The Doom of Devorgoil or Never Lend Your Kindle

I've always felt like I've been unfair to Sir Walter Scott. There was a made-for-TV movie of Ivanhoe in the 80s that I just absolutely loved. When I was young, I just loved anything medieval, though at the time I wouldn't have said "medieval," but something like "knights and castles." I had no concept of history back then, so I didn't know how interesting Scott's novel was because of its historical setting post-Norman Invasion. Years later I read the novel itself and though the film adaptation had taken certain liberties, it was very much familiar to my imagination.

When I started getting serious about reading poetry (just after I was married at twenty-one), a friend gave me a cheap edition of Scott's poems, which is what I read The Doom of Devorgoil from this weekend. I've read a handful of Scott's ballads and enjoyed their medievalness. But, like I said, I feel like I've been unfair to Scott--neglected him. I guess it's that, although I enjoy his characters, stories, and settings, he tends to a rollicking, heavy-handed ballad meter that just isn't to my taste. The friend who gave me the volume is very much into obvious meters (he likes Pope, for one thing--ugh!), and I prefer subtle stuff, especially blank verse (too much rhyme cloys me quickly--it has to be diffused through intricate stanzas for me to enjoy it much).

Well, I read Devorgoil this weekend because my wife was borrowing my Kindle and I wanted something other than lyrics (I've been reading through The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy) but something short. Devorgoil was entertaining enough. . .I guess.

I would have thought it was a closet drama, but Scott added particular suggestions for production beyond the simple stage directions, so I'm not sure. It's verse, but not clangy, rhymed, clunking verse.

The story is fairly interesting in itself, I suppose, and the characters range from mildly endearing to mildly funny. I'm not really sure if the play is supposed to be a comedy or not. Oh, I suppose it's a comedy in the sense that it ends happily, but is it supposed to be funny? Not so sure about that. There are funny parts, but they're not all that amusing. Scott tries to get some good laughs out of a Puritan know-it-all (who is, of course, a fool and doesn't know much at all). He also brings in some interesting contrast between Protestantism and Catholicism with a comparison between this fool and a mendicant, dispossessed monk.

The only thing more confusing than whether I should be laughing or not is the historical setting of the play. I expected it to be late medieval, I guess, but since firearms are mentioned several times, it must be later than that, but how late I'm not sure.

The best part, I suppose, is a touching scene where one character (Katleen), who is the niece of the down-on-his-luck lord swears that she will stick by the family who has done good to her whether they prosper or fall. It's the sort of thing I'd tear up at in a movie.

Anyway, I've spent more words on the play than it probably deserves. I've got my Kindle back, but I also got two books of Northrop Frye essays for my birthday (actual print books). I'm still reading Hardy's poems and a collection by E. A. Robinson. I'm also reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X on the Kindle. I suspect it'll be a while before I read Scott again, although I suppose I will have to get to Waverly one of these days.

C. S. Lewis Plays it Cool (Sectarians Rage)

Throughout his life as a Christian, CS Lewis tried his best to avoid intramural debates among other Christians. He was an Anglican because he was not convinced of the claims of the Roman Catholic Church, but he never went out of his way to attack Roman Catholicism. But some folks are married to sectarianism and cannot abide to have anybody stand outside their particular dichotomy and refuse to argue. Apparently Joseph Pearce is one of those folks.

Pearce's C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church is well-written, but unfortunately poorly-thought-out. Pearce spends the entire book being surprised when Lewis, who was a Protestant, holds Protestant views. Every disagreement with Roman Catholic theology is anti-Roman Catholic bigotry for Pearce. Everything Lewis thought or practiced that isn't typically Protestant is crypto-Catholic and proves that Lewis really wanted to be a Catholic. Everything Lewis ever said or did or any doctrine he held to that was typically Protestant shows Lewis to be a hypocrite and a bigot. . .somehow.

