The Magus

This is a book I stumbled across in a Barnes and Noble. I had read The French Lieutenant’s Woman because it was in my Dad’s collection. But I had yet to discover John Fowles. This first-rate writer came out of the sixties with a bang. No other writer from this era really has the descriptive power of Fowles.

The novel concerns Nicholas, and is a tour de force of a bildungsroman. It is clearly a sexually explicit romp through all the caverns of Nicholas’ consciousness. Alison, his paramour, writes him off early in the novel to pursue her various forbidden loves.

What is a magus? It is a magician, a conjurer, a sorcerer of sorts. This was expressly forbidden by scripture, and yet we have magicians. This may be the role of the poet, to use language in a magical way:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time. (69).

The explorer is similar to the magician in that the new environs is like magic. I play the Magic the Gathering game in the same way. This is an exploration, a ‘nonnadoo’ (do nothing) of sorts.

The original title of this book was The God Game. This man is an atheist, but he cannot stop talking about God:

“Lily was humanity bound to duty, unable to choose, suffering, at the mercy of social ideals. Humanity was both crucified and marching toward the cross” (152).

This is the gospel. This method of righteousness is the sale of certain ‘social ideals.’ I was taken aback by the level of detail in which this is described. The cross is still the best way that atheists have to talk about suffering. This happened to me as I was trying to quit smoking. In fact, the cross stands as the primary example from antiquity about suffering. This is the god game that even atheists play.

The magus is Maurice Conchis. He is the wizened old sage that Nick the narrator constantly comes to for advice: “Very wise. If I prayed, I’d ask God never to reveal himself to me. Because if He did I should know that He was not God. But a liar.” (296).

From the Scripture, we understand that ‘all men are liars.’ ( Romans 3: 4). The accusation of God is a liar is the worst amount of heresy. We need to make sure that there is some visiting of the Holy Scripture to the god game. Otherwise, we lack the terms to have a vigorous debate.

Jesus Christ appears only one time in the book, which is 665 pages. “What did Christ say on the cross? Why hast thou forsaken me?” (434). Clearly, even atheists have a sense of the ’emptying’ that the Lord made for our sakes. This is also part of the god game. We talk of the abandoning of the Savior, but He was crucified in our places.

This makes for a good conversation between atheists and believers. As long as we are willing to agree on terminology, we can play the god game with others. But we dare not be anything but silent in the presence of greatness. This is the truth that we have to grapple with: the historical fact of the cross.

I read The Magus because of this god game. It kept me going through some of the pages. If you want to talk about Jesus, you have to make sure that you have the right terms. Even Blaise Pascal said, that faith was a gamble. But according to Pascal, if you bet and lose, you’re out nothing. But if you are right, you have everything to gain (Pascal 132). This wager is what makes the god game meaningful.

Works Cited

Fowles, John. The Magus. Back Bay Books, 2010, pp. 1-655.

Pascal, Blaise. Pensees. Penguin, 2001, p. 132.

Post-Antebellum Novels

I’ve recently been reading material that addresses the antebellum era in American history and literature. Several texts come to mind: Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water, William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. Each of these texts brings a unique approach to the period. I’m in the process of getting published in the era of antebellum fiction, and these texts provide a belwether of literary attitudes towards a controversial era.

Harris’ The Sweetness of Water (2021), addresses two former slaves, Prentiss and Landry — freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. They seek refuges on the homestead of George Walker and his wife Isabelle. They go on an unabated quest to reunite with their mother. The most poignant moment is between two gay ex-confederate soldiers who at the conclusion of the novel, have a forbidden romance. I thought that this work was a little ham-handed, but still carried on the tradition of chronicling slavery in the tradition of Edward P. Jones.

Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner (1966), recounts the internal monologue of a historical leader of a slave rebellion — Nat Turner. He is equally slave, preacher, and executive of this slave rebellion. Nat was caught with a sword (slaves did not have access to firearms) after murdering several inhabitants of a Virginia town. This work shows the scar of slavery, and how it mutilated race relations at the time. The novel is typical of Styron’s free indirect discourse, and shows how one polarizing figure can become the avatar of abolition several decades before the Civil War.

In Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), Cora is a young slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Caesar, a slave who had arrived from Virginia, urges her to join him on the Underground Railroad, a secret method that slaves used in order to escape from the slave states in the South to Northern states and Canada. Cora embarks on a “harrowing flight” from slavery that draws comparisons to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1). The quest to escape the horrors of bondage of chattel slavery gives us a contemporary account of what it must have been like to participate in this diaspora, popularized by the renegade slave Harriet Tubman.

