My latest: a review of Christian Wiman in Comment

It’s called “A Poet’s Faith Against Despair.” The following excerpt comes after the essay’s opening discussion of kataphatic and apophatic talk about God:

You can see why apophasis—as a theory and practice of language, yes, but just as much a style or mood—might appeal to poets. Poetry is the art of saying with words more than words can say. Poets are not masters of words; or, at least, the mastery lies in their recognition of the incapacities of language and their resilience with the failures that result. Is human language metaphysically load-bearing? Poets know the answer is affirmative so long as it’s immediately negated.

Of apophasis in all its varieties, Christian Wiman is a poet without living peer. Or if that’s too grand for you—I wouldn’t really know, since I read poetry the way Wiman reads theology, for nourishment and joy and the prick of provocation, which is to say, not professionally, not with a skeptical and parsimonious eye, which is to say, the way we all read before we’re taught to stop it—then say simply that Wiman’s work stands out from the crowd. Whether he’s writing prose or poetry or something in between, you know his voice at once. In part this is because he’s always writing about the same thing (more on that below, and why it’s not a criticism). What he writes about, though, is indistinguishable from how he writes. That’s what makes him great.

Click here to rest the rest.

Every fantasy a comedy, every comedy a theodicy

Recently I wrote about returning to Osten Ard, the fantasy world of novelist Tad Williams in his two series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn and The Last King of Osten Ard. One of the things I’d forgotten about the first series, a trilogy written from 1988 to 1993, is its interest in theodicy. Multiple characters throughout the books wonder, both aloud and to themselves, about the existence of God (or the gods); about their power; about their goodness; about the supposed truths taught by priests and monks; about the myths of old, handed down for centuries; about whether a world such as theirs—namely, a world of unremitting pain, illness, suffering, violence, and death, all apparently senseless, random, and unrectified—is one a just God would either create or sustain. As the lead character Simon realizes at one point: he no longer feels himself capable of praying to such a God even if he does exist. Yet this very realization is itself an indication that there is no such God, since he would not correspond to “the old stories.”

I do not know whether Tad Williams, the author, believes in God, nor can I say just what his aim was in posing these theodical questions throughout his trilogy. I’ve not yet re-read the second half of the third book in the series, so my memory may be wrong, but I don’t recall him resolving these questions in a clear or satisfactory way. That’s fine. Theodicy is usually a dish best served incomplete anyway.

Here’s the thing, though. Williams’ story wraps up beautifully. Every narrative thread is woven, by story’s end, into a gorgeous tapestry clearly thought through and planned out from the beginning. This is what makes the epic tale so marvelously told. There is not a character forgotten, nor a plot device left by the wayside. By the final pages, it’s as though behind this seemingly senseless drama stands an author, an author with meaning and purpose, whose design may have been hidden before but has now been made manifest.

It seems this way, because it is this way. The author isn’t a hypothesis we are forced to postulate in order to make sense of a story we otherwise couldn’t make sense of. We know the author’s name. The story is a novel. He wrote it. He planned it. He designed it. Duh.

But there’s the rub. If, outside the text, there stands an author, then inside the text, within the story, there must likewise be an Author. The perfect pleasing blueprint of the thing works because there is an architect. The fact of there being an architect is itself an answer to the characters’ ponderings about God. The characters wonder to themselves whether they are living in a meaningful story or a meaningless chaos. Well, we know: it’s the former, not the latter. The end of the story clears that right up. More to the point, the fact that they are characters inside a story written by an author for readers’ pleasure is as direct an answer as one could have. It may not be an answer available to the characters, within the story, but it’s a meta-textual answer available to us, the readers of their story.

In this way, Williams is unable to render a negative answer to the theodicy his narrative is meant to embody, however ambivalent his own intentions may be. Merely by authoring the story and having it make some kind of sense, he answers his own question: Yes, there is a God. In a word, it’s him. He’s the deus ex machina. He’s the one behind the curtain. There’s someone pulling the strings. It’s him. And if he exists, then the existence of God (or the gods) within the world he’s created is a given. Of course he (they) exist. Otherwise the story wouldn’t unfold the way it does; wouldn’t be orchestrated and choreographed in such a supremely fitting and satisfying manner.

This, in turn, becomes an extra-textual answer about our world, not just Osten Ard. There is a God in our world just as there is in that world, as evidenced by the fact that we make worlds like Osten Ard. Human sub-creation imitates and exemplifies divine creation. In the words of poet Franz Wright:

…And the way, always, being 
a maker 
reminds:

you were made. 

What I mean is this. Insofar as a fantasy is a comedy, it is also a theodicy: it poses and answers whether there is a God and, if he exists, whether he is both all-good and all-powerful. There is and he is, fantasy replies. For in a comedy, the Good triumphs in the end—ultimately, in some way, to some degree. This is why Dante’s masterpiece is called, simply, La Commedia. It’s the comedy, and therefore the divine comedy. This world is a comedy, for all its evil and suffering. It is not a tragedy.

For modern fantasy to avoid theodicy, it would have to embrace tragedy. Not darkness, not “grittiness,” not violence and sadism and gratuitous sex and playing footsie with nihilism. Actual, bona fide tragedy. I’ve not encountered fantasy that does that. And even then, if there’s a human author doing the tragedy-writing, there’s a case to be made that it can’t fully escape the pull of theodicy. It seems to me you’d have to go full Sartre and write a fantasy akin to La Nausée. But what world-building fantasist wants to do that? Is even capable of stomaching it?

We write because we are written. We make because we are made. We work providence in our stories because providence works in ours. We give the final word to the Good because the Good has the final word in our world—or will, at least; we hope, at least.

This is why every fantasy is a theodicy. Because every fantasy is a comedy. And comedy is a witness to our trust, howsoever we deny it or mask it, of our trust that God is, that God is good, and that God will right all wrongs in the End.