Relocation

After only a couple of months on Blogger, A Noble Theme has headed for more flexible pastures. You can find all of these entries and all the future ones here.

Albert Camus--The Plague

Albert Camus, hardly a comfort to the Christian reader in most cases, has two things to recommend him despite his atheism: his unflinching attention to matters of good and evil, and his doggedly rigorous thinking. Although Camus' mind leads him to some destinations that a person of faith find unpleasant, we cannot claim that he has reached these locations without careful deliberation. He therefore forces us to think hard and long, an exercise for which we can thank him.
Both of these qualities show themselves in Camus' great wartime novel, The Plague. For our purposes, I would like to set out with a single quotation, spinning out from there:

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.

The Plague deals not only with a natural evil, the bubonic plague, but with all manner of human evils as people respond nobly and basely to the illness, the quarantine, and the privations that arise in the wake of the plague. This evil, and the virtue that is brought into sharp relief by the presence of the evil, is Camus' principle interest in this book. But is his view of evil tenable for a Christian. I'd like to camp on that for a moment.
"The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance" begins this statement. My first reaction is to refuse this assertion. After all, we traditionally associate evil and knowledge, since evil came into the world when Adam and Eve ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. But let's be clear. Knowledge did not cause Eve to sin. That first sin brought about a great deal of knowledge and a great deal of responsibility, but the knowledge did not cause the sin.
Did ignorance cause Eve's sin? I could argue for that. For a moment, Eve looked at the fruit, saw that it had benefits and appeared delicious, and decided that this fruit's positives outweighed its negatives. Had she known the negative results of her disobedience, would she have committed this evil? Had she known the positives she would be forfeiting, would she have taken that bite? I have to believe that answer to be "no."
The great evils in Camus' novel are those who escape from the city of Oran, in defiance of the quarantine, therefore risking countless other people's lives for their own selfish needs. Other evils include those who profiteer from the situation in various ways. All of these place their own selfish needs over those of the larger community.
Similarly, the greatest virtues are to be found in the self-sacrifices of the citizens. Dr. Bernard Rieux, the main character and narrator of the book, risks himself beyond what is necessary in treating the sick and dying. Around him, a variety of others demonstrate a self-sacrifice and nobility that is not always rewarded with positive outcomes. Nevertheless, these people are held up as moral exemplars.
In 1 John 3:15, we learn that "no murderer has eternal life in him." This verse matches well with Camus' assertion that the ultimate evil is that which claims the right to kill. Having just read and written on East of Eden, I am quick to run to the example of Cain and Abel here. What Cain discovers after killing his brother is that he has not made his situation better by this deed. Indeed, he has estranged himself from the rest of humanity and diminished his world. He has deprived his parents of not one but two sons.
In the spin of systematic theologies, we as Christians can sometimes forget that the new command Jesus gave at the Last Supper was that his disciples love one another as he had loved them (John 13:34). How did Jesus love? Like Rieux, he lived and loved in a self-sacrificing manner. Although not a Christian, Camus gives the believer a great deal to chew on in this novel.

