Gene C. Fant Jr.'s Blog, page 7

“You are too bright to remain a Christian. . . .”

Among the shining experiences of my doctoral work was a genuinely transformational course:  “Seminar in William Faulkner,” shepherded by Dr. Noel Polk, one of the world’s pre-eminent scholars, who passed away this past weekend.

Non-Mississippians cannot fully understand how my home state feels about its writers.  It’s hard to swing a dead cat in most places without hitting a writer of some repute, which means there is a neighborliness toward local writers that does not exist in many other places.  Before her death, it was hardly newsworthy to stand behind Eudora Welty in line at the Jitney-Jungle (a grocery chain).  I was in line at the local dry cleaners once and realized that I was sandwiched between two bestselling mystery writers, Nevada Barr and Terri Blackstock; between the three of us, we had sold something like 10.001 million books.  ;-)

Noel was a fellow Mississippian, from the town of Picayune, where he had been raised in the local Baptist church and had believed that God was calling him to be a preacher.  He attended the flagship Baptist college in the state and soon discovered the siren call of literature.  One of his classmates was Barry Hannah, another prominent Mississippi writer whom I eulogized on this site  a few years ago.

Noel once told me that he started his walk away from Christianity in that context; graduate school finalized that journey and when I came to know him, he was a massively articulate, Bible-steeped skeptic with little taste for the cultural Christianity that characterized all too much of the deep South.  I highly recommend his memoir about growing up in Picayune, “Outside the Southern Myth” (Mississippi University Press) for those who wish to understand the unresolved nature of the era that “The Help” explored in an overly slick way.  For those of us from the deep South, it is easy to read Polk’s memoir and wonder how anyone from that era was able to stomach remaining in the faith after witnessing so much hatred and ignorance.

As a scholar, Polk had gained access to Faulkner’s carbon typescripts for the major works; these were, effectively, keystroke logs of the author’s original manuscripts, and Polk compared these with the published texts to return the prose to Faulkner’s original intentions (these are the “corrected text editions” published by Vintage).  As you can imagine, Polk’s attention to detail was a dominant characteristic of his work; this is ironic, given that the word “picayune” (his birthplace) means “tiny” or “trivial.”

The seminar was breathtaking; we read only two novels the entire term: The Sound and the Fury and Absalom! Absalom!   Yes, you read that correctly, two novels in an entire doctoral seminar.  But it was brutal.  Faulkner is dense with allusions and his language is among the most challenging of that period, as his mastery of minutia and regionalism combined to provide the text with pivotal moments that centered upon words that were obscure or ambiguous.  One day, Noel dragged in a two-volume Compact Oxford English Dictionary and forced us to look up words after shaming us for not having done so in the first place.  His former life as a youth revivalist had prepared him for close readings of text in ways that are rare among those who were not trained in exegesis.

We wrote two seminar papers that had to be pristine.  By pristine, I mean utterly perfect.  He read the papers in his office with us sitting in a hard chair next to him, shredding our prose, our word choices, and attention to details.  While he was silent, I sat in that chair praying that I would not cry.  He delighted in making doctoral students cry; I did not want to delight him.  At the end of the term he congratulated me on my final revisions (after umpteen sleepless nights) and told me to get them published.  Both papers were published in the next few years, one as a book chapter.  This is, to say the least, highly unusual for seminar papers, but I had been blessed with an unusual professor who was an incredible editor.

Students either adored him or despised him; it was a bi-modal distribution, with an utter vacuum in the middle range.  By the end of my graduate work, I dearly loved the man, sort of in a Stockholm Syndrome way (where hostages empathize with their captors) but also because despite his vibrant cynicism, he was such an incredibly encouraging person who had clearly learned something from his time in church, or perhaps in spite of it, if his memoir is to be considered.