In each of these tales, we get a jarred sense of the scourge of slavery, and how this moral stain continues to affect the history of the United States. I would also recommend the work of historian Jill Lepore in These Truths, an expansive history of the United States. For anyone interested in this topic, there are countless examples of antebellum historical fiction that gives us a good sense of what was at stake in the abolition movement, which has a vise grip on the social fabric of the antebellum period, but which also informs our understanding of race relations in the 21st century.

Works Cited

Harris, Nathan. The Sweetness of Water. Back Bay Books, 2021, pp. 1-101.

Lepore, Jill. These Truths: A History of the United States. Norton, 2018, pp. 153-272.

Styron, William. The Confessions of Nat Turner. Vintage, 1966, pp. 1-117.

Whitehead, Colson. The Underground Railroad. Anchor Books, 2016, pp.1-135.

Modern American Lit (actually…)

I recently picked up Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky (1959). I got this book mainly because Dave Eggers had a blurb on the front cover, and I read everything that Eggers writes. But I was actually very interested in exploring Bowles, a fine writer from the 20th century that I had only a little experience with. (There are so many authors from the 20th century American scene! Especially pre- and post- World War II authors like James Agee.)

This work picks up on Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and gives it a new twist: these are expatriates in Oran, Algeria. The main character, Port, experiences some malaise as his wife is enticed by a man during their train ride to Tangiers. Port is an interesting character because he neither typifies the American expatriate, nor the tourist. He likes to think of himself as the “traveller” instead of a “tourist” (12). This makes him thoroughly uprooted from his native country, the United States.

The main issue in this particular work is that the characters are ‘deracinés’ which is a French word for people who are no longer tied to the land. This uprooted quality of the text is what makes it hypnotic. You can never tell whether the characters are actually American or North African. Because they aren’t ‘natives’ in any sense of the word. But Bowles skillfully weaves this aimlessness into the narrative: “[The bar] was full of the sadness inherent in all deracinated things” (49).

Then there is the hypnotic magical realism at work in this novel: “Reach out, pierce the fine fabric of the sheltering sky, take repose” (229). At times, Bowles is at pains to express the danger inherent in the Sahara. There seems to be only some comfort in the sky. In some sense, we see the sky “le ciel” (in French) as the “sacred canopy” that is described in Peter L. Berger’s work of the same name.

We have a ‘Sheltering Sky’ in which a hole is torn into it. When men and women used to trust in God, they have now an existential universe that is plagued by secularism. For this reason, it is necessary to “re-enchant” the cosmos, as Charles Taylor argues in his A Secular Age (101).

Works Cited:

Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy. Anchor Books, 1969, p.102.

Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. Ecco, 1959, pp. 2-229.

Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap, 2010, p.101

Balzac in English pedagogy

I’m developing a course for student at GSU who have not been successful at English courses. I thought this proem from Balzac’s ‘Lost Illusions’ (1847) to be helpful in inspiring poetic literacy.

““Oh, my Lord,” the poet replied, hoping to knock these thick heads with his golden sceptre, “But ordinary people have neither your intelligence nor your charity. Our sorrows are ignored, and nobody know our labours. It is easier for the miner to dig gold from the rocks than to draw poetic images from the entrails of the most unrewarding of languages. If it is the function of poetry to state ideas so that everybody can feel and understand them, the poet must constantly run the gamut of every type of human mind, so as to be capable of satisfying all; he must conceal logic and feeling, those conflicting powers, under the brightest colours; he must condense a whole world of thought into a single word, sum up whole philosophies in an image; indeed, his poems are the seed whose flowers must blossom in all hearts, growing there in soil made receptive by personal experience. How can you state everything unless you have felt everything? And to feel deeply, is not that to suffer? Poems are born only after difficult explorations of the vast regions of the mind, and of the world as well.” (96-97) (Modern Library edition; translated by Kathleen Raine)

I often use classic 19th century literature in my pedagogy. This is a method that has yielded mixed results. Some students are turned on, but for others, it’s irrelevant. I’m interested to know how other instructors have used old books for pedagogy. Thoughts? 🙂

I’m happy to field comments from any subscribers…

Christian musings

John 1:1 says ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.’ (NIV) This places the word as the self-existent evidence of God’s creative power. The Greek word for ‘word’ is logos, which is where we get our word logic. The fact that science can discover the mind of the universe is one thing I think gets omitted from the conversation. But Sir Isaac Newton wrote many religious treatises, and his laws are based on the self-existent power of God in the word.

