Formation + Inquiry + Service

Frank Bruni in a Times column the other day described the need, in an age said to be defined by social media, for what he calls “slow debate” – an exchange of ideas informed by the reading of books more than tweets, texts, posts, and the like. His reason is as obvious as it is sound: because real reading is “a prompt for empathy and a whole lot more: coolheadedness, maybe even open-mindedness, definitely deliberation.” It was a call for a collective New Year’s resolution.

Well, it’s already resolved that a “slow debate” about the future of university education will be taking place at Georgetown this year through a series of conversations led by our president, John J. DeGioia, and involving figures from the university, the Washington community, and the wider world.

This CNBC segment gives a preview of Pres. DeGioia’s idea of the university as an entity in service to the common good. Across different eras and cultures, he explains, university education has been characterized by three aspects: the formation of students, the faculty’s pursuit of scholarly inquiry, and the university’s service to the common good of the surrounding community.

All that — and another aspect so evocative that I’ll address it in a separate piece.

These aspects of university life are facing real challenges – ranging from the cost of higher education to the diminished sense that it actually is a common good.

What do universities do? What are universities for? Those are questions that Pres. DeGioia and his conversation partners will be asking continually in 2014 – and November’s opening session with Provost Bob Groves made clear that it’s going to be a conversation to follow, not just to Follow.

• 4 Jan 2014

Smaug Is No Mock-Epic, Alas

Typically the mock-epic follows and echoes the epic. The knight-errant Don Quixote walks deprecatingly in the paths presumably less erring knights have taken before him; Leopold Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin one day in June 1904 line up with Odysseus’s wanderings in the Odyssey, making an epic hero of an ordinary middle-class man.

J.R.R. Tolkien inverted the process. The success of the mock-epic The Hobbit – a compact, inadvertent masterwork written in 1936 – prompted Tolkien to write the actual epic of The Lord of the Rings during the war years. And the epic scale and grandeur of the trilogy (back-shadowed by the epics Tolkien knew by heart) make the light, playfully epic gestures of The Hobbit all the more apparent.

Peter Jackson is inverting the process with his Hobbit movies, but in a very different way and to very different effect. Here the short adventure follows the long one. Here the modest scale of the novel (255 pages) is blown up to six hours of action (with three more coming). A story shortish – like a hobbit – is made epically large. The French word grosse comes to mind.

And the “mock” part of “mock-epic” is overwhelmed by the action. Rereading a passage from the novel at bedtime after seeing The Desolation of Smaug on New Year’s Day, I was struck by how emphatically the story is told from Bilbo Baggins’ point of view, and how tender and thorough his reluctance to take part is: “This is the dreariest and dullest part of all this wretched, tiresome, uncomfortable adventure! I wish I was back in my hobbit-hole by my own warm fireside with the lamp shining!”

The Bilbo of the book really would rather be in his hobbit hole. The Bilbo of The Desolation of Smaug is neither here nor there; as Anthony Lane put it in the New Yorker, he is “along for the ride.”

It’s said that we modern folk lack the epic abilities of our predecessors. That’s the thrust of the Julian Barnes memoir I considered the other day. But the Hobbit movies suggest that the situation is more complicated than the Barnes book – itself an inadvertent masterwork – allows.

It’s not that we aren’t capable of epic gestures: in fact, we are prone to them, we have a weakness for them. So maybe it’s that we don’t have the confidence in the epics of the past that would enable us to echo those epics in our own works rather than try to match them – the old word o’ermaster comes to mind – through industrial light and magic.

• 3 Jan 2014

No Loss of Depth for Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes, in a recent memoir of his wife’s death, insists again and again that we’ve lost the “levels of depth” once afforded by religion and other patterns of significance practiced in the past. And yet with his usual blend of Francophile indirection and English reticence he presents his marriage to his wife – the literary agent Pat Kavanagh – by way of the history of ballooning, the advances of early photography, and the romances of the great pre-cinema actress Sarah Bernhardt.

He recounts how his griefstruck self was momentarily unstuck through drama:

The first play I was taken to was Oedipus; the first opera, Strauss’s Elektra. But as I sat through these harshest of tragedies, in which the gods inflict intolerable punishment for human offence, I didn’t feel myself transported to a distant, antique culture where pity and terror reigned. I felt instead that Oedipus and Elektra were coming to me, to my land, to the new geography I now inhabited.

And he recounts how, in grief, opera and its levels of life and death reached him for the first time:

For most of my life, it had seemed one of the least comprehensible art forms… . I couldn’t make the necessary imaginative leap. Operas felt like deeply implausible and badly constructed plays, with characters yelling in one another’s faces simultaneously … But now, in the darkness of an auditorium and the darkness of grief, the form’s implausibility suddenly dissolved. Now it seemed quite plausible for people to stand onstage and sing at one another, because song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word – both higher and deeper.

