because of these two things, online education doesn't take as long. If one believes (as I do) that online education can be as rigorous and interesting as campus education, then one should ask where these perceptions have come from.

The university being parodied now has hundreds of thousands of graduates, many from online programs. How many of them are talking about the quality (or lack of it) of their education? Intel has discontinued financial aid for MBA students from this university--why is that? Now it's not as though the players and writers of SNL are actually academics; some of them probably haven't even gone to much, if any, college. They may be the voice of the East Coast, but they are in touch with the urban culture there. Maybe they're like Gary Trudeau, a social liberal but educational conservative, who for years has decried what he sees as slipping standards at Yale (parodied in Doonesbury as Walden College).

It might just be the case that it's the real-life experience of online college students, and the experience of their employers, that's giving the material here. As in any educational situation, it's all in the execution, not in the medium. If those of us in online education do it right, then these satires will go away (or at least change their form).

The Duchess

Of course, a movie starring Kiera Knightly is always going to be visually interesting, but this film ended up being surprisingly dissatisfying. It may be that I'm not a fan of the genre of modern Romance, which is what this movie ended up being. In Northrop Frye's terms, Romance has the structure of comedy (disorder to order), plus exotic settings and interesting noble characters.

This picture, instead, played up the "modern Romance" conventions one sees in such books as Shogun, Gaijin, and the Thorn Birds. The "main characters" have lives that never turn out well; it does not end in relationship, but in a kind of stasis. In the Thorn Birds, for example, the great lovers are torn apart by the calling of the male character, having only one night together. In Gaijin, the putative hero dies of his wounds relatively early on in the novel, leaving no character focus.

In the same way, The Duchess not only compresses the heroine's love life into a few weeks in Bath, it falsifies history as well. In history, the duchess's affair lasted for years.

I'm beginning to believe that there's something to Frye's (and Aristotle's) contention that the actual structures and archetypes of literature carry a special meaning.

The Dark Knight

A couple of days ago, I watched Batman: The Dark Knight, at my son's suggestion. It is different. It's more noir and "realistic" than the others; Christian Bale is the same, but they had to replace Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal. One of my friends yesterday said that she hated the movie because, among other things, she felt that Heath Ledger's depiction of the Joker was over the top, and not at all funny. I, on the other hand, found it to be an intriguing look at the incipient anarchy of humor, and the way that unrestrained humor becomes horror.

I'm always intrigued by the rejection of the "hero" concept. The movie also provided an interesting definition of it: "A hero is someone who plays by the rules--always--and saves society." Given this, Batman can't be a hero, because he doesn't play by the legal rules. But he is a hero because he covers up Harvey Dent's descent into madness, in favor of Dent's image as a hero. So, the concept is exposed as a lie, and the Dark Knight becomes a new definition of the term: self-sacrificing for the society when he instructs Gordon to "tell them I killed those people," since people need an heroic image to believe in. In the same way, Alfred burns the last letter from Gyllenhaal's character because Bruce Wayne still needs something to believe in.

Thus, the traditional concept of the hero is deconstructed-- it's not following the rules, it's one's motivation for action that becomes heroism.

I was also intrigued by the incipient apologia for waterboarding and harsh interrogation methods in the questioning of the Joker in the city jail.

I saw the new movie Knowledge, starring Nick Cage. (Note: there may be plot spoilers coming, so if you want to see the movie, stop reading.) On principle, I have a problem with apocalyptic movies. Armageddon (Bruce Willis) was good, at least in part because the threatened apocalypse did not come about. The Left Behind series of movies was problematic because there's just a generic problem with apocalypse movies, as there is with the "evolutionary" kind of science fiction (you know, when humanity transforms into something other, with concomitant millennial consequences). I think the issue is that in general, audiences identify and sympathize with the hero, and when the hero dies, it produces the tragic effect. However, when the whole of humanity is wiped out, it goes beyond tragedy, as sci-fi goes beyond romance when humanity changes beyond recognition.

I am, however, interested in the repackaging of religious themes in contemporary movies, and Knowledge had that in abundance--Left Behind meets Erich von Daniken meets Armageddon.

So, why am I intrigued, though not completely sold on, Knowledge, while dissing the Left Behind series? I don't really know, if one leaves out better CGI. I suspect that apocalypse is a problem because there's an end to all tension if everyone's dead. Even if a new Eden or millennial existence results for a few, there's something inconceivable about humanity, essentially as we know it, suddenly coming to a complete end (maybe more than 5 billion of the earth's 6 billion being wiped out in an instant, with maybe a few thousand saved? There's a Schindler's List for you). Plus, for Left Behind, if one reads biblical prophecy, there's a millennial existence and Heaven at the end. John struggled to describe it, and such an existence would almost certainly be impossible to describe adequately by an earth-bound human. Literature is based on tension and conflict, so it's not clear where that goes.