John goes on to say ‘the word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us.’ ( John 1:14 NIV) The word is in the person of Jesus Christ. As C. S. Lewis has stated, it is impossible to look at this man as merely a wise teacher. In Mere Christianity, he writes “Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse” (52). A close reading of the synoptic gospels has squarely located the person of Christ as the evidence of divine personhood in history.

Bright Eyes recent release Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was, has a killer line “I read God is dead/ I shed some tears for Him/ But I swore on His grave I’d never do it again/ And I screamed when I realized what was happening/ that I had Good News.” ( “Dance and Sing”) This is the beauty of the gospel, that the sacrament of the eucharist gives us reason to celebrate. In fact, god was killed, but he rose again. And He lives in the hearts of everyone who has accepted him.

I’ve been watching churches on the internet and TV, and I can say, there are some good ones out there. Particularly, Revolution church in Canton, pastored by Jason Gerdes, is a a quotable and worthy one. Some of his sermons are available on YouTube. There is one moment in a worship song that really moved my heart. It was in the song Jesus You Alone where the female singer sings “You broke the curse for our freedom” (3:24). This is a theological point that is not easy to master.

Matthew 5:17 refers to the fact that Jesus came to fulfill the law, not to abolish it. In fact, Jesus kept the law perfectly, but all of our sin had to be dealt with. The cross shows how Jesus bore the penalty of all the ways in which mankind had failed to keep the law. There’s a great Crossway article about this. Thus, the penalty for salvation was his to take, which he took willingly. In truth, there is no other person quite like Jesus in history who fulfills the law perfectly. But he tries to instill our hearts with a new law: the law of love.

I know that the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus Christ may be hard to grasp, but the spiritual law that guides our steps is one in which we must grapple with. There’s no shortage of spates of violence, ingratitude, and iniquity in our culture, but the healing power of Jesus is something that I cannot deny, nor completely grasp. But it has certainly made a difference for me.

American Lit (classically)

I’m teaching American Lit this fall, and I’m trying to rack my brain. I need the spirit of the ages to complete the thing. I spent the week trying to assemble a reading list for my students, and frankly, I’m still reeling with the challenge.

Mainly, the issue that is confronting many classrooms is that some canonical texts are considered to be racist. But I concur with the notion that these works have stood the test of time for reasons unrelated to their inherent racism. We can still get a lot out of reading these texts, even though we don’t necessarily think the same way that they did.

This is also part of the internal zeitgeist of the American literary canon. Some have suggested that like Delillo’s Underworld, American literary icons produce these cultural artefacts that tell us more about the age that they were written in than anything about the “warm-blooded” individuals that make up a society.

I’ve got a pretty good handle on the subject matter, but I want to inspire my students. I want to make sure that all the bases are covered. If I drop the ball, it won’t be because I haven’t prepared a lot. I need a lot of encouragement, and frankly, it’s coming from the bottom up.

I’m looking to cover the antebellum period with reference to Transcendentalism (Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau) and a peek into Henry James in the post-bellum period. What seems less opaque is the transbellum period (1860-1865). The journalism of Whitman is always helpful, but may need some scaffolding to truly understand.

I think the main thing that I’m wrestling with is how to present the literary period without too much historical background, and yet to couch it in terms of literary movements that defined the period. I love Henry Adams ‘The Education of Henry Adams,’ but am not sure that my students would take well to it.

It is important not to overload the students with text. They have a significant reading load and get behind easily. So the main issue might to be to contextualize the text that they are reading instead of introducing new text as a rule. Georgia State can be a place where students feel a little lost, so it’s good not to impose too much upon them.

What is paramount is to imaginatively transport students to the time period in which this piece was written. To do this, I often imaginatively ‘reenact’ the literature, especially to pique their interest. In this way, we are able to ‘walk a mile in the shoes’ of the writer, and get a better handle on the material.

The darned 4th chapter

I have been struggling with a forgotten relic of the 19th century American lit of the antebellum period. In fact, the novel itself, by Robert Henry Newell, is very little evidence of utopian thinking in this period. What it does reveal is that paper itself was a kind of utopia — an entrance point to a literate culture that could subsist on anti-woke dreams and romances. The novel ‘Avery Gleebun; between two fires’ (1857) is a tough read because of its paper thin characters and intense sentimentality.

