The Discarded Image

I just finished reading CS Lewis's The Discarded Image. Very good read. I promised myself the happiness of typing out this quote from Chesterton, which Lewis uses to front his chapter on the "Longaevi", or the "faerie folk":

"There is something sinister about putting a leprechaun in the workhouse. The only solid comfort is that he certainly will not work."

But that is a bit of an incidental in this post, which is more about Lewis' "Short Course" (really, a series of lectures) on the Medieval "Model". By "model" he means how things looked from the perspective of the medieval author and thinker. He traces the thinking from the classical days up to how it manifested itself in the medieval and Renaissance literature. Maybe putting the leprechaun in the workhouse is a bit similar by analogy to the common fallacy Lewis describes and tries to get us past in the book -- the fallacy is taking some image or expression of times past and trying to understand it strictly in terms of our modern sensibility and intellectual context. This fallacy is almost the mark of ignorance -- parochialism, defined as "narrowly restricted in scope or outlook; provincial" -- and we are all subject to it, but ought to try and acknowledge it and at least attempt to get beyond it. I'm preaching a bit here, but Lewis does not preach in this book, though he does try to make a point about the advantages of the more respectful approach -- more about that later. The bulk of The Discarded Image deals in a scholarly, meticulous fashion with the details and big picture of the medieval "Model", so much like a cathedral with the abundance of detail and the soaring vision. With the background given in this book, it is much easier to understand allusions and themes in Chaucer, Milton and Spenser, among others, which simply pass by our radar without the understanding of the context which Lewis gives.

As he writes:

Hence to look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest--trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The "space" of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical.

I requested the book because of the Seven Liberal Arts couplet and so found that chapter the most directly interesting to me, though the section on the medieval universe was also absorbing. Here's a bit on the subject of "Grammar" -- he states that Grammar meant Latin grammar, of course, but:

"While Grammar was thus restricted to a single tongue, in another way it sometimes extended far beyond the realm it claims today. It had done so for centures. Quintilian suggests literatura as the proper translation of Greek grammatike, and literatura, though it does not mean "literature", included a good deal more than literacy. It included all that is required for "making up' a 'set book'; syntax, etymology, prosody, and the explanation of allusions. Isidore makes even history a department of Grammar. He would have described the book I am now writing as a book of Grammar. Scholarship is perhaps our nearest equivalent.

In popular usage Grammatica or Grammaria slid into the vague sense of learning in general; and since learning is usually an object both of respect and suspicion to the masses, grammar, in the form grammary comes to mean magic. Thus in the ballad of King Estmere, 'My mother was a western woman learned in grammarye.' And from grammary, by a familiar sound-change, comes glamour --- a word whose associations with grammar and even with magic have now been annihilated by the beauty-specialists."

As for Dialectic:

"Dialectic in the couplet 'teaches words'; an obscure saying. What is really meant is that, having learned from grammar how to talk, we must learn from Dialectic how to talk sense, to argue, to prove and disprove. .... Everyone who has tried to teach mere Logic knows how difficult it is, especially with an intelligent pupil, to avoid raising questions which force us into metaphysics."

A bit about Rhetoric:

"Chaucer's apostrophe to 'Gaufred, dere mayster souverain; has kept alive the memory of Geoffrey de Vinsauf who...wrote the Nova Poetria, a work whose value lies in its extreme naivety.

He divides "Ordo" (which some call Dispositio) into two kinds, Natural and Artificial. The Nature follows the King of Hearts' advice by beginning at the beginning. The Artificial is of three kinds. You ccan begin at the end (as in the Oedipus Rex or a play by Ibsen); or in the middle (like Virgil and Spenser); or with a Sententia or Exemplum. Chaucer begins with a Sententia or maxim in the Parlement, the Hous of Fame, the Prologue to the Legen, the Legend of Phillis and the Prioress's Tale. I cannot remember that he ever begins with an Exemplum, but no one needs to be reminded how frequent they are in his work...

And I like this section:

Here Geoffrey is dealing with a real problem, which we have all faced though few of us would pose it so bluntly. The Natural Order will not always serve. And the plan of beginning with a Sententia, or something like it, is still an unlaid ghost. It 'walks' in that fatal opening paragraph with which schoolboys are apparently taught to begin their essays.

