I’ve no familiarity at all with the work of Wyndham Lewis, this article’s partial subject, or Dr. Gilfedder, its author, and my knowledge of Shakespeare is small. men against darkness, published in Islander #5 doubtless possesses certain interests for the otherwise equipped which I am insensible to. I therefore turn my eye in this response-review to a different quarter: understanding some of the ideas presented and questioning how they weigh in narrative art. How they weigh in narrative art, of course, speaks also to how they weigh on the historic narrative of each person and of society.

(For the review of the article, separate from this analysis, I can only say that it was competently written and stirred much thought- a significant recommendation.)

The other article response-reviews are posted on my substack, barring those unreviewed and this one.

The Lion and the Fox

The first idea I’d draw out is the contrast between the lion and the fox, as seen by W. Lewis in Shakespeare and other literature. As Gilfedder conveys it, this dichotomy compares the mythic hero, acting on the ideal plane, with the pragmatic survivor, occupying and acting on the real. It is chivalry on the one hand and Machiavelli (as commonly understood) on the other. When they come into clash, in this conception, the ideal hero, who was the greater of the two, comes crashing down; he cannot sustain the undermining worked by the cynic. His thirst upwards topples over beneath the relentless worming of the fox’s determination to merely survive.

I must answer in generalities- the topic is at once too broad and too specific for more, in the time and with the information I have.

The clash seems to me, as is hinted in the comparison of chivalry with Machiavellian modernism, to be essentially a change in the metaphysic of the stories. In the chivalric tale, the hero works on eternal themes and with eternal things. In the Machiavellian concept, the protagonist works on merely particular things and with denial of themes (which is itself a theological-thematic statement). The first world was, in Christian Europe, a personal world; the second is merely mechanical. The first understood itself in context of eternity and cosmos; the second understands itself in merely experiential terms, so that whatever does not affect the protagonist does not, strictly speaking, really exist.

Of course, the divide is not so stark as a short article or a single sentence might put it. The heroic figure, historically, was far from guileless. Many a hero has fallen by guile’s touch; many a one has risen by the same. Jack the Giant Slayer was at once mythic hero and callow trickster. Was he Machiavellian? No, for the Machiavellian understands ‘giant-slaying’ is a short-term proposition; much better to stop after one or two in order to rule. Indeed, why be their foe at all? Become their seneschal and use their power as your own. Jack was a hero because he fought the giants. He still lived in that eternal context.

In more pagan myth, too, we must remember that death or downfall by cunning are plentiful. Cu Chulainn faces the clash of his oaths, which in at least one version (if memory serves) results in his death. The myths of the Norse, with their juxtaposition of grandeur and squalid vice, of dragon-slaying and revenge-driven, miserable incest, testify also that the mythic hero need not be naïve to be larger than life (Shippey, an expert in the area, describes much of those Norse legends as ‘amoral’).

The mythic hero is not a mere idealist. He does not live in a world divorced from reality. In his truest, fullest form, he lives in a reality which eternity lends intensity to. A forthright version of this enhanced reality is evident in the novels of G.K. Chesterton, in worlds vibrant and bursting with life. Here Patrick Dalroy, the boisterous hero, faces down the Machiavellian brilliance of Lord Ivywood, a cold and calculating man, and wins regardless, open-eyed truth triumphing over deceit. (Admittedly, however, Lord Ivywood is himself by far the more divorced of the two from squalid reality; Dalroy, being connected to eternity, rejoices in the mud, while Ivywood, refusing real eternity in favor of vapid idealism, turns his every Machiavellian power to his ideal’s purpose.)

If I object to this article’s dichotomy at this point, therefore, I object to its understanding of the mythic hero. The hero need not be vulnerable to the squalid and the petty and the mundane. The great heroes came from those roots and knew them well. The great writers lived within this world and wrote of its connection with eternity because that connected them more fully with reality, not as a divorce from it into airy idealism. The hero who is merely an ideal is an incomplete, hobbled hero; he is just as much half-man as the Machiavellian survivalist who sees no ideal or eternity.

Speaking of half-men, we find in Tolkien the sort of mythic hero which I have here spoken of. Frodo, Aragorn, Gandalf, they are all heroes in the mythic mold. Yet they are no naïve fools; they are wise in part because they can identify and deal with petty evils and manipulations. Gandalf is not stalled by Wormtongue or by Denethor; he does not let his ideals divorce him from reality but occupies them instead as a part of the truth which reveals his foes’ emptiness. Frodo is not fooled or cozened by Gollum (contrary to the films, in possibly their worst decision), for he recognizes the Machiavellian (in today’s terms) in Gollum. The lion is also a fox.

