Who writes a novel?

I was mowing the lawn today thinking about my upcoming dissertation proposal presentation, and the thought occurred to me: who writes a novel? I'm working on Atlantic Canadian literature and the theme of religion though and in it, and what is coming to the fore is that Catholics are writing novels like they are going out of style. When you look back into the history of Can lit and At-can lit, you find that this is somewhat of a new thing. So I've been wondering why now? What makes one want to write a novel? What political and economic forces must be in place to make writing a novel something you might do? What follows is a conversation over gmail between me and my colleague, Holly (who works on Jews is film), about what gave rise to the novel:

1:22 PM me: who writes a novel?
1:23 PM Holly: a-a-an authour?
well, in biblical lit, we have the debate - "a person creates a document, not a community"
me: this is the big question that hit me while mowing the lawn....
Holly: but then again I don't know if that is true
1:24 PM a text is created FOR a community
me: that seems to be a debate with german romantic ancestry...and a novel isn't really any old document
Holly: no published authour creates just for him or herself
1:25 PM me: no author creates ex nihlo
Holly: yes - that is my take with film
I like Berger's theory of internalization, externalization
1:26 PM me: you know that is Berger's retelling of Marx's dialectic of production - worker makes product and becomes alienated from it though the process of production
1:27 PM Holly: yes
me: but back to the novel. it seems to me that the novel has a particular place in history
Holly: but the idea that a person consumes the product - that is important
1:28 PM novels both document and create history
me: it's kind of like the car... you don't have it until the 20th century...with the novel you don't really have it in full force until the 19th century
Holly: yes - but you had things that led up to it
1:29 PM the stage led to the novel, as well as the essay, the sermon, the poem and the song
me: yes, certainly biblical literature, as well as greek and roman epics lead up to it
1:30 PM The stage...the play
uh huh... is a novel a private 5 act play?
Holly: it is the frustration
poem are too short, sermons too dusty, and plays not internal enough
1:31 PM and, yes, too corporate
me: the european epic to clunky
Holly: the novel is a drawing room intrigue laid bare
a false memoir
me: yes the novel comes to rise after europe is tired of trying to organize communities to act their ideas
Holly: yes
1:32 PM I think I see what you mean
me: the novel also needs the printing press, where the play doesn't
Holly: it is the individual, not the chorus
yes
but with the enlightenment, the emphasis placed on internal reason...
you can't just show after that
you have to let the reader into the mind
1:33 PM since that is what "really matters"
me: wow, this is the question, or the impulse that lead to the unconscious
1:34 PM since the novel is the presentation of one's own imagination, housed in the mind, plus one's own theory of external organization - say Jane Austen's communities and the play of marriage
1:35 PM Holly: yes
1:36 PM me: it can't be wholly about the social, or the community, it has to also be about the depth and complexity of ones internal realm. it has to be exibihitionist
Holly: it is the digesting of what is around you - not the Truth, but the digested matter
people cannot get away from their showing roots
they still must show
but the mode of shoing is different
me: this is why scatological tropes are so common
1:37 PM Holly: through the novel, you can create a play, but you get more than action to do it with
that is why film bridges the gap - it is a play, but with tighter angles so you can show the internal, as well
1:38 PM me: well shakespeare certainly had more then action. Hamlets whole to be or not to be is internal reasoning at its finest
Holly: yes, but it is still rare and short
with a novel, there is more room to develope
and you don't have to rely on artificail things like silloquies
1:39 PM Shakespeare is to the novel as musicals are to personal films
me: so beyond the psychological and the formal, what has to be happening in your state to create a novel?
1:40 PM Holly: a need to express
me: I'm thinking that the novel is tied to the rise of nationalism in europe
Holly: a need to reflect what you see
a need to find others who feel the same
perhaps a need to pursuade
me: perhaps reflect is the wrong word, maybe dominate would do better?
1:41 PM yes, a need to persuade one to your way of thinking... this must come after everyone's unified, catholic way of thinking has been ruptured
1:42 PM Holly: well, that is the function of the nation state
me: The novel is a protestant apolegetic invention
Holly: to unifiy individuals
me: it is made to create communities
audiences (here the parallel with film is strong, yet different)
1:44 PM so we started by saying that a novel was created by an individual who was not interested in organizing and persuading other individuals to take the time to act out their particular imaginative thing. Now we see that the novel does still have a communal impulse - it longs to draw people together under it in affirmation of the author's individual mastery of the known world and the interior drama of self.
1:45 PM It is the drive to political leadership internalized, privatized...
1:46 PM when margaret atwood travels around canada to audiences that gawk at her she is actual demonstrating her leadership of a certain community within a nation. She has created a party
1:48 PM Have you read mrs. Dalloway or seen the film the hours?
1:49 PM Holly: read
me: you know how she bustles around all day trying to create a party, which happens at the end...I think this is an analogy for the novel and its function in society
1:51 PM VW was trying to create an audience of readers, a party in both the upper class and political sense.
do you think this is the same with film?
1:52 PM Holly: maybe