John Steinbeck--East of Eden

Where do you put your hands on a huge, sprawling novel like this in order to get a hold of the entirety of the thing? Oprah's favorite Steinbeck novel, East of Eden, covers some sixty years, the breadth of North America, and a host of characters, including three generations of one family and two of another. Whose novel is this? The most obvious answer to this question is that the book belongs to Adam Trask, the character whose life is covered in the most completeness and with whose death the narration ends. Yet Adam does not appear in the story, in Connecticut at that, until two chapters have passed by, focusing on the Hamiltons and the Salinas Valley of California.
Unlike many other stories, I believe that the "Whose story is it?" approach is wrong-headed when it comes to East of Eden. To ask this question of this novel would be like asking whose story is Genesis? Does Genesis belong to Adam? Noah? Abraham? Issac? Jacob? Joseph? Certainly Joseph can lay claim to a bigger share of chapters than any of the other patriarchs, but does that mean Genesis is his story? I don't choose Genesis lightly, of course, since Steinbeck draws heavily on the narratives of Genesis, especially the Cain and Abel story and the story of the Fall, in order to create his novel. The title comes from Genesis 3:24, in the aftermath of the Fall and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The ostensible main character is Adam. Two pairs of brothers, Charles and Adam Trask in the book's second generation and Cal and Aron Trask in the third, appear to mirror Cain and Abel. Steinbeck argues "I believe there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us . . . . Humans are caught . . . in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence."
East of Eden must not be read as a sort of allegory for the primeval history. Adam cannot, in such a reading, be simultaneously the original Adam and Abel. Adam Trask, I should add, does not die at the hand of his C-named brother, Charles, although Charles does attempt to kill Adam early on. The second C-brother, Cal does bring about the death of his brother, but he does so indirectly. And if we try to fit all the characters into a Genesis mold, what on earth are we to do with Cathy/Kate? She's a long way from Eve, and closer to the Serpent than any other character in the book.
This book, it has been suggested by some clever commentator, takes the form of a Midrash on the early chapters of Genesis. A Midrash is a form of peculiarly Jewish commentary on the Scripture, quite far removed from the typical Bible Commentary. The Midrash form, especially in its Aggadic or non-legal aspects, is composed of analogies, stories, folklore, and anecdotes. Many of Jesus' parables might be taken as Midrashim (the plural form of Midrash).
Clearly, Steinbeck finds special significance in a single word to be found in the Biblical text, the word rendered as "thou shalt rule over him [sin]" in the King James Version. He transliterates it as timshel and prefers a translation of "thou mayest." Since this word occupies a spot in the next to last sentence in the book and dominates two lengthy philosophical asides in the middle of the tale, I think a person can profitably focus on it to understand this novel.
In one way of thinking, every significant character in this novel is Cain and Abel at the same time. Some characters are more Abel-like, yet even they are hardly perfect. Adam, for example, is clearly to be seen as a more virtuous character than his brother Charles, yet he, like Cain, winds up "a restless wanderer on the earth" early in the story as he first re-enlists in the army and then delays in various ways his return home.
The more Cain-like characters are not without redeeming characteristics. Charles possesses more compunction regarding the source of their father's wealth than does Adam. Cal, except for his father's rejection, would not have led Aron to his death. Even the thoroughly evil Kate seems to have a dram of goodness or at least awareness of her evil nature when confronted with her son Aron. Why does Kate commit suicide? She has apparently seen through the attempts of her henchman Joe to mislead her. While she has cause to worry that her murder of Faye will be discovered all these years later, whatever threat stands against her remains several moves away. Her suicide seems motivated by something else, perhaps awareness of her own fallen nature.
In the end, I would argue that Steinbeck paints a world filled with people caught in a net of good and evil. All of us, he would suggest, have different measures of good and evil. Some of us, like Kate, possess mostly evil, while some, like Adam, possess mostly good. All of us, however, Steinbeck asserts, may opt to shift this balance. While we cannot utterly banish the good or the evil, we can shift the ratio and thus choose good versus evil.
A Christian reading of this novel, however, recognizes the insufficiency in Steinbeck's vision. True to a point--in fact true through and through--Steinbeck's view suggests that we can opt to do less evil and more good, but holds out no hope for the banishment of evil. Steinbeck's view leaves us with a variety of wandering, shiftless characters. Adam squanders a huge portion of his life as a result of his own foolishness. Aron dies. Cal despairs. Charles withdraws further and further into himself. Lee fails to launch into a life of his own. Kate harms everyone with whom she comes in contact, even spreading damage after her death.
Steinbeck's world, then, is a Christ-less world, a hopeless world. Although he got many things right in these pages, he left the one great thing unsaid. This, to my mind, makes all the difference.

Joyce Carol Oates--"The Lady with the Pet Dog"

I've never been all that drawn to Joyce Carol Oates, but the vagaries and vicissitudes of life--and the shortcomings of a textbook--have forced me into reading some of her work that I would have happily left untouched. Still, even in the least pleasant reading there is typically something to learn. If you want delve into Oates' short fiction, you could do worse than with High Lonesome.
"The Lady with the Pet Dog," although a tale of adultery justified, holds some interest for the Christian reader. Far from the many tales of adultery punished, including films like Unfaithful or Fatal Attraction, Oates relates the story of a wife who, for apparently no real reason, opts to engage in an illicit tryst and then, after breaking it off once, to resume it. In the story's end, Anna, the only named character among the key three, feels, "joyfully . . . a miraculous calm." She "discovers" or rationalizes to herself that this man, despite her marriage to another man and her lover's marriage to another woman, "was her husband truly--they were truly married, here in this room--they had been married haphazardly and accidentally for a long time."
Anna, like the protagonist of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, has no significant complaint about her marriage. She cannot point to abuse or lack of support or infidelity on the part of her husband. Granted, the husband is not painted by Oates in a particularly flattering manner, but the reader is left to wonder whether his greatest fault is his lack sensitivity or his declining physical appearance. The husband's insensitivity is evidenced while they're making love: "her husband was impatient. He was apart from her, working on her, operating on her; and then, stricken, he whispered, 'Did I hurt you?'" While nobody wants this guy as their Valentine, this sort of callousness is hardly a hanging offense. Couple that fact with Anna's reaction during the same act. "He made love to her and she was back in the auditorium again" seeing her lover. Might the fault for her husband's detachment lie in both of their hearts and minds?
The glorious faux "marriage" that Anna celebrates as the story closes is, of course, no marriage at all. It is a series of liaisons, experienced furtively in a different hotel room each week. This relationship, experienced in darkness, evokes the teachings in 1 John 1:5-10. This is not marriage. The shame that Anna mentions several times during the story should be a real shame, but she manages, at the story's conclusion, to smooth it over, to decide that her shame should not be shame at all, but this is something that she can do only by playing semantic games, deciding that her husband is no real husband at all and that her affair is somehow a real marriage, playing the sort of games that Paul decries in Romans 1:25.
Of course, Oates would not have seen things in this light. She seems to admire the development Anna achieves by the story's close. However, her re-identification of evil as good is no more convincing or authoritative than is Anna's.