I do not wish to overstate my relationship with Dr. Polk (after I graduated we exchanged emails every few years) but his influence over me, a fellow Mississippi Baptist by birth and a devotee of literature by choice, was significant.  One of my fondest memories of doctoral work was the day he ended our conference by saying, “Let’s go drive around, you drive,” and we drove around town and just shot the breeze on a particularly sunny day.  It was a pleasant, easy way to spend an afternoon.

On more than one occasion, Noel said to me, “You are too bright to remain a Christian, Gene.”  He meant this as a compliment, I was sure, even with the backhanded swipe at my faith, and I was glad to accept it as such.  I’ve thought about that a lot since I heard about his death.  All too often when we hear such things, we are without a ready response.  This morning I thought of the response I wish I had uttered back then: “And you, Dr. Polk, are too encouraging to remain a skeptic.”

Foreshadowing: Why Literature Helps Us Understand the Scriptures

When I sat for oral examinations in my master’s degree in English, where I concentrated in creative writing, one of the questions was about how I approach foreshadowing in my short stories.  Foreshadowing is the way that writers hint about upcoming events or twists in a story.  For the careful reader, foreshadowing creates a particularly effective form of engagement, ultimately moving into the territory of dramatic irony, where the reader knows more than the characters in the story.  In Oedipus Rex, for example, Sophocles plays on the knowledge the audience has that Oedipus has committed a sin that he has not yet figured out, which heightens our horror and sense of catharsis.

Foreshadowing is particularly compelling when the reader re-reads a text (the same is true for other narrative formats, such as film), having then the ultimate knowledge of the story’s whole.  The second and subsequent times through the text, the reader finds all sorts of nuggets that can be very satisfying in terms of realizing just how carefully the story was crafted.

In my book on narrative, “God as Author: A Biblical Approach to Narrative” (B & H Academic), I propose that one of the reasons authors are so prone to addiction and depression is because they function as little gods in the worlds of their stories.  Authors can move events, generate conflicts, frustrate hope, create new characters, and even provide for rescue when all hope has been lost.  In tales with happy endings, the author is a kind of savior-facilitator who rescues the protagonist.  In sad tales, the author is a kind of despot-sadist who leaves us yearning for something more meaningful.  In the world of the story, the author is ultimately in control, to some extent anyway.  But then the pen must cease moving or the fingers typing, and authors must return to reality, where bills must be paid, garbage must be removed, and spouses attended to.  It’s hard to remain sober when you no longer are divine.

The quasi-divinity of the author is found most clearly in the element of foreshadowing.  Because the author is outside of the story, she can read over an event and then go back to the preceding chapters and drop in clues or accentuate the pathos of the characters.  The editorial process allows for a refinement of narrative that is like a surgeon’s scalpel, paring away extraneous information and laying bare the characters in the starkest of terms.

I thought about this on Sunday when my Bible study teacher was working through 2 Samuel 12, where Nathan confronts David over his sin with Bathsheba.  In verse 13, Nathan says, “The Lord has taken away your sin; you will not die,” but in the following verse, he says that the son born of this adulterous union will die.

I must admit that I have always struggled with the fact that the innocent son had to pay for his father’s sin with his infant life.  This is unfair, I want to offer, unjust in fact.  But then I re-read the verses by the light of the subsequent events of the Bible’s narrative and I realize that this infant son was not the only son to die for David’s sins.  The king had another son, born many generations later, the progeny that fulfilled the foreshadowing of the entirety of the Scriptures, and this son genuinely paid for the sins of that father, and all of the other sins of the world.  When John the Baptist declares in John 1:29, “Here is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” and when Christ Himself groans from the Cross (Mark 15:34) the opening lines of David’s lament in Psalm 22, the foreshadowing of the Nathan passage is made crystal clear.  Only in the case of the Scriptures, the author is not a petty demi-god but is, instead, the Spirit, who used not mere foreshadowing to enhance the story but rather prophecy to speak God’s mission through the ages into our minds.  An amazing Author indeed.

