 Good afternoon and welcome to the 2015-16 Robert E. Wall lecture. We may have a few people coming in late because I know there's no parking anywhere around here, and it's raining out. That always slows people down. But I'd like to welcome you this afternoon to the 2015-16 Robert E. Wall Award lecture. And this program is in its 23rd year. I'd honors a faculty scholar who, through a competitive proposal process, is awarded a research sabbatical to bring a project to fruition, and then the opportunity to deliver that in a university-wide lecture. Today, we are so pleased to have our 2015-16 Wall Award winner, Dr. Paul Lakeland, the Aloysius P. Kelly Chair in Catholic Studies, a Professor of Religious Studies, Director of the Center for Catholic Studies, and the newly elected Vice President of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He will present his research and book project on the theological impact of reading serious fiction in a lecture entitled Wounded Angel, Fiction, and the Religious Imagination. An internationally-recognized Catholic theologian, Professor Lakeland, holds a licensia in philosophy from Hathrop Pontifical and Anthinium, a Master of Arts in English Language and Literature from Oxford University, a Bachelor of Divinity degree from the University of London, and a PhD from Vanderbilt University. He began teaching at Fairfield in 1981, and he was awarded tenure in 1985. In 2004, as I indicated, he was the inaugural Aloysius P. Kelly Chair of Catholic Studies and founding director for our Center for Catholic Studies. And during Paul's time here at Fairfield, he served as chair of the Department of Religious Studies for 10 years, director of the Honors Program for six years, and is expected to be the president of the Catholic Theological Society of America in 2018. Professor Lakeland's honors include the 1990 Fairfield University Ahana Students Professor of the Year Award, the 2004 and 2005 Fairfield University Alpha Sigma New Teacher of the Year Award, and the 2007 Faculty Welfare Committee colleague of the year. And in recognition for his vast and exceptional scholarly achievements, he was awarded honorary membership in Fairfield Zeta Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 2013. Dr. Lakeland is a recipient of multiple Catholic Press Association Awards, including the Catholic Press Association Award for the Best Book in Theology for the Liberation of the Laity in 2004, also an award from the Catholic Press Association in the Social Concerns category for Catholicism at the Crossroads in 2008, and again by the Catholic Press Association for his books on the Second Vatican Council in 2014. So Paul has been seeking a break from exploring different aspects of the Second Vatican Council, as he did from his four most recent books. He's returned to his avowed first love of literature in his new book, whose title is the title of this lecture. Convinced that carefully chosen literary texts could introduce undergraduates to fundamental religious issues in a more easily digestible format than many theological texts, he's made an increasing use of serious fiction in all of his courses over the past 10 years, and has taught two courses directly on the issues of literature and religion, saints and sinners, representations of holiness in modern fiction, and belief and unbelief, explorations of the space between. Please join me in welcoming our 2015-16 Wall Award winner, Professor Paul Lakeland, as he discusses his latest book project, Wounded Angel, Fiction and the Religious Imagination. Paul? Thank you all for coming, for being so kind as to show up here. Those of you who are not from the humanities may wonder about calling this research, since I always think of research outside the humanities as intense study of a very small area of something. And when I think of what certainly I do in the humanities, I'm reminded of what a friend of mine who was a scripture scholar actually said to me way back when I was in grad school in Nashville. He referred half jokingly, half contemptuously to my discipline of theology as the Great Ideas Program. So that's the school I come from, I guess. Thank you, Lynn, for your introduction. That was very nice. Thank you. Most of it was true, actually. So what I've been doing over the last year is sort of tackling a ridiculously large project, but trying to focus it to some degree. I mean, the ridiculously large project is really what is the relationship between the way people think seriously in the secular world and the way people think seriously in the world of religion, which is not something you can handle in one 200-page book. But I've sort of tightened it a bit by looking at the issue of faith and fiction. So what I'm going to say here shouldn't take more than about 30 minutes, and then I'll answer any questions, I'll try to answer any questions anyway. Some of this I'm going to read at you, some of it I'm going to move away from the reading. I have three little quotes which you may not remember, but you'll get the flavor of them as a sort of text for the beginning of this. So the first quote is from the French philosopher Simon Veil, and that is this. All art of the highest order is religious in essence. Well, she was a religious thinker, so you might not be surprised to think that, although she was a very unorthodox religious thinker. The second quote from someone you may know more intimately, and that's Martin Scorsese, who wrote very recently, Every truly great work of art orients you to what isn't there, what can't be seen or described or named. He actually said that in reference to a movie. He's just finished making a movie adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel, Silence, which some of you may have read and which gets discussed in this book. And the third quote is from Virginia Woolf. I'm certain that the only meanings that are worth anything in a work of art are those that the artist himself knows nothing about, which to those of you who are not particularly fond of Virginia Woolf and you read through the book and you ask yourself, well, what was that about? Well, now you know it really doesn't matter. So thanks for being