Drifting (Again)

Bob Robinson posed a question in response to my Comment Q & A:

I wonder if revolutionaries are not just individuals or if there may also be movements that happen, either with intentional conspiring (people bucking the "bad examples" together) or with separate moves of individuals being led by the same Spirit of God (that maybe God himself is the one who wants a revolution). When is it the "spirit of the age" and when is it the Spirit of God?

Instead of giving a straight answer, I thought it might be nice to dredge up an old post from Notes on Craft, written when the passages from T. S. Eliot and Evelyn Waugh that inform my answer to the Comment questions first took root in my brain. So with no further ado . . .

DRIFTING

Maybe readers are better off giving contemporary authors a wide berth. With the classics, you encounter books that have stood the test of time. Each of them is a voice in the great conversation and, taken together, they balance each other out. Read widely enough and a kind of synthesis emerges. That's what T. S. Eliot says in his essay "Religion and Literature." With contemporary art, though, you don't really experience the back-and-forth dialectic. Time has not yet thinned the ranks, so instead of a counterpointed conversation between individuals, spanning centuries, in today's books -- whenever today happens to be -- you get a chorus of the zeitgeist. As Eliot points out:

... the reader of contemporary literature is not, like the reader of the established great literature of all time, exposing himself to the influence of divers and contradictory personalities; he is exposing himself to a mass movement of writers who, each of them, think that they have something individually to offer, but are really all working together in the same direction.

This is a daunting consideration if you happen to be a contemporary author. On the one hand, I hear Eliot's advice and it rings true. As a reader I set great store by old books. But as an author I wonder if this doesn't cast a shadow over my own efforts. Am I just another cog in some contemporary 'mass movement,' or am I one of the few individuals? Eliot considered it harder than ever in his own day to be an individual, and I don't imagine it's gotten easier since then. I would be flattering myself, I suspect, to classify myself in the sacred camp, which means that by passing along Eliot's advice with approbation, I am in essence telling you not to bother to read my work. At the very least, you should wait until I'm dead and history has had an opportunity to give its verdict.

If I'm not an individual, I would at least like to believe that I'm striving to become one, and that self-awareness is the first step. Last summer, I was much inspired by something Evelyn Waugh said on the subject:

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.

Most of the artists I know are not reactionaries. The opposition they offer is very much in tune with the tenor of the age. They have quite conventional views on most subjects and are only able to fancy themselves as rebels by imagining some great unwashed Other that opposes their principles. In fact, the uniformity of moral and political opinion among the creative class is somewhat notorious. Our art may transgress, but our opinions rarely do. Or if they do, the people they offend are the uncouth, easily-manipulated masses. We tend to side with the elites.

George Orwell understood this. In an unfinished essay on Waugh, he wrote:

. . . the opinions which a writer feels frightened of expressing are not those which are disapproved of by society as a whole. To a great extent, what is still loosely thought of as heterodoxy has become orthodoxy. It is nonsense to pretend, for instance, that at this date there is something daring and original in proclaiming yourself an anarchist, an atheist, a pacificist, etc. The daring thing, or at any rate the unfashionable thing, is to believe in God or to approve of the capitalist system.

Not that Orwell did either. But Evelyn Waugh did, and it made him stand out as a novelist. Orwell continues:

In our own day, the English novelist who has most conspicuously defied his contemporaries is Evelyn Waugh. Waugh's outlook on life is, I should say, false and to some extent perverse, but at least it must be said for him that he adopted it at a time when it did not pay to do so, and his literary reputation has suffered accordingly.

According to Orwell, Waugh's is the "only loudly discordant voice" of his generation. Naturally, Orwell had no sympathy for Waugh's Christianity or his conservative politics, but I think we'd all agree that George Orwell was an individual and it appears from this essay that he recognized Waugh as one, too. Over the summer, I finished Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, which follows the adventures of a WW II officer named Guy Crouchback, who begins the conflict with chivalric ambitions and ends it with the desire to imitate Christ through self-sacrifice. Waugh is not content to tell us that war is hell, or even that war is crazy; instead, he shows that while its horror and absurdity make sport of the desire to pursue glory, they are redeemed by the decision to pursue Christ. This is a perspective which, as Orwell says, does not pay, but it is certainly out of step with the mass movement of Waugh's contemporaries.

Abraham Kuyper, in his Stone Lectures, speaks of marching "under the banner of the Cross against the spirit of the times," as if to be under the one is invariably to be against the other. It's an implication worth pondering for a Christian in the arts. "When the contemporary novelist is an individual," T. S. Eliot writes, "thinking for himself in isolation, he may have something important to offer to those who are able to receive it. He who is alone may speak to the individual. But the majority of novelists are persons drifting in the stream, only a little faster." And a Christian novelist has more reasons than most to come up out of that stream.

Eliot did not mean, of course, that we should have a stream of our own to swim in, with cleaner water and less traffic.

And the last thing I would wish for would be the existence of two literatures, one for Christian consumption and the other for the pagan world. What I believe to be incumbent upon all Christians is the duty of maintaining consciously certain standards and criteria of criticism over and above those applied by the rest of the world; and that by these criteria and standards everything that we read must be tested.

Christian readers, in other words, must be individuals too, people of whom something more is expected, not just something different.

These reflections leave me with a greater desire for independence from my artistic and intellectual influences. They prompt me not to be so beholden to what I admire. For me, the rhetoric of individualism is largely bankrupt, but now I want to find a new way to talk about becoming an individual, not out of a desire to be rugged or self-sufficient, but in the hope of being more than just one more voice in the contemporary chorus -- the supposed cacophony that is all too regular in pattern.

Comments

[Bob Robinson]

As I started getting really serious about writing a book, my flights of grandeur were quickly grounded. I realized that this must not be something that I think will sell, something that I think will link into the latest fad. It must be about what I deeply, most devoutly believe in.

That changed everything.

Maybe it will be a part of the Zeitgeist, but at least it will be my part of the Zeitgeist! And at least it will not be a part of a Zeitgeist that is only fleeting. When I really want my voice to be heard, I realized that I did not want my voice to be collecting dust in some category of "by-gone exciting movements."

Thanks again. This is very helpful.

[DLE]

Mark,

Have you read the book The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb? That book has quite interesting thoughts on this issue from an angle not typically explored in philosophy.

Oddly enough, I'm writing a novel on causality that addresses this very issue, only to have someone recommend this book to me well into my novel's creation.

[J. Mark Bertrand]

I haven't, Dan. So are you going back to the drawing board after reading it, or are you happy with your approach?

[DLE]

Mark,

Actually I'm ecstatic and devastated at the same time. Ecstatic because everything I've written so far jives with the book. Devastated because people will think that I stole my ideas from the book.

I seem to have this problem in my novel writing. I keep discovering that, while my ideas look great, they so closely mirror someone else's work as to risk being considered derivative. That stinks.

Sure, there is nothing new under the sun. But no one wants to be deemed a copycat. Mine may be a novel and Taleb's non-fiction, but still. I wouldn't want a publisher billing it as being based on The Black Swan.

[J. Mark Bertrand]

That's an interesting dilemma, Dan. You probably shouldn't worry. Even if people took the book for one of your influences, I don't think you'd be branded a copycat. I read Bergson because people said that's where Proust's ideas about time came from, but it never diminished by awe of Proust. Surely reading Taleb won't diminish people's awe of Edelen!