Strange Powers?

A reader writes:

Have you read Tim Powers? He was recently featured on the ignatius press website http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/tpowers_intvw_sept05.asp as as a Catholic writer getting alot of attention in the sci-fi genre. So I went out and purchased the only Powers book I could find at my local Barnes & Noble titled "Last Call."

It was just sick stuff, very weird and occultish. I cannot find any reason for recommending this freaky writing to Catholics. I know that lately he’s written a decidedly Catholic book called "Declare" but I’m just wondering if you have read, or have any thoughts on his work.

P.S. btw…where are you from in East Texas?

Okay, second question first. I was actually born in South Texas (down in the point), but I’ve spent more time in East Texas–specifically Houston (where I still have three aunts and three uncles and a bunch of cousins) and Deep East Texas (near Nacogdoches and San Augustine and Lufkin), where the family ranch is located and where my hurricane-withstanding grandmother still lives (as well as bunches of great aunts and uncles and cousins who I reckon by the dozens).

(Okay, now I’ve got the lyrics of the HMS Pinafore going through my head.)

As to the first question, I haven’t yet read either of the two books you mention, though I plan to. This puts me in a position from where I cannot comment directly on the works, but I have some thoughts that may be worth passing on.

I think that the problem may be one of expectations. You express concern about Last Call being sick, weird, and occultish. Those are things that definitely can be problematic with literature but the situation also can be more complex than that.

Lemme splain:

Suppose I recommended that you read a particular book–let’s call it Book X–that has all kinds of sick stuff in it. It’s got murder and rape and homosexuality and prostitution and adultery and the dismemberment of corpses and decapitation and driving spikes through people’s heads and stabbing people in the gut so that the contents of their intestines comes out. It also has a lot of weird stuff in it, like trees that talk and animals that talk and dragons and monsters composed of mixed-up body parts of other animals. It’s also got occult stuff in it: witches and mediums and demonic possessions and people who read books of magic.

You might very well ask why I would recommend this book to you given all the sick and weird and occult stuff in it.

"Why on earth should Book X ever be recommended to Catholics?" you might want to know.

Well, because it’s the Bible.

Every one of the things I mentioned above is found in the Bible. (Have fun in the combox citing the relevant stories and passages if y’all want!)

The fact that the Bible can include all this stuff and yet remain on every good Catholic’s "Must Read!" list tells us something about literature: It CAN (not the same thing as MUST) contain sick and weird and occult stuff.

If that’s not what you’re expecting from a piece of literature then it’s quite understandable that you’ll be put off by it, but in principle literature can contain all that stuff.

It also may be that a particular piece of literature contains so much of that stuff that it’s offputting–and this is often a matter of taste. Different people (or even the same people in different moods) have different tolerances for such content. And that can play a role.

There also can be moral problems with the WAY in which the material is presented. Some works GLORIFY sick and weird and occult stuff, and that’s just wrong.

I haven’t read Last Call, so I don’t know if that’s the case there, but I think that some light is shed on Tim Powers’s approach in the interview that you link.

For example, in commenting on the fact that he used Tarot cards in that book, he states:

   I don’t think I created a moral framework for Tarot cards – I think I used the framework that was already clustered around them. I mean, everybody’s scared of Ouija boards, right? Tarot cards are very similar. It might be an idiosyncrasy of mine, or something I’ve picked up from being a Christian and a C. S. Lewis fan, but I’ve always taken it as a given that magic is bad for you, and that if you mess with it a lot it will damage and diminish you.

   I think a book that presented Tarot cards a benign or neutral – as opposed to dangerous – would have to get over the average reader’s accumulated impression that Tarot cards are dangerous. I had to buy a deck of the Ryder-Waite Tarot cards, to look at the pictures on them, but I’d never shuffle them. After all, if some fortune-telling device works, you’re getting something: information. Is this free? If it’s not free, what is the cost?

So Powers indicates that he views Tarot cards as something that are dangerous and that (if one behaves morally) one should not use. That doesn’t preclude using Tarot cards in fiction, though, as long as one doesn’t glorify their use. You can show someone being attracted to Tarot cards (just like one can show someone in a story being attracted to any other evil) as long as the story retains a fundamental moral framework, which I gather his does with respect to Tarot cards since he seems to show the cost (danger/evil) associated with using Tarot cards.

This doesn’t mean he’s writing a story that’s just an anti-Tarot card apologetic. That kind of heavyhanded preaching in stories often ruins the art of the story–a fact on which Powers also comments:

Trying to make fiction that will illustrate a pre-determined message is (it seems to me) like trying to make wine by adding grape-juice to ethanol. Joan Didion said once that art is hostile to ideology, which I take to mean that if you force the ideology in, the art goes away.

Of course any work of fiction will have a theme – maybe even a message! But I think these are more effective, and more truly represent the writer’s actual convictions, when they manifest themselves without the writer’s conscious assistance. I generally see a theme manifesting itself in whatever I’m writing, but I’d never presume to summarize it or attach a conclusion to it. I concern myself with my plots, but I let my subconscious worry about my themes.

I love that quote about making wine by trying to mix grape juice and ethanol, because that is what too many heavyhanded "message" stories are like. Michael Crichton’s STATE OF FEAR being a great example. Even though I’m quite sympathetic to his message in this book, the book itself is utter <EXPLETIVE DELETED> as a piece of literature.

So it sounds to me like Powers is doing what is generally considered sound practice in literary circles: Providing a moral framework for his story (Tarot cards = attractive + dangerous; like all sin) without turning this into a sermon cloaked in the guise of fiction.

That being said, I can’t say if this novel would be to my taste or not. Upon reading it I might like it or hate it. I’ll have to wait and see.

I did really like the interview with Powers at the Ignatius Insight website, though. One thing he said I laughed out loud at because he was expressing a literary opinion that I DEFINITELY agree with.

Y’see: Often times people want to read all kinds of covert messages in stories and say that they are really "about" something other than what they appear to be about. Except in the case of deliberate allegories, I resist this impulse and like to stay close to the text in my interpretation of the text. I therefore loved it when Powers said:

I was on a panel once in which a woman said, "Dracula is actually about the plight of 19^th-century women," to which I replied, "No, it’s about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood – don’t take my word for it, check it out."

Love it!

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Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin