I’ve been rereading Robert Frost lately. The immediate occasion is Adam Plunkett’s superb new biography, Love and Need: The Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35, 512 pp.). But Frost is always worth returning to. A quicksilver poet, he never stays put from one reading to the next. What appeared to be folksy last time turns out to be ferocious this time; what you thought an expression of skepticism now reads as desperate hope.
Take “Hyla Brook,” a sonnet from Frost’s 1916 collection Mountain Interval:
By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
Typical of Frost, the voice here seems strangely both intimate (“our brook’s”; “We love”) and impersonal (those first-person plurals appear in the first and last lines but disappear for the intervening twelve). The language never settles into one rhythm for too long, with a simple one-line sentence followed by a much more complicated, though never convoluted, eight-line sentence. Frost is a master of repetition—“And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep,” he hauntingly ends “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”—and here he uses repetition when writing both figuratively (“like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow”) and aphoristically (“We love the things we love for what they are”).
Plunkett has many smart things to say about “Hyla Brook,” but he’s most interested in the complexity of its conclusion. As he notes, one of the poem’s ironies is that “we readers are told with great feeling to love the things we love for what they are by means of a description that on close inspection tells us what the brook was and will and might be, not what it is.” The poem opens in June, when the brook’s song has departed and its speed has slowed. And yet we hear the water’s music (“the way its water went”) and, in that bravura second sentence, we feel its rush. That is to say, we know what the brook is not by attending to it in the present but by reconstructing it via the imagination. The route to the real runs through poetry. “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows,” as Frost writes in “Mowing.”
But there’s more. Plunkett observes that, syntactically, it’s unclear if the brook is currently dried up in June or if the speaker is imagining how the brook will be when it is finally and fully dried up. “Its bed is left a faded paper sheet”: Plunkett argues that this could “refer to the present of the poem or to an imagined continuation of the second sentence, which for eight lines imagined where one would find the dried brook ‘much after’ the beginning of June.” In other words, the speaker’s lament might be read proleptically, “his sense of [the brook’s] diminishment lead[ing] him to anticipate missing it so powerfully that he loses it while it’s still there.” In Plunkett’s summary, “The poem, which has shown us something of how it feels to love a thing for what it is, shows us something of how hard it is to see a thing as what it is if you love it.”
Does love clarify or obscure our perception of the things we love? I tend to think (hope?) the former. Because I love a poem, I assume that there are always more things to be found within it. Because I assume that there are always more things to be found within it, I’m able to see previously unseen shades of meaning and hear previously unheard notes of music. One thing is clear: perfect critical objectivity isn’t really possible. We read with all our beings, our affections and investments always shaping—which is not to say distorting—our interpretations.
Because of this, I’m comfortable saying that Cassandra Nelson’s A Theology of Fiction (Wiseblood Books, $10, 116 pp.) is an elegant work of criticism despite the fact that I know Nelson and am thanked in her acknowledgements. (We were in a working group together and have chatted at conferences.) A Theology of Fiction is the seventeenth volume in a series of slim books on contemporary culture put out by Wiseblood Books. Previous titles include considerations of the work of novelist Christopher Beha and the thought of literary critic and cultural anthropologist René Girard; all are worth reading.
A Theology of Fiction is an act of critical recovery, reintroducing the midcentury literary scholar, Sr. Mariella Gable, O.S.B. Sr. Mariella taught English at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota, and, in a series of essays, books, and anthologies, articulated her vision of what constitutes Catholic fiction. For her, Catholic fiction isn’t fiction that “pour[s] out miracles, three for a cent, cheaper than dirt.” It is fiction that is grounded in the material world but finds within it glimmers of transcendence; that takes place in our recognizable social world but knows that “there is another reality in that drawing-room”; that is, in a word, sacramental.
Not a year seems to go by without critics lamenting the contemporary state of Catholic literature, or celebrating its continued resurgence, or debating its very definition. (Indeed, Wiseblood has published Dana Gioia’s The Catholic Writer Today and Trever Cribben Merrill’s The Situation of the Catholic Novelist in recent years.) Nelson reminds us that such lamentations/celebrations/debates have been going on for quite some time and that Sr. Mariella helped get the conversation started. At St. Joseph, she taught Betty Wahl, a talented young writer. Wahl married J. F. Powers, who remains, with Flannery O’Connor, the best short-story writer American Catholicism has produced. (Nelson tells us that O’Connor praised Sr. Mariella’s criticism in her letters.) Culture is, Nelson argues, like the children’s game of telephone, and she traces some of “the messy, fallible, and convoluted paths by which culture, tradition, and stories are preserved and passed on.”