Theological Aesthetics Part Four - The Beauty of the Infinite

David Bentley Hart published The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth in 2003. Hart, an American Greek Orthodox himself [I suspect he is a convert], draws on the thought of Gregory of Nyssa, who was a contemporary of Augustine, the younger brother of Basil the Great, and a good friend of Gregory of Nazianzus. It seems that Gregory of Nyssa was (one of) the first theologian(s) to argue that God was infinite. Before this thinkers like Origen had argued, as consistent with Platonism, that God was limited. I suspect this has something to do with the "form" of the Good in the Platonic system. At any rate, Nyssa pushed towards negative theology, claiming that God was unknowable. The idea that is at the centre of Hart's text, which I suspect comes form Nyssa, is that God is an abyss in which beauty subsists. All the beautiful particulars of creation are not subsumed into unity with God, but given to the beauty of their very particularity in the infinite distance of God himself. For the first third of the book, Hart critiques the "postmodernists" - Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Levinas, Lyotard, Nancy, as well as their intellectual fathers, Heidegger and Nietzsche. Following in Milbank's footsteps, he argues that these thinkers theorize an ontology of violence, a Hobbsian war of all against all, which is based on the Cartesian separation of soul and body, God and creation - that leaves us with skepticism about reality - an inner violence of self consciousness. This is to say that the postmodernists, following Nietzsche, claim that the will to power precedes any peace. For Christians this in unacceptable as the peace of God, b(r)ought through the lamb of God, was spoken before time as the Word of God, and is the primary principle of creation. Any violence that ensues, ensues through deviance from the beautiful order of God in the Garden. We see the violence of lying and disobedience in Adam and Eve, which leads to the brother against brother violence, when Cain kills Abel. The chaos of the Cannanite myth of the Leviathan is placed after the order, peace, goodness and beauty of God's creation (Hart 257-8; this is the best Christian answer to Zizek's chaotic "night of the world" which is his primary principal of the imagination - The Ticklish Subject 29-32 and throughout).
The chaos of culture obscures the objectivity of beauty that was so central to Hellenistic and the Church Fathers. But Hart claims that beauty must not be relegated to a subjective effect, but exalted as an on objective presence (I'm lost for a word here, as Hart critique metaphysics heavily). However, he would be the first to claim that empirical methodologies will not be able to capture of isolate beauty as it is a transcendental, embodying divine distance, which always has a beyond, even while it is present. Like the transcendentals, Hart's thesis pervades his work and yet is not fully understable until you have read the whole.
Not being able to get into the myriad arguments that he puts forth, I will list off notable comments about the beautiful that he makes in the introduction, and which are elaborated throughout.
I should mention that Hart is in Balthasar's camp - arguing for beauty through the analogy of beauty. He critiques Barth quite heavily on this topic.

1. Beauty is objective: "in the beautiful God's glory is revealed as something communicable and intrinsically delightful, as including the creature in its ends, and as completely worthy of love...beauty calls not only for awe and penitence, but also for rejoicing" (17-8).

