Maze of Blood at First Things

Having just fished a snow-laden contributor's copy of First Things out of the mailbox, I am pleased to find not only my review of A. M. Juster's St. Aldhelm's Riddles (thank you to Matthew Schmitz for asking), but also an appearance in the year's roundup of 2015. I'm very glad to be among the lucky few included in the essay.

Here's a look, for visitors who don't have a subscription. (The essay will probably up online later on, just as last year's was.) I should clarify that the reference to "who wasn't written for Marly or for me" is a glance back to prior paragraphs, where Claire Vaye Watkins is mentioned, along with her much-read (yes, I read it) essay in Tin House that stabs at a good many targets, especially "white male literati."

* * *

from John Wilson, "Books of 2015," First Things (March 2016)

Jacket art, Clive Hicks-Jenkins;
book design, Mary-Frances Glover Burt

      Marly Youmans's new novel, Maze of Blood, has an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges (who wasn't writing for Marly or for me, but whose books I have read and reread over the years). It's taken from Borges's story "The Garden of the Forking Paths": I thought of a maze of mazes, of a sinuous, ever growing maze which would take in both past and future and would somehow involve the stars."
     I hate to give away too much and spoil someone's first reading, but here I will be violating that rule a bit. Maze of Blood is (among other things) a novel about the imagination--"about it" by enacting it. (Coleridge is a tutelary presence throughout.) The protagonist, Conall Weaver, is based on Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan the Barbarian. Youmans tells us that before the book begins. But it is not a novel "about" Howard. Rather, it takes his experience as a kind of template.
     Howard committed suicide at the age of thirty--stunning, if you consider what he'd already achieved. (Lots of writers today have published very little by the time they are thirty!) Conall Weaver also kills himself--very early in the book. This is a novel told in reverse chronology: In the last section, Conall is a young boy.
     By now, you may be shaking your head--what sort of book is this? "Experimental fiction"? Ugh. Actually, no--though it may not be your cup of tea in any case. If you are willing to trust the writer, you'll soon get the hang of it. Conall Weaver, like Robert E. Howard, grows up in hardscrabble Texas, a setting in which his writing seems out of place. But he's not just alienated from his setting (which he also loves); he feels at odds with his "time." As does Marly Youmans in her "time," which is ours as well. His stories are an act of rebellion and an act of celebration.
     But this isn't simply a Portrait of the Artist--for Artists (or would-be Artists) only. We are all characters in search of an Author, so the Spirit of Story tells Conall:

     For everything inside a story--and know most of all, that the world is a story and began with a word--is made up. And so the tale of a Green Knight with his chopped-off head still holding a knight of the Round Table to promises made is no less true than the tale of a man crammed with secrets who spontaneously combusts and leaves behind only a black, tallowy mark on the floorboards, and his story in turn is no less true than the tale of a Texas sharecropper's wife who has had a miscarriage only ten days before but just this morning was walking behind the mule and guiding the jerking plow.

A failure of imagination--

I may have more of a mixed crowd among my Twitter and facebook friends than most writers do; I'm not sure. But for a long time I have been bothered about the vehemence and hatred I see expressed by many of my e-friends about an amorphous "they." Usually this means liberal friends expressing anger or scorn toward conservatives or their beliefs, though occasionally I see the reverse. That tilt is natural because I have a lot of friends who are writers and artists, and we tend to fall somewhere on the liberal spectrum. My academic friends are likewise.

Here's what's interesting to me from a writer's point of view about all this.

Novelists dream about that large category, people. Yet there is a whole mass of people about whom novelists won't write except from a stance of scorn. Can anybody tell me the names of some first-rate novels from the past decade or so by writers who tell a story about conservatives with a stance of love and understanding, rather than scorn? That attempt to grasp the worldview, that clamber inside a paper brain with more in mind that mockery and destruction?

The strange thing about this tendency is that writers, of all people, should be able to enter into the ideas and views of those unlike themselves with charity for all. But in this one case, they do not. Will not. And yet for novelists, that is our calling . . . Entering-in is our vocation, or a major part of it.