But given that the most that people could afford at the time was a Bible and a few scattered religious tracts, the popular novel (of the time) had (HAD) to be sentimental. It is a work of literature with a few choice gems scattered in between pages of almost impenetrable sentimental dialogue. But why this work & its author fell into the forgotten list of antebellum authors who were NOT Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville is a blessed mystery that I am trying to unravel.

This novel has struck my interest, as well as the Orpheus C. Kerr (a pun based on “Off-Ice See-Ker”) Papers, has relaunched my study into the history of print in the 19th century. This begins and ends with William Charvat’s ‘Literary Publishing in America 1790-1850,’ a book that I have yet to fully read and truly appreciate. I’m going to try to read and take notes in hopes that a Ch. 4 of the dissertation will emerge.

I still remember that ‘God gives us the privilege of seeing the right’ to quote A. Lincoln, the 16th president and a fan of R. H. Newell’s work. So it will take a mountain of prayer to get over this hill which is also a kind of desert. I hope to emerge from it unscathed, but fear that it may be everlong (Foo Fighters’ song) an issue that never gets resolved. I hope that I am able to get a bird’s eye view of this chapter but it may not happen.

In the courtyard…

The cat creature bustled and hustled out of the open window and towards the garden. He overheard a conversation, as he stood on the roof, of a legend that no man’s ear had ever yet heard.

A young woman, dressed daintilly in red and gold, sat talking to her sister about the strangest of tales: a dragonite from afar. He was likely to dismiss this as nonsense from an old wives tale, but Bubba Yee perked his ears nonetheless.

The young woman in the dark crimson gown bent her head, brunette hair falling behind her ears, ever so preciously over her coffee, as she told the tale of the dragonite to her elder sister.

“I have seen it with my own eyes: the Naxos. A blue dragon from the floating continent who has shape shifting ability,” she said.

“Surely you must be joking!” the dark haired companion siad with ribald laughter.

“I would not tell you fairy stories!” the crimson lady said. ” I read it in the Annals of Marginalia Vol. IX part i. The Naxos is a beast who speaks fluent Cosmou, and he can take the form of a sage.”

“… or wiseacre!” she retorted.

“It was he who related the information of Mithrax’s attack repelled by…”

“Who?” she asked.

“An elf that I cannot remember or recall his name,” she said with a puzzled look.

“Speaking of elves, have you been apprised of how our young green friend is getting along?”

“I suppose better than usual since he was manumitted,” she said.

“I’ve heard that he spends all his days trying to master mathematics and poetry,” the dark-haired woman in navy blue said.

“Nonsense. This fellow is trying to become a white mage. I’ve heard his abortive incantations all day, and frankly, I’m sick of them.”

“Back to Naxos,” said the dark-haired woman.

“What do you know of him?”

“His wisdom is at least partially responsible for the prophecy,” she whispered,

adding, “That’s what Daddy doesn’t want you to know.”

“He always told us that Melchior received the prophecy through a red mage disguised as a beggar woman,” she said.

“Papa is always trying to keep us in the dark,” she said.

Another wizard came a-sauntering in with moxie. He mixed drinks often, and had a red nose from frequent drinking.

“I know the beggar woman,” he stated flatly.

“I think you read too many dragonite novels,” she retorted.

“Adam, don’t be silly.”

Adam had a peak-hat with three corners, scarlet as the late afternoon sunset. His face was like flint, and he screwed his eyes up at the two damsels.

Bubba Yee could hardly believe his luck having run into a real wizard. This fellow could possibly grant his wish to anthropomorphize. He listened intently to the conversation.

“You met her?”

“Well, not to say exactly…” he offered.

“I think you have been dreaming,” she said, staring at the hem of her crimson dress.

Leo part ii

The cat noticed that the green face was extremely frustrated. His efforts to master magic had sloughed off like a snake skin. Weirdos had to become wanderers and learn magic the hard way… through experience. But the green elf with pointy ears could not afford to be weird – it was against court life – ruled by formality , honor, and of course, conformity. That day there was a horrible flood in the kitchen. BY had knocked over his water bowl much to the chagrin of his owner. The massive eartherware vessel with an open lip and arabesque decorations had been a sort of heirloom – a testimony of many cats – but was unstable and porous because of cracks. In order to grab a kitty snack, BY had turned over the box of kitty treats. His pointy ears perked and he purred like the staccato ticks of a clockwork owl.