Thinking with and through Sr. Mariella allows Nelson to offer a theology of fiction. Note the singular: this is, Nelson writes, “one particular understanding of fiction’s theological dimensions, as transmitted through one small branch of a much larger tree.” So, what are some of the theological dimensions of fiction for Nelson? Above all else, she sees fiction as incarnational in its sense that “physical reality contains hints of the metaphysical reality from which it springs and toward which it points.” Fiction proceeds via the analogical imagination. This is the case whether or not the writer believes in such a metaphysical reality or intends that such hints be there:
The saving grace in this equation is form. There is an order to every work of art, a set of governing principles which unites it and makes it function as an organic whole. When the substrate of meaning that animates a particular work of art overlaps with God’s governing principles—that is, with the order and design we find in God’s created world and in normative morality—then the artist has succeeded in the most meaningful way possible.
Like the best criticism, these claims initiate rather than shut down conversation. I love the idea of form as a kind of grace; Robert Frost would have, too. But I need to hear more about how a work of art’s “substrate of meaning” might “overlap…with God’s governing principles” and what “normative morality” has to do with all of this. The governing principles that unite a Flannery O’Connor story seem to me very different from the governing principles that unite a J. F. Powers story, and, despite both being great Catholic writers, they seem to have different moral visions. O’Connor is a wild visionary and Powers a dry ironist. Her characters are prophets and murderers, seers and con men—a crew unlikely to hang out with, in Mary Gordon’s apt description, “the carefully barbered, untonsured heads of the Powers clergy.”
At one point, Nelson builds upon Sr. Mariella to make another bold claim: “Great fiction cannot remain at the surface of human experience; it must get to the heart of the matter, to the way human beings straddle time and eternity.” Again, I don’t entirely agree: surfaces can be deep and there are artists whose work largely ignores the eternal but whom I’d still call great (Alan Hollinghurst and Anita Brookner, to name two novelists). Yet I still admire the sentiment behind the assertion. In art, technical proficiency isn’t enough; technique should irradiate something bigger and more mysterious.
Smallness of vision isn’t a problem for Gjertrud Schnackenberg, the poet other than Frost with whom I’ve spent the most time recently. In A Gilded Lapse of Time (1992), Schnackenberg describes visiting the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna. There, she sees “a tomb / A barbarian empress built for herself / That conceals within its inauspicious, / Shattered-looking vault the whirl of gold, / The inflooding realm we may only touch / For one instant with a total leap of the heart.” Sr. Mariella would admire this description of “the inflooding realm” that comes when we encounter beauty. (The italicized bit comes from St. Augustine, who gave Flannery O’Connor language for the analogical imagination, who gave the language to Cassandra Nelson. Another game of telephone.)
In October, Schnackenberg published St. Matthew Passion (Arrowsmith, $18, 100 pp.), a book-length poem that works through what it’s like to listen to Bach’s 1727 masterpiece. Using center-aligned tercets, Schnackenberg testifies to the power of Bach’s oratorio—a power that is aesthetic, to be sure, but also spiritual and phenomenological. The speaker, leaving her house on the way to errands, is “arrested at the door, held in abeyance / By the music I left on.” Reality stops, compresses, expands: “The violin, engulfed / By what has happened, brings the room // Into another state of being.” To channel Frost, Schnackenberg loves this piece of music for what it is. She hears depths in Bach’s Passion setting and these depths lead on to more depths. This is art as sacrament: the music brings another plane of reality—the aesthetic sphere but also sacred history—into the speaker’s home.
Why do we go to art? To experience “a momentary stay against confusion,” Frost wrote. To see glimmers of the eternal in the temporal, Sr. Mariella and Nelson contend. To feel called by something beyond us, Schnackenberg describes and enacts. To be hailed and held in abeyance and ultimately transformed:
A sound so charged with care
It turns its listeners
Into involuntary witnesses
And inadvertent lookers-on
And random passersby, persons
Anonymous, indifferent, unaware,
But stalled by what they’ve heard,
Caught up, cut off
From their immediate concerns,
And charged, from who and what they were,
To shocked participants,
Gebracht, drawn in
By instruments believing they were born
For this, by voices born to call
From Thomaskirche’s balconies,
What shall I tell my soul—
What shall I say, when the appointed hour
Has come and gone,
When each and every one is called upon,
And even God
Is called upon, to mourn.
