The Literary Imagination
FITCH, ROBERT E.
The Literary Imagination Christ and Apollo. By William F. Lynch, S.J. Sheed and Ward. 267 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion THE...
...It is completely false to say that Christ redeemed time...
...To be sure he is no formal rationalist, and rebukes those evangelists who, in saving the soul of a man, are content with "the saving of the top of the head...
...For whether in an old person like Lear or in young persons like Romeo and Juliet, there is also a revelation of inner dignity, an evolution of character, which is the counterpoise to death and to physical defeat...
...Just what is the proportion between these two consequences, and which does the more good, may be matter for debate...
...So we have complaint that a Judith Anderson in Medea, or a Laurence Olivier in Richard III, destroys the beauty of the lines of the poet—"the lines were no longer allowed to float out in the air as ritual victories"—and tears them to tatters of "meaningful fact...
...But what he has to offer as a theory of tragedy is adequate neither to illuminate the old nor to condemn the contemporary...
...He moves with ease from Sophocles to St...
...Who, if he were honest, would not be happier if he knew that beauty and understanding were completely contained within the literal, the plain, ordinary, completely self-enclosed fact that meets the eyes and ears...
...Thus some of the noblest works of art have been concerned with the portrayal of the "steady march of the soul through irrevocable events...
...And here he illustrates the peculiar paradox of our time: that the humanists and non-theists, who used to claim a monopoly on the joy of living, are those who now deny the worth and significance of life...
...We do not get at truth by seeking to transcend time, or by attempting to leap beyond the world of events...
...But there is a rationalism of common sense which can be equally formidable...
...It is not nearly enough to say just that...
...In this connection Lynch illustrates his point from a variety of literary sources and also from the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola...
...There may be artists, and forms of art, that are afflicted with such a desire—but it is, to my mind, precisely that: an affliction...
...First of all the symbols in the title have meanings the opposite of the customary ones...
...Also, while this book, as the subtitle—The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination—indicates, is focused on those dimensions, some of the generalizations seem to apply to all the arts...
...This is William Lynch's Apollo, but neither Nietzsche's Apollo nor Spengler's...
...But while it is true that the verses of Shakespeare, for instance, have a beauty of their own, and may be uttered as pure literature, surely it is the mark of the amateur actor that he merely declaims in the ritual or in the lyrical mood, whereas the great performer fulfills the whole intent of the poet in blending together the act and the image...
...Again there are moments when Lynch's "rock-bottom being" appears to be capricious in its inclusions and exclusions...
...While he will not say that these things are altogether good, he does declare that it is with them that the artist must do his work, and it is through them that truth is to be found...
...What commands our fundamental respect for the author of the book is the extraordinary range and catholicity of his appreciations...
...As a good Christian, Lynch also attacks the Gnostics of his day...
...Thus, on time: "It is simply not true to say that the function of all art is to immobilize time, to freeze into permanence some instant of peace or illumination so that we may have it forever, and thus share in that quality of eternity that does not move but simply is...
...After a while we begin to wonder about the austerely prosaic and literal character of the "rock-bottom being" which Lynch extols...
...Certainly there is nothing provincial in his literary outlook...
...To be sure he is both apt and persuasive in an attack on the false heroics of the modern tragic hero...
...But if so, what are we to do with painting and sculpture and architecture, and what disease of the feelings infects a Clement Greenberg, for example, when he extols the experience of what he calls "at-onceness" in modern abstract expressionism...
...it only needed someone to explore its inner resources fully, as He did...
...It is not enough to say that "successful tragedy has always fought its way to beauty through the story of the insufficiency of the human will," that it thrusts "all the way up to the hilt of helplessness, all the way into the abyss of non-being that lies underneath the masks of finitude...
...He believes in the definite, the finite, the concrete, the temporal, the complex...
...Apollo stands for "a kind of infinite dream," for a "fantasy beauty" which "will not abide the straitened gates of limitation," and for an "autonomous and facile intellectualism...
...There are many observations in Christ and Apollo which deserve our serious consideration...
...while it is the Christians, the allegedly "otherworldly," who stoutly maintain the value and meaning of life on this earth...
...He can illustrate the same point by drawing on the mother of Hector in the Iliad, or on the mother of six sons in Synge's Riders to the Sea, or on the traveling circus man in the movie La Strada...
...Let there be no nontemporal short cuts to the truth...
...He is equally at home with the literature of classical Greece and Rome, with the thought of the Middle Ages, and with modern poetry and drama...
...But when at the book's end Lynch comes to discuss the theological imagination, and then the Christian imagination, it seems that the imagination is just what is absent...
...There are the presentation of the false attitudes toward the finite in contemporary literature, the portrayal of the four types of the pseudo-comic, the penetrating critique of Camus' The Plague...
...In brief, this is a Jesuit Christ, but neither a Franciscan nor a Methodist Christ...
...Reviewed by Robert E. Fitch Professor of Christian Ethics, Pacific School of Religion THE PERSISTING reader of Christ and Apollo, if he is like this reviewer, will come out of it with mingled feelings of inspiration and of irritation...
...Moreover, Lynch affirms reality against those who would flee from it...
...Above all Lynch insists that time must be taken seriously...
...For time has never needed redeeming...
...Does Lynch really mean it when he asks, "Who wants to overcome the literal...
...But while every artist and every critic must raise the question of reality, and give his answer to it, let him beware of begging the question...
...The impulse itself represents a disease of the feelings and a collapse of the true metaphysical mind...
...One would have thought, moreover, that Lynch would have made this argument his own...
...What gradually takes over in this writing is an enormous paraphernalia of ex-egetical devices—literal, tropological, analogical, anagogical—until finally not only the arts but also Christ and Apollo are buried beneath a tremendous clatter of categories...
...Paul to George Bernard Shaw, can treat of Shakespeare, Karl Barth, Dante and Arthur Miller, is as familiar with Baudelaire, Proust, Joyce, O'Neill, Maxwell Anderson, as with Homer, Plato, Cervantes and Ignatius Loyola...
...Christ stands for "definiteness and actuality," for the "model and source of that energy and courage we again need to enter the finite as the only creative and generative source of beauty...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 45