2. Beauty is the true form of distance: Hart has his eye on Derrida here, who claims that "meaning" [for lack of a better word] cannot traverse distance, and falls to differance. "This presence of distance within the beautiful, as primordially the effect of beauty, provides the essential logic of theological aesthetics: one that does not interpret all distance as an original absence, or as the difference of differentiation's heterogeneous and violent forces, but that sees in distance, and in all the series and intervals that dwell in it, the possibility of peaceful analogies and representations that neither falsify nor constrain the object of regard"(18). "The first thought ... is the thought of the distance that opens up all differences, the interval between their terms, the event of their emergence; and in asserting that distance is originally the gift of the beautiful - rather then the featureless sublimity of will, or force, or differance, or the ontological Nothing - theology interprets the nature and possibility of every interval within being" (19). Hart latter evokes Augustine's analogy of music to describe how created differences can be brought together beautifully and peacefully, under God's orchestration - perhaps the most important point of the book.

3. Beauty evokes desire. Contra Luther and Kierkegaard, who separate ethics and aesthetics, Hart sides with Dante and sees eros and agape united in desire of the particular.

4. Beauty crosses boundaries. Goodness, truth and beauty are convertable..."that God is good may be seen and tasted; and this means that a theology of beauty should not scruple to express itself at times as an ontology, an epistemology, or an ethics...theology should ponder how beauty can compel morally by its excess" (21).

5. Beauty's authority, within theology, guards against any tendency towards gnosticism. Beauty is the incarnate logos, Christ. He came as God and man, spirit and body, united. Creation is good.

6. Beauty resists reduction to the "symbolic". "beauty lies in the immediacy of a certain splendor, radiance, mystery, or allure; it plays upon the continuous insisture of a plastic, or lyric, or organic, or metaphoric surface" (24). He, here, is denying the bad symbolic of fixity (Lacan's law of the father)"the symbolic occurs as that which stabilizes the individual aesthetic moment as a fixed property, a meaning, a kind of exchangeable capital or currency that stands in lieu of substantial wealth" (25). This invites the Cartesian gnosticism, where real and symbolic are parsed from each other, causing the real or the meaning to be an abstracted extra, a supplementarity. For Hart, beauty is on the surface, not in the depths (gnostic truth). "But the beautiful is prior to all schemes of isolable meanings: it is excess but never formlessness, a spilling over, jubilant, proclaming glory without "explaining" it. For just this reason it fixes reflection upon the irreducibly particular, the momentary, fragile, and fortuitous. In the beautiful, when it is liberated from the "symbolic," a purely serial infinity is implied - such as Hegel dreaded - and the circular infinity of synthesis and transcendental reconciliation - such as Hegel heralded - is resisted"(25).

Hart concludes by arguing that beauty is in the particulars: "In the end, that within Christianity which draws persons to itself is a concrete and particular beauty, because a concrete and particular beauty is its deepest truth" (28). Here Hart is trying to side step the onto-theological critique of Heidegger and Derrida.

As you can see, Hart has given Christian thinkers much to mull over. I am not done with Hart. And I'm sure the exercise isn't in vain.

Theological Aesthetics Part Three - Barth and VB

Ladies and gentlemen: wake the kids, call this neighbours, this is an extravaganza you won't want to miss - Theological Aesthetics Part Three.

