Category: Fiction

Okay, I’d like to call this first meeting of the JimmyAkin.Org Literary Club to order.

(Bangs gavel several times. Waves it threateningly at one member of the crowd, who quickly settles down.)

Our story today is "Through and Through" by Catholic fantasy author Tim Powers.

If you didn’t do your homework and read the story (or if your time zone prevented you from doing so–drat these global forums!) then kindly read it now. It’s the post just under this one.

To prevent spoilerage, I’m putting my own remarks on the story in the below-the-fold part of this post. Please feel free to add your own remarks on the story and the issues it raises in the combox, and I hope you’ll enjoy this first-ever meeting of the JA.O Literary Club!

(NOTE TO OTHER BLOGGERS: If you like the story and the discussion of it, you might invite your own readers to join in!)

Continue reading “JA.O Literary Club Meeting #1”

Just an announcement that we will be having a special meeting of the JimmyAkin.Org Literary Club tomorrow.

This will be our first meeting, and I’m pleased to say that I have secured the Internet reprint rights to a short story by the renowned Catholic fantasy author Tim Powers.

The story is titled "Through and Through," and it is heavily Catholic-themed. (You’ll be surprised at how much!)

I read the story and thought it would make an excellent text for the JA.OLC, and Mr. Powers was kind enough to allow me to reprint it so we can all read it.

Here’s how it’ll work: Tomorrow at a bit after midnight (Pacific Time), I’ll put up the story, but it’ll have the combox turned off so that folks can just read the story. Then, at about nine a.m. (again Pacific), I’ll put up my review of the story with the combox turned on so that folks can add their own reviews, thoughts, discussions.

Hope y’all enjoy the story, and I hope to see you at the first-ever meeting of the JA.O Literary Club!

If Uncle Screwtape had thumbs, he’d be giving The DaVinci Code two thumbs up.

"Now, Wormwood, before you object to my calling this book ‘non-fiction’ — since it is technically classified as ‘fiction’ — let me say that it is essentially non-fiction, at least as far as our purposes are concerned. That’s because it’s principle delight for our side is that in the tacky plastic shell of some below-average ‘fiction’ the book parades as ‘fact’ a veritable phalanx of practical propaganda and disinformation that would make our dear Herr Goebbels (Circle Eight, third spiderhole on the right) jade green with envy! Souls by the boatload are blithely believing almost all of the deliciously corrosive non-facts that are congealed everywhere in it, like flies in bad aspic, and it is that precisely which most recommends this glorious effort as worthy of our dedicated and especial study.

"But where to begin in describing to you its myriad delights? First, a brief synopsis of the plot: a museum curator is murdered by a fanatical albino Christian bigot (nice opening, no?); the curator’s granddaughter and an American ‘symbologist’ (don’t ask me, I haven’t the time) try to find the real killer and are launched on a wildly implausible and fantastically cryptical search for the proverbial Holy Grail, all the while chased by angry gendarmes and the aforementioned unhinged albino. In the process they (and the lucky reader) discover that: the Church is murderous and evil; the Bible is a hoax; Jesus is not divine, but merely a married mortal and an earnest proto-feminist (!); there is no such thing as Truth; and oh, yes… is the truest kind of prayer. Can you stand it? A virtuoso performance, no? It’s as if the author’s somehow squeezed all of hell into a walnut shell. And oh, yes, one more historical ‘fact’: Leonardo DaVinci’s homosexuality was ‘flamboyant’! Do tell."

GET THE STORY. (Warning: Put down the coffee mug and clear the throat first. JimmyAkin.org takes no responsibility for the state of your keyboard, monitor, or respiratory system if you read this while drinking or eating.)

(Nod to Mark Shea for the link.)

I’ve read a number of Screwtapian musings by writers attempting to channel C. S. Lewis, but this is the first one I’ve read of which I think even Lewis himself would approve. Eric Metaxas nails Screwtape. Read the whole thing.

After writing my previous post on the transfusion issues in Dracula, I ran into another factual problem with the novel. This time it isn’t medical; it’s religious.

Someone had told me about it years ago. In fact, though I was an Evangelical at the time, a friend of mine who was reading the book asked me about it to see if it squared with my understanding of Catholic belief and practice, because it sounded wrong to him.