Pearce also has a problem with Lewis's influences. He takes every Roman Catholic that Lewis read and enjoyed and emphasizes them as literary and theological influences. Every person Lewis knew who even considered converting to Catholicism is put forth as a super-influence. But Lewis's Protestant influences are strangely downplayed, especially George MacDonald.

At the end of the book, Pearce goes on a long rant against the Anglican church. Ironically, his complaints about changes in the Anglican church, and his subsequent inability to understand why Lewis didn't leave it, sound exactly like Luther and others in response to changes in the RCC just prior to the Reformation.

Pearce is simply unable or unwilling to take Lewis on his own terms. He wants to measure Lewis by his own terms. As a Catholic, Pearce is used to asserting the authority of his church, but what he fails to see is that he had to decide for himself that the RCC was authoritative, thus making himself the very thing he accuses Protestants (Lewis among them) of being: self-authoritative.

Alexander Besher's Mir

Mir is the first of two sequels to the Alexander Besher’s cyber-fiction novel Rim. I read Rim back in late 1995 at a time in my life that was full of both despair and the sort of uncertain resolution that characterized my late teens. Rim was a comfort to me in that moment and in that situation just by being a good story, and I never forgot what it did for me. I always intended to go back and read it again, and when I finally did last year, it was the first book I read on my Kindle. Fitting, I thought—an e-reader is the sort of thing you’d find in one of Besher’s books. I’d known there were two sequels to the book, but I’d never bothered to get around to them till now. Well, till last December, actually, which is when I got both books, Mir and Chi, in hardcover for a few books each. There’s something to be said for procrastinative reading. I took up Mir as soon as I got it, but it just wasn’t the right time for it, and I don’t think I even got through the prologue. As much as Rim meant to me, and as much as I’d still enjoyed it the second time through and some fifteen years later, I was a bit disappointed.



Not so on the second attempt. I took up Mir again Friday afternoon, and I was done with it early Sunday morning. This post is really about me, not about the book, so I won’t go into any details about plot or character here. What I will say is that Besher’s future world is intriguing in its combination of technology and Pacific Rim cultures, and that Besher is obviously a lover of language as verbal art. When I read Rim, the internet was just beginning to approach something mainstream. I’d only had the least bit of experience with BBSs, and I was fascinated with the idea of the (as it was then touted) “Information Superhighway”. Stupid name, but nobody much knew what the internet would be like back then, so it’s excusable. I was also the slightest bit interested in Japanese culture at the time. I’d read Shogun the year before, and was intrigued enough by the bits of Japanese language sprinkled in Clavell’s novel that I bought a Japanese dictionary and self-teaching book that came with (get this) a cassette tape for practicing. Yeah. Anyway, Rim just fit right in because of the Orientalism, even though 21st century cyber Nippon is a far cry from 16th century feudal Japan.

Reading Mir, I couldn’t help thinking how much it reminded me of anime somehow. I’m no fan of anime—don’t even really care for it on the whole—but it has its charms as an art form. When I first read Rim, I’d only ever seen Vampire Hunter D and Fist of the North Star, but they were exciting to me at the time, and I wonder if I wouldn’t have ended up an anime freak give different circumstances.

Instead, I ended up a poetry freak who just this weekend was considering tackling the entire Norton Anthology of English Literature—both volumes. I decided against it because that would mean wasting a month or more in the 18th century, and my post on Tristram Shandy made it pretty clear, I think, how highly I value the literature of that era. I try to be fair and to take all works of literature on their own terms, but even I have my limits and personal tastes. Books like Besher’s cyber-fiction novels probably won’t ever be included in any literature anthologies, but I like what I like, and my literati credentials can’t be questions, so let others waste their time on Pope, and I’ll read what I like.

Maybe I’ll read another of Clavell’s books before too long, but I’m thinking of Brideshead Revisited next. It’s another of those I always see mentioned but don’t really know anything about. My wife is borrowing my Kindle this week, so I’m reading some in the massive complete poems of Hardy that I’ve got. I’m also reading a book on CS Lewis that I’ll probably post about later on this week.