I have an image in my mind of Karl Barth and Hans Urs Von Balthasar sitting in a dusty European room with a phonograph. Light pours through the window, refracting off the ancient particles floating through the air. Barth is sitting back in a leather chair with stained wooden arms, and Von Balthasar is leaning forward on a piano bench. There are books surrounding them. Towers on the end tables, tomes in the corners, piled high like miniature babels, or conversely, paper altars. What has these two great theologians enraptured? Mozart. His music enchants the still air of their dim room. Both listen for hours, allowing the music to take hold of their bodies, not to dance, but to cause shivers and great sensuous pleasures. But we must not forget the soul. The soul climbs on braided strands of the music, floating on the drafts of sonorous emanations, lifting the mind higher, perhaps contemplating even the lower stratum of the third heaven. Perhaps…
This image is not one I have read of in a book, but one that I have stored in my mind from a course on Charles Taylor by Peter Erb. I have added to it, but it expresses something eminently European, something North American Christians have lost sight of. If this certain “je ne sais qua” was simply European there would be no need for its recovery, but the truth of the matter is that this European element is an important aspect of Christian tradition – the enjoyment of God’s beauty.
Today I want to look at Barth’s thoughts on beauty. There is a difficulty here for Barth. As a protestant who leans on the pillars of Catholicism, Barth saw a danger in raising mater up so high that it might refract God’s glory. Barth thinks Balthasar and his church does this. Balthasar picks up Erich Prytzwara’s notion of the analogy of being, which expresses the idea that the ontic substance of humanity, being, shares a similarity with God’s being, that is separated by a humanly unbridgeable distance between God’s being and Humanity’s. Barth stresses that such an analogy is only to be made through eyes that have been graced by faith. The term often used for Barth’s position is called the analogy of faith. While Barth’s expression of the analogy of faith is to be seen as the door to the contemplation of any further theological analogies, Balthasar sees the analogy of being and the analogy of faith as overlapping analogies. This is to say that the beauty of God can be seen in nature without faith (Rom: 1:20), but that faith perfects this analogy. Where Paul writes: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse” (Rom 1:20), Balthasarian scholar Stephen Fields claims, “If loving self-sacrifice exerts a universal aesthetic appeal, then worldly beauty is an analogy of proper proportionality. In other words, beauty inheres in the Grand Canyon, a Mozart sonata and the Parthenon, even as it does in Mother Theresa and her work. As a result, anyone, even without the analogy of faith, can begin to understand how Christ’s crucifixion can be perceived as beautiful, although only the conviction of faith can ground a firm certitude of this beauty” (“The Beauty of the Ugly” 181).
Barth has problems with this view because it is tied in, traditionally, with a merit mediating interpretation of the sacraments, and leads, in his eyes to the idolatry of nature. I have not read Barth on Rom 1:20, so I cannot speak to what he says about natural theology. But let it be known that the relationship between, in the first case, natural theology and its parallel, “intramundane aesthetics” (Fields’ term for philosophical aesthetics), and revelation, in the second case, is what is at stake here. Is revelation so strange that we are fools before the world? Or is there a kernel of “natural” reason within Christian revelation, which makes us only seem the fool? I’m drawn to the parables and Christ’s concept of hiddenness on this front, but I’ll not advance that idea here.
But what does Barth think about beauty? I’ll let the horse speak (from the horse’s mouth…):
“in answering this as all other questions in the doctrine of God, we must be careful not to start from any preconceived ideas, especially in this case a preconceived idea of the beautiful…. God is not beautiful in the sense that He shares in an idea of beauty superior to Him, so that to know it is to know Him as God. On the contrary, it is as He is God that He is also beautiful, so that He is the basis and standard of everything that is beautiful and of all ideas of the beautiful….” (Gesa Theissen’s Theological Aesthetics: a Reader 318). That said, Barth does not think that beauty is “a leading concept” of God (316). He thinks that both Pseudo-Dionysius and Augustine have mis-stepped here (Balthasar does not share Barth’s opinion). But if we are going to talk about beauty we must see it as an aspect of God’s glory, which includes what we call beauty. “The objective meaning of God’s glory is His active grace and mercy and patience, His love” (317). His glory gives pleasure, awakens desire, but above all “creat[es] enjoyment” (317). Here Barth recovers Augustine, who claimed that there are two categories all “things” can fall into usi (use) and frui (enjoyment). God is the only “thing” that can be enjoyed, where as all other things are to be used for the enjoyment of God; yes, this includes other people, a concept which is repugnant to modern ears. But let us put it this way, if God is the summon bonum, the supreme good, it is likely that his desire for one’s use of other people will not contradict his goodness, and will instead lead to mutual enjoyment in God (for more on this see Paul Griffith’s Lying 52-3). So when Barth claims that God’s glory is to be enjoyed, he is tying theological conceptions of beauty to the source of enjoyment. What is then the sensation of beauty? Joy. “…[T]he glory of God is not only great and sublime [read Kant here] or holy [Otto] and gracious [Luther]…[God’s glory] awakens joy, and is itself joyful. It is not merely a glory which is solemn and good and true, and which, in its perfection and sublimity, might be gloomy or at least joyless…The theologian who has no joy in his work is not a theologians at all” (319). As we can see, Barth is serious about joy, and rightly so. What is it about God that makes him this source of enjoyment and beauty? Barth claims that God is the perfect unity of form and content, “in this form the perfect content, God Himself, shines out” (319). I find this argument to be a bit circular, but I suppose it is the best we can do for now. God is what makes God beautiful. I would point to aspects of wholeness, as Barth does, symmetry, unity, proportionality, spoken-ness and absolute reception in love. But much of this is tied to the imminent trinity and not the economic trinity, which I think is the most tangible aspect of God’s beauty, his discipline. Odd that I’m saying this, but his discipline gives form to his beauty in us, which we are to respond to in obedience. Ultimately we fail, but we fail into grace, which is a beautiful thought.