On Amplificatio he is almost embarrassing. He calls the various method of 'amplifying' you piece, quite frankly, morae (delays); as if the art of literature consisted in learning how to say much when you have little to say. That, I suspect, was how he really regarded it. But this means not that the morae he recommends are all necessarily bad but that he misunderstands -- I do not profess to understand it fully myself -- their real function.

There is a bit more about Geoffrey de Vinsauf here, and here.

Personally, I wonder whether "delays" as an artifice weren't a matter of pacing.... of suiting the delivery to the occasion. I see that mora is a linguistic and metric term, and I don't see why it shouldn't extend out to the actual syntax and substance when the occasion calls for it.

Elsewhere Lewis writes (in The Influence of the Model, the last chapter):

Rhetoric recommended morae -- delays or padding. Does all this science and 'story' come in simply longius ut sit opus, 'that the work may be longer'? But this perhaps overlooks that fact that Rhetoric explains the formal, not the material, characteristic. That is, it may tell you to digress; not what to put into your digressions. It may approve Common Places; it can hardly decide what shall achieve the status of a Common Place.

OK, I had better stop now because I keep finding more things to quote. Anyway, the book was interesting in more ways than I can find time to describe here.

I thought the examples of morae and sententiae brought up to today's schoolboy essays had applicability to some of the criticisms of the SAT essays.

SAT essay test rewards length and ignores errors

Receptive Reading & More

In reference to those Right Questions I just wrote about --

I just received CS Lewis's The Discarded Image from ILL and this bit of the preface spoke to what I was trying to say about putting yourself into the receptive but not credulous mode -- he is talking about researching to get help with the more difficult older books:

"Frequent researches ad hoc sadly impair receptive reading, so that sensitive people may even come to regard scholarship as a baleful thing which is always taking you out of the literature itself. ....to be always looking at the map when there is a fine prospect before you shatters the 'wise passiveness' in which landscape ought to be enjoyed."

James Taylor writes similarly in Poetic Knowledge:

Unlike the scientific mode of learning that proposes methods and systems for acquiring knowledge, the tradition that has been thus far reviewed reveals rather a way of knowledge, like a path or winding road, with interesting detours off the road, more than the superhighway of modern education. It is a way more akin to the natural human response to discovery of the world. It is a way of leisure and reflection of what is there, the way things are, and when one is considering the kinds of knowledge, it is seen that there is a natural order after all that corresponds to the learner and his universe..

I wonder if CS Lewis's point about the scholarship possibly leading out of the literature is the reason that I have always hesitated to impose on my kids those "look up vocabulary words in the dictionary" type exercises that seem to be common in literature unit studies. For "hesitated", read "never had the heart to even try."

It's interesting that Charlotte Mason used the term "wise passiveness", too. Of course, it is from Wordsworth.

A bit more from James Taylor:

An education that appeals only to the intellect at the expense of the senses and emotions results in teaching mainly to the problem-solving intellect, the active intellect, neglecting at great peril the receptive heart and soul that knows for certain what it knows, and wonders and dreams about what it does not know. The risk in all this denatured teaching is to make one “narrow of heart”, as Dom Gerard explained to me. And John Senior used to say it is the heart and intuitive mind that knows the good, it is not a problem to be solved, but like truth and beauty are realities to be admired and shared, not analyzed and dissected.

Now we must remember that the light of the intellect is always at play throughout the soul and avoid the error of the Romantics who seemed to think that the emotions were the seat of wisdom. However, the light of the intellect does not confine her illumination to just the reason, but also in some mysterious manner to the exterior and interior senses, the emotions and the will in one complete wash of light.

My love for connecting quotes is running away with me, again... I meant originally to mention how CS Lewis's point might also connect with my ongoing slight hesitation about narration. For years, I've heard that it is essential to a CM education; but urgency usually raises my adrenaline level without actually affecting my actions, UNLESS I can see why.

I have thought for many years that narration right after a reading could short-circuit the reception process -- bringing it too quickly to a rational, verbal-linguistic level. So in that way, almost taking the child "outside" the literature and into his own verbal-linguistic brain, which might actually shut down some of the other attributes of intelligence that are used for understanding and assimilating "the best that has been thought and said."