The Effect of Failure on Followers

One of my rock-ribbed beliefs is that we are to learn from academic pursuits, not merely about them.  Since I teach literature, I tell my students that we are to learn from our stories and apply those lessons to their lives.  Because college-educated persons have the responsibility and the duty to be leaders in their communities and their churches, I emphasize many lessons about leadership in my classes.  From Shakespeare, we learn about Mark Anthony and how his fleshly pursuit of Cleopatra led to battles and deaths, even as we learn about Prospero’s misplaced devotion to his books allows a harsh ruler to usurp his rightful rule.  From Gilagmesh, we learn about how a leader who believes that he is a god causes his people to suffer terribly.  From Beowulf, we see how a leader who has abandoned his role as protector of the people invites chaos into his citadel.  From Chaucer we learn about how articulated holiness is a tool that can be used to harvest funds and, eventually, credibility from the faithful.  In the end, fallen leaders face their own fates, but their followers often face punishments and difficulties that pay the price for the leader’s arrogance.  We call this the “mirror for magistrates” tradition, where literature provides a mirror by which leaders may examine their own lives for transgressions and lessons.

The jaw-dropping scandal at Penn State is a real-life example of this.  Today’s penalties from the NCAA indicate that the university’s liabilities will continue apace and I will not be surprised if the total lawsuits end up approaching the billion-dollar mark, especially if the early indications and evidences are accurate.

I feel terrible, however, for the players who knew nothing about this and for the students and alumni who have watched their alma mater emerge as the utter inversion of what everyone had thought about the institution’s reputation for near sterling character in a context that is worse than tarnished.  I love college sports but it’s clear that something has to change.  Those who are leaders must be vigilant and diligent, for the consequences are real and affect the futures of everyone attached to the institutions.

Because I am deeply committed to the life of the local church, I cannot help but draw parallels between the Penn State situation and that of many local churches / ministries and their leaders.  A pastor or two  allegedly decides to break into houses and the churches suffer.  A pastor pursues a sexual dalliance and a generation of members becomes cynical about the moral authority of the pulpit.  A leader succumbs to financial temptation and a ministry collapses.  What’s left in the wake of these things is a group of followers who pay the price.

For me, this is a humbling proposition: leaders carry particular burdens of responsibility.  If that doesn’t drive you to your knees, well, something must be amiss.  And if something is amiss, I share the words of Numbers 32:23, in the King James for added gravity: “behold, ye have sinned against the Lord: and be sure your sin will find you out.”

Nobody Knows . . .

One of my guilty pleasures is The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom about a group of socially inept science geniuses.  Having walked the halls of academe for over two decades, I can associate friends with the primary characters.  One scene caught my eye recently, where a main character plays a theremin, the quirky synthesizer that made the ethereal soundtrack for much early science fiction, including the theme song to the original Star Trek series.

I noted that the character was singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” trying to sound out the notes to the ancient spiritual and he sang, “nobody knows my sorrows,” rather than “nobody knows but Jesus.”  From the bit of research I’ve done, it’s unclear which line is the original, but for Christians, the second version is much more consonant with the rest of the lyrics.  Without “but Jesus,” the song ceases to be a spiritual and becomes a solipsistic yawp at the universe not unlike much of modernist and naturalist art that complains that we are alone in an uncaring universe.  Stephen Crane, the novelist of “The Red Badge of Courage,” once wrote a brief poem that summarizes the thoughts that the pre-conversion T. S. Eliot expanded on in “The Wasteland”:

A man said to the universe:

“Sir I exist!”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

A quotation that often is attributed to C. S. Lewis is “We read to know that we are not alone.”  Lewis meant that art, particularly literature, connects us in ways that are an antidote to the loneliness of our times.  Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus once remarked, “Misery loves company,” which seemed to mean not only that misery is contagious but that miserable people tend to hang together and wallow in their troubles.  The reality, though, is that misery tends to lead individuals to become detached and isolated.  At some point, misery tends to eschew company, which leads to the most destructive form of egotism and self-isolation.  Perhaps this is what we should expect, though, when we decide that no one knows the troubles we’ve seen and that Jesus is not an option.  After all, if He is our friend, He might soon become our Lord, and then where will our misery be?