I’m going to try and tackle David Bentley Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, tomorrow – Part 4. I find his conception of beauty very compelling, and theoretically potent. You might notice that you’ve been getting Balthasar throughout. I wonder if I’ll dedicate a day to him, or if he just floats through this whole investigation like a spirit…time will tell.

Theological Aesthetics Part Two

In my last post I outlined some scriptural support for theological beauty and I highlighted the necessity of adopting a specifically Christian conception of beauty that can reconcile “the father of lights” and the transfiguration with the ugliness of the cross and the humility of Christ. In Part Two I want to consider Allen Tate’s incarnational poetics.

Who was Allen Tate?
Allen Tate (1899-1979) was a poet and literary critic from Kentucky. He went to Vanderbilt University, where he met Robert Penn Warren. He was a member of the Fugitive Poets with John Crow Ransom, and is most often labelled a Southern Agrarian, along with Caroline Gordon, his sometime wife, and the previous two, Warren and Ransom. Wendell Berry is considered a contemporary descendant of this literary movement.

What were Allen Tate’s views on Aesthetics?
I’ll make Balthazar proud and first assert that Tate’s Catholicism is the most important facet of his aesthetic theory. Of the Southern Fugitives in general, Francesca Murphy writes: “The history of the ‘earth’ of the South became the archetypal image through which the Fugitives perceived the transcendentals. This earth acts on its inhabitants as a concrete given: a fence, and a boundary for the imagination, as well as a means of transcendence. To imagine it is to be drawn into a dense, singular fact” (Christ the Form of Beauty 70). For Tate, the particulars of a location are as important to the theological view as the universal. In fact, the particulars are the door through which the universal may be encountered. Siding with T.S. Eliot, as a voice of conservative modernism, Tate et al were ticked off at the Scopes Monkey trial, and though they didn’t hold to literal 7 day creation, they thought there was more at stake. I see them envisioning this trial as an influx of northern liberalism on a political level, which took the right to free thought, as a right to conquest. The trial represented “colonial” aggression from the north that was about to wipe away what they saw as the sin of tradition. To Tate, tradition represented something else: the memory of a history of encounters with a place, with particulars. Tradition in this sense is a house of the memory of interaction with God. To scrap tradition and move on with the modernity of the northern eastern seaboard was not an option. Somewhere during the debates about civil rights and racism in the 60s, we have lost the secondary argument, that liberalism has a way of undermining local particularities while it extends the rule of individual rights and “equality”.
Tate would call this impulse “The Angelic Imagination”, in an essay of that title, bearing the secondary clause: “Poe as God”. The distinctive mark of this imagination is that it: “Surges toward essences without touching upon the mater in which they are enclosed... Poe’s disembodied mind is said to parallel that of the Cartesian dualism. Poe’s imagination is an absolute: it flies directly up into beauty, without crossing the material world” (Murphy 95)
In Tate’s words:
“The reach of our imaginative enlargement is no longer than the ladder of analogy, at the top of which we may see all…that we have brought up with us from the bottom where lies the sensible world. If we take nothing with us to the top but our emptied, angelic intellects, we shall see nothing when we get there. Poe as God sits silent in darkness. Here the movement of tragedy is reversed: there is no action” (Murphy 96).
In Poe, Tate sees Descartes. In Tate we should see Jacques Maritain. In Maritain we should see Aquinas and Dante (not to mention Beatrice). Back to Poe: Tate’s problem: like Descartes, the angelic imagination “ends in solipsism” (96). Where Descartes’ skepticism lead him to doubt the very existence of the world, Poe’s angelic imagination does away with the world so as to live in thought. Descartes’ had a crisis; whereas Poe’s nationals see an economic opportunity. To quote David Bowie ( but it's Kurt Cobain I hear): “You’re face to face, with the man who sold the world”. The second stanza highlights the predicament that Tate feared:
I laughed and shook his hand,
I made my way back home,
I searched for form and land,
Years and years I roamed,
I gazed a gazely stare,
We walked a million hills -- I must have died alone,
A long long time ago.
The death of the world, the real, leads to the death of the self. What is the fix? Murphy leads us to Dante and Beatrice: “The radiance which shines through this feminine figure (Beatrice) gives its beholder a sense of reality, but only when the witness binds themselves to this one, single form” (97).
The theory of being-in-the-world that pre-figures much of this conception is decidedly anti-cartesian, anti-Kantian, pro-Thomistic. For Maritain, we engage the world through the intellect. We see a flower. Our mind forms a phantasm or an image of that flower. Our illuminative intellect then activates the phantasm and the intellect-in-act encounters the phantasm of the flower-in-act, revealing a glimpse of the essence, or form of the flower (for more on this see Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, p. 70-74, or Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, q. 84). Catherine Pickstock calls this process “hylomorphism” : “the form of the thing is already synthesized before it ‘informs’ the mind (even though the active intellect must bring out its full coherence)... the thing fulfills itself in and through its comprehensibility. Such a view regards the knowing of a thing as commensurate with the known thing’s own constitutive repetition. For when the species is formed in our mind, the thing perceived happens again (since being is an event), or repeats itself, though in a different mode” (After Writing 131). What all of these thinkers are defending is the convertability of knowledge to being and to beauty. One will notice that using the post-modern variants of Kantian representation, beauty becomes disengaged with reality, the real, God. Beauty is purely cultural, and not the penetration of God in culture, the incarnation. Tate and others were attempting to preserve the Thomistic tradition of essence, participation and analogy, which, as we all know, is assailed from all sides.