My friend was right: It was wrong.

Or at least it would be in the real world.

Here’s the issue: Y’know how Dracula is vulnerable to crucifixes? Crucifixes are symbols of Jesus. So if he’s vulnerable to those, he ought to be vulnerable to Jesus himself. (And who isn’t?)

Now, in the novel as in the real world, Jesus isn’t available to descend from the heavens with a shout to rescue the heroes.

But he is present in the Eucharist.

And so Van Helsing (a Dutch doctor who is the leader of those arrayed against Dracula) uses the Host to ward off vampires. Specifically, he uses it in five ways:

1. He (and others) hold up pieces of the Host in order to ward off vampires–just like they otherwise do with crucifixes (only the Host is more effective since it is more sacred as it isn’t just a symbol of Jesus).
2. He places pieces of the Host in vampires’ coffins to keep the vampires from being able to take refuge in them.
3. To help a woman who Dracula has been praying on, he touches a piece of the Host to the forehead, but since she is already infected with latent vampirism it burns a scar on her forehead (this was not Van Helsing’s intent, and the scar disappears when Dracula is killed, signalling that she is free).
4. A couple of times he draws a circle on the ground, passes the Host over it, and then places fine crumbles from the Host in the circle so that vampires cannot enter or leave the circle.
5. He takes a whitish material that is described as being like dough or putty and, after putting crumbles from a Host in it, he uses it to line the cracks of a tomb so that a vampire can’t slip into or out of the tomb through the cracks.

To any well-formed Catholic from the real world, this kind of use of the Host is profoundly offensive to pious sensibilities.

In the novel, all of this is done with great reverence, and the novel makes it very clear that Van Helsing considers the Host to be the most sacred thing there is in the whole world. He also tries to avoid using the Host in this way if he can, not wanting to expost it to the presence of evil unnecessarily.

And he explains that what he is doing is okay because he has "an indulgence."

My friend wanted to know if that sounded right to me concerning Catholic belief and practice.

Even as an Evangelical, it didn’t.

The subject is a little ambiguous, though, because what Stoker means by all this isn’t clear. For example, Van Helsing’s remark that he has an indulgence is ambigous.

Stoker may be calling to mind the common misunderstanding that an indulgence is a license to do something sinful (it’s not). If that is what he means then the novel portrays Van Helsing’s use of the Host as something that is sinful in and of itself, but it’s "okay" because Van Helsing is a Catholic and has a hoojoo way of being forgiven in advance through his indulgence.

If that’s what Stoker means then this element of the novel is based on a misunderstanding of Catholic theology, because indulgences do not give one a license to sins. Sins are always sins and cannot be forgiven in advance, only when the person repents of having done them.

On the other hand, Stoker may have meant (and badly phrased) the idea that Van Helsing has an indult allowing him to use the Host in this manner. In other words, he’s received special permission from a competent ecclesiastical authority authorizing him to do this.

If that’s what Stoker meant then the question of how the Host is used in the novel becomes more complex.

In our world, you certainly would never get an indult allowing you to use a Host in this manner. Canon law has no provisions for anything like this. But then vampires aren’t real in the real world, and so in a world where vampires are real canon law may have taken note of this fact and allowed for procedures to deal with this threat.

In fact, in such a world the Church might even have vampire extirpators who are equivalent to exorcists in our world, and Van Helsing may be such an individual.

Supposing such to be the case, what are we to make of Van Helsing’s use of the Host?

Vampire literature has already established the use of sacred things (crucifixes, holy water, rosaries) to ward off or injure vampires and if these lesser holy things do so then it would be expected that the Host would be all the more effective–in fact, the most effective thing possible. (One wonders that vampires don’t burst into flame the moment that a Host is held up to them.)

Where the revulsion comes in is the idea of exposing something so holy to something so evil. It feels like profanation.

But then . . . God allowed the devil to have access to heaven for a sigificant amount of time (see, e.g., the beginning of Job). And Jesus allowed himself to suffer for our sake on the Cross, which was certainly a profanation.

In the Host he can’t even be hurt by the presence of a vampire, nor can his heavenly beatitude be disturbed. So, intrinsically speaking, he suffers no injury.

That is true, though, of any situation in which the Eucharist is profaned, yet profanation is still morally impermissible.

