Experiments in Criticism

John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) is nearly fifty years old, but its espionage yarn and themes of ethics and disillusionment still resonate.

PLOT

1. In the middle of the Cold War, the British spy service must find its mole, a Russian infiltrator.
2. George Smiley, an ousted spy, must figure out who the mole is with the help of three other spies: Jim Prideaux, Peter Guillam, and Ricki Tarr.
3. The four suspects are Britain’s highest ranking spy officers. Each has a nickname, taken from the children’s nursery rhyme, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor”: Percy Alleline (Tinker), Bill Haydon (Tailor), Roy Bland (Soldier), and Toby Esterhase (Poor Man).
4. Smiley discovers that the traitor is the same man who had an affair with his wife and was best friends with Prideaux. The traitor has his neck broken while awaiting extradition to Russia.
5. Smiley reflects on Britain’s shattered ideals, as he witnesses the nation’s best and brightest become old and broken.

THEME

As a spy novel, the book is primarily about hierarchy (who can you trust?), ethics (which nation is in the right?), and sanctions (what rewards does such service bring?). By connecting the plot with Arthurian romance, le Carré gives his novel mythological resonance. These spies are twentieth-century knights. Smiley is an Arthurian figure, Britain is Guinevere, and the traitor is Lancelot (or Mordred). The novel shows that political allegiance (whether democratic or communist) is an idol that will ultimately disappoint its adherents.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009) tells the story of England’s break with the Roman Catholic Church from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief political adviser. This is the first book in a trilogy.

PLOT

1. Henry VIII wants to marry Anne Boelyn. There’s just one problem. He’s already married.
2. Thomas Cromwell works for Cardinal Wolsey who has been unable to get Henry an annulment with Pope Clement.
3. When Wolsey gets deposed, Cromwell takes his place in the king’s confidence and gets Henry the marriage he wants.
4. The religious and political ramifications of Henry’s remarriage are huge, especially when Anne Boelyn fails to deliver the male heir Henry craves.
5. The novel ends with Cromwell planning the king’s next move as his nemesis, Thomas More, gets executed.

THEME

The novel is about ethics and sanctions. Mantel rewrites the Thomas More-friendly A Man For All Seasons with Cromwell, a Machiavel, for a hero. Cromwell’s motivations are not religious; they are political and pragmatic. He knows the Bible, but he doesn’t live by it. He knows that certain Catholic doctrines have no scriptural support but wearies of how scripture gets used to explain life’s harsh realities. His father beat him, and his wife and children died from sweating sickness. He’s not entirely amoral. As he clashes with Thomas More, he appears more reasonable. The novel shows that even when religion is pervasive, the sanctions that matter most happen here on earth.

This is a modern theme set in an early modern era. Mantel is, in fact, trying to persuade us that this was the moment our modern world began.

C.S. Lewis would disagree with what I have been doing on this site. My readings, he would argue, turn literature into philosophy and religion. I am using Shakespeare, not receiving him. For that reason, I will continue to mull over Lewis’s argument. I know that he and I disagree. I do not know precisely what I would say to him.

An Experiment in Criticism ends with a thrilling description of why Lewis loves literature.

But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

Lewis draws attention to the fact that this transcendent experience resembles worship. In fact, this passage recalls the conclusion of his book Mere Christianity.

Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

The similarity between the passages gives me pause. Literature offers readers the chief advantage of getting beyond ourselves. Christianity takes this advantage to its logical conclusion.

So, I wouldn’t make a statement to Lewis. Instead, I would ask two questions.

1. Is the Bible literature? (Lewis conspicuously leaves scripture out of his experiment.)
2. Should we subordinate our reading of literature to our reading of the Bible? That is, is there a limit to our receiving literature?

This site takes its name from CS Lewis’s book An Experiment in Criticism. What is Lewis’s experiment? He focuses on readers rather than books.

Here are the five important points he makes in the book’s first half.

1. Literary readers receive the books they read, while the unliterary only use what they read.
2. Literary readers rest in the books they read. The unliterary distract themselves with books or expect liteature to offer cover philosophy.
3. Literary readers pay attention to words. The unliterary want to move past words to the ideas they represents.
4. Literary readers hear, as well as read, words. The unliterary ignore how words sound.
5. Literary readers accept the variety of emotions occassioned by the books they read. The unliterary only approve of books that meet their desire for projection or wish-fulfillment.

Don DeLillo’s novel Libra (1988) offers a fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life and death. What follows is an account of the novel’s plot and theme.

PLOT

• Lee Harvey Oswald is a directionless boy who seeks access to a secret world.
• Three men connected with American intelligence conspire to nearly assassinate the president so that the US will invade Cuba.
• Oswald goes back and forth between the Soviet Union and US in his politics and geography.
• Oswald agrees to assassinate the president but finds himself in a larger conspiracy when it comes to executing his plan.
• Oswald dies, but his name lives on.

THEME

The novel’s subject is history. Several characters comment on history’s meaning. Oswald believes, “There is a world inside the world.” David Ferry tells Oswald that history is “the sum total of all the things they aren’t telling us.” The historian Nicholas Branch who is asked to provide the definitive account of the case, feels like he’s working on a “theology of secrets.”

The word “theology” indicates the novel’s actual theme. The novel shows that confronted with the mystery of history, we need to believe in a coherent explanation. This is not only true individually but corporately. The secret world that Oswald seeks is divine providence. The government offers a pale substitute in place of the Lord’s secrets (cf. Deuteronomy 29:29)e.

