Monthly Archives: May 2009

Phantastes

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This is the book that C.S. Lewis read one day on a train and felt his imagination had been “baptized.” I read it back when I was in college and it didn’t capture me. But recently, after reading more of George MacDonald’s books and being intrigued, I decided to try again.

I thought I didn’t remember it, and it’s partly true; it was mixed up in my memory with Lilith, another of MacDonald’s tales I read around the same time. But I was surprised to stumble across not episodes, but sentences that I remembered exactly from my previous reading of this book.

This time, it captured me. I still wouldn’t say I can “explain” it (which is part of the reason I like it), but I felt I grasped more than I did before. I’m sure certain scenes will stay with me, waiting to be explained by experiences I’ve yet to have.

What it is: “A Faerie Romance,” its title proclaims. It concerns the journey of a young man named Anodos (Greek for “the path up” or “the march up”) through Fairy Land. His journey begins on his 21st birthday, when he inherits the key to an antique desk of his father’s, and discovers a secret compartment at its very heart out of which pops a fairy maiden claiming to be (maybe) his ancestor, and suggesting that some surprises are in store. The next morning his room is transformed, and his journey begins.

I remember studying a novel written about a hundred years before Phantastes — Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown — in which enclosures functioned as mind symbols. So that’s what I thought of when Anodos unlocked the desk. Judging from the nature of the adventures that follow, I think MacDonald may have been using the same symbolism. Fairy Land has a labyrinthian quality, full of mysterious and complex palaces, tales within tales, door that open into different worlds, and encounters and re-encounters with various characters. He meets his shadow there. He considers questions of love and death there. And ultimately he’s tested and learns true humility there. I read one review that said Anodos gives up his ideals at the end, but I disagree. His ideals are tempered, but surely he doesn’t give them up.

That’s a paltry summary. There’s really no way I can summarize this tale. It has a dreamlike quality. But as I said, some of its episodes will stay with me. For instance, there’s one tale Anodos reads during his stay at a mysterious castle in fairyland about a young man with a magic mirror. Every night a woman appears in his apartment, but he can only see her in the mirror. It’s an absorbing story that, like many episodes, explores the nature of love and passion. Will he rise to the occasion and set her free? In the episode that’s perhaps most decisive for Anodos, he witnesses a religious ceremony in which white-robed youths are presented to a majestic figure on a throne — who turns out to be made of wood, and the chamber behind his chair contains a raging wolf that must be killed. What does the wolf stand for? Another decisive plotline has to do with a marble lady Anodos calls to life. She represents his ideal of beauty, but will she return his love — if indeed it’s love that he feels?

These are the kinds of questions the story raises — and many more, both metaphysical and practical. Now that I’ve read more MacDonald, I can recognize some characteristic features, and I enjoyed being able to fit this tale into my mind’s slowly growing network of books by this author: The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, The Golden Key, The Light Princess, At the Back of the North Wind, and Lilith. I also enjoyed the illustrations by Arthur Hughes, praised in the preface by MacDonald’s son Greville as part of the reason he supported this re-issue of the book in 1905. I recommend it for fans of MacDonald, and for fans of fairy tales in general.

The Gutenberg Elegies

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How shall we characterize [reading]? What is it that separate reading acts share that lies beyond the local construction of setting, characters, and narrative circumstances? Is there a fundamental and identifiably constant condition that we return to over and over, one different from all other conditions, from being asleep, from being high, from daydreaming?

I think there is — certainly for me. But years of working in bookstores have convinced me that this fundamental condition is there for others as well — not just a specific inner state, but a need for getting back to it. Readers know it and they seek it out. I study people in the aisles of bookstores all the time. I see them standing in one place with their necks tilted at a forty-five degree angle, looking often not for a specific book, but for a book they can trust to do the job. They want plot and character, sure, but what they really want is a vehicle that will bear them off to the reading state. (Sven Birkerts)

The pages of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age are filled with passages like these. They manage to put a finger precisely on something I feel to be true but have never heard said so well. Birkerts takes reading as his subject, and writes about it compellingly enough to leave me reflective and troubled about our collective step “out of an ancient and familiar solitude and into an enormous web of imponderable linkages. We have created the technology that not only enables us to change our basic nature, but that is making such change all but inevitable.”