Now, I am pretty sure that my reasoning has taken a wrong turning somewhere, but until I've solved the problem I'm likely to go on muddling through with narration as a half-measure.

Intuitively, the Waldorf "breathe in -- breathe out" approach appeals to me more because it seems to add the element of time to assimilate, especially with my crew of introverts who need their space. The way I grew up, I would read something and think, and think, but the thoughts didn't become words of my own till much later, sometimes years later.

Still, I have so much respect for CM's thinking which has often proved correct even when my intitial reaction was a bit hesitatnt. And she was emphatic on the value of the immediate retelling. So one of my mental projects for this summer is to try to figure out this narration thing enough to be able to actually use it. I know I've said that before, but then, anything worth doing is worth doing badly -- or over and over again, until I get it right ;-).

The Right Questions

From Robert Hutchins, The Ways (and Whys) of Reading:

"Deluged as we are with a welter of printed words, we tend to devaluate all writing, to look at every book on the shelf as the counterpart of every other, and to weigh volumes instead of words."

and a bit on the questions to ask of a reading:

"The art of reading a book or piece of writing consists in asking the right questions in the right order. They are as follows:

1. What is this piece of writing about? What is its leading theme or main point? What is it trying to say?
2. How does it say what it is trying to say? How does the writer get his central point across? How does he tell his story or argue for his conlcusion to produce the effect in us that he is aiming at?
3. Is it true -- factually or poetically -- in whole or part? HAs he won our assent or sympathy? And if not, what reasons do we have for disagreeing with or rejecting his view of things?
4. What of it? What meaning does it have for us in the shape of opinions or attitudes that we are led to form for ourselves as the result of reading this piece?

Now, I typed these out because I thought they were good questions. These are the sort of questions that a serious reader goes into a work trying to find answers to. It is helpful for me to keep them in mind as I prepare for teaching my 5th 12 year old next year.

HOWEVER -- and I am not sure how to say this, so it will be interesting to see how it turns out on the screen ;-) -- judging purely by myself, since I don't have access to anyone else's head -- they are not the kind of questions that you fire at the author. You don't go into the book demanding answers; rather, you put yourself into a receptive though not credulous mode; you listen and attend. Hutchins talks about the respect owed to an author, elsewhere. Nor are they the sort of questions you scribble answers to, quickly and simply, on a worksheet. If you do it that way, if you are like me, you will get the feeling of bored horror I get when I look at many literature study guides. Or worse, you may think you understand the book, but that would be like giving a personality questionnaire to a visitor to your house and imagining that now you know everything about him.

They are good questions to keep in mind, but they are not as good to bring to the forefront, like a scripted dialogue rather than a real conversation.

Talking to myself here, and there's a bigger application than just literary analysis. I have been thinking recently about how much "philosophy begins in wonder" as Socrates said. My daughter commented recently how much she dislikes having answers given to her before she has formulated the questions (just to make the context clear, we were talking about Plato's Republic which we are reading together, and how Socrates often seems to raise issues that he doesn't really settle). David Hicks said that much the same thing is the problem with modern teaching methods, often... the answers are given before the questions are asked -- a multitude of answers. I feel like last homeschool year, though it went pretty well in many respects, was a little bit too much about giving the answers before the questions were really thought through. Anyway, I thought I would write that out to remind myself!

understand before evaluating

This is from Robert Hutchins' essay on "The Ways (and Whys) of Reading". I am quoting it because it discusses what I see as one of the most common mistakes people make when they are critiquing a work, whether expository OR literary. As my 12 year old embarks on his teenage years -- what Dorothy Sayers called the "Pert" or dialectic stage -- I don't necessarily want to just TELL him this, but I try to make it an operating principle in all book- or topical events type discussions with my teens. Needless to say, this is a reminder to myself as well.

The first (rule or maxim) is that the reader should neither agree nor disagree with an author until he is sure that he understand what the author is saying. To agree with what you do not understand is inane; to disagree in the absence of understanding is impertinent. Many readers start to disagree with what they are reading almost at once -- before they have performed the tasks of analysis and interpretation which should always precede that of criticism. In effect, they are saying to an author: "I don't know what you are talking about, but I think you are wrong." It would be just as silly for them to say, "right" as it is for them to say "wrong". In either case, they are expressing prejudice rather than undertaking genuine criticism, which must be based on understanding.