The reason would not seem to be that profanation injures Jesus (it can’t) but that it involves a disrespecting ON OUR PART of the holiness of God.

We can handle the Eucharist in ways that God permits (e.g., receiving holy Communion, reserving it in the tabernacle, carrying it in Eucharistic processions) but not in ways that God does not permit. As long as we are handling the Eucharist in a way that God permits, no profanation is committed.

So in a world where vampires are real, would God allow the Eucharist to be used to ward them off?

I don’t know. He might. (He can do what he wants. He’s God.)

Certain specific ways in which Van Helsing handles the Host seem to me to be more plausible than others (at least in terms of real-world sensibilities.)

For example, holidng up a Host to cause a vampire to stop or flee seems to me to be the least problematic. In fact, something in my memory says that at some points in history (I’m NOT recommending this NOW), consecrated Hosts may have been used in exorcisms–e.g., seeing if the possessed person can tell the difference between a consecrated Host and an unconsecrated host (and thus displaying supernatural knowledge) or holding one up or touching it to the person’s forehead to compel the demon to flee.

If so then we would have a potential real-world parallel to a couple of the things that Van Helsing does (i.e., #1 and #3).

#2 is more problematic because it involves leaving the sacred species to be corrupted by the elements. By plaing the host in a dirt-filled coffin, it will be soiled and eventually the species will corrupt and the Real Presence will cease. Before that happens–in the novel–the deposition of the Host will hallow the place, though, so that it cannot be used by vampires.

#4 is more problematic yet because it involves the destruction of a Host not by the elements but by human agency–APART from the way that God has ordained–in the real-world–for humans to disassociate the sacred species (i.e., by consuming them and, when this is not possible, by dissolving them in water).

#5 is the same and even worse because not only is a Host destroyed but the remnants are then mixed with another substance.

In the novel, when #4 and #5 occur Van Helsing is said to finely crumble up a piece of the Host. If he crumbles it very finely then it will cease to appear to be pieces of bread and the Real Presence will cease, which would partially ameliorate the situation. (I.e., it would be worse to scatter or embed species that still held the Real Presence in something than to scatter or embed species that no longer held it). Unfortunately, I don’t think Stoker knows this, and I think we are meant to understand that Van Helsing believes that the Real Presence continues in these cases.

Ultimately, it’s up to God the ways in which he chooses to authorize man to handle the Eucharist, and I can’t gainsay what he might sovereignly choose to do in another world.

What I CAN say is that all of this (particularly the latter numbers) is PROFOUNDLY offensive to pious sensibilities and that it is a LITERARY FLAW in the novel for Bram Stoker to have handled things the way he did.

I suspect (as I’ll explain in a future post) that he simply didn’t understand the theological implications of significant parts of what he was writing, and so this may to some extent be a case of "Forgive them, for they know not what they do."

In my life, I think I’ve read three vampire stories: The Vampyre, Interview with the Vampire, and Dracula.

Each is a major landmark in vampire fiction (which is why I read them; the genre doesn’t have a lot of native appeal to me, but I’m not opposed to reading the classics in it). Yesterday I was listening to an audiobook that I made out of Dracula, and it got me to thinking about the medical aspects of vampirism, which led me to do a pair of posts on the subject.

I must say that I’m impressed with the way Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. Though, from what I can tell, Stoker was an Irish Protestant, his novel is remarkably Catholic-friendly and spends a great deal of time discussing spiritual matters.

It’s also quite cosmopolitan culturally. Though the main characters are British, there are not only representatives from different English social classes but also a lot of characters from and portraits of other cultures. As he goes to visit Count Dracula in Transylvania, Jonathan Harker describes various eastern European cultures in significant detail. Dracula himself is Transylvanian. Dracula’s nemesis–Dr. Van Helsing–is Dutch. And there’s even a major character who is a cowboy from Texas.

A special treat for me is the way that different languages and dialects bleed through into the language of the novel–as when Van Helsing speaks of things that in English are neuter using the masculine or feminine genders they would have in Dutch. (E.g., referring to "corn" [i.e., wheat] as "he" instead of "it.")