Poxig wondered if Halifax was open to math lessons. The dreary court atmosphere made him pine for the freedoms as a young bard. But they were nullabists, and Poxig had higher ambitions. He had to be satisfied with his enervating job as a court mathematician’s assistant. The court yawned in boredom of his math lessons – but these were the best that money could buy. His familiarity with differential equations made him a hit commodity, but did the business of the court have to be so irretrievably dull? He would have to teach them again summations. This seemed to be almost impossible for them to conceive of.

BY, as a cat, was not at all obedient to his master. He acknowledged him in passing, but without interest. He was an affectionate cat, but his green-faced master seemed to be always too busy. He used to sit on the mat in order to get in a staring contest. But the cat’s eyes always burned with the ambition of his master. He was no ordinary cat, but wanted his master to be able to shine the light of transmogrification on him so that he could anthropomorphize. He wished to grow legs so that he could learn to stand on his own two feet. He was tired of walking on four, & being a burden to his master. He looked around the castle’s interior room which was adjacent to the refectory. He was filled with hatred for all those objects – the king’s toys from when he was a child – they were now his toys. A ragged old doll with a green face, the smelling salts that now emitted noxious fumes, the cradle which was his bed (now time worn and tawdry). They reminded him of his inferior status, and he longed to rise. He was sick of sitting at home and lying around like a vagrant. He wanted to do something significant.

As the green-faced owner had to admit, he was no ordinary cat, someday he would be a ‘yion.’ The Yion would be his new name once he had been changed to his anthropomorphic self. But until the, he had to admit that he was still a cat – no more, no less. Tears of pain continued to fall from his face, only because he was so ignored. The elvish human hardly paid attention to him. The unassuming little cat used to play games – something that would obviously be beneath a yion. These trivialitites passed the time, but clearly did not get him to his goal. He played the scratching post ball game – a tether tied to a scratching post. The was the circle ball game – a ball that went around in a circle. The point of this game, he could not discern. But the amusement suited his fancy and dispelled the awful spectre of boredom – a continual issue in the court of Cornelia, the capitol of Marginalia.

BY could tell that the green master felt this boredom powerfully as well, but he called it ‘ennuie,’ which was perhaps Dragonite for something he could hardly understand. He remained resigned to his temporary fate as a housecat, but his dreams were different. BY could imagine himself the summoned creature of a powerful warrior – perhaps his master. But it was beyond him for now so he curled up by the fireplace and napped.

What I got from fantasy novels

I’ve been perusing into fantasy literature, and have found a few gems which I will explicate here. Wizard’s First Rule, by Terry Goodkind, is one of the best that I have ever read. This one has nuggets of wisdom woven into tangibly readable dialogue and action. I haven’t yet seen a fantasy novel that leads in so well with the death of Richard’s father, to the Mud People, to the jarring revelation of the Rule. Why this hasn’t been made into a TV miniseries yet, I don’t know.

I’m less of a fan of some of the spinoff fiction from this author. Severed Souls, for me, wasn’t near up to the descriptive capability of its predecessor. I’m still struggling with the wanton violence, which seems excessive and doesn’t really have a point. But many people would say that fantasy works do this ad infinitum. Going over the top doesn’t really help the dialogue, nor the plot. Without an appreciation of the characters, the book wouldn’t attract me in the slightest.

I also recently finished Eye of the World, by Robert Jordan. Jordan seems an able administrator of his fiction in a way that is catching to the eye. His work was recently redone in a miniseries, but I didn’t like way the characters were portrayed. It didn’t hold a candle to the book, not by a longshot. In order to create a fantasy world this detailed, you probably have to get a PhD in the thing. But I’m still trying to get this book, and I may have to give it another good solid read.

The greatest fantasy novel (other than Tolkien which doesn’t count) is ‘The Elfstones of Shannara,’ by Terry Brooks. This masterwork was made into a TV miniseries with MTV, but as far as I know, it has been yanked off of Netflix, for reasons that I durst not explain. I did enjoy this portrayal of the work, and it was much closer to the book’s contents with a few annoying teen prop fictional sentimentalism. But if I had to recommend one to go for, it would be this one. I’m part of the way through Song of Shannara. This work seems promising, but ‘Elfstones’ is the masterpiece.

I’ve recently finished Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Roses and Thorns. The world she has created is fairy tale friendly and quite sexy at points. I’ve likened this particular work to other mythos registers such as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, and Erica Johansen’s The Queen of the Tearling. The storytelling is succinct, dynamic, and eminently readable. Romance and fantasy do often dovetail nicely, as they do in this incipient work about Prythia.

The list goes on here, and I’m about to get into some N. K. Jemsin total escapism. I wouldn’t recommend it if you want to hold down a job!