Darkness Visible
McCabe, Bernard
things which should have been done at greater depth. One can only invite them to do it. McBrien's readers will not be grossly misled. At the risk of some shallow spots the reader will find in...
...Eliot's brilliant technique of "hints and guesses" at mystical experience in the Four Quartets...
...bols of darkness surround her as much a~ symbols of light surround Matty...
...It illuminates the way we interact with each other today and, at least for the religious person, the way our choices and decisions relate to our spiritual outlook...
...And there are longer passages of reverent excitement that tell us but cannot show us wh/lt's going on, a crucial error...
...Joseph and his brothers...
...As in earlier novels Golding here deliberately shackles himself...
...Golding should have heeded T.S...
...To escape the "fierce wine of fornication" he hits on a trip to Australia...
...The problem is certainly still with us, and no one could object to a twentieth century artist feeling a crying need to face it...
...In the anonymityof a hospital and an orphanage he is partly patched up, given a name at random -Matty -- and launched on the "broken business of living" in Golding's world...
...She too is a seer, but a seer who has chosen (or is chosen by...
...Abraham and God...
...What is more, it is bad for the writer, who perforce must present himself as one of the elect, and bad for the reader, too, who naturally excepts himself from the catechumen's role and wants to join the writer, up there with the elect...
...The shackles are too heavy...
...It is part of Matty's role to bring a unifying vision to his own self and some moments of such a vision to others...
...There would be points for discussion...
...The shattered building he emerges from, for example,human will for evil is denied...
...as Ralph saw at the end of Lord of the Flies man's heart is dark: "darkness visible" is of course a phrase from Milton's description of Hell...
...Her sexual selfinitiation (a close echo of Stendhal's Lamiel) shows her that sex and power can be one...
...Cain and Abel...
...McBrien is best on the church, weakest on God and the Trinity...
...But it is clear in thefinal pages that such achievements have been costly, and are tenuous and precarious...
...Film critics and analysts have been more or less applying Chesterton's maxim to the narrative sound film and audiences' reactions to it ever since that locomotive scattered the front row three generations ago...
...Eschatology is the weakest part of McBrien's book...
...That is a very good point...
...She moves to sadism, has a near-go at incest, and soon is planning and passionately imaging a combined sexual assault and knifing to death of a kidnapped small boy...
...He has always gone in for tours deforce...
...that is the world of Sophy...
...In The Inheritors he invents a kind of preconceptual image-language to initiate Neanderthal ~mental processes --"I've got a picture," grunts Lok to Fa, Pincher Martin's story is acrobatically told in the last quarter-second of his life, or perhaps in the first quarter-second of his afterlife...
...No matter now many ingenuities are there to project "complexity" of vision, theirs is a simple and programmatic view of life after all...
...Since his style is lucid, his tone calm, and his knowledge of both literature and film history considerable, Commonweal: 536...
...later still he dances in mystic glee to some music he overhears...
...The novel's oxymoronic title is echoed in Matty's dualistic role as wise fool with two faces, and in the, dualities and doubl!ngs that abound...
...Throughout these odd chapters the reader becomes aware that St...
...Try as I may what I end up with is an impression of a very earnest writer, blessed with remarkable skills and up to all sorts of ingenuities, struggling with a dark vision of man trying to express it through a complex art, making another attempt at another tour deforce, and getting nowhere...
...Pedigree, a pederast and schoolmaster who lives in and out of jail, who hates the ugly boy and blames him for the untimely death of one of his eleven-year-old paramours, and lust.for a pretty shop assistant at the hardware store...
...He rightly uses some evasion when dealing with mystical matters, "I experienced more than words~can say," or a proper vagueness...
...If you are interested in theology, I can find at random a dozen contemporaries who are harder to work through...
...The vehicle of truth is totally unglamorous, frighteningly ugly, rather stupid...
...In the local and cosmic battle that is now waged between good and evil, darkness and light, Sophy, who has "a darktunnel at the back of her head," is (nott her name) as wise in fundamentals a,, Matty...
...enthused G. K. Chesterton when he first saw Times Square...
...Purified by these events he now dedicates himself, in a midnight ceremony involving fh'e and water, a self-baptism, to his mystic task...
...At the risk of some shallow spots the reader will find in one work--not small--an understanding of what is going on in the theological world, and some good guesses of its future directions...
...The Devil's world is associated with feminine sensuality, heat, and darkness...
...The forces oflight have made some ground, then...
...All this high-flown material escapes Golding's control...
...Here we meet some awful people, awfulwithout exception: a malicious selfhating bookseller, Goodchild, an ineffectual liberal teacher, Bell, a heartless chess-writer, Stanhope, various unattractive wives and servants, Mr...
...We are invited to find acomicelementinMatty's predicaments...
...15.00 at your bookstore or directly from The MIT Press28 Carleton Street Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142 26 September1980:535 that first comes through violence and then through sex...
...And the characters are all stereotypes...