Imagination and feeling

We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy's impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character's pain, we might also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.  --David Foster Wallace

I read these lines today and was struck by them because I disagree so simply and utterly. Yes, we suffer alone. But no, empathy is not impossible. Utter identification is impossible; we would have to become the Other in order to do so. But empathy is an act that used to be commonly taught in all classes of society; it began often in a young child's observation and instinctual feelings and proceeded to grow through the learning of manners and courtesy. It is still so in many places.

What startled me most in these lines was this: "we might also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own." That had never crossed my mind as a writer's motive for creating fiction until I read those words. In fact, a great deal of my life has been devoted to a role--mother--which one would be mad to undertake if hoping that "others" would "identify" with "our own" feelings. That's not why one becomes a parent. I don't believe that I've ever thought much about others identifying with my feelings; i never thought that there was some special need in me for them to do so, though I appreciate sympathetic feelings as much as anyone. And when I write fiction, I desire my readers to identify not with my feelings but with those of a created character, a being independent from me. My sensation as a writer is one of out-pouring; the sense of a single self or "me" is lost in the deluge.

I have spent many hours as a writer, a worker, a mother, a child, a relative, a friend, and as a simple passer-by on the world's road in identifying with the feelings of others. And I do indeed find the act to be "nourishing" and "redemptive."  Not only am I "less alone," but I am changed and charged with feeling by becoming, for a little while, linked to another person. The inside of me is a little bigger and a little more multitudinous than it was before.

So right now I am thinking hard about what it must have been to be David Foster Wallace, needing the knowledge that others could imagine feeling the way he felt in order for him to feel less alone. While I am most joyous when I turn outward in life or in creation, he needed the nourishment of others turning toward his inwardness and knowing his pain. And now it is empathy and imagination that will tell me what that means, and exactly how sorrowful it is...

The Reduction of Art

Today I commented on a not-new and rather irascible thread, even though I meant not to do so--I don't really like web-contention or find it worthwhile. Both the article and the thread made me feel the urge to reach out a hand toward the long-dead artist.  It's not just that Bernini arouses controversy; it's a certain lack of courtesy and understanding and love for the works of the past that bothers me.

Why attempt to sink into a  work of art when we are so very different (and better, surely) now?  We're sex-friendly, so Bernini must have just been wanting to show the world a sexual image and plunk it down in the middle of Cardinal Cornaro's chosen burial site. As for Teresa of Avila, a mystical nun, and her precisely stated account of divine contact, what do we care whether it was a direct source for Bernini and accurately portrayed? What does that have to do with anything?

Anyway, I thought that "entering in" to a work of art is an important topic for people who love the arts and the achievements of our predecessors, so I am sharing my comment here. See below the picture for a link to the original article.

from "Sexuality and Love in Art"
The critic says that some of the shots he included were stills
 from Schama's Power of Art DVD--not sure whether this is one.

 http://sexualityinart.wordpress.com/2009/08/28/berninis-portrayal-of-the-ecstasy-of-saint-theresa/

The desire to depict the overwhelming nature of religious ecstasy and the ravishment of the soul led Bernini here. You can find parallels in written art--in John Donne, for example. The biblical concept of the body of the Church (that is, the company of all believers) as “bride of Christ” is here taken to its passionate, baroque extreme.

Judging by this thread, I would say that the secular eye and the religious eye are not seeing the same piece of art. Two world views, two versions.

The secular viewer is constrained to be reductive and perceive only sex. To use a proverb with a few sexual connotations of its own, “When you’re a hammer, all the world’s a nail.”

Meanwhile the religious viewer sees the sensuality of this bride of Christ, yes, but in the form of an utter abandon of the human body “slain in the spirit.”

Bernini was not a secular man but a Christian, and here he presents divine joy in a way utterly right for how St. Theresa described her mystic union with God. “The Ecstasy of St. Theresa” shines with his genius for bringing passionate life to stone and a thrilling ability to create dramatic architectural design as setting for his sculptural works.

A hallmark error of our era is to diminish the glories of the past in an effort to make them better “fit” our modern times and modern sensibilities. Not only is there a lack of sympathy for religious experience and transformation, but there is a determined and even self-righteous lack of imagination, which has already begun to close off the great works of past time from many secular viewers.