I’ve never read such a brilliant meditation on what makes reading distinctive. I’m not talking about the lists of virtues we’re familiar with. I’m talking about perceptive, thorough description of what occurs in us when we read, written in prose that’s vivid and engaging and unfailingly equipped with the categories to take any half-developed hunches we may have had on the subject, and carry them all the way to the end.

As the title promises, this book is an elegiac consideration of what happens to books in an electronic age. Under this heading it covers a lot of ground. There’s no way I can summarize without oversimplifying, but I can offer an incomplete sampling of the subjects addressed:

  • privacy, memory, reflection
  • the linearity and sequential logic of the book vs. interactivity and hypertext
  • how the medium affects the message in literary art
  • how the means affects the end
  • otherness
  • the explosion of data vs. the defining boundaries of the disciplines
  • wisdom vs. expert accessing of information
  • how modern literacy stacks up with the past
  • deconstruction and multiculturalism and the decline (or death) of the author and all forms of author-ity
  • the subversiveness of reading

Birkerts writes, especially in the early chapters, with a digressiveness that might have bothered me except that even his digressions are fascinating. He speaks of the physical book with a reverence I couldn’t completely relate to. Early on, he offers a chapter of reading autobiography that helps to define the significance books and reading have had for him, and I can only partly relate. I’ve always loved reading, and I prefer the book to cyberspace. But Birkerts’ comments make me feel I’ve been downright half-hearted about it at best, doctorate in English notwthstanding. And there are a few points in the argument at which I felt skeptical — more sanguine, and not quite ready to accept the grim worst-case-scenario.

But the chapters that examine the reading act, and that contrast the kinds of mental and even soul-making (borrowing a term from Keats) activity that belong to reading with those encouraged in an information age, have been deeply affecting for me. (One reader said the book had affected him at “a subatomic level.”) I’ve never read anything that opened my eyes more to all that happens when we read, and all the implications of the kinds of media we read. If indeed the book is in decline, this one puts up quite a fight.  I’ve recognized the possibility before that we live in a crucial age when our technology gives us the power to have an impact incalculable to earlier generations. After reading The Gutenberg Elegies I’m convinced beyond a doubt. I recommend it highly for anyone who wants to be more awake and aware in a historic moment when much is at stake.

Getting to Wonderland

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Independent childhood reading seems to continue and elaborate upon the process of imaginative projection initiated through listening. It is, beautifully and openly, a voluntary participation in an ulterior scheme of reality. We might almost call it pure escape, except that getting away is probably less important than getting to… (Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies)

It’s beautifully stated. Is it true that listening is just the “initiating” phase? The preface to the Read-Aloud Handbook speaks of a student with astronomical test scores whose parents chalked it up to the fact that they continued to read aloud to him all the way through high school.

But if there’s some truth to the notion (as there probably is), my question is, have I slowed my daughters’ progress toward independent reading by letting them listen to audiobooks so much?

I’ve rhapsodized before about the virtues of audiobooks. But lately I’ve been working quietly to cover some of the ground formerly occupied by audiobooks with physical books. Audiobooks have some down-sides, too:

  1. They make multi-task-reading possible. Some folks put on music in the background, but my daughters put on stories. They do their playing and building and drawing with Black Beauty or the Little House books or the Narnia books spinning out their worlds in the background. But they aren’t required to give these imaginative worlds their full concentration.
  2. It’s possible to hear a story without getting lost in the clockless, inner world of a book — and without losing self-consciousness.
  3. It’s possible to enjoy complex, deep tales without having to work — without having to sound out words, or figure out unfamiliar concepts from context, or be slowed to the pace of your particular capability at the moment.
  4. It lacks the visual component of language on the page. How does the medium differ when heard instead of seen?

There have been rich cultures that depended on oral tradition. Maybe these things don’t matter. And just because it’s possible for them to happen doesn’t mean they are happening.

