"To read well, we must become as little children." Thus says Peter Leithart in his sublime essay Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader, in which he presents a theory of authorship and readership based on authority and humility.
Leithart begins by proclaiming the "death of the author" in postmodernism. He argues that postmodern theorists are "challenging the 'authority' of the 'author'." He points us back to a time when "literary theory centered on the concepts of auctor [author] and auctoritas [authority]." To be called an author was "an accolade".
This being in mind, "reading could not be anything but an act of humility -- homage to the auctoritas of an auctor". Leithart argues (and he laments that truisms have to be argued in the postmodern age) that "simply by picking up a book, opening it, and following the words someone else has written, the reader is subjecting himself to the author". Reading fiction and reading it intelligently "requires a humble acceptance of the world of the novel". Leithart calls the "suspension of disbelief" an act of humility. Chesterton wrote that "humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." It makes everything around us large and magnificent. The humility Leithart speaks of is not mere "let's pretend", but "paying attention to what the author thinks is important". We have to submit to the rules that the writer sets, and we play by the rules because he is an auctor with auctoritas. Not every writer deserves the accolade of auctor, and Leithart argues that we have a responsibility "to judge literature ethically.... Though fiction creates its own world, the book also is an objective presence in our world; the world becomes flesh and dwells among us, and the question must be asked whether this incarnate word is doing mischief or good." There are consequences of reading, and we surely do prefer that they be profitable.
At the essay's end, Leithart assures that, "having humbled himself before the author, the reader shall, quite properly, be exalted."
Perfection hounds us remorselessly. - Thomas Howard (Myth: Flight to Reality)Myths have fascinated me since childhood. (I can't remember the first myths I read, although I'm pretty sure I first read about general mythology in an old 1980-something edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.) I read stories about gods, demigods, heroes, monsters, dragons, and cows, and these tales shaped my imagination positively.
... he who has most most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.... though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say, "I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune," etc., as he stands up and says "I believe in God the Father Almighty".... (The Everlasting Man)Another purpose -- if it may be called that -- of the myth is to satisfy man's longing for perfection. Here enters Thomas Howard, Catholic author and brother of Elisabeth Eliott. He says in his essay Myth: Flight to Reality:
The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think the search for perfection.... We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire....
Politics, medicine, ecology, and jurisprudence are our efforts to repair the damage.... When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy that we feel between ourselves and perfection....
... We are driven by who knows what -- maybe it's the Holy Ghost -- to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, and to transcend it.... Myth is one version of this effort.Howard argues for myth's high place in the realm of narrative, saying that "[in] it you will find more or less perfectly manifested what is implicit in all art". He then writes an apologetic for the disengagement of the myth world from our own.
... if we move the world of myth away from the immediate... out of our calendar completely, we disengage it from the fuss of our world, and by thus setting it free from our time, we set ourselves free with respect to it. For time may be the tragic dimension of human experience... the agent and vehicle of change and decay and death. This why poetry and the promise of paradise are so attractive to us. They all offer an escape from time....We don't want the stuff of myths and fairy stories happening in our particular world, Howard says. We don't want storms instantly happening or volcanoes suddenly erupting because the gods are fighting over who gets the remote. Tolkien expresses this, "I in my timid body did not wish to have [dragons] in the neighbourhood, intruding into my relatively safe world ("On Fairy Stories")." Yes, in a sense, myths do happen in this world, but no one really believes that the Titans were first born about 150,000 B.C., or that on the morning of June 17, 1967 the sky-god Horus couldn't let the sun rise yet because the storm-god Set was still having fun flooding Alabama. Erik Christian Haugaard writes:
"Once upon a time" is no time.... In reality... it means "at all times, in all places." ("Portrait of a Poet: Hans Christian Andersen and His Fairy Tales")Even the story like A Tale of Two Cities did not happen in this world. London and Paris exist on Earth, but quite a few of the Tale's characters never lived and breathed on our planet, and for that reason, the world that Dickens created is different from ours.
... we have decided (sometime in the Renaissance it was and we finished the job in the eighteenth century) to recreate the world. It's a very small one now, limited as it is by microscopes and telescopes and computers, and asphalts parking lots at MacDonald's hamburger stands. And it's a horror. It is, above all, boring, for mystery has fled from it. We have announced to anyone who cares to listen -- and somehow one imagines that angels and elves aren't that enthralled by the information -- that we can explain everything....