That is, it gave him access to levels of depth that are levels of life:

Of course, opera has plot – and I was already anticipating all those unknown stories I was about to discover – but its main function is to deliver the characters as swiftly as possible to the point where thet can sing of their deepest emotions. Opera cuts to the chase – as death does.

“We cannot be Orfeo, or Euridice,” Barnes declares with confidence (confidence of the kind usually dubbed old-fashioned or premodern). “We have lost the old metaphors, and must find new ones. We can’t go down as he went down. So we must go down in a different way.” And yet on page after page of Levels of Life he disproves his own point, going down into grief by drawing deeply and powerfully on the levels of depth found in canonical literature, history, the visual arts, drama, and opera – all in a 128-page book.

Levels of Life is Barnes’s twentieth book, and his recent books represent a turning away from the present (treated so deftly in Metroland, Talking It Over, and other books) and toward the past and its depths. Which suggests that Barnes has outgrown his solitary-and-bereft late-modern manner, and that maybe he hasn’t – maybe we haven’t – lost those levels of life after all.

• 1 Jan 2014

In London NW, Madonna Talks Back

Flannery O’Connor said that reading a little Kafka makes you bolder as a writer, and that’s the way I feel reading Zadie Smith’s novel NW.

The conversation about the state of Catholic writing is now a running conversation.

Gregory Wolfe in a memorable (if unappealing) formulation insists that the current generation of Catholic writers is a “whispering generation.” Which leads me to ask: Whispering why?

The answers usually have something to do with the state of the church or the state of the culture or some such. But my approach to the issue begins with the conviction that literature is made by individual writers, not by the surrounding culture or the spirit of the age – by individual writers who for whatever reasons are (the religious word is undiminished here) inspired to make written works in some ways rather than others.

I wonder if the “whispering generation” is really a cowering generation – writers who are timid when they ought to be bold.

But how to be bold? Well, along comes Zadie Smith to show us. NW is a novel about the neighborhoods of northwest London and certain “encounters, mercurial and vital, like the city itself,” that take place there.

Chapter 17 is set at a medieval church in Willesden, and in a few freestyle sentences Smith sketches the place, the weary edifical presence of it in an ever-changing rough-and-tumble corner of London, the alienation-slash-fascination the characters feel toward it:

—Crazy. Never seen it before. Must have driven by it hundreds of times.

And then the scene-setting turns into a religious moment as unexpectedly apt as Neil Klugman’s impious prayer in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” The protagonist, named Leah Hanwell, a pregnant white Londoner in her mid-thirties, considers an ancient Madonna, and the Madonna – reproachfully – considers her back:

How have you lived your whole life in these streets and never known me? How long did you think you could avoid me? What made you think you were exempt? Don’t you know that I have been here as long as people have cried out for help? Hear me: I am not like those mealy-mouthed pale Madonnas, those simpering virgins! I am older than this place! Older even than the faith that takes my name in vain! Spirit of these beech woods and phone boxes, hedgerows and lampposts, freshwater springs and tube stations, ancient yews and one-stop shops, grazing land and 3D multiplexes. Unruly England of the real life, the animal life! Of the old church, of the new, of a time before churches. Are you feeling hot? Is it all too much? Did you hope for something else? Was there more to it than that? Or less? …

The Madonna talks back: it’s a bold stroke, and I know it makes me want to be a little bolder in my own little metropolitan novel.

• 31 Dec 2013
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O Little Soul of Bethlehem

“The heavy burden of the growing soul / Perplexes and offends more, day by day …”

Come Christmas, down comes the T.S. Eliot Selected for the “Ariel Poems.” So I suggested in a sketch posted the other morning. In truth, the Selected comes down for two of the Ariel poems: “Journey of the Magi” and “A Song of Simeon,” which I’ve read many years running.

So this year I read “Animula” instead. The term of the title is Latin for “little soul,” and in the poem – a tight thirty-odd lines, after the convention of Faber’s Ariel chapbook series – Eliot follows the progress of a modern growing soul. Like much of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholic poetry, it strikes a note of starchy superiority, proposing that the soul innocent of the ministrations of the church remains unjoined to God — remains a very, very small soul.

And then near the end “Animula” flows over into frankly penitential poetry — poetry which might have been written yesterday, not eighty-five years ago:

Pray for Guiterriez, avid of speed and power,

For Boudin, blown to pieces,

For this one who made a great fortune,

And that one who went his own way.

Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth.

Animula — it turns out — is the first word of a famous set of five verses in which the Roman emperor Hadrian, dying in body, bid goodbye to his soul. The verses became a whetstone for parsonical folk sharpening their Latin translation skills. The poet Devin Coldewey’s site has forty-three different translations from five centuries. This especially deft one is by the nineteenth-century Rev. R. Malone:

Pretty spirit, tiny fleeting flame,

Guest and partner of my earthly frame,

Whither passest thou away?

