As we try to understand the disintegration of culture around us, including the prevailing drift of pop culture toward that which is grimy — on the assumption that it is therefore more “authentic” — we have to do some hard thinking about the relationship of flesh and bones.
Particulars matter. The way something is enfleshed matters. If we look at the New Testament, we of course see the death and resurrection pattern, which is a structure that we can (and should) use to understand novels, short stories, music, events in our own lives, etc. This structure is a skeleton (which I am using here as a metaphor, not a metaphysical assumption).
But it is not a structural skeleton upon which any old flesh may be placed. A story about a prostitute who is betrayed by her boyfriend and knifed, and brought back from the very edge of death in a dramatic ER scene, and after a long period of recovery returns to be the best prostitute ever, is a story that follows the death and resurrection structure. And so what? The particulars matter, and this is a story which by its content revolts against its structure.
Over the years I have noticed a weird sort of gnosticism among many who want to claim that gnosticism is actually anathema to them. I said in the previous post on this subject that the privileging of the “gritty” over the “nice” with terms such as realistic is a breathtaking sleight of hand. Someone who wants to write realistic fiction should start with a story about a guy who gets saved at a Billy Graham crusade. That’s realistic. Happens all the time.
Christians often try to have it both ways by accepting some “deep” structural forms that are Christian in some way, while at the same time accepting the dictates of the prevailing dogmas of lowlife authenticity, dictates which determine what kind of flesh goes on the skeleton. Usually it is flesh in great need of a bath. But this approach is profoundly gnostic. And as the Lord taught us in so many ways, we can’t have it both ways.
For example, a movie is not redeemed because someone has detected an incarnational emphasis in it, or a death and resurrection motif, or sacrifice. Because of the way God made the world, it is impossible to tell a story that doesn’t borrow these kinds of structures in some way. But the nouns and verbs we drop into the sentence (that we have already diagrammed) still matter. The fact that we have detected an approved subject/verb/object pattern does not allow us to say that I love the devil is therefore a wonderful sentiment. The structure is fine. So? What the Ps and Qs stand for in the logic problem matter. And whether the character who is placed in the Christ-place is noble or not matters.
The issue is always nobility. Nobility is good and it is very real. Sweety-nice and sentimental cliches set themselves up as good, but they are not real. The difference between Sam Gamgree and Elsie Dinsmore is vast. To complicate the picture further, hypocrisy pays lip service to that which is good, but lives in such a way as to say that the good is unreal in the hypocrite’s experience. Those who live with the hypocrite come to agree, and as I wrote earlier, they go off to find authenticity on the seedy side of town. But there is just as much hypocrisy there — the difference is the world is engaged in a vast conspiracy on this subject, and has agreed to not notice it. Church-going hypocrisy gets pounded, and we should have no problem with that. Go for it. It deserves everything it gets, good and hard. But the hypocrites of lowlife authenticity are just as bad, just as inconsistent. They just never get called on it. Why? Because they are living authentic lives. Why do we say so? Well, the grease for starters.
If a Sunday School superintendent cheats on his wife, the hypocrisy is very real. God condemns it, and offers forgiveness. The world condemns it and offers no forgiveness at all because the guy is obviously a beady-eyed fundamentalist. But if a nihilistic English professor cheats on his wife, the number of broken promises is exactly the same. Does anyone turn from the life of relativistic grime at his university with disgust? “I could never write authentic fiction. There are too many hypocrites in that department.” Not a chance. One guy breaks a promise and it is a sign of his inauthenticity, or to use Sartre’s phrase, it is his bad faith. The other guy breaks his promise and it is a sign that he is trying to struggle free of the inauthentic constraints that bind him — a sign of his true and deep authenticity. A Christian needs to respond to this incoherence with “a plague on both their houses.” There is an alternative to all this. It is called keeping your promises, or truly repenting if you have not. What a concept. And in all the stories we tell, we need to learn how to honor those who keep their promises, and to receive with kindness those who repent of not having done so.
In C.S. Lewis’ great book The Abolition of Man, he notes that in our day, we laugh at honor, and then are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings to be fruitful. We remove the organ and demand the function. Whatever word we must use to describe this set of expectations, it would not be the word realistic.
Grimy characters can certainly be real, as they are in the book God is writing. As Chesterton once put it, a book without a wicked character is a wicked book. But such characters are not good because they are real, and they most certainly are not more real just because they are real. They do not have any advantage over the noble, cute, pretty, or clean in that great footrace for the blue ribbon prize that we call being “realistic.” Pious four-year-old girls with big blue eyes are real. Crack cocaine addicts are real. Both of them can share basically the same quadrant in the space/time continuum, the same zip code, and even the same mother. Some of these people who privilege grime over the good need to work through some basic questions of ontology, or, to pinpoint the problem more accurately, ethics.
As I said earlier, the insistence that grime be privileged in this way is the driving engine of our modern unculture. When this assumption is challenged (and we must learn to constantly challenge it), the responses to the critique will vary. Some will mock, some will misunderstand, some will pretend to misunderstand, some will pretend to mock, and a few may be brought up short. Whatever we do, we must not make the point and then move on. We have to press the point because this false assumption is not a bagatelle; it is the death of cultures, including ours unless we somehow come to a cultural repentance on this point. A cancer patient in denial cannot tell the doctor that “that is all very well, but what was your other point?”
Whether we carry the point successfully, we need to continue to insist upon this. Critics will of course rally to defend the foundational authenticity of grime, and they will do so fiercely because this is a trick that has worked very effectively for them from Rousseau on down. Why give up a good lie? And I have no doubt that many will condemn our praise of nobility as inauthentic, hackneyed, cliche-ridden, smarmy, goody-goodyism. And that is all right. It ought not to distress a prince when a crow outside the palace struts in the gutter.