This rule calls for patience and humility on the reader's part. If he is reading anything worth reading -- anything which has the power to instruct him and elevate his mind -- he should be loath to judge it too soon, for it would be rash to presume that he has so quickly attained an adequate understanding of it. If he suspects that he has fallen short in his understanding, he should always blame himself rather than the author. Not only is that the proper attitude if the author is worth reading at all, but, in addition, such an attitude may keep the reader's mind on the task of interpretation. There is always time for criticism after that is well done.

This relates a bit to a quote by Chesterton which I put here some time ago.

I notice it also ramifies out to an interpersonal skill, as of course literary and topical discussion always seem to. The Catholic Church calls "rash judgment" the habit of leaping to conclusions -- usually negative ones, but I think it's possible to be too foolishly approving as well. Melancholics and cholerics (I'm one of the former) may be inclined to hit the negative side of the rash judgment, while sanguines and phlegmatics may be too quick to jump on a bandwagon.

Early teens are particularly likely to argue and to form hasty judgments, as you may remember from your own younger days or from life with teen children. This is a developmental advance of great significance, and is to be celebrated. The child is newly able to entertain abstract ideas and consider their meaning in his mind. However, he is not yet skilled in entertaining -- he pulls some in as HIS ideas, and rejects some cursorily, sometimes for very odd reasons, like not liking the author's name.

The goal of education is to foster the impartiality necessary to come to honest, not pre-digested, conclusions.

To some extent, of course, it's impossible not to evaluate as you go. I have met people, and books, that make me immediately wary on the first encounter. The trick is not to "rest your case" until you've thought it through. Nor ought you to start shotgunning your conclusions and judgments --like random pellets -- in all directions.

Since I'm a visual person, I usually think of reading a new book or entertaining a new idea as "letting it into the outer chamber". I try to entertain cordially, fairly, and impartially, but I keep it in the outside rooms until trust has been established. This is a process, and certainly doesn't come through hasty approval or hasty condemnation. As Hutchins points out, it is impossible to grow through reading and thinking if you just turn everything into yourself, as material to support what you already think and feel.

I doubt if many people succeed in doing this fairly and well ALL the time; it's an intellectual discipline. But I do think it's one of the more important habits to acquire, and it's one that each person must acquire for himself or herself. Once you can do it a bit though, you can truly be educated through books.

All Literature is Dangerous

This is what Martin Cothran writes in The Classical Teacher sent out from Memoria Press. He quotes Chesterton, who says in "On Reading":

To be merely modern is to condemn oneself to an ultimate narrowness; just as to spend one's last earthly money on the newest hat is to condemn oneself to the old-fashioned. The road of the ancient centuries is strewn with dead moderns.
Literature, classic and enduring literature, does its best work in reminding us perpetually of the whole round of truth and balancing other and older ideas against the ideas to which we might for a moment be prone.

Cothran writes about young college students who read some of Ayn Rand's work and were "swept away", not having read enough or thought enough to realize that books like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead were not great literature or thought. You could probably substitute whatever book or idea you could imagine. The best insurance against a disproportionate influence of one book or idea is a broad, deep environment of them.

Of course, CS Lewis says something very similar in his famous Introduction to Athanasius:

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook - even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.

Cothran goes on (he is talking about the Harry Potter series):

"To a child who is not well-read, Harry Potter is dangerous -- and so is any other book he or she may read. But the best defense against one idea is not fewer ideas but more of them....being widely read, in other words, is the best inoculation against the dangers of literature. Being widely read enables a person to not only see an idea, but, as Chesterton put it, to see through it."

"Literature is dangerous-- except when taken in large doses"

I read Ayn Rand in my freshman year of university, so that is why the example particularly rang with me. The friend who gave me her books was an enthusiast who took her philosophy as truth. As for me, I admired Rand's vigor and a sort of cool sweeping bleakness in her tales of striving, dispassionate men and women. But I knew it was not great writing and I knew it wasn't great thinking. When I reflect on how I knew, I think it was because of my mother reading Winnie the Pooh to me, among much else, and I knew that Rand had left a whole lot out that needed to be accounted for at least implicitly.