Marxist literary criticism begins with the presupposition that the causes for art are material. Though Marxist criticism is not monolithic, they all deny spiritual realities. When they differ, it is in the different material causes they identify: strictly economic or diffusely political.

From this materialist premise comes the following covenant.

1. The content of literature never displays its overt meaning. Literary works hide their material causes. Readers (if they’re Marxist) determine what their work truly means.
2. Not only does a work’s content not mean what it overtly says. Authors don’t understand what their work means either. They often unconsciously display their own economic and political relationships.
3. We find the cause for the conventions or rules that govern a work of art in an era’s economic and political context.
4. Readers themselves judge works based on their economic and political circumstances. Marxist critics can correctly analyze the judgments of past readers.
5. Literary form manifests political commitments. How an author writes has political implications, not just what an author writes.

Marxist criticism constitutes an alternative interpretive covenant. These critics follow the money and the confession.

In contrast, Christian criticism responds with the premise of a transcendent and immanent God and Paul’s reminder that “we wrestle not against flesh and blood.” Reducing a work of art to its material causes misses the point.

This is the 30th anniversary of Oliver Stone’s scabrous film, JFK. Stone played fast and loose with the facts to hold the military-industrial complex’s feet to the fire. The government had to kill JFK, Stone maintained, because JFK would have quashed Vietnam and other CIA shenanigans.

Conspiracies highlight the storytelling at the heart of history by taking the facts and telling a different story.

This week, I’ve picked up two novels that attempt to tell the truth in fiction. Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) tells the story of Lee Harvey Oswald with a mixture of historical and fictional characters. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid (1995) tells the story of three men who conspired to kill Kennedy and succeeded. The books offer two different styles of telling the truth in fiction.

DeLillo tells a postmodern tale. “This is a work of imagination,” he tells the reader in a postscript. “I’ve altered and embellished reality.” Nothing surprising there. But DeLillo’s motives are postmodern: a skepticism about metanarratives and the ability for anyone to tell the truth. He chooses to write a novel about the assassination because the story demonstrates the impenetrability of historical fact. All history is subjective. “The writing of any history brings a persuasion and form to events,” Oswald thinks in the novel. Fiction takes a historical account of the crime to its logical conclusion. DeLillo’s narration raises more questions than it answers. He goes inside various characters’ heads, jumps in time, and makes up reasons for historical details while leaving others unexplained. DeLillo tells his story in such a way as to make us understand and feel the weight of the assassination’s

Ellroy tells a gritty tale in often obscene language. Eschewing DeLillo’s aestheticized and philosophical approach, Ellroy makes it his job to get ugly and burn historical myths to the ground. “It’s time to demythologize an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars,” Ellroy writes. “It’s time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here’s to them.” Ellroy gets the “gutter” part right. It’s as though Ellroy has committed himself to tell how the heathen rage (cf. Psalm 2) without revealing the punchline that the Lord holds such earthly power brokers in derision.

DeLillo more effectively evokes the reader’s meditation on God’s providence, the governance of the world that eludes the control of any individual or group. Ellroy more effectively evokes both the disgust of sin and the nasty, brutish, and short world corrupt men and women fight to control. DeLillo shows that transcendence without God is impossible. Ellroy reveals the ethical depths to which covenant-breakers fall.

An important concept in psychoanalysis is “the unconscious,” the part of us that operates without our direct knowledge. Here is how Peter Barry describes it.

The content of the unconscious is, by definition, unknowable, but everything we do is affected by it: we can guess at the nature of this content by observing its effects…

Psychoanalysis substitutes the human unconscious for divine providence. While human beings are not given access to the hidden closet of God’s providence, we know that as the Westminster Confession says, “God the great Creator of all things doth uphold…by his most wise and holy providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge.”

John Calvin compares seeking after the hidden content of God’s providence to getting lost in a maze. Psychoanalytic criticism frequently makes this search even more disorienting by seeking answers in the heart of human beings.

In Beginning Theory, Peter Barry compares structuralism and post-structuralism in four categories. The two schools of literary criticism deny a transcendent God or truth. That’s a point of similarity. The four differences in Barry’s description correspond to the following four points of the covenant.

HIERARCHY: Structuralism and Post-structuralism disagree about which discipline should give literary criticism its marching orders. Structuralism favors linguistics, while Post-structuralism prefers philosophy.

ETHICS: Structuralism attempts to analyze texts with scientific rigor. Structuralist criticism privileges objectivity and orderliness. Post-structuralism is openly emotional, and its criticism focuses on language’s materiality. In legal terms, structuralism prefers statutes, while post-structuralists prefer case-laws.

SANCTIONS: While Structuralists maintain that language creates reality, they insist that reality is orderly. Language is a blessing. Post-structuralists doubt that language is coherent. We are trapped in language, and it is a curse.

SUCCESSION: Structuralism says it offers freedom. If we recognized mediated structures of reality, we can create more reliable ones. Post-structuralism offers revolution. When we examine the tenets of Western Civilization like language and reason, we discover they are make matters worse.

In his book Beginning Theory, Peter Barry reveals the creed of contemporary literary criticism.

Politics is pervasive.

Language is constitutive.

Truth is provisional.

Meaning is contingent.

Human nature is a myth.

Barry writes that this list is the “basic frame of mind which theory embodies.”

Notice how the creed forms a covenant.

Politics is god (transcendence). Language creates power relationships (hierarchy). The truth is a provisional law (ethics), and meaning vacillates (sanctions). Finally, human nature is discontinuous (succession).

I will read and review Barry’s book next week.