Last week’s article was all about ‘n-dimensional spaces’ and literary analysis. We considered the options for ‘what are we counting as part of this story,’ levels of priority (how important each element is to us right now), and the comprehensivity of our analysis. That’s only the start, of course, but it all begs the question: why is this analysis important? I mean, if we’re honest, we already do all these things without thinking them through, without explicit statement. And that there is the crucial statement. As it turns out, what we don’t know we’re doing we can’t communicate to others, and what we don’t communicate to others they can be excused for entirely missing. In the end, it turns out, clarity is very important.

Clarity is important first because it keeps us from tripping over our own toes. Think of it like this: when you walk through an unfamiliar forest at night, do you prefer to have a lamp or not? Most of us prefer the lamp. It keeps those toes safely un-stubbed, the shins pleasantly un-scraped. When we analyze literature, we must be clear to ourselves for a similar reason. If I analyze The Lord of the Rings one way, Narnia in another, and my own work in a third, unless I account for the differences in the analyses, I will make some mistakes in comparing the three works. Most likely, I’ll miss something I could have learned; quite possibly, I’ll get a false impression and misstep on its basis.

Now, clearly I can’t account for differences in the analyses unless I know how they are different. Vital to that knowledge, then, is clearly understanding how I’m conducting the analyses. What parts of the story do I consider worth it? How do I weight different priorities? What explanations am I willing to make for myself, and which ones do I demand the book provide to me? The three dimensions we’ll consider today all pose potential challenges here, as we’ll see.

Second, too, is the necessity of clarity to critique when it is communicated or compared by two different people. If I share my analysis with somebody else, whether from excitement or to teach them or because I’m being paid or because I need a way to distract them from my collaborator looting the cookie stash, they need to understand the grounds I’m conducting the analysis on. They need to know that when I explain how the Eagles not taking the Ring to Mordor isn’t a plot hole, I have intentionally restricted myself to what the book provides, not allowing in outside material, not even the Hobbit (as Gandalf’s escape via eagle earlier provides precedent for the plot-hole to operate on). They need to know too that I recognize that other explanations, perhaps better ones, exist outside my restrictions, but that such explanations aren’t the point.

With that point highlighted, we can turn to the three remaining dimensions, starting with the most complicated and complicating.

What Axis Matters?

We can critique art along numerous axes, and we can divide out these axes in multiple ways. For myself, I postulate a four-fold division in this dimension, four possible states (which can be mixed and matched as the critic pleases): efficacy, morality, beauty, and taste. The question here is of what standard I’m applying, what trait I’m looking for in the story to praise or condemn.

With efficacy, what I desire is that the story achieve what the author set out to achieve. For this purpose, I may be comparing the story to its meta-intent or to the author’s proclaimed purpose. In this area, it is necessary to compare different levels of the author’s intent to see how they harmonize and which ones are more effectively carried out than others. An author who wants to write a horror-romance, for instance, may write a very good romance that, in the process of being a good romance, is not a very good horror novel. The critic’s job, on this axis, is to recognize this clash and find the reasons each part is more or less efficacious at fulfilling authorial intent.

With morality, my standard is God’s law. Here, instead of saying, ‘What did the author want?’ I say, ‘How do the author’s intentions and actual results line up with morality?’ Thus, whereas I can acknowledge that Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, at least the 80% I read, displays a lot of skill in conveying a clear intent and effectively fulfilling that intent, under this rubric I am concerned more with the reason I didn’t actually finish that famous bit of sci-fi: its moral standard. Stapledon is a skilled writer, no doubt, but he also promotes evil ideas, like the complete destruction of the family structure and eugenics. What must be clear here, though, is that while morality is not separate from or unrelated to writing-skill, it’s not the same thing either. As this example shows, very immoral ideas can be endorsed by very skilled (efficacious) writing, though this has its limit.

Three other notes are mete here. First, this moral analysis should extend to the metaphysic and underlying theology of the work. Warhammer 40K, for instance, has a basically atheist metaphysic; to attempt to incorporate God into the setting, as a thought experiment, entirely alters its tone and character, removes its essential nihilism (meaning: eventually, everything is nothing) and materialism (yes, it has spirit-stuff, but the spirit-stuff is really just another state of matter, in metaphysical terms, just as its gods are just other-dimensional aliens). Similarly, Narnia has a nearly orthodox metaphysic and theology, with Aslan and the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea (marred by Lewis’s belief in salvation for ‘noble pagans’), a component not removable without altering the DNA of the story entirely.