“What is Truth?”

As a literature professor, one of the challenges I face is helping students to see that “fiction” and “falsehood” are not interchangeable terms.  Just because something is fictional does not mean that it is, per se, untrue; fiction is imaginative prose that may or may not be journalistically or historically true.

Typically, fiction makes no claim on historicity or journalistic probity, though there certainly are exceptions to this.  Some writers of historical fiction create imaginative characters who function in historically accurate settings (think Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sobering Uncle Tom’s Cabin), even as some fiction writers place actual historical persons into imaginative settings (think Seth Grahame-Smith’s surreal Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter).  Some writers arrange historical tidbits into fictional tales that masquerade as factual truth.  Perhaps the most notorious of these writers is Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code fame, who opened that novel with three assertions of fact, the third being that “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” (1).

I often tell my students that they have only to shop at a bookstore (brick and mortar stores in particular) and inspect the non-fiction section to see that “non-fiction” emphatically does not mean “true.”  The inverse may be true as well: “fiction” does not mean “untrue.”

Not long ago I gave a lecture on citizen journalism to a course in media and everyone wanted to talk about Mike Daisey’s expose on NPR’s This American Life, which was a scathing indictment of the working conditions of Apple’s factories in China.  Daisey’s episode had, apparently, become the most downloaded in the show’s history.  The students were very interested in how this one man seemed poised to change corporate human rights perceptions among a generation of Westerners who were navigating their own culpability in Apple’s alleged abuses.  Since that lecture, however, Daisey’s report has unraveled and NPR has taken the unusual step of retracting the episode.

Daisey’s defense, however, has been that his report was not journalistically accurate but was “artistic truth.”  He says that the essence of the story, not the facts themselves, create a representation of truth that is, well, true.  Apparently, students in a journalism course at Seton Hall agreed with Daisey, with the instructor saying that for the students, “the idea that there might be different versions of the truth — a larger truth, or an emotional truth — . . . seemed OK.”

Troubling on so many levels.

Here’s my bottom line, though: when we allow truth to be mixed with error, we give quarter to those who would abuse the truth in service to self.  If the police trump up charges to press for a conviction of a man who is guilty of an actual crime, the criminal may escape his due punishment.  Worse, we may commit an atrocity of law that can only be viewed as some sort of karmic justice (see for instance, William Faulkner’s character Popeye in the brutal novel Sanctuary, who is hanged for a crime that he couldn’t have committed because at the time he was committing another capital crime, which he could not use as an alibi in the convicting court).

One of the most frustrating things that I have do deal with in my secular contexts is the ease with which Christians pass along rumors that masquerade as fact.  Yes, we may find a particular party or organization wicked, but we are not, then, entitled to mix truth with error in a vain quest for “ethical truth” or “virtual power.”  In doing this, we succeed not in destroying those who may be guilty of egregious wrong but rather of looking foolish and allowing the (other) wrong-doers to escape the veracity of their actual malfeasance.

When Pontius Pilate asked the iconic question “What is truth?” (John 18:38) he was voicing the overarching question of unbelievers everywhere.  If Christians are not clear in their use of both truth and Truth, we cannot overcome the eye-rolling response that occurs all too often.

Faith and Rationality

When I was in doctoral work, I enjoyed taking courses from professors who smoked because they took longer breaks (our seminars met once per week, with a break about halfway through the session).  This was the time when we got to know our classmates, which greatly enhanced class discussions.