The novel is told in semi-epistolary form. An epistolary novel (in the strict sense) is one told exclusively through the use of letters written by characters in the novel, though in Dracula not only letters are used but also diary entries, telegrams, and newspaper articles. (I’m sure one day soon someone will write an e-pistolary novel told entirely through e-mails.)

So it’s a cool read.

But there are still flaws.

Some of these occurred to me when Stoker got to a particular point in the plot in which a character named Lucy had become the object of Dracula’s predations and her health was suffering. Dr. Van Helsing determines (I presume correctly) that her blood loss is sufficient that she needed transfusions in order to survive. He then sets about arranging these.

At the time, this would have been REALLY cool. I don’t know of ANY prior vampire story in which they tried to bring (then) modern science to bear on the problem of vampirism by giving blood transfusions. So megakudos to Stoker for that!

But there are some oddities for the modern reader.

One of the first things that struck me about the way the novel treated them was how DRAMATIC the transfusions were held to be. I mean, the characters were making a WAY bigger deal over transfusions than we would today.

Some of that may be natural for the time period, though, since I assume transfusions weren’t done as regularly as they are now.

One of the ways that a bigger deal is made of transfusions is that there is a big hullaballoo over who can be a donor for the procedure. Van Helsing is willing to do it himself, but his student–the English Dr. John Seward–points out that he is younger and ought to do it. Better yet is Lucy’s fiance, an even younger lord who is simple and healthy and uncomplicated–unlike the two doctors who, being engaged in intellectual pursuits by their profession, have higher strung "nerves" and are less suitable donors.

This sounds very suspicious. Old people give blood all the time today. In fact, blood banks rely HEAVILY on the generosity of older people; the young frequently being unable to be bothered with giving blood. And having an intellectual career has NOTHING to do with the ability to give blood.

Still, this may have been the 19th century understanding of things.

Another way a bigger deal is made of the transfusions than we would make of them is that discussion is made of giving the donors an opiate in order to knock them out during the procedure. I guess maybe folks back then were so horrified at the thought of giving blood that they wanted to be knocked out for it, though today people give blood all the time without any sedation at all. (I’d also have a hesitancy of giving the donor a sedative as anything that goes into his bloodstream is, of necessity, going to go into the recipient’s bloodstream in short order as the transfusion progresses–see below.)

After the transfusions are over, Van Helsing orders that the donors "eat and drink much," which is fine by modern medical science. They should do that to help their bodies replenish their blood supply.

I’m less sanguine (pun intended) regarding his advice that one of the donors should be given port wine to drink after a transfusion. I’m not sure about the effects of alcohol on a person who has just given blood (won’t that at least make him EXTRA woozy?), but I can let that pass.

What really set off alarm bells was Van Helsing administering to LUCY (the blood recpient) an opiate BEFORE the transfusion in order to knock her out.

WAIT A MINUTE! Lucy is suffering from acute posthemorrhagic anemia! She’s lost so much blood that she’s going to DIE if you don’t get more blood into her. Her blood pressure is DOWN and her heart is STRUGGLING ot beat fast enough to keep her blood pressure up and her cells oxygenated. Is giving her a sedative that will depress her system REALLY the thing to do at this moment?

"Please, Jim! Don’t leave her in the clutches of 19th-century medicine!"

Where Dracula really loses it, though, is in the fact that Van Helsing administers the blood transfusions with NO ATTEMPT WHATSOEVER to establish whether the donors have blood types that are compatible with Lucy’s blood type or not.

I’m sorry, but Dracula came out in 1897, and blood typing began (in a rudimentary form) almost a hundred years earlier. Doctors had realized that far back that the reason that people often died from blood transfusions was that they had different types of blood than the donors. It was the discovery of blood typing that ALLOWED transfusions to begin to become commonplace. Previously it was too dangerous.

Now, I’m not an expert on the history of medicine, and it could be that a doctor in 1897 would have made no attempt to type the blood of a donor and a recipient, but it seems to me that almost a century after this discovery–when it was this discovery that really allowed blood transfusions to take off–that a supergenius such as Dr. Van Helsing should have been on top of this one.

So, like later authors of vampire stories, I think that Stoker could have done with a little more medical research amidst his admirable cultural and historical researches.

That doesn’t stop the book from being a really cool read, though.

GET THE STORY (FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG).

UPDATE: Further investigation reveals that Van Helsing did just fine by not checking for blood typing. The original criticism was based on a Wikipedia statement that blood typing was discovered in the first decade of the 19th century, but whoever wrote that was wrong. It now appears that blood typing was not described in medical literature until three years after Dracula appeared.

I admit it: I nitpick the science in novels I read.

Take Anne Rice’s Interview With A Vampire–those best-known vampire novel of the last few decades. When I read this novel, I couldn’t help being distracted by the fact that, when the vampires in it are draining blood from someone they can hear the person’s heartbeat (okay, I can buy that part; Rice’s vampires have supersensitive senses, including hearing) and the person’s heartbeat is getting slower and slower until the vampire drains so much blood that the person dies.

"This is not what would happen," I said to myself.

A person about to die from vampire predation would be suffering from acute posthemorrhagic anemia, whose symptoms are known, though in the real world they are more commonly caused by accidents than vampire predation. The symptioms include faintness, dizziness, thirst, and sweating. Gradually slowing heartbeat AIN’T one of them, though.

In fact, you get just the opposite.

If you suddenly lose a whole bunch of blood then there is a mechanical process that takes place which is relatively easy to understand. With the sudden subtraction of a bunch of your blood volume that means you’ve got LESS blood in your circulatory system. That means that your blood pressure goes DOWN. That means that your heart will pump FASTER to try to keep your blood pressure up so that oxygen can keep getting to your cells, and you will go into TACHYCARDIA.

Eventually, the amount of blood loss will overtax the heart’s ability to pump fast so that it can’t push through enough blood because the chambers don’t have the chance to fill completely and the heartbeat will be rapid and weak. The heart itself will also start suffering oxygen deprivation and you’ll have a myocardial infarction or "heart attack." Eventually you get things like uncontrollable falling blood pressure and fatal cardiac arrythmias.

Not quite so romantic–eh?

But in Interview with the Vampire it’s such a seductive experience that the vampires have to STOP themselves from draining a victim so that they don’t get drug down into death with him.

Why that is, I’m not sure. If all you’re doing is moving blood from the victim to yourself then (assuming you can metabolize blood), you’d be STRONGER as the victim gets closer to death.

What’s more, the process of killing a victim by vampirism would be so revolting that it would have built-in factors that would cause you to want to let go at a certain point.

Unless vampires do something that allows them to bypass the normal rules of cardiology, their victims’ hearts won’t just slow gently down as they drop into the sleep of death. It’ll be a much more traumatic thing than that with the victims’ hearts speeding up, getting faster and weaker and more irregular until the victim dies, possibly amid classic heart attack symptoms like chest pain and numbness in the left arm and nausea and vomiting and dizziness and things like that.

ICK!

What vampire wouldn’t want to pull away before THAT happens!

Reading the novel, I also found myself wondering: "Just how long do these vampire predations go on? Wouldn’t it take quite a long time to get enough blood out of a person to kill him?"

It turns out that the amount of blood you can lose without dying depends on how fast you lose it. If you lose it rapidly, you can only stand to lose about 1/3rd of your blood volume (3-4 pints). But if you lose it slowly–say, over a 24 hour period–you can lose up to 2/3rds of your blood volume (6-8 pints). If a vampire sucked you dry slowly, over the course of a day, he could get a lot more out of you before you died, but that isn’t the way vampire predations are typically depicted. They’re much faster things.

So in a classic vampire attack, the vampire would only be able to pull 3-4 pints of blood out of a person before the person died.

That’s still a LOT of blood–especially if it’s being taken from two little holes in the blood vessels of the neck. I mean, I assume from the way that vampire attacks on the neck are classically depicted that they’re either going after the carotid artery or the jugular vein, but even though these are large blood vessels, it seems to me that it would take a significant amount of time to suck 3-4 pints out of one of these, especially (in the case of the carotid artery) without starving the brain of oxygen and causing the victim to go unconscious for that reason (as opposed to hypnotism or something).

Such long predations might be possible in the seclusion of a house, but not in a darkened alley in London with lots of people walking around and stuff.

Now, I know that vampires are supposed to be supernatural beings who may have ways of circumventing what would normally happen in the real world in such situations (like their ability to hypnotize the victim into staying still for all of this), but I still think that the authors of vampire stories could do with some medical research as part of all the other research (e.g., of a historical nature) that they do for their stories.

