May 14, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Dramatic Unities

In his Poetics Aristotle sets down rough principles in regard to unity of action and time. He remarks that the plot of tragedy concerns, in a real sense, a single action, and that it “tries especially to be bound by one circuit of the sun or to vary little from this.” He doesn’t explicitly mention any stricture in regard to unity of place, though the stricture on time might be taken to imply one. In the neoclassical movement of the 16th and 17th centuries, in the drama of Molière and Racine, Aristotle’s rough principles of dramatic unity calcified into hard-and-fast rules. But even taking Aristotle’s remarks about dramatic unity of place and time as principles, not rules, is there any reason for the dramatist to be bound by them?

I worried especially about the unity of place as I composed my play, The Actor, which depicts the life of the young Karol Wojtyła from the years 1939 to 1942. There is a certain unity of place in the play in that all the scenes take place in Nazi-occupied Kraków, but the scenes themselves move from the university to the Wojtyła apartment to a quarry to a cemetery, etc. At very least I had made the jobs of a future director and set designer more challenging. But I took consolation from Tom Stoppard’s approach in the text of The Coast of Utopia, which effortlessly moves through the months and years and from setting to setting as though it were a screenplay.

In an essay included in his 1923 volumes, Fancies versus Fads, G.K. Chesterton offered an intriguing defense of the principles of dramatic unity. “Wherever [dramatic unity] can be satisfied, something not superficial but rather subconscious is satisfied. Something revisits us that is the strange soul of single places; the shadow of haunting gods or of household gods.”

A single setting and a single action bound more or less “by one circuit of the sun.” Artists have always recognized the freedom that is unleashed by placing limits upon their creativity; the principles of dramatic unity are the “frame” around the action of a plot. The effect of such limitation is, as Chesterton observes, uncanny: something strange and haunting is set free when the action of a play or other story is thus constrained.

“We might say,” concludes Chesterton, “that superior literature is centripetal, while inferior literature is centrifugal.”

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March 26, 2014 Leave a Comment

“In the Kung-Fu Grip of the Invisible Hand”

So, my friends, did you notice my new web banner?

Very much like my old web banner, of course. Same basic illustration and color scheme. But I asked Ted Schluenderfritz, who has illustrated the covers of all my books as well as done the illustrations for this site, to put my name in the banner. Part of the rebranding of the site, which I used to call The Comic Muse.

Anyway, let me know what you think about the banner.

And too, let me know if you can guess the identities of the famous writers depicted in the sidebar.

Meanwhile, I’m happy to announce that I finally got my hands on a copy of my short story, “In the King-Fu Grip of the Invisible Hand,” published in the Christmas issue of GILBERT, the magazine of the American Chesterton Society (that’s G.K. Chesterton). It’s a humorous tale about a young man torn between his business interests and his hankering for the virtues of a simpler life.

Ted Schluenderfritz also illustrates for GILBERT and here’s the illustration he did for my story:

And here’s a screen shot of the first page of the story:

The image above is of Adam Smith (1723-1790), theorist of the “invisible hand,” which is reproduced courtesy of the Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

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January 19, 2014 Leave a Comment

Sherlock the Savage

PBS Masterpiece’s hit show Sherlock, an edgy, 21st-century updating of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective series, returns this Sunday evening, January 19, for a much-anticipated Season 3 (you can follow the countdown clock on the Masterpiece website). As the Season 2 cliffhanger was the revelation that Sherlock’s death at the hands of the evil genius Moriarty was only apparent, fans of the show will be eager to learn just how Sherlock (Benedict Cumberbatch) will make his dramatic return to the land of the living, and how his beleaguered friend, Dr. John Watson (Martin Freeman), will handle it.

The return of this series invites the question: what makes Conan Doyle’s character so perennial? What explains it?