Tristram Shandy, Or An Example of Attention Deficit Disorder Among 18th Century British Authors

Why would anybody read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman? Probably nine out of ten folks who read Tristram Shandy these days do so as a course requirement in college. Well, I'm not in college anymore--so why would I read it?

Tristram Shandy is one of those books that I've known about for a long time and always sorta thought I'd get around to, but I wasn't sure when that would be. It could have remained in outer orbit, just drifting within my periphery now and then, for the rest of my life. But, I've been trying to read more English-novelists-that-aren't-Charles-Dickens-or-Thomas-Hardy lately. I read Thackeray's Vanity Fair a month or so ago, and it was good enough. What decided me on Sterne was seeing Shandy on one of those horrid little "books everyone should read" lists (the type that almost never contain anything in verse or anything earlier than Jane Austen, the lone exception to both typically being Shakespeare) and thinking "Well, I might as well get it out of my way."

I knew that Shandy wasn't your standard novel--that it was full of digressions and didn't get anywhere fast--but that didn't deter me; I figured it would make for an interesting read. I remembered CS Lewis mentioning the novel (if you can even call it that) more than a handful of times, so I rather associated it with Lewis, and his taste in books has historically been a good guide for my own reading.

Well, Tristram Shandy reminds me of what my three-year-old daughter said about celery: "It almost tastes good." The whole interrupting digression gimmick is funny at first, but eventually even Sterne seems to have gotten tired of it as he used it less and less going along. He threw in other silly things that I didn't often find funny. The more I read, the more I came to realize that Shandy was the 18th century equivalent of today's "dumb comedy," an American Pie or Scary Movie 25½, and I like it about as much as I like those sort of films.

Sometimes, Sterne appears to have been straight drunk while writing. The story doesn't go anywhere, and Sterne is writing as close to nonsense as seems possible while keeping up some semblance of meaningful text. And it isn't structured "nonsense" of the Carrollian type--it's disjointed blather. Oh, and while we're talking about unreadability, let's not forget that pages and pages in Latin. Mercifully, I don't really read Latin, so I was able to skip these sections. Unfortunately, Sterne always provided a "translation" to slog through.

About halfway through the book, things seem to have become increasingly dull. Once the narrator finally managed to tell about his birth (a third of the way into the novel), he spent more pages than was necessary on a not-entirely-amusing story about his accidental circumcision via window, and then somehow zipped to his making the Grand Tour of the Continent.

Somehow we got back to England, and I'm currently enduring the most uninteresting story about Tristram's Uncle Toby's romantic doings with some widow or other. *yawn* Is it more or less of a snorefest than all the bits through the book about Uncle Toby's obsession with model re-enactments of various sieges? It's hard to say. It's rather like when the optometrist asks you "Better or worse? 1 or 2?" Or maybe it's more like "Which of these piles of dog crap is least offensive to your senses?"

It's not unusual for me to think about what I'll try next the whole time I'm reading something. It's also pretty standard for me to keep an eye on how much further I have to read, even in something I really enjoy. But with Tristram Shandy, every other moment I'm distracted by plans for my next read, and I sometimes check how far I have to go after every chapter (which, by the way, are sometimes only a paragraph's length or less--I guess that sort of thing was considered funny in Sterne's day).

I suppose what reading Tristram Shandy has taught me is that I was right about the wasteland in British literature between Milton and Cowper (exclusive, obviously). Pope and Dryden and their lot are dull both in matter and meter, and the pretend novelists (who apparently had no concept of structure) are unbearable. I hope this is the last time I'll be tempted to give that era the benefit of the doubt and try once more to enjoy its literature. If not, I suppose I deserve the likes of Tristram Shandy for being such a fool.

Where are your books?

"Where are your books?--that light bequeathed
To beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind."

from "Expostulation and Reply"
William Wordsworth