Raymond Carver--Cathedral

Raymond Carver's short story, "Cathedral," is, like so many of this author's stories, a peculiar piece of work. Populated by mostly unsympathetic characters living drab lives, Carver's work stands a long distance from the classic narrative structures of O. Henry and Guy Du Maupassant.
In this story, an unnamed husband and wife play host to the blind former employer of the wife. The husband and narrator of the story does not want the blind man, Robert to come over. In fact, he doesn't seem to want anybody to come over. This character leads a hopelessly detached life. When he protests that he doesn't have any blind friends, his wife replies by noting "You don't have any friends. Period."
Although married, he and his wife sleep in separate rooms. They rarely go to bed at the same time. Instead, he sits up watching meaningless TV late into the night. Clearly the couple don't have much meaningful communication of any sort. The husband dislikes his job. He's just an alienated being bobbing along through life, moving toward death because there's nothing else to do.
Robert, we're told, has just lost his wife, Beulah. What an intriguing name that is, Beulah. It derives from a Hebrew word meaning married. Is that significant? I think so. In fact, I think the entire existence of Beulah is important. Carver could have easily portrayed Robert simply as the wife's former employer without the baggage of a recently deceased wife, but he compounds the significance by describing Beulah as the reader who came to work for Robert after the wife gave up the job. It doesn't take too much imagination to wonder if the wife didn't see herself in Beulah's shoes. She could have married Robert, but instead she married this guy who, although sighted, is as blind as can be.
Why is it, do you suppose, that Robert and Beulah have names while the husband and wife, clearly the closer characters to the narrator, do not have names? I would suggest that these names indicate the greater reality of these characters. Although blind and dead, respectively, Robert and Beulah have experienced what the husband and wife have never experienced, connecting in a way they have never connected.
The name "Beulah" also evokes images of the Promised Land or the land of peace in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. This suggests to me that there's more to this idea of connection than just friendship. Raymond Carver is not known as a religious writer, but here he seems to be describing a character with a God-shaped hole, a hole that he cannot fill with the alcohol he continues to drink throughout the story, the marijuana that he persuades Robert to share, his pointless job, his marriage-in-name-only, or his late-night television marathons.
What does eventually fill the husband's void or at least suggest the potential of filling is a moment of communion when he and Robert together hold a pen and draw an image of a cathedral. One can imagine this bit of collaborative art as an act of worship, or at least an act of potential worship. Is that what Carver intended? I don't think so, but often artists say more than they ever intend to say when they put pen to paper.
"Cathedral" is the title story in a fine collection of Carver's work.

There Will Be Blood aka Upton Sinclair's Oil!

Although it did not win the Best Picture Oscar this week, There Will Be Blood, a screen adaptation of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil!, stands as one of 2007's finest offerings on the big screen. Paul Edwards sees a spiritual silver lining around the dark clouds of violence and greed in this film. It's worth a read.

Zora Neale Hurston--Sweat

To my mind, Zora Neale Hurston is the best of African-American fiction writers. I appreciate the work, such as it is, of Ralph Ellison, and some of Toni Morrison's offerings, but Zora continues to delight me each time I return to her work. Why? Perhaps it is because she writes of an African-American experience that includes discrimination and oppression, but doesn't become utterly possessed by those forces. She writes of humans.
In "Sweat," we have a marriage gone bad. After sixteen years of life together, Sykes and Delia can say, without fear of contradiction, that the good is gone. The problem is obvious: Delia works like a slave to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, while Sykes flits about and womanizes. Joe Clarke, who comes off looking a lot better here than in Hurston's masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, compares the relationship to people sucking on sugar cane:

There's plenty men dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It's round, juicy, an' sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an' grind, squeeze an'
grind an' wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat's in 'em out. When dey's satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats 'em jes' lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey thows 'em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin' while dey is at it, an' hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin' after huh tell she's empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein' a cane-chew an' in de way.

The Christian reader of this story has a good inventory of approaches to take. We might consider the imagery of the snake, the "harlot" Bertha, or the theme of forgiveness. Those all have potential, but I'd like to dwell for a moment on the Biblical metaphor of Christ and the Church being husband and wife. Compare the husband in Hurston's story with the husband in that Biblical metaphor. Where Sykes does not provide, Jesus provides. Where Sykes is unfaithful, Jesus is completely faithful. Where Sykes is full of hate, Jesus abounds in love. Sykes seeks to bring death to Delia; Jesus promises life--abundant life--to his bride.
Delia on the other hand, mirrors the church reasonably well. She is faithful but not perfect. She seeks to turn the other cheek, moving her church membership rather than take communion impurely with Sykes. She even attempts to accomodate the snake. How many women would allow a caged rattlesnake to remain in their house for weeks on end? As a woman of God, Delia knew what her husband ought to be, she knew the model held up for her. She could see plainly that Sykes did not come close to measuring up, yet she did not use his unfaithfulness as an excuse to turn away herself. Her only sin against Sykes, if we can call it that, is walking away in his dying moments. All things considered, this seems a justified response.