John Senior writes:

"The seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, romances, adventures-the thousand good books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest."

I think that if children have explored the territory of these "thousand good books" (you could probably add others to the list) then they will have some means by which to measure the books and ideas that will inevitably come their way. The virtues and the limitations of the Hogwarts world will be clearer against a context of Middle Earth, Narnia, Sherwood Forest, and Ravenhurst, to mention only a few.

I like what Theresa at La Paz Learning wrote some time ago about Living Dangerously. She writes:

Far better to teach your child how to appropriately handle the dangerous things he may come into contact with, like power tools, knives, or fire. It is actually safer than trying to keep your child in a sterile, “safe” environment in hopes of keeping him from harm. Rather than forbidding a child to touch these things, teach him (age appropriately, of course) to use “dangerous” things safely, and you no longer need fear him coming across them (because he inevitably will) and then hurting himself. I contend (though I admit I have not done the research to back it up) that most accidents happen due to lack of knowledge, not because of the possession of too much of it.

I think this mastery of danger has ramifications in the literary sphere too. A lot of the most worthwhile things have an element of risk. We don't read them or do them BECAUSE they are risky; but because of their very value or power, there is some danger in their handling. This would include our faith, of course. A constant theme in CS Lewis's Narnia Chronicles is that "he (Aslan) is not a TAME lion". Our faith is not tame, or at least should not be; our lives are not tame, unless we have insulated them to the point of vacuum-sealing; nor is tameness all we should expect of our literature, even for our children.

Of course, this is not about letting kids have free rein with the matches or knives or guns or books with adult themes, either. I think our society tends towards a dichotomy -- XTreme precautions, to the point that you can't buy a real chemistry set anymore and laws are being proposed to restrict fast food; and on the other hand, simple neglect or indifference to a toxic environment. Everyone has to find their own balance for their own family and children. But there is a golden mean between any two extremes, and it seems to me that children learn more about risk by learning to handle it to some extent according to their maturity than by being kept from it altogether.

Freedom is Always New

I am still thinking about The Village, which I watched Friday night with my older children. CS Lewis said that one ought to have read a poem at least three times before making a judgment, and I would think that applies somewhat to cinema as well, so I don't want to make an evaluation too soon. Besides, you probably have read a lot of those already. Many critics don't seem to have liked it, and I can see why. One, their own slightly pagan literary sensibilities tell them that anyone who has been touted fervently needs some kind of "fall" to balance out the picture. Being in the position of obligation to churn out movie reviews constantly, the "fall" of Shyamalan provides them with a glib readymade template. Two, the movie depicts an 18th century style village hidden from the 20th century world, which offends their sense of realism. Three, it doesn't tie up very neatly, so you can't say "the theme is...." or pull an allegorical message from it. There are a lot of unresolved notes; for that reason, it seemed to evoke meaning rather than encapsulate it.

The dialogue that seems to be a key part to the theme is frustrating because it has a slightly trite ring to it (there, I am evaluating even when I said I would not). The actual scenes, the colors and details, and the positioning of the characters and how they are filmed, even the musical score and sound effects, seem to have more poetic depth to them than the words. But here are the words that seem to sum up the way the movie seems to change direction (whether it actually changes course or just adds new light that retrospects towards the beginning -- a recurrent device in Shyamalan's movies --- I haven't figured out yet).

Anyway, here is the dialogue that seems to be the pivot:

---Who do you think will continue this place, this life? Do you plan to live forever? It is in them that our future lies, it is in Ivy and Lucius that this way of life will continue. Yes I have risked, I hope I am always able to risk everything for the just and right cause. If we did not make this decision, we could never again call ourselves innocent, and that in the end is what we have protected here, innocence! That I'm not ready to give up.
---Let her go. If it ends, it ends. We can move towards hope, that's what's beautiful about this place. We cannot run from heartache. My brother was slain in the towns, the rest of my family died here. Heartache is a part of life, we know that now. Ivy is running toward hope, let her run. If this place is worthy, she'll be successful in her quest.
---How could you have sent her. She is blind.
---She is more capable than most in this village. And she is led by love. The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.