Second, we should not consider books ‘bad’ merely because they are imperfect in their morality. I still love Narnia despite Lewis’s foibles, and Chesterton certainly had some doctrinal screws loose (he wasn’t even a Christian, if I remember rightly, when he wrote The Ball and the Cross, a very good story). Where the breaking point is, I admit, is a difficult question, and for now I’ll just say that it takes wisdom to balance moral content versus artistic merit.¹

Third, we must exercise discretion in how we judge morality. The book I’m currently re-reading, The Hidden Hand² by E.D.E.N.³ Southworth, contains a fair bit of swearing, mostly under a cloak of dialectal misspelling, and a large dollop of language today considered racist (it was written in the 1800s and is largely set in pre-War Between The States Virginia). Nevertheless, to call the book evil on those grounds would be foolish. The book’s entire structure rests on a strong belief in God’s providence, after all, and it never endorses either of the unsavory elements it includes (though neither, to my memory, is particularly confronted, because that’s not the point). Nor is the impressive temper of Major Warfield or Capitola’s own impetuosity endorsed; these two indeed are brought through the story’s events to greater maturity.

With beauty, the previous two come together. Beauty, as I define it in most circumstances, is the thorough reflection of God’s character in the created thing, on a level beyond explicit morality or explicit logic. Beauty is a reflection of God and of His reflection in His creation, specifically a reflection incarnated in the relationship between each part of the story and the rest, whether in symmetry or dissimilarity. It is this reflection which, as Lewis declares in Till We Have Faces, calls to us, which causes us to long beyond words for something, to feel instinctively that we are stretched towards it till we would die were we to take another step, and to desire, in full sanity, to take that step.⁴ It creates an apprehension of God in us, and we, being sinners, know on instinct that it would be death to embrace Him, yet we long to have that fullness (nor is death a deterrent at all), even if in sinful man that longing is hidden and vitiated till it can only condemn.

When I critique a story for its beauty, I consider what the author intended; I consider what he achieved; I consider how each aligns with His law; I set my eye to find also how the author has reflected, in all these elements, the character of God and His creation. I say to the work, ‘Do you know man as he is, or with eyes too distorted for the truth?’ I ask it, ‘Do you know to fear the ocean but to fear the ocean’s Maker more? Do you have the sanity to abhor death without fearing it? Do you set each part of His world- man, child, woman, beast, rock, tree, star, sun, spirit, angel, elf, and story- in their proper relation to each other?’ In sum, I ask of each work of art: how do you reflect His beauty?

This is a total endeavor and one which, by reason of our ever growing knowledge of Him, has no real end (at least on this earth). It is also necessary for an author particularly. We seek to create beauty, and by seeking to understand the beauty- and the lack of beauty- in other artist’s work (narrative, particularly, but also visual and auditory), by this search we are equipped to better reflect His beauty to the eyes of our fellow men, to our own eyes, for the search will inevitably unfold new beauties to us as we continue it, even if they are beauties which our subject-to-be-critiqued fails to reflect.

With taste, finally, we pass into the final axis and the most ephemeral, the least important but one still essential to the others and to communication. Simply put, sometimes stories will hit right with us and not with others, or they’ll miss us entirely while hammering the other guy flat onto his back. Nor is this an evil. While we should strive to increase our thirst for true beauty, for Him in reflection, different people really should have different relationships. Different elements of beauty cohere more thoroughly and more properly to different people.

The practical outworking of this is three-fold. First, we must learn to distinguish between ‘I like it’ and ‘it is good.’ Over time, they should come to coincide more and more, the first being caused more and more by the second, but always our analysis is in danger of being tainted by our predilections. So long as we recognize this contamination, though, we can account for it, can even rejoice in a peculiar appreciation for some elements of beauty, can find in our specific taste passion to show what we love to others. Second, as a sub-component of this, we must learn to appreciate that some people like a work because it fits their taste, that we sometimes dislike a work because of prejudice, not truly its merits, whatever those may be. In such cases, we must account for taste, not pretend our taste is everybody’s. A lot of the time, this application has a simple summation: don’t be a snob.

