Addendum: Poe and the Patristics

I misspoke a bit on the podcast yesterday—if you haven’t listened to it yet, what are you waiting for?—when I said that the Church Fathers play virtually no role in American literature. (If you didn’t notice, I had actually forgotten about Updike’s Roger’s Version until the second before I brought it up.) In fact, there’s at least one other major American author who leans on them from time to time: Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe was not a religious man. The quote you see on atheist websites from time to time (“No man who ever lived knows any more about the hereafter than you and I; and all religion is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry”) seems to be more or less an accurate statement of his views. But the man was something close to obsessed with subjective experience, which leaves a space open not only for semi-traditional mysticism but for Kierkegaard-style religious existentialism. (My first paper in my PhD program was on this topic.)

So when Poe brings up the Church Fathers, which happens only very rarely, it’s generally to serve a higher purpose—to demonstrate a character’s intense subjectivity. The most famous instance is in the short story “Berenice,” one of his very best. Our narrator is one of Poe’s typical hyper-sensitive artist types, this time named Ægeus. He’s a half-cousin to Roderick Usher, sickly and gloomy. Indeed, his entire existence seems bound up in his family’s enormous library, in which his mother died giving birth to him.

His cousin Berenice, on the other hand, is “agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy . . . roaming carelessly through life with no thought of the shadows in her path.” It takes a paranoid and neurotic subjectivist like Ægeus to see the shadows, of course, and he watches as his cousin develops an illness that strips her of her personality and identity. His own illness, at this point, “grew rapidly upon me, and assumed finally a monomaniac character of a novel and extraordinary form . . . This monomania, if I must so term it, consisted in a morbid irritability of those properties of the mind in metaphysical science termed the attentive.” He has become a hysteric—or a mystic.

His monomania is fed by his choice of reading material, which consists primarily of “St. Austin’s great work, the ‘City of God;’ and Tertullian ‘de Carne Christi.’ ” The operative sentence in the latter, of course, is the famous “Mortuus est Dei filius; credibile est quia ineptum est; et sepultus resurrexit; certum est quia impossibile est”: “The Son of God died; it is wholly credible because it is unsound. And, buried, he rose again; it is certain because it is impossible.” Ægeus’ hypersensitive mind takes this paradoxical statement to heart, and when Berenice dies and is buried, he unconsciously slinks out to the grave, exhumes the corpse, and uses dental equipment to pull out his cousin’s teeth.

That’s when we learn that Berenice hadn’t died after all; she was merely in a swoon, and this act of amateur dentistry has brought her out of it. (Biblical scholars: When did the “swoon theory” against the resurrection first enter theological conversation?) Her cousin’s monomania, fueled by the absurdist writings of the most unpleasant of the Church Fathers, has saved her, albeit in a horrifying way.

(I have the vague sense that the Patristics pop up in another of Poe’s tales, but I can’t place which one. I had assumed it was “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” a heavily philosophical conversation between two corpses buried in the same grave, but I was wrong. So this may be Poe’s lone reference to the Church Fathers.)

What this demonstrates is that the attitude we described in the podcast as typical of Evangelicals is by no means exclusive to Evangelicals. If the Church Fathers are our crazy uncles to whom we are related but to whom no one wishes to speak at the family reunion, we’re in good artistic company in thinking so. Poe asserts here that they have something valuable, perhaps even life-saving, to say—but in saying it they threaten our souls and our sanity.

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet: Plato and the American Renaissance (Pt. 1)

James Kibler, who teaches my Southern Literature course, has assigned William Gilmore Simms' Poetry and the Practical, a forgotten treatise by a nearly forgotten poet. When Simms is remembered at all, it's as a rabidly pro-slavery ideologue and the author of The Sword and the Distaff, one of the first novels written in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet Simms was a true antebellum Renaissance man, a trial lawyer and state congressman who wrote more than two thousand poems in the W.C. Bryant mode and many now-forgotten novels that echo Edgar Allan Poe (who once called Simms America's greatest novelist). I have not read these novels, so I can't agree or disagree with Poe, but Poetry and the Practical is at the very least an interesting and original argument.