This evoked for me the Pope's words in Spe Salvi:

Let us ask once again: what may we hope? And what may we not hope? First of all, we must acknowledge that incremental progress is possible only in the material sphere. Here, amid our growing knowledge of the structure of matter and in the light of ever more advanced inventions, we clearly see continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of nature.

Yet in the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility of accumulation for the simple reason that man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew. These decisions can never simply be made for us in advance by others—if that were the case, we would no longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning.

Naturally, new generations can build on the knowledge and experience of those who went before, and they can draw upon the moral treasury of the whole of humanity. But they can also reject it, because it can never be self-evident in the same way as material inventions. The moral treasury of humanity is not readily at hand like tools that we use; it is present as an appeal to freedom and a possibility for it.

If the theme in The Village ties together in some way, it seems to me it would be something along these lines. Before the time frame of the movie, the elders have made a radical decision to withdraw from the world, in light of their horrific experiences with human evil. The "monsters" are their device for making this horror both vivid and vague, to protect their children and provide them a haven.

At this turning point in the movie, where they allow Ivy to go on her quest, to leave the haven, they are deciding to turn towards the future in a new way; to hand over the active role to the next generation. In order to preserve what is valuable to them -- the essence of its value -- they must be willing to accept the possibility of change, even disruption, of its outward form. In some real way, otherwise, they will "become the monsters" themselves.

Cardinal Newman said (quoted here by then-Cardinal Ratzinger) that "to live is to change". In the context of the essay he wrote, it goes like this:

But whatever be the risk of corruption from intercourse with the world around, such a risk must be encountered if a great idea is duly to be understood, and much more if it is to be fully exhibited. It is elicited and expanded by trial, and battles into perfection and supremacy. .... It seems in suspense which way to go; it wavers, and at length strikes out in one definite direction. .... old principles reappear under new forms. It changes with them in order to remain the same. In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change....

So something like that would be my reading. I still haven't figured out if it coheres throughout The Village, which certainly has several puzzling and thought-provoking elements that aren't quite contained in this idea. My kids and I had fun discussing these yesterday, and will probably continue to ponder more upon it in the future.

This isn't a real post, just a quote....

The Doctor Who Is Thursday posted this Chesterton quote on Nancy C Brown's blog and I wanted to preserve it since I thoroughly agree --

The man who would not praise Pindar unless he had read him would be a low, distrustful fellow, the worst kind of sceptic, who doubts not only God, but man. He would be like a man who could not call Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it. He would be like a man who would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had been there.

But I think there is a limit, and a highly legitimate limit, to this process. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well perhaps--I think, at any rate, it would do no harm--if he did know a little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar. And I think the same situation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point out that Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestilently cynical, or low and beastly in his views of life. When people brought such attacks against the morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek;....

I found the whole GKC article here.

CS Lewis says something very similar in an article about science fiction and who should undertake to review it (NOT, he says, the people who generally despise or have no sympathy for sci-fi or have no understanding of what it purports to be about).

Reflections on Penguins

JoVE at Tricotomania posted some thoughts about literature and mentioned the book Deconstructing Penguins, which I serendipitously was able to find in our library system. It came yesterday, which meant I read the first half while I was at the beach with the kids.

Here is an excerpt from the book.

JoVE asked for opinions on how the book relates to the wider field of literary analysis. I am certainly no expert, but here are some necessarily incomplete thoughts. My exposure to Deconstructionism in literature was brief and came about through my literature BA training in university. It looks like deconstruction is a difficult term to apply, since even its main proponents -- Derrida and Rorty are two names that came up during my college years-- hesitated to define it in precise terms, probably for good reasons, from their perspective. What I got out of the concept back in college was that the text was sort of the raw material for the reader's interpretation. Therefore, it followed that what the author MEANT to say was of less importance than what the reader brought to the experience and what the author's worldview and context determined he would say.

Wikipedia says it just a bit differently:

"Though Derrida himself denied deconstruction was a method or school of philosophy, or indeed anything outside of reading the text itself, the term has been used by others to describe Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism, which involved discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlying—and unspoken and implicit—assumptions, ideas, and frameworks that form the basis for thought and belief, for example, in complicating the ordinary division made between nature and culture."