Third, when we discuss and critique art in communication with others, we must be careful to communicate our particular taste to them, to account for it in both us and them. The Lord of the Rings is my favorite work of fiction bar none, but I work to remember that it’s simply not suited for everybody. Some people, whether by circumstance or temperament, will be much less impressed by it than me. Conversely, I know that some people really love The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo, but I find them both pretty decent at best, skillfully written but not exciting. If I find that my difference with somebody is a matter of taste rather than fact (usually a large disagreement has some of both), I need to distinguish the ‘taste’ element from the objective elements, to allow for the subjective.

Why Am I Doing This?

When we critique, we should keep an awareness of why we’re critiquing, what we want out of the endeavor. Critique can be roughly divided into three purposes: for the self, for others, and for chronicling. When we critique for ourselves, we’re usually doing it to learn or to enjoy; when we critique for others, we can have all sorts of motives, but some common ones are teaching, monetary gain, and theological/ ideological dissemination. As for ‘chronicling’, here I refer to critique undertaken as a subcomponent of another analytical endeavor, such as when Chesterton provides critique of Dickens in The Victorian Age in Literature as a part of providing an overview of the Victorian Age itself.

This dimension, frankly, is important in self-analysis mostly in being sure we recognize our motives in order to account for possible biases. Hopefully we were doing that already. Where it’s more constantly pertinent is in taking in other people’s critiques of various stories (including our own). Asking why they’re bringing up a particular point will often lead us to where their motives lie, and where their motives lie can illustrate to us their biases, their strengths, and the weaknesses, including the parts of the art they’re not even going to consider at all.

Grace & Stricture

When we write our stories, we don’t include every detail. When we critique stories, therefore, there are always some gaps. Mostly, we expect readers to fill them in. Why did he not fall when we stepped on the ground? Most readers, in this simplistic example, will conclude that he’s walking on solid ground. Cases like these are uncontroversial, of course. Different people, however, will give different latitudes. Did Tolkien need to explain why the Eagles weren’t an option? Most will say no, unless they believe in the plot-hole, but every once in a while you’ll find somebody who asserts some sort of throw-away line was necessary (particularly for the movie).

Being conscious about how much lee-way you’re giving a story is healthy, as is being ready to acknowledge that somebody else isn’t giving it that much. Know how far you’re willing to go beyond the story’s explicit statements in explaining the story’s events. Suspension of disbelief also plays into this. Sometimes a story requires more SoD than others; sometimes it brings up facts that one reader knows require SoD but the other doesn’t. Of course, none of this is really quantifiable. I can’t say, ‘I allow for 3.5 deci-beliefs and 15 grams of reader-provided explanation and 2 ounces of reading between the lines.’ Instead, we just need to keep these factors in mind.

Conclusion

Clarity really is paramount. Keep your mixture of these dimensions in mind, and keep the peculiar strengths and weaknesses of every part of each dimension. In fact, choose the position that best suits your purpose and your needs. Then, once you know where you stand, be clear to others about that fact; seek to establish them too on clear terms. Once this is done, arguments, conversations, and agreement can all happen in truth and with real fruitfulness.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – I could say that pornography lies outside the pale, as it does, but that’s definitional. If a work does not lie outside the pale, it’s not pornography; if it’s pornography, it lies outside the pale. This sort of distinction is true but not particularly useful (unless arguing with somebody who does not acknowledge its truth).

2 – Published as such by Lamplighter Publishing, if you want a really nice copy, but available as two books (volumes one and two) via Gutenberg.org for free (as e-books), under the names The Hidden Hand and Capitola the Madcap. I’m actually reading the second book right now, but truthfully they’re one book. The first volume ends without bothering to resolve any of the major plot lines, in fact on the beginning of a major element of one plot-line, and the second volume picks up with nary an apology or explanation (which is why Lamplighter publishing it as a single book makes perfect sense).

3 – These seem to be her actual initials, not merely a pen name. Finally an English (the language, because she was American) author with a name longer than Tolkien’s!

4 – The passage I reference, from the later portion of Chapter 7 of Till We Have Faces, has the best affective description of beauty as a concept I have ever encountered. For that passage alone, the book would be worth reading, but that book has much more to be found, for all that the portion referenced is my favorite.