Kibler himself wrote the introduction to the book, and in it and in class he spends a good deal of time arguing for Simms' philosophical affinities with Poe. He overstates his case, in my opinion. Poe, after all, famously says in "The Philosophy of Composition" that "Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem," rejecting moral readings and anticipating Oscar Wilde, the decadents, and their off-quoted "art for art's sake." But Simms wrests Poe's work away from its author's intentions: "Their [poets'] instincts . . . peculiar to their gifts, have always made them, more or less willingly, so many moral teachers." No, Simms sounds less like Poe and more like another "P"--Plato, whom I've written about so often that even I am sick of him. (Maybe this will be the last time he comes up. Probably not.)

I've been kicking around the subject of this post for a good long time, and Simms merely provides me with an excuse to finally write it up. The bulk of Poetry and the Practical is a Sidney-esque defense of art--he actually takes the difficult position that the poet is the most practical of all men. Plato, of course, is at the very best ambivalent about art; his theory of forms will not allow him to praise mimetic art, that copy of a copy of a copy, and poetry, built as it is on emotion rather than logic, disturbs him. He excludes the poet from his Republic on the grounds that he

can use words and phrases as a medium to paint a picture of any craftsman, though he knows nothing except how to represent him, and the metre and rhythm and music will persuade people who are as ignorant as he is . . . Strip [poetry] of its poetic colouring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to. (Republic 601A-B)

And so it baffled me for a long time as to why Simms' fellow Romantics so revere Plato. Emerson is typical in his praise: "Plato is philosophy, and philosophy, Plato,--at once the glory and the shame of mankind, since neither Saxon nor Roman have availed to add any idea to his categories." Emerson (and the other Romantics) classes Plato as a philosopher rather than a poet, but he also calls him "almost literature" and a "great artist," and he clearly believes the Greek to be on his side. But Emerson, Coleridge, and the rest would be left shivering outside the gates of the Republic. What gives?

Well, for one thing, Plato isn't as consistent in his critique/rejection of art as we might assume him to be. Socrates loves Homer--who for Greeks of the era was not only the composer of the national epic but also a religious figure. He quotes the blind sage more than he quotes anyone else, and when he does so, it's so he can appeal to his authority. Further, Plato dedicates an entire dialogue to something resembling literary criticism. In the dialogue bearing his name, we meet Ion, a rhapsode. Trevor J. Saunders explains in his introduction to the Penguin edition:

What did rhapsodes do? Gorgeously attired, they recited the works of Homer and other poets, apparently in some sort of chant, and usually without the musical accompaniment employed by earlier Homeric singers. Their performances were dramatic: they threw themselves into the part of whatever character Homer was depicting, and acted his scenes.

Additionally, their acting has an interpretative/critical element to it. Socrates classes the rhapsode with the artist, and here, at least, that's a compliment; after all, the rhapsode ends up as an intermediary between the Author and the Reader, and as such he operates by a "divine power" (533D).

Now: Saunders claims a dialogic consistency here--that is, he says that Plato uses the rhapsode to criticize the poet, rather than using the poet to define the rhapsode:

The question it poses is: "Do poets know what they are talking about?" Socrates, clearly thinks, the answer is "no"; indeed, he believes that poets are ignorant fellows who can write poetry only in a state of madness.

Strictly speaking, Saunders is correct. Socrates says that poetic inspiration can come only when the poet goes out of his head. But Saunders' tone is all wrong. I know nothing about him, but I suspect from his error that he approaches this subject through the Enlightenment, the period in which the fool stopped being holy and started being insane. (There's more to it than that, of course, and you can get it all from Foucault's seminal Madness and Civilization.) As late as the Renaissance, madness was all right; as Shakespeare says, "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends" (A Midsummer Night's Dream V.i.4-6).