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16).

The Divided Man

A quick glance at the ‘divided man’ mentioned in the article as the new protagonist, the successor of the ideal hero.

I think that again here we have an imperfect dichotomy. The ‘divided man’ is not as new as the article suggests. To my eye, the proliferation of these characters is a function of genre and technology, the freedom afforded by facility towards length. Authors can spend more time delving into areas which formerly would have to be compressed into allusion or inference- a change not good or bad but simply a shift in the direction of potential. Novels, not poems.

Sir Gawain, however, was already a divided man in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Wiglaf, though not the hero of Beowulf, has his own struggle. These are abbreviated, but they are true divisions. This self-division does involve a division of the character from eternity- as we see in the relative earthliness of Boromir compared to Aragorn. Yet if we take this as a mere binary, we fail. Samwise and the other hobbits are hard to term ‘ideal heroes’ (though Frodo, to some extent, fits the description), but they are not ‘divided’ in the way of many moderns, nor are they ‘weaklings’ or ‘Machiavellians.’ Moreover, Sir Gawain was a man of chivalry, of ideals, as seen by the Pentangle in his shield, and yet he struggles, struggles with an eternal question.

Again, much of the division here is of metaphysic. Modernity’s world is experiential or mere; it is a sensory existence, a hallucination of thought, a practicality alone. The world of the Christian and of many differently-deluded pagans is an immanent world, an immanent-transcendent God, and a reflection of the transcendent in the immanent (Gen. 1:26). We can focus on the here-and-now particular, becoming only minimally ideal; we can focus on the eternal, becoming minimally in contact with the petty. The modern can only imagine one half, never remembering the connection to the other: the mythic hero must be an ideal, divorced from reality; the realistic man must be a survivalist, divorced from eternity (from morality). These two half realities both collapse in the long run. Neither, as it turns out, is self-sufficient, for the ideal-eternal is an ideal, eternal reality, and the real-temporal-contingent is contingent upon the reality of the ideal-eternal.¹

It is Christ, as they say, or chaos.

The Nature of Art and the Artist

Gilfedder (which is an awesome name) speaks also of W. Lewis’s opinion of art, relating it to Nietzsche’s (another man with some fascinating opinions). Lewis, as per Gilfedder, viewed art as an ‘interposition’ between man and nothing. If I read between the lines a little, aided by my memory of Nietzsche, Lewis seems to propose that art is a technically-false ordering of reality towards certain ideals, the mythic or the ideal narrative writing over the meaningless randomness of the world.

On two points he is thoroughly wrong.

First, reality is basically orderly and meaningful. God made the world, and He made it with meaning referential to Himself, directly and indirectly. Even man’s greatest rebellion, with all its denial of meaning and cause, is meaningful in His decree, His eternal plan which He enacted in total, creating the entirety of history ex nihilo, transcendent of time His creation. Order and meaning can be false, but that falsity can only be by being the wrong order or meaning, not because no meaning or order exists- a comparison, not an inapplicability of category.

Second, the work of the artist is of imitating God, not of imposing a phantasmal order. God decreed and created the entire narrative of the world, decreed too His part in this world, including the spinal story of it all, the Christ story. Human art is an imitation of His creative work, using His materials to reflect His deeds, second-order causes replicating or imaging second-order causes. In this way, actually, Christian art is not fundamentally different from any other righteous vocation, for all righteous vocations are imitations of God, creaturely reflections of the Divine attributes and of His perfect fulfilment of that reflection in Christ, differing in each Christian according to what circumstance requires (different ground requires different steps to maintain a steady reflection).

Summary

Did I agree much with this article? No. Perhaps some of my critiques Dr. Gilfedder has already found; it is possible he even holds to them but eschewed them for the sake of the article (though his inclusion of a different author in semi-counterbalance at the end speaks against him finding them as important as I do). Nevertheless, I do not regret having read it. Islander #5 is proving to be a flawed work but one which rewards thought- at least by prodding the reader to argue harder. The ideas and narrative elements here tackled are right to think deeply on.

God bless.

1. Consider Mark Studdock in That Hideous Strength. He is undoubtedly a divided man- and his resolution is in the eternal. ↩︎