...Goodness, in Manichean terms, is associated with bright light, quickening fire, clear water and cooling wind...
...Leaving school early Matty works in a decaying old-fashionedhardware store, itselfa symbol of one of the novel's major themes, the accelerating entropy of the modern world...
...So do the accounts of Sophy's life in the (hippy, yippy,) punk (or whatever it is currently called) London scene...
...This optimism is reflected in the keneral rejection of eschatology by modern theologians...
...Pedigree is given a moment of unitary awareness...
...BernardMcCabe DARKNESS ¥1$1BLE'S striking opening pages present a small child, horribly burned, horribly disfigured, who walks out of the flames at the height of the London blitz...
...this indicates that the book is stimulating...
...Or he will slip into contemporary jargon...
...Optimism is a refusal to accept the reality of sin, death and judgment...
...and Solomon and the two women claiming motherhood in the case of the disputed baby...
...By this optimism I mean a basic acceptance of the world and a belief that the world is an object of salvation...
...Golding cannot persuade that he is interested in them...
...Matty's provisional "name" in hospital is "number seven," laterhe is called Septimus: from his Bible he learns that "John writeth his revelaCommonweal: 534 tion to the seven churches of Asia, signified by the seven golden candlesticks...
...He also cannot avoid some awkward shifts in tone, of the kind mentioned above...
...Bell...
...So Golding switches into Biblese as Matty wanders in the desert: "And Matty came in the evening into the city of Gladstone which is a great city...
...And it's uncomfortable being pressed into such priggishness...
...In Darkness Visible Golding evidently wants to warrant the genuineness of his saint and seer by presenting him in minimal terms...
...The young man is lost, hungry and thirsty in the desert: "The literature of survival had passed Matty by...
...Matty, whose mission it is to protect that small boy, keeps a journal about his sessions with his tutelary angels that seems, well, simply silly...
...II I is called "a burning bush," the firemen stare into "two pillars of lighted smoke," the child walks with a "ritual gait," he appears to have been "born from the sheer agony of a burning city...
...This, as I said, is addressed less to McBrien than to his peers in the theological world...
...Darkness Visible has its undeniable fascinations, and has been greeted with loud applause on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Golding's parable offers characters as unfleshed ideas...
...When it is denied,judgment becomes an archaic anthropomorphism which comes between us and the vision of God...
...Soph) knows and abandons herself to an innel self that "lives and watches without an3 feelings at all," and has a passionat~ desire to transcend the placid trivialitie., of "the daytime world" through some form of outrage and"weirdness...
...The last section of the book is entitled "One is One...
...Jacob and Esau...
...Samson and Delilah...
...SteveLawson $BI||tHAT A WONDERFULSIGHT for y¢ people who can't read...
...Well, that is as it may be...
...Individual persons and even nations and civilizations die, but the world of human achievement, we think, is secure from death...
...Pedigree again, creeping about a smelly public urinal on his hunt for delectable small boys, and, the incarnation of evil, two stunningly beautiful twin girls, Sophy and Toni...
...love for a decayedclassical scholar, Mr...
...The Manichaean movement developed as a response to the second century's crying Skirting the swamp of STORYTELLING AND IqYTHNAK]IIG: IMAGES FROMFILM AND LITERATURE Frank MeConneli Oxford University, $13.95, 289 pp...
...Troubled by these distractions from his Bible-reading, and already aware of a power of seeing, he decides to prepare himself for some mission he does not yet understand ("Who am I?" he asked himself, "What am I for...
...In Australia, after various drab adventures he realizes he must go out into the wilderness...
...Golding's glimpses into life among the depraved young, told in "their" language sounds embarrassingly pop-eyed and alarmist, like a busload of tourists peering through the windows at the Village or Haight-Ashbury ten years ago...
...This is the insight of Biblical Games, a new approach to understanding the Scriptures...
...About the book I have more to say than the allotted space permits...
...The fire-bombing and rescue-work and Matty's appearance are described in painstaking realistic detail, but we are also pressed to see the boy as a symbolic and apocalyptic figure...
...The strategies employed by the players (God included) in more than twenty stories of conflict and intrigue are analyzed, among them the cootests involving Adam, Eve, and God...
...Although most of this story is told with the utmost seriousness not to say solemn portentousness -- "he understood the roundness of the earth and theterrorofthingshungin emptiness"--Golding's curious strategyseems to be to cover his tracks by shifting into irony...
...Isaiah hints a presence, and it is possible that other prophets like Habbakuk, Obadiah and Hagai may be lurking there too...
...William Ted Martin, Senior Lecturer, Professor Emeritus of Education and Mathematics, MIT "This fascinating book on biblical games sheds light on why these Bible stories have intrigued people for so long and continue to do so...
...Now Frank McConnell, a professor of English at Northwestern, has published Storytelling and Mythmaking , the central thesis of which is that film recapitulates narrative literature in Western art and the major themes and subjects of literary classics are echoed in contemporary movies...