Shakespeare, I'll allege, is of one mind with Plato, at least in the Ion. The evidence too difficult to explain away, try as Trevor Saunders might:

All good epic poets recite all that splendid poetry not by virtue of a skill, but in a state of inspiration and possession. The same is true of good lyric poets as well: just as Corybantic worshippers dance without being in control of their senses, so too it's when they are not in control of their senses that the lyric poets compose those fine lyric poems. But once launched into their rhythm and musical mode, they catch a Bacchic frenzy: they are possessed, just like Bacchic women, who when possessed and out of their senses draw milk and honey from rivers--exactly what the souls of the lyric poets do, as they say themselves . . . A poet, you see, is a light thing, and winged and holy, and cannot compose before he gets inspiration and loses control of his senses and his reason has deserted him. No man, so long as he keeps that, can prophesy or compose . . . the god relieves them of their reason, and uses them as his ministers, just as he uses soothsayers and divine prophets--so that we who listen to them may realize that it is not they who say such supremely valuable things as they do, who have not reason in them, but that it is the god himself who speaks, and addresses us through them. (533E-534D)

So it's not poetry that Plato objects to; it's uninspired poetry, poetry written by man instead of by the gods.

With this in mind, the Romantic affection for Plato comes shining through, in ways I will explain in the next edition.

The Stooge

I avoided reading Tom Wolfe for some time because of his fifth-grade reaction to criticism from John Updike (whom I love), John Irving (whom I like), and Norman Mailer (whom I've never read). So now that I'm finally reading Bonfire of the Vanities, I'm wondering if their criticism was fair.

Updike said that Wolfe's "A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers' investment, the novel tries too hard to please us." Updike is usually not such a bloodthirsty critic; in my fairly extensive reading of his nonfiction, I've been struck by how magnanimous he is, always trying to find good things about books he doesn't like. So I'm going to assume that either (a) He really, really hates A Man in Full; or (b) He is somehow personally threatened by Tom Wolfe.

Mailer was a little more veiled in his criticism, calling Wolfe ""the most gifted best-seller writer to come along since Margaret Mitchell" and coyly noting that "Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer. How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great--his absence of truly large compass."

I'm going to avoid dealing with Updike's criticism of Wolfe, mostly because doing so would involve defining "literature," which Updike is probably happy to do but which I am not. But I think Mailer is on to something here. Bonfire is enormous, fiction (or literature, whatever) on a grand scale--other critics have noted a similarity to Dickens (as they have with Irving), and that's fair enough. But at the beginning, the book gave me the impression that it will be a Percyan novel ideas, wrapping Wolfe's wordy prose around guilt and sin and bigotry and a million other issues.

But Wolfe can't control this for long; like Mailer, I think he lacks a "truly large compass." Less than halfway through, Bonfire of the Vanities turns into a potboiler, plot-driven and hurried. That doesn't make it bad--it just makes it less permanently interesting. It's a page-turner, but I don't think I'm going to remember much about it next year. On the other hand, other than its length, the novel is custom-made for a film adaptation, whereas something like Lancelot is less immediately engrossing but has more permanent value, at least for me.

The same is true of Irving, although I'll argue that Irving's prose is better-written. Lisa Simpson introduces Wolfe to Moe the Bartender by saying "He uses more exclamation points than any other living author." I'll vouch for that and add to it, elipses. Nearly every paragraph features ten-plus exclamation points and at least five aggravating dot-dot-dots. In this, he reminds me of that most overrated of 19th-century authors, Edgar Allan Poe (who himself plays a minor role in Bonfire of the Vanities). I come close to hating Poe, and I hate him because of the stagy melodrama of his prose. Like Wolfe, he's plot-driven, despite his fan base's concerted attempts to prove otherwise, and like Wolfe, he's a fan of exclamation points, italics, and dashes. Too many of Poe's short stories end with a frenzied interjection: "I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"; "[he]--was the man that was used up"; "These are the full, and the black, and the wild eyes--of my lost love--of the lady--of the LADY LIGEIA!" It's the stuff of B-grade horror films, and it's no wonder Vincent Price adapted so many Poe stories.

Wolfe is better than Poe, though. While he cannot sustain a philosophical theme through the course of his enormous novel, he at least has grand ambitions (I am still not convinced E.A.P. did), and his prose is never less than enjoyable, while any trip through Poe is like slogging through the streams of vomit and urine that so populate his stories. Literature? Who cares? Cohesive? Probably not. But Wolfe's worth reading--if not for the questions he halfheartedly raises . . . then at least for the way he ignores them!