Pale one, stark, unclothed—never more

Sparkling now with joy as heretofore.

Reading these poems, I am struck by how strange the word soul sounds on the tongue and in the inner ear. The idea of the soul, it seems to me, is an idea that has undergone drastic change in our time without anybody really noticing. We don’t think of Eliot’s poetry as soulful, do we? We don’t think of poetry as soulful, do we? We don’t think of the soul as soulful, do we?

• 30 Dec 2013

Science as Performance Art

In 2009 plenty of adult children found Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder under the tree as a Christmas gift. And no wonder: the book – a history of scientific discovery in the era known as the Romantic Age of literature and art – showed this master “Romantic biographer” moving outside the precincts of literature and finding there there the genius, stubborn individualism, eccentricity, and cockeyed Englishness he found in the lives of Shelley and Coleridge.

I suspect that somewhat fewer adult children got Holmes’ Falling Upwards as a Christmas gift this year, and therein lies a story.

It’s not that the book isn’t extraordinary: it is, and I sought to convey the wonders of it in a piece for the New York Times Book Review. It’s that the book tells the story of intrepid 19th-century balloonists – and tells it by floating back past the story of air travel centered on the Wright Brothers and the fixed-wing airplane to other, earlier, more exotic beginnings. This has a strange effect. It makes the stories episodes in a long-lost narrative, rather than a narrative that leads up to the present:

And the high color of the stories, stylized from the start by their protagonists, makes the past feel more self-contained — more past — than it feels in Holmes’s literary ­biographies.

In the same way, it makes the stories episodes in an arrested narrative, one that some would say ended in failure, as the fixed-wing airplane – less elegant than the balloon, but easier to control – came to dominate aviation:

The elusive quality of these narratives has more to do with the spirit-flattening ­forces of modern history and commerce than with the efforts of the author. Ballooning, it is clear, is one of the glories of pre-Great War European civilization. It is research science as performance art. Alongside the aeronauts, the Wright brothers look like a couple of Goldbergian rubes. But the mechanics elbowed the visionaries aside.

Holmes took a ride in the balloon above with the Times's Chip McGrath to promote the book — and while they were aloft explained that the hot-air balloon “has pretty much returned to its original function as a means of lifting people off the ground so they can see the world anew.”

• 29 Dec 2013

Tonight on Conan: Flannery O’Connor?

Dana Gioia’s essay on "The Catholic Writer Today" is up on the First Things site, and I’m going to post several pieces about it in the next few days.

"For years I’ve pondered a cultural and social paradox that diminishes the vitality and diversity of the American arts," Dana begins. In fact, as he knows, many of us have been pondering it: at Georgetown, in Commonweal, in the New York Times Book Review, in Image, in the Wall Street Journal, on Andrew Sullivan’s site, on dappledthings.org, and in the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at USC, where Dana introduced a presentation of mine on the subject this fall and offered spirited commentary right afterward. And in plenty of other places.

In our different ways we’ve sought to get a conversation going, and it has worked. Now it’s time to have the conversation.

One way to begin is to look outside the Catholic literary tradition for parallels and points of contact. That’s what I found myself doing as I watched Inside Llewyn Davis last night. Earlier in the year the Atlantic published a piece in which I argued that folk music hasn’t gone away in recent years; it has just taken a different form, instigated especially by the producer T Bone Burnett, who put together the soundtracks for O Brother, Where Art Thou! and now Llewyn Davis:

More than anybody, Burnett has kept alike the tradition of informal, collective music-making that the folk movement was all about. He’s done it by taking the hootenanny to the movies — using Hollywood cash and clout to get people with old-school wooden instruments to make music together.

I’d propose that something similar has happened with the Catholic imagination. Twenty years ago in the Times Gay Talese asked "Where Are the Italian-American Novelists?" The answer soon became obvious. They weren’t writing novels; they were writing for film and television.

In the same way, Catholics of a certain age — Catholics about my age; I am forty-eight — are thriving in comedy. Stephen Colbert, of course. And Conan O’Brien, who wrote his senior thesis at Harvard about Flannery O’Connor. And Jimmy Fallon, who learned a few tricks at Our Lady of the Snows in Saugerties and the College of St. Rose in Albany. And Amy Poehler, a graduate of Boston College. And on and on.

This isn’t to say that Catholic-accented comedy today is a successor to the visionary Catholic literature of mid-century. It’s just a reminder — as the conversation starts in earnest — that the Catholic imagination isn’t necessarily going to be found where we are looking, or where we want to find it.

• 27 Dec 2013