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!

GET THE STORY.

Over the weekend, I read Anne Rice‘s new book Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Not being much of a fan of goth-horror, I hadn’t read a novel of hers since having read some of The Witching Hour many moons ago. Since reports of her reversion to Catholicism started filling the press, I’ve been eager to read this new book.

The book is not an easy read. Rice tries to write from the point of view of a seven-year-old who just happens to be God Almighty, so between the seven-year-old’s voice and trying to juggle the different modes of Christ’s knowledge, the book is not a spine-tingling page-turner. I give Rice high points for working hard to be orthodox, but I think she would have had an easier time accomplishing her task if she had not attempted to tell the story in the first-person point of view of Christ himself. Perhaps it would have been simpler to have written from the point of view of James, our Lord’s "brother" and depicted here as a thirteen-year-old, either in the first- or third-person.

Rice draws liberally on apocryphal stories told of Christ’s childhood struggles with his divinity. Mentioned are the apocryphal gospels tales of Christ bringing to life clay birds and resurrecting a child he had accidentally killed through his childish inability to control his divine power. While the incidents in the apocrypha are apocryphal, I appreciated Rice’s attempt to show Christ as fully God and fully human. Fully God in that he had divine power; fully human in that he was a child who may, in his childhood, have had to learn how to control it.

Whatever you make of the theological implications and whether Rice was completely theologically-correct, she asks interesting "What if?" questions while still trying to remain faithful to orthodoxy. I would much rather read an honest fictional imagining of our Lord that leaves open the possibility of an orthodox Christian understanding of him than a clearly anti-Christian screed like Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code.

Rice does make some interesting small choices within her story. She uses the older tradition of Joseph being an older (but not elderly) widower who is James’ father by his first marriage, but incorporates the later tradition of extended relations among the Lord’s "brothers" by making the other "brothers" and "sisters" Jesus’ cousins. As a personal preference, not a matter of doctrine, I prefer the later idea of a virginal Joseph because it makes the Holy Family an earthly, human image of the divine reality of the Trinity, but Rice’s picture is just as possible and within legitimate Catholic opinion.

One of the smaller choices I disliked was the idea that Jesus was taught to call Joseph by his name, rather than to call him "Father." Rice presumably chooses this for theological reasons and for dramatic purpose, and it is within the realm of acceptable opinion. Still, I prefer to believe that Jesus called Joseph Abba. It seems to me to fit better within the Catholic understanding of the sacramental understanding of creation. Human beings, because they are made in the image and likeness of God, can be physical, tangible images of divine reality.

All told, I’m glad I read this book. It’s not perfect by any means, either theologically or as fiction, but it is a solid piece of work that goes far in furthering Rice’s goal to take on the challenge of writing a novel about the Jesus of the Gospels instead of a Jesus of popular agenda. I hope that this book is the start in a series about Christ’s life. I would like to see how Rice’s development of Christ’s story matures.

During his life, H. P. Lovecraft was an impoverished writer who at times made ends meet by "revising" (*cough*ghostwriting*cough*) stories for more literarily-challenged authors.

One of them was Zealia Bishop (nee Reed).

She hired Lovecraft to do a number of stories for her based on minimal premises or plot synopses that she provided for him. Unfortunately, she didn’t pay Lovecraft in a timely manner, and he foreswore working for her.

One of the stories he wrote for her–The Mound–is regarded as one of Lovecraft’s best. In it, as in only two other stories (At The Mountains Of Madness, The Shadow Out Of Time), he envisions an entire non-human civilization. Most remarkably, in The Mound we actually get the narrative of a human character who lives in the eldritch society for some time–rather than just an after-the-fact summary of what the culture was like.

 Though much of the tale deals with a hidden, underground civilization, The Mound is set in the town of Binger, Oklahoma. Binger ("Bing-er")–unlike Arkham and other Lovecraft locations–is a real town, just over 60 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, and it is located in the Oklahoma mound country.

The title of the story refers to one of the Indian mounds in Caddo County, Oklahoma. Specifically, it refers to a mound that Zealia Bishop mentioned to Lovecraft in her premise for the story:

There is an Indian mound near here, which is haunted by a headless ghost. Sometimes it is a woman (S. T Joshi, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, 467).

