Classics and Potboilers, and Penny dreadfuls

Image via Wikipedia

I can't help contrasting two books I recently finished reading. One I read out loud to my ten year old and many home school moms would say it is a classic. The other I read myself and probably quicker than the one I read to my son. Most home school moms wouldn't recognize it and would be leery of letting their older children read it without some investigation.

At a certain level they were both great reads. The one has been made into many movies (and I think a TV series). It's the story of a child reared in the jungle by animals who eventually encounters a group of humans and saves them (multiple times) and falls in love with the girl in the group. He returns to civilization with one of the party and learns French and that he is the son of a well to do man and pursues the girl. Alas, she is already promised to another. He returns to the jungle.

The other is a play about a man who's brought home a war captive and her child. He's fallen in love with her and she will have none of him. He's also got a promised bride who loves him. Into the scene arrives another man demanding the death of the child (son of the enemy in the last great war) and who is also in love with the promised bride. Two die, one is insane, and the captive woman is ruling the country at the end of the play.

So which is which? Which the classic? Which the potboiling penny dreadful?

More Meaning

Image via Wikipedia

In looking over the reviews of the commentary by Ben Witherington on the book of Revelation. I noticed one reviewer complained that he never told which meaning the original readers and writer would have given an image in the book. I'm now about half way through his book and haven't found this to be a problem, but it does raise for me an important point about reading metaphoric literature of all kinds.

That's the fact that often an image can have more than one meaning and the author intended that multiple layer of meaning. It gives a piece much more depth to have this multi-level approach. To look for the one right meaning is to miss the point.

I can remember studying Yeats' "Leda and the Swan" and having a teacher walk me through those mutliple meanings that both overlapped and meshed together.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

This poem has at least four such levels, maybe more. Certainly Yeats contrived to have them there and to interlock them to allow the reader to get more than just the first reading of such a poem would give.

First, there's the basic story, Leda, a girl, is raped by a swan. To embellish that more and explain the lines about Agamemnon and the burning wall, we find the second layer, that of Greek mythology. The swan is Zeus and the children of this mating are Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, who marries and later kills Agamemnon.

But Yeats wasn't willing to stop there. He had is own view of history as a cycle of rising and falling events. For him the fall of Troy was the fall of Greek culture and signaled the rise of a later culture, Christanity. For him this moment is the beginning of modern history.1

Yet even all this doesn't quite explain that last lines, "Did she put on his knowledge with his power, Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?" Which takes us to yet a fourth level of meaning. That of the creative person who struggles to capture that one flash of creation that comes from a greater and higher force before that moment and that creativity are gone.2

This adds depth and meaning to the poem and to try to decide which of the four is right just wouldn't be, well, right.

Fie on Historical Fiction!

Image via Wikipedia

Have I got your attention? Truth be told I like historical fiction as much as the next home school mom, but over the last two years I've had to reshape a commonly mentioned point about historical fiction: "It really helps me and my my children to understand the time period."

After being challenged by the writers of Tapestry of Grace curriculum to read their high school level literature which is the literature of the time studied, I've found this often stated truism isn't true.

I've always been aware that some historical novels don't exactly get their details right and that often characters are portrayed in ways that don't really fit with the time period. Further it is clear that different periods of historical fiction write differently about a time period than each other. I probably would have agreed that the ideals found in historical characters mouths and thoughts are thrust back into the past from the time of the writer.

But until you've delved into literature actually written during the time period it isn't clear just how different people in the past thought. Just how different and shocking the past can be.

My best examples come from my present year's readings which thus far encompass medieval and renaissance times. But one Roman piece was so different and so flew in the face of what I've heard said and preached about Roman times that I need to mention it. Lately I've often heard commentators talk about how New Testament writers were actually much more respectful of marriage than were those of the surrounding Jewish and Greek culture. I agree that is the case, Greek's didn't raise women and marital faithfulness very high. But in Virgil's Aeneid written in the decades just before Jesus' birth we have a different picture. Now family is raised very high. Aeneid must turn from his love interest (who also could give him power and money) to instead continue on to find his fate with his family in Italy not Carthage.

On to medieval times and suppose for instance you were reading a novel about Charlemagne. Would you expect to find in it a bishop who rides with Charlemagne as a warrior? How would this character be described? Would he be a positive or negative character?

Yet, in the Song of Roland written about 200 years after this time period we find just that. The only real details we are given about this man is that he is brave and a good fighter. I can't imagine such details in a novel written today.

In Beowulf you find the odd clash of a Christian writer writing glowingly of pagans who lived about 200 years before. In one of two commentaries supplied by Norton the scholar claims that the writer was respectful of these pagan's religion. But in truth that was his (the scholar's) opinion. It is clear that the writer admires these men of the past, but still thinks they are doomed.

In my final work, I found myself on a voyage through hell. A hell populated with notable people of the writer's day. If such a novel was written today who would be there? Hitler, Stalin, other super bad guys right? Would you put any relgious figures there, if so which ones? Would a writer in a fairly controlled society where a dominant ruler and religious rulers could easily condemn you to death for a slight include those folks in his work in a negative light? Especially if he wasn't writing for political or religious reasons?

Yet, again, right there in the Inferno is Dante with hordes of clerics, bishops, and yes, even popes. Further he even includes that the current pope will be joining the previous one in the same hole in Hell. All very odd and shocking to my modern mind. It makes me reevaluate many things: how much control rulers had in this past time and how religious folk were viewed by others in their culture are just two of the points I find myself considering.

I find myself becoming cautious about whether books written about a past long gone can really capture that time. Yes, they may get many historical details correct, but will they be able to capture how differently people thought then? Will their heroes and heroines instead think like modern Americans?

Certainly by the time your student reaches high school, it is time to read some of these pieces of literature and ask how they differ from the historical novels not written in the time period you've assigned. Will this be easy reading? No, but it will open the past in a way historical fiction cannot.