The one real concern is #3. Good readers acquire patience and diligence, because there’s no other way to get at the story — no other way to accomplish the “getting to” that Birkerts talks about in the excerpt above. That seems like a good thing to me, though I’m not entirely sure why. Is it because of this stubborn belief that good things should cost something? Or that some rites of passage are necessary? I don’t know. But a willingness to work at reading is something I want to encourage.

War and Peace

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This novel spans roughly 15 years, from 1805-1820, centering on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and Russia’s resistance. More than 500 characters populate its pages, all of them well developed, and several of whose stories are told in great detail. Every social class from peasant to emperor is represented, and every stage of maturity is touched upon.

It’s an amazing book.

There were two aspects that made the greatest impression on me. One is Tolstoy’s sympathetic imagination. The way he renders these characters shows an incredible degree of both keen observation and wisdom. Their personalities are so distinct and so diverse, and Tolstoy develops them so completely, that I’ll never forget some of them. Sometimes he’s exact and loving, as with Pierre and Natasha and Prince Andrei and Princess Marya. Other times he’s exact and merciless, as with Countess Bezhukov. Always, he’s convincing.

The second aspect of the book that stood out to me was its theory of knowledge. (That sounds pretty dry, but it doesn’t come across that way in the story!) Everyone in this tale is trying to impose some sort of order on experience. For Princess Marya, it’s religion. For Nikolai Rostov, it’s military life. For Pierre, at least for awhile, it’s freemasonry. For Countess Bezhukov and Boris Drubetskoy, it’s social status. For Prince Andrei, it’s reason. None of these are shown to be effective at making life meaningful. Ultimately, I thought Tolstoy’s heroine was Natasha Rostov, who approaches life intuitively and passionately, instead of getting weighed down by analysis. She’s not haunted, as the other characters are, by questions about why things are the way they are. She operates more by compassionate instinct than by rational thought, and she’s far and away the most appealing and vibrant character in the book. Pierre is a close second, a kindred spirit to Natasha who arrives at the same approach himself and makes a fit companion for her.

All of the characters seem to have some mystical experience at one point or another when they recognize that human life is ultimately inscrutable. This moment when Prince Andrei thinks he’s about to die on the battlefield is representative of what I mean:

There was nothing over him now except the sky — the lofty sky, not clear, but still immeasurably lofty, with gray clouds slowly creeping across it. “How quiet, calm, and solemn, not like when we were running, shouting, and fighting; not at all like when the Frenchman and the artillerist, with angry and frightened faces, were pulling at the swab — it’s quite different the way the clouds creep across this lofty, infinite sky. How is it I haven’t seen this lofty sky before? And how happy I am that I’ve finally come to know it. Yes! everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing except that. But there is not even that, there is nothing except silence, tranquillity. And thank God!…

There’s no question that Prince Andrei is seeing something significant here, and it has to do with getting a glimpse beyond the chaos of human activity into something that can only be expressed in terms of the feeling of peace he has when he contemplates the sky.

One of Tolstoy’s main agendas in this novel is to make a similar point about the way historians try to make meaning out of human events. Why do things happen the way they do? Why is one battle lost and another won? Why do the fates of nations play out the way they do? Often, Tolstoy’s narrator expounds on how the methods historians use are inadequate. In the same way Prince Andrei recognizes in the sky something larger than his style of accounting has been able to measure, Tolstoy sees in human life forces that historians fail to take into account when they see history in a linear fashion, or as the result of a few men’s decisions: “the spirit of the people,” “necessity,” and other nonrational things are every bit as powerful as the will of emperors or political processes — often moreso. On the whole Tolstoy puts little stock in scientific knowledge of the kind that ascribes motives and causes. (At one point he defines science as “an imaginary knowledge of the perfect truth.”)

For someone who wants to depict the sprawling complexity of human experience, this novel with its epic scope and ever-instructive narrator is the perfect artistic vehicle. It’s a masterpiece, one impossible to close without many different thoughts and impressions. Far be it from me to commit Tolstoy’s cardinal sin by reducing it to dry analysis! I do however plan to debrief with a viewing of the classic 50’s movie version with Audrey Hepburn as Natasha and Henry Fonda as Pierre. A bowl of popcorn and a more passive experience of based on this grand tale should make a suitable bookend to an exhausting but satisfying read.