In practice, to me, this seemed to lead to a lot of half-baked undergrads and slightly flaky professors having a clear field to talking about the homosexuality of Shakespeare, or whatever was the fun topical-topic of the day or best suited the individual litterateur's own personal worldview. There is probably way more to it than that, but I still get my university's literature newsletter and the publication listings are still too often in this strained mode.

Deconstructing Penguins doesn't quite seem to follow in this school as I understood it. The authors propose that all books are mysteries -- there are clues to be solved to get to the heart of what the writer is saying. Everything is significant. You look at the characters -- who is the protaganist, the character who is trying to push forward the main action of the books? who is the antagonist, who is trying to block this progress? how does the setting contribute to the motion of the book?

The process of understanding the book is the process of getting underneath the surface and sometimes the results are surprising. From the authors' described approach, I get the idea that they are using the word "deconstructing" to mean the opposite of "constructing" -- ie, working back from the finished product, the author's construction, to its origins.

Once you have gone through the process of understanding what the author is trying to say, according to the book, THEN you can justly critique how he or she said it -- to what extent the author is successful. (I notice that often in the cyberworld, there is a tendency to do this BEFORE actually making the effort to understand the work on its own terms). Perhaps this hasty judgment was also a besetting temptation in my literature department .... jumping too fast to what the author's limitations are, and what he is REALLY talking about, shortcircuits the solution of the mystery. Thus, you got early critics of the Lord of the Rings talking about how the Ring was really the atom bomb. Chesterton also satirizes this temptation to invent or impose meaning, in several of his Father Brown mystery stories.

For example, read Chesterton's Oracle of the Dog for a funny and telling depiction of how meaning is sometimes imposed from without the actual thing itself, rather than properly understood within it.

‘The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk,’ said the priest. ‘All I complain of is that because he couldn’t talk you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It’s part of something I’ve noticed more and more in the modern world, appearing in all sorts of newspaper rumours and conversational catchwords; something that’s arbitrary without being authoritative.

Deconstructing Penguins does NOT seem to fall into this trap, as far as I've read it. The authors seem to keep to the actual text and use their methods to uncover real layers of meaning contained within. They attempt to engage with the life experience of the child to show, for example how prejudice works. But this is a legitimate literary process -- checking the work against one's own experience -- and is difference from using one's own life understanding to trump or subvert the text of the book. Perhaps this is what deconstruction is at its best.

The authors do a nice job of showing their process interactively, through their lively accounts of the book clubs they ran for second to fifth graders and their parents. I totally agree with what they say here:

"The theory, still in vogue, that says it doesn't matter what your child reads as long as he or she reads something is just plain wrong. If anyone tries to convince you otherwise, don't believe it. ....If you start your children off with books that are well-written, whose plots demand attention, with characters drawn with depth and wit, that is the type of reading they will come to enjoy. ...

Kids enjoy depth. The idea that a boy or girl will only be interested in discussing a book in a superficial way is another misguided assumption. .... The irony is that it is far more fun for kids (and adults) to try and solve the mystery of a book. "

I think the only possible danger with this approach might be expressed in another quote from the book:

"We're looking for what the author is trying to say underneath the story. What the story is really about. What do you think the story is really about?"

I could see that if this approach was used in a very schooly, artificial way, the kids and parents could fall into the trap of thinking that the story is a kind of code for some boiled-down thesis. The Lord of the Rings is about: The danger of power. Charlotte's Web is about: the importance of friendship. And so on. In other words, a glib and reductionist problem-solving approach that closes down significance rather than expands understanding of it. But within the examples given in the book, the search for meaning actually does go deeper into the heart of the book, rather than shutting it off quickly.

The nice thing, though, about a conversational approach such as the authors recommend is that it is to some extent self-correcting. Any group of kids and adults will come up with enough diversity of approach and understanding that some of the dangers of superficiality will be avoided.

JoVe posted some more literature thoughts here.

I remember researching Mortimer Adler's Shared Inquiry ideas a few years back and in some ways the Deconstructing Penguins approach seems a bit similar, but I'd have to look more into it to see how and if they differ significantly.

Another book in a slightly similar vein, which I have on my bookshelves, is Reading Strands... though I liked the tone of Deconstructing Penguins just a bit better.

The Thinking Mother blogged a bit about the book, too.