...But with a very few exceptionsneed for a comprehensible answer to the problem of evil...
...Goodchild and the childish school teacher Mr...
...He wanders into the out-back and in that desert, at the hands of a cruel "Abo" he endures a non-fatal crucifixion (Golding calls it, uncomically, "a cruci-farce or a crucifiction") and a semi-castration...
...What I wish to say about the theologicai optimism of the book is addressed not just to McBrien but to the theological world of which he is a competent spokesman...
...And Golding cannot avoid some awkward shifts from the inconsequential detail of daily life to awed awareness of the Ineffable, try as he may...
...It is Beethoven's, Seventh....The symbolic nudges come thick and fast in Darkness Visible...
...But Manichaeans do not make good novelists...
...For Golding has a Manichaean cast of mind, and in such a worldview, although the elect'have their moments, and even humble catechumens such as Goodchild and Bell sometimes learn to see, the sublunary world is largely the Devil's property, and is passionate in its outrage and cruelty...
...She is aware of her power, a powel "Biblical Games is a remarkable book which furnishes deep insight into the Bible...
...In each instance, techniques of game theory show that the various players acted consistently and rationally to achieve their goals...
...Moses, the Israelites, and God...
...One dissenting voice was Joyce Carol Oates, who remarked that Golding's fiction is "probably most admired by people who dislike'fiction...
...But sometimes he tries to render such expenences...
...Sin is denied when the II Manichaean depressive II DARKNESS VISIBLE William Goiding Fm'rm', Strsus, Giroux, $10.95, 265 pp...
...By the world I mean the complex of human achievements by which we believe that human life is enriched...
...If we are wrong, the price of correcting our error could be very stiff...
...Lord of the Flies' dark'tale is told through the sensibilities of eleven-year old boys...
...The hellish twins, the pair of Bells, the duality that emerges in almost every character's dialogue with an inner self...
...Matty reads his Bible daily, and memorizes it, occupies himself with menial chores,, and struggles with his love and lust...
...And he sojourned there for many months at peace," and so on...
...Fire and water are Matty's elements, he is bathed in light, and his last name, which keeps changing, (I'm not sure why) is always associated with the wind -- Windrave, Windrove, Windrow and so on...
...He simply has not the visionary power that offers us Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, say, or Saul Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm in Seize The Day, tragically disturbing yet ultimately reconciliatory figures...
...Kenneth E. Boulding, Distinguished Professor of Economics, University of Colorado, Boulder God plays games, and His behavior can be comprehended through the application of modern game theory...
...Having come from fire he dies in fire, in another apocalpytic scene, but not before he has saved a child's life, presumably thus expiating his early offense against Pedigree, and not before he has afforded a moment of silent vision to Mr...
...Goldingplaysnumbersgames throughout the book...
...this reflects the state of theological thought...
...In a convulsion unlike anything he had ever known, Sim stared into the gigantic world of his own palm and saw that it was holy...
...Saul and David...
...John's Revelations and Ezekiel and his wheels are buzzing about...
...That work, The Waste Land, and Eliot's verse plays are, I would guess, an overwhelming influence on Golding) Matty returns to England, to the town he grew up in, now a wasteland of industxialization (Golding calls it Greenfield...
...profundity I -- Stanley Kanffmann, Leo Brandy in The World in a Frame,Robert Richardson in Literature and Film, the late Charles T. Samuels in Mastering the Film--the experts have come off as enthusiastically muddled as the masses...
...Now Golding's story becomes deliberately grotesque...
...I shall now risk another guess -- that Golding used a Manichaeanmythassustaning framework for Darkness Visible, as well as calling on the Old Testament prophets...
...Even Mr...
...Without a personal devil as a scapegoat ora cop-out (and McBrien keeps him) wickedness is either denied or becomes a human responsibility...
...And it's never funny...
...For years, a few hardy commentators have sought to trace the parallels and differences between film and its antecedents in literature...
...A not unfamiliar ploy...
...McConnell no sooner had me on his side'in this book than a new ingredient in the debate would promptly alienate my sympathies...
...The world includes the price which was paid for these achievements...
...The sexual encounters go beyond embarrassment, Golding gritting his teeth and getting it over with...
...Admirable, intense--and arguable...
...It is a dubium which should be entered at much greater length, but it would go beyond the task of reviewing McBrien's book...
...Evil...
...But prolonged attention to this figure makes for tedious reading...
...as when Matty is "near the centre of things...
...Let me say finallythat my delay in reviewing two volumes of this size was not due to any difficulty in reading the books...
...We now watch as this maimed and fearsome-looking person, semi-literate, utterly deprived of most "normal" human contacts and feelings, gradually develops into a visionary who can "see into a still dimension of otherness" and who can offerhis vision to others because he is "near the centre of things...
...I simply wonder how close we have come to denying the difference between good and evil...
Vol. 107 • September 1980 • No. 17