Mystery as Paradox

To answer this question we must first understand what a mystery is. The detective mystery, like all mysteries including theological ones, is a form of paradox. In encountering paradox we experience the shock of (apparent) contradiction. “Silver Blaze,” one of Conan Doyle’s most popular Sherlock Holmes stories, involves a horse trainer found dead on a moor. A London bookmaker has been arrested for the crime, but the facts don’t add up to a conviction. Holmes, and the reader, are thus faced with the shock of contradiction: a man is dead, yet there is no clear cause of his death. An even more profound shock occurs when we encounter a theological paradox. “The last shall be first.” “Three persons in one God.” What do these statements mean? How can they be?

The role of the sleuth and the role of the theologian are similar: each one tries to solve a mystery. The climax of each endeavor is a moment of illumination in which what seemed contradictory is shown not in fact to be so. Theological illumination, however, always remains deficient. Despite the abundant wisdom in St. Augustine’s De trinitate, it does not wholly illuminate the mystery of the Trinity. But in a detective story, the climax is usually wholly illuminating as the culprit is discovered and apprehended.

Two sorts of illumination can be found in detective stories. One sort, call it the Sherlock Holmes sort, sees the paradox or mystery as a riddle or challenge resolvable by the “scientific” discovery of causal linkages. Here, the detective’s illumination is merely material and mechanical. This sort of illumination is interesting and entertaining, and, judging by the enduring popularity of Sherlock Holmes and his many literary and cinematic heirs, it shows no signs of waning. But another sort of illumination found in detective stories is the Father Brown sort (which I name after G.K. Chesterton’s famous priest-detective). Here, the detective’s illumination involves the discovery of material causes, but also, and more importantly, the illumination of causes (moral, spiritual, diabolical) that transcend the material world. These two sorts of illumination are not at all mutually exclusive. They exist along a continuum, and often are in play in the same story. Still, distinguishing them helps us identify tendencies within detective mysteries.

Holmes as Thinking Machine

As a man devoted to the illumination of material causes, Sherlock Holmes is a thinking machine. His world is one of data, “facts”, sensible stimuli. These facts can sometimes seem to contradict one another. Yet a mind sufficiently responsive to the facts, like Holmes’s, can understand them as “clues” which can illuminate or resolve mystery. The same mode of inquiry is on display in practically every mystery we read or watch, whether it’s a work by Agatha Christie or Henning Mankell, or an episode of CSI or Bones.

I don’t mean to deny that there is real moral, interest in stories featuring such thinking machines. There are criminals to be apprehended and justice to be served. It’s also worth mentioning that  these thinking machines often display certain impressive characteristics, principally a kind of cunning and courage.

But in the character of Sherlock Holmes, whether as depicted by Conan Doyle himself or by his many adapters, we can also notice a defect that mutates and spreads like a virus through the dramatic lineage of heroes and heroines who succeed him. This defect is not Holmes’s notorious addiction to cocaine. It is his addiction to his “method.” Holmes plays the “game” entirely (almost entirely?) for the game’s own sake. The “game” is his real drug. In “The Adventure of the Retired Colourman,” Conan Doyle has Holmes goes so far as to admit: “Burglary has always been an alternative profession, had I cared to adopt it, and I have little doubt that I should have come to the front.” This startling revelation indicates that Holmes’s mechanic mind is morally neutral; it can just as efficiently be used for evil as for good.

That is to say, detection for Holmes is as amoral as geometry (Holmes often refers to a case as “a pretty little demonstration”). Hugh Kenner has pointed out that in “The Return of Sherlock Holmes,” when Watson protests in horror Holmes’s quasi-seduction of a housemaid with information to give, that Holmes calmly replies, “You can’t help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table.”

Toward Savagery

What the character of Sherlock Holmes plays with is the idea of the detective as aesthete. The aesthete, writes philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, is one who fends off “the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites.” Doesn’t this serve as a good description of Sherlock Holmes? Isn’t Holmes always complaining of boredom? And whenever he isn’t fighting boredom with cocaine and his violin he is indulging in the pleasures of being a thinking machine, pleasures which motivate him far more than justice, and in which other people are treated as means, not ends.