In Part three of Theological Aesthetics I will consider Karl Barth's contention that Beauty is not a front running concept of God.

Theological Aesthetics Part One

One of the questions I will need to answer for my upcoming comprehensive exam is on theological aesthetics. Hans Urs von Balthazar has drawn a harsh line across this field of study by claiming that theology must be the adjective and aesthetics the noun, and not the other way around. To inquire into aesthetic theology is to free a conception of beauty from the tradition of theology, only to apply it to theology itself, thereby twisting theology towards a non-theological conception of beauty. In opposition to this, theological aesthetics weds Christian claims with a conception of beauty. We essentially refuse the difference between God and beauty, while asserting the truth of Christian dogma. The transcendental of beauty finds it's home in the trinity and not the other way around.

How is the father revealed to the world? Through the son as logos and as Jesus the Christ. Here we run smack dab into Isaiah's account of the messiah: "He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him" (Isa 53:2b). Christ was not beautiful of body, but beautiful in action, in obedience, in spirit. Beauty, if it is linked to the trinity, must have an aspect in it that can hold both the apex and nadir of the kenotic passage in Phil. 2:6-11. We have Christ the humble, who was willing to become horrendous on the Cross, but who was raised up in his true light...a light that is too radiant for fallen eyes. We see a foretaste of this in the transfiguration of Christ, and we see the analogical fulfillment of this beautiful, awesome Christ in Rev. 1:12-16. This is Christ as he was uttered before time: the cosmological Christ who shines like the sun, speaks with words that sound like running waters, holds seven stars in his hand, has hair like wool, eyes like blazing fire, wearing a golden sash. John of Patmos then goes on to rhetorically unfold this figure, but if we move too fast to the hermeneutics of apocalyptic secrets, we miss the most important point of all. This analogical image of Christ is one that ascends and descends. The beauty of Christ is explained through the sensuous particulars of creation, all of which are brought together in a constellation that mediates Christ's beauty. We ascend to the glory of the son through an appreciation of the materials of the world.

Here is the central tension of theological aesthetics. It must orient us toward the beauty of the trinity, while also demonstrating how it is that the trinitarian beauty is transcendentally present in the world. If we cut off the world, we lose the flesh to a variation of gnosticism, and as we know from the crucifixion and resurrection, Christ valued humanity so much that he sought to redeem his "very good" creation (Gen. 1:31).

In part two I'm going to look at Allen Tate's conception of the universal in the particular, as articulated by Francesca Murphy in Christ the Form of Beauty.