Pretty thin for a story premise, huh! It’s also one that Lovecraft found really dull–just another ghost story. So he made up a whole non-human civilization and a 25,000-word novella was an explanation for the premise.

In the story, Lovecraft describes the location of "the mound" this way:

[It was] a huge, lone mound or small hill that rose above the plain about a third of a
mile west of the village—a mound which some thought a product of Nature, but
which others believed to be a burial-place or ceremonial dais constructed by
prehistoric tribes. This mound, the villagers said, was constantly haunted by,
two Indian figures which appeared in alternation; an old man who paced back and
forth along the top from dawn till dusk, regardless of the weather and with only
brief intervals of disappearance, and a squaw who took his place at night with a
blue-flamed torch that glimmered quite continuously till morning. When the moon
was bright the squaw’s peculiar figure could be seen fairly plainly, and over
half the villagers agreed that the apparition was headless.

Now, if you look on GPS/topographical maps of the area around Binger, Oklahoma–like the excellent Delorme Oklahoma guide–you’ll see that ther AIN’T NO mound a third of a mile west of Binger. Lovecraft made that detail up.

BUT!

If you call the officials in Binger (as I did) to track down what Bishop may have been talking about, it’s easy enough to figure out the mystery.

It turns out that there is indeed a mound in Caddo County, where Binger is located, that is reputed to be haunted by ghosts. It’s name is . . . (are you ready?) . . . "GHOST MOUND" (Dum! Dum! Dum!).

 Ghost Mound is more than a third of a mile west of Binger (as well as a bit north-see map to the left). It’s also not the only death-related mound in the county. There is also "Dead Woman Mound"–so named because a local found the body of a dead woman there an buried her at the site. Dead Woman Mound, though, is located father north from Binger, and as far as I know does not have ghost legends associated with it. The best evidence I have is that Zealia Bishop was referring to Ghost Mound, with perhaps an admixture of information about Dead Woman Mound.

The thing, though, is that these mounds are real. They really exist. And folks have been visiting them since Lovecraft’s time. In fact, of late they’ve been using GPS devices to go there. Here are the coordinates:

GHOST MOUND: Lat.
35.4025, Long.
-98.61306.
DEAD WOMAN MOUND: Lat.
35.47583, Long. -98.50444.

If I’ve read the sattelite maps correctly, this (left) is a picture of Ghost Mound.

I plan to find out for myself, though.

Y’see, I have friends in Oklahoma City, and the next time I go visit them, I plan to stop off on the way and visit Ghost Mound (and Dead Woman Mound).

Hopefully, I won’t get dragged down to the blue-litten realm of K’n-yan!

If I do, DON’T COME AFTER ME! Spare the world and unguessable horror and LEAVE THE MOUND ALONE!

I’m very much looking forward to Anne Rice’s new novel.

Instead of being an interview with a vampire, though, this novel will be a monologue by the Messiah.

In other words: It’s a story told in first-person narration by Jesus Christ.

In the hands of many authors, that kind of story could be an anti-Christian disaster, but Rice is–or has become–a believer. She’s reverted to the Catholic Church, ended her vampire chronicles, and dedicated her future writing to serving God.

Currently she has planned a trilogy of books on the life of Christ, told from his point of view.

That’s a prospect that–as an author–gives me the willies.

It’s the literary equivalent of climing Mount Everest. How on earth do you pull that off? The potential pitfalls associated with such a project are mind boggling! Even if you get the theology right, striking the right tone and style for first person narration by Jesus is nearly unimaginable–especially for something as long as a novel (and certianly for a trilogy!).

That’s one reason I’m interested in reading the first volume, which is about to be released: I want to see how she tackles so daunting a task.

The book is titled Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and will be released November 1.

In the meantime . . .

READ AN INTERESTING ARTICLE ABOUT RICE AND THE BOOK.

PRE-ORDER THE BOOK VIA AMAZON.

or wait for it to be released on AUDIBLE.COM on November 1.

Incidentally, Rice has moved from her native New Orleans to La Jolla (lah HOY-yah), California, which is here in the greater San Diego area. I wonder if I’ll ever bump into her as a result of interaction with the local Catholic community. That’d be cool.