Holmes’s misanthropy becomes even more exaggerated in Sherlock, in a way similar to that of Hugh Laurie’s eponymous character in Fox Television’s House (an audial pun on the connection with “Holmes,” House creator David Shore has said). In both of these characters the image of sleuth as savage is carried far, yet not quite all the way. For a good part of the pleasure in watching Sherlock or House is waiting for the point when these thinking machines betray a sign of real human affection. They play the savage for a good part of each episode, greedily collecting the facts that excite their mental impulses, treating those around them like imbeciles. But before it’s all done, there is usually some suggestion that the thinking machine is not really, at heart, a savage. That he sees at least a glimmer into the deeper mystery of what it means to be a human being.

This article originally appeared on Aleteia and is reposted with permission.

The photograph above is reproduced courtesy of Fat Les (bellaphon) via Wikimedia Commons.

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March 16, 2013 Leave a Comment

In Defense of High Concepts

One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar.

So wrote G.K. Chesterton, in a marvelous little essay entitled “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls,” published in his book, The Defendant, back in 1901. What are penny dreadfuls? Pulp fiction, cheap fiction, cheap in more than one sense, no doubt. But not in every sense. Chesterton’s essay focuses on the boys’ book—i.e., the story of pirates or outlaws, of Robin Hood and Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine—stories light on literary merit but heavy on excitement. He asks whether boys should be kept away from such fiction. His answer, perhaps surprisingly, is “no.” [Read more...]

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February 20, 2013 Leave a Comment

In Defense of a Popular Literature

Michael Chabon’s instinct is spot on. In his essay, “Trickster in a Suit of Lights–Thoughts on the Modern Short Story,” from his 2008 collection, Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands, he makes the case for a literature that does not despise to be entertainment, that challenges the hegemony of “literary fiction,” that seeks to inhabit the borderlands between high art and low genres such as sci-fi, horror, and the western.

Chabon concocts a thought experiment. “Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel but the nurse romance from the canon of the future”:

Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances.

Once this fanciful scenario is in place, Chabon invites us to substitute for nurse romance the “contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” And once we do so, he predicts, we’re going to find sitting right back in our own world. For the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story wields an almost tyrannic rule over the state of literature.

And let’s not forget, Chabon observes, that the CQPMOTRS (contemporary, quotidian, etc.) has conventions just as rigorous as any popular genre. Such as: “the primacy of a unified point of view, for example; letters and their liability to being read or intercepted; the dance of adulterous partners; the buried family secret that curses generations to come; the ordinary heroism of an unsung life.”

Why, Chabon asks, should this genre trump all others?

Chabon’s critique is squarely on target, and I applaud his desire to explore the “spaces between genres” in order to produce a literature that is as entertaining as it is artful. But what he fails to explain is why the disconnection of literature from entertainment can only occur to the detriment of literature.

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” So G.K. Chesterton famously asserts in his 1901 essay, “In Defense of Penny Dreadfuls.” Similarly to Chabon in “Trickster,” Chesterton in this essay takes on those who would sneer at popular fiction, especially fiction for boys, both because it corrupts and because it does not meet the standards of literature. Chesterton will have none of it, but he defends popular fiction for reasons that are probably very different from Chabon’s:

These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all.

What truisms does Chesterton have in mind? “The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.”

Literary fiction, by contrast, both then and now, tends to eschew such truisms. “It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated,” contends Chesterton, “which is avowedly and aggressively criminal. Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables.”

It is a good question whether in our day much popular fiction itself wouldn’t offend the sensibilities of a high-souled errand boy–if there are any more errand boys.

Be that as it may, Chesterton and Chabon agree that there is a sharp distinction between literature and fiction. But the truth at least implicit in Chesterton’s essay, but wholly missing from Chabon’s, is that literature and popular fiction exist along a continuum, and not just a literary continuum but a moral one as well. For this reason, when literature becomes profligate and pessimistic, divorcing itself from the entertaining truisms of popular fiction, it becomes what Chesterton calls “criminal.”

And in this light, a fiction along the borderlands of high art and popular fiction is not simply a refreshing change, a way to renew (as Chabon wants) the art of the short story. Rather, it is a way of reintroducing the truisms of civilized life–that is, the humanity–back into our literature.

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