One particular evening, a classmate sidled up to me and looked around as if to indicate that he had a secret to confide in me.  “Gene,” he whispered, “I have heard that you are a Christian.  Is that true?”  I looked around, matching his opening gesture and leaning to whisper back, “Yes, I’m a Christian.”  His eyes grew large and he said, “But honestly, you don’t seem mentally ill?  I’m just shocked that you even admit that you are a Christian.  I mean, you seem like a pretty bright guy.”

He was genuine in his inquiry, not hostile at all.  His reaction was that of one who had learned that the moon was not, in fact, made of cheese.  This was my third graduate degree and I was amply sure that his thoughts were the product of too much Freud (religion being a psychosis) fertilized with Marx (religion being an opiate) and not of a particular animus toward me whatsoever.  In fact, I’d had a similar conversation with a professor about that same time.

I couldn’t help but think about that incident this week as I read two bits of news.  First, in the Ninth Circuit’s ruling on California’s Proposition 8, the majority opinion ruled that the initiative failed the “rational basis standard,” meaning it was based on irrational thought, rooted, apparently, in religious irrationality in particular.  Second, in a transcript of an exchange at Vanderbilt, the chief academic officer of the institution scolded students who wished to allow their religious faith to influence their decision-making:

Now let me give you another example, and this would affect all of you. I’m Catholic. What if my faith beliefs guided all of the decisions I make from day to day?[At this point, the crowd applauds the idea that people should live according to their faith.]

No they shouldn’t! No they shouldn’t! No they shouldn’t! No they shouldn’t! [Disagreement from crowd.] Well, I know you do, but I’m telling you that as a Catholic I am very comfortable using my best judgment as a person to make decisions. As a Catholic, if I held that life begins at conception, I’d have a very big problem with our hospital. Right? Would I not? . . . I would, but I don’t. . . . We don’t want to have personal religious views intrude on good decisionmaking on this campus. They can guide your personal conduct, but I’m not going to let my faith life intrude.  We don’t want to have personal religious views intrude on good decision-making on this campus. They can guide your personal conduct, but I’m not going to let my faith life intrude.

The spirit of those views toward faith is the same spirit of my classmate, that faith and rationality are mutually exclusive terms.  The gravity of the articulations of the view, however, is stunningly different.  A classmate may look askance at me, but a federal appellate panel and an institution’s senior officer for intellectual pursuits have real teeth that can gobble up the rights of persons of faith (and not just Christians, I might add; such animus crosses all lines of belief).  For those of us who are devotees of both history and literature, we recognize, with a shudder, this line of thinking starts with the ad hominem retort, “Oh yeah?  Well, you’re crazy!” and ends by populating gulags (mental illness being a primary grounds for imprisonment by dictators) with candidates for sanity retraining  (i.e., one’s conformity with the dictator’s views).

Persons of faith know that the only path to true reason is that of faith, for the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and without that canon standard, we are left to our own devices to account for right and wrong.  In the end, we choose whatever matches our covert desires to become tyrannical mini-gods.  Without the external standard of revealed faith and knowledge, we are left to create yardsticks that are based on the various lengths of our own individual feet and such a lack of objective measurements leads to a world that is filled with chaotic and conflicting architecture.

This is why, as an educator, I assert the marvels of the Christian Intellectual Tradition, for I stand with the rationality of those multitudes who have gone before me, the great cloud of scholar-witnesses who have sounded the world with the tools of rational faith and found it to be perfectly reasonable.  This is why it is no accident that abolition, Western science, modern medicine, and so many other marvelous developments arose with particular thunder in Christendom.

Persons of faith are not perfect.  We all are, after all, human and I can provide a cornucopia of examples of individuals who are, as my country friends would term it, “nuttier than squirrel spit.”  But those are individuals, not the Tradition as a whole.  As many an observer has noted about many a tradition, we are unwise to generalize about the nature of groups from the behaviors of a few individuals.  Such a pixelated view always distorts.  No, we are not perfect, but we also are not irrational, and the chronological snobbery and ignorance necessary to make such a claim is utterly breathtaking.