By the eighteenth century the myth became sovereign that the analytic and rational capacity is absolutely adequate for unscrambling the mystery of the universe. Somewhere in the process the gods fled. The irony is that in the very effort of modern art to disentangle human experience from the transcendent, human experience turned to ashes.(I have never seen a MacDonald's hamburger stand, but this was the twentieth century.) Howard, just as a good Catholic author should, values mystery and disdains contemporary literary materialism. He does commend authors such as Flannery O'Connor and Tolkien the mythmaker: O'Connor, because, through her striking, grotesque images, has reminded us that things are not the way they're supposed to be and that what we've made from these things haven't been satisfactory; Tolkien, because he has used the "ancient shapes" (because nothing the world had at hand suited his purpose) to create a truer world than what most modern authors have produced. Modern (or postmodern) man has come close to explaining everything they have on hand, but he hasn't found explanations of things which matter. Man still hasn't transcended the mess he's put himself in and, stumbling around in ever-growing darkness, still hasn't a grip even on the shadow of perfection. And until the Perfection incarnate returns and puts the final period this chapter of the story of the world and begins the new and more glorious chapter, man never will taste perfection.
God... sent the human race what I call good dreams. I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has given new life to men.Therefore, Howard argues at the essay's end, an excursion "into that world [of myth] [is] never a flight away from reality; they are, rather, a flight to reality".
...[the fairy tale] does not deny the existence of... sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of the deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat..., giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of the good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the "turn" comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen that given by any form of literary art.Buechner continues to write of the Joy of the "happily ever after", not as portrayed in spotless Disney Land but that which happens in a dark world akin to ours -- the happily ever after which gives "a fleeting glimpse of Joy... beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief" which can bring tears to our eyes.
I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels... and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. The story begins and ends in joy.Buechner writing on the same point is a vivid storyteller:
Like the fairy-tale world, the world of the Gospel is a world of darkness, and many of the great scenes take place at night. The child is born at night. He had his first meal in the dark at his mother's breast, and he had his last meal in the dark too.... In the garden he could hardly see the face that leaned forward to kiss him, and from the sixth hour to the ninth hour the sun went out like a match so he died in the same darkness that he was born in and rose in it....
In the world of the fairy tale, the wicked sisters are dressed as if for a Palm Beach wedding, and in the world of the Gospel it is the killjoys, the phonies, the nitpickers, the holier-than-thous, the loveless and cheerless and irrelevant.... It is the ravening wolves who wear sheep's clothing.... When Jesus is asked who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, he reaches into the crown and pulls out a child with a cheek full of bubble gum and eyes full of whatever a child's eyes are full of and says unless you can become like that, don't bother to ask.
And as for the king of the kingdom himself, whoever would recognize him? He has no form or comeliness. His clothes are what he picked up at a rummage sale. He hasn't shaved for weeks. He smells of mortality. We have romanticized his raggedness so long that we can catch echoes only of the way it must have scandalized his time in the horrified question of the Baptist's disciples, "Are you he who is to come?"; in Pilate's "Are you the king of the Jews?"... in the black comedy of the sign they nailed over his head where the joke was written out in three languages so nobody would miss the laugh.
But the whole point of the fairy tale of the Gospel, is of course, that he is the king in spite of everything. The frog turns out to be the prince, the ugly duckling the swan.... There is no less danger and darkness in the Gospel than there is in the Brothers Grimm, but beyond and above all there is the joy of it, the tale of a light breaking into the world that not even the darkness can overcome.Returning to Tolkien:
But in God's kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the "happy ending".These two essays have heightened my appreciation of the Gospels and the story of the Bible as a whole as narrative. They have portrayed the Gospel in a wonderful way -- freshly wonderful. Tolkien's eucatastrophe has altered how I see Christ's first coming in history, and Buechner has beautifully portrayed Christ's work as a fairy story -- or, as Tolkien wrote, a larger kind of story "which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories". Indeed, the fairy tale that is the Gospel is larger and better than all other fairy tales, greater than the legends which it has hallowed, simply because this "tale of a light breaking into the world that not even the darkness can overcome" happened not in a land far, far away, but in our very time-space, and this fairy tale gives us not only glimpses but tastes of that "Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief". Tolkien writes:
It is not difficult to imagine the peculiar excitement and joy that one would fell, if any specially beautiful fairy-story were found to be "primarily" true, its narrative to be history.... The Christian joy, the Gloria, is... pre-eminently (infinitely, if our capacity were not finite) high and joyous.