here. I'm really grateful for the gift of the Robert Wall Award. I know I was lucky. Lots of people deserve it just as much as me, and I was particularly lucky because when I got it, it coincided with the year in which I was due to have a sabbatical leave. So I got the whole year. So for once in my career at Fairfield, I was able to take a whole year off and find out what it's like to be a Jesuit member of the faculty. Sorry, Frank. It also let me work through the book, a book from the idea to the completion. It's actually being proofread now and is on its way through production. So I'm going to talk, of course, in three parts. I want to say a little bit about overall introduction, a little bit more in detail about one aspect of the argument, and then a little bit about this picture up here. This is the wounded angel, as you can see if you're close enough. It's a finished painting, painted in 1903. It was given to me as a gift, not the painting, but the idea by one of my closest and oldest friends in Scotland, the Jesuit priest, who when I was visiting him over a year ago now and I was talking about the book project, said, oh, you should look at this picture. And this picture has helped me enormously. We'll get to that in a little while. So as Lynn sort of said, I mean for the last 10 years or so, out of the 35 years I've been here, I've increasingly been using works of fiction to focus undergraduate's attention. They're certainly more comfortable with novels than they are with theological treatises, and so am I, so the two come together quite nicely. Sometimes I've wondered if all I'm doing when I do this is what Mark Edmondson does with literature when he says in his book, Why Read, which I recommend to you. Humanism is the belief that it is possible for some of us, and maybe more than some, to use secular writing as the preeminent means for shaping our lives. But then he also added, the most consequential questions for an individual life are related to questions of faith, although he's not a person of faith himself. Anyway, I sort of turned the question around to ask if in fact there is much difference at all between the struggle to shape one's life and the struggle to believe. So how might fiction be an appropriate conduit of information and inspiration in the task of being more and more fully human? How indeed can fiction aid faith, and equally importantly, how can the elements of transcendence that lie behind the greatest fiction influence the secular reader? So I have a paragraph here on sin and grace, but I'm going to skip it for now, since sin and grace is important to theologians and important to people who don't have a theological bone in their bodies, but they don't use the language. I'll come back to that maybe. So the argument that I'm presenting in this book, there's really sort of three steps to it. The first step is to think quite a bit about what's going on in the act of faith, what's really going on in the act of faith, as opposed to what people in the sort of unreflective way might imagine believing is about. I'm not going to torture you with that part of the argument because it's got to do largely with some medieval theology, particularly the relationship between Thomas Aquinas and William of Occam, who didn't know one another, but they write about similar matters in a somewhat different way. Question of whether you need to know anything about God before you can have faith in God, which seems a reasonable thing, and that is roughly speaking, Aquinas' view that you need to know something about God in order to be able to believe since if you don't know something about God, what are you believing in? And Occam on the other side is basically arguing that there's no such thing as evidence in faith. There's only revelation. And revelation isn't, it can't be classified as knowledge in the way that other kinds of knowledge can because it's simply there in the book, in the Bible. So they argue with one another. I'm not going to go into that now, but they sort of come to a conclusion and the conclusion is actually formalized about 700 years later by a Jesuit theologian in the early 20th century, Pierre Russell, who blends their two views and shows the role of imagination holding them together and moving between the two. The second key, although it also comes in the first chapter, the second key is the thinking of the romantics in general and colorage in particular on the imagination. There's a huge book by colorage called Biographia Literaria, which is a sort of, well the first half of it, it's two volumes, the first volume is the Supreme Con Act. He begins this book saying, I'm going to give you a comprehensive theory of the imagination and at the end of 200 and some pages he wimps out and gives you half a paragraph in which he says, and this has had enormous influence, this is colorage, I hold to be, he's talking about the imagination and he divides the imagination up a bit with the primary imagination he says, I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception. Though it's important. And as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite, I am. So in romantic terms, and the romantics were probably in us, they weren't religious people in the traditional sense but they were certainly open to the transcendent. So he's a sort of secular analog in the book to this religious focus on imagination in faith. The third key moment has more to do with literary theory and particularly with a German literary theorist, Wolfgang Ezer, who very complicated stuff but at the heart of it, he distinguishes between two kinds of writing which we'd all agree with I think, he's basically distinguishing between what we would call and you go to the bookstore and there is popular fiction and there's literature. So that's not quite the distinction but for him, if we follow that distinction, popular fiction is, he says, fiction to which we take an attitude. I like it, I don't like it, it's good, it's not so good, it's mystery, it's crime fiction, it's romance, etc. And he doesn't have any greater depth than that and there are exceptions to that but by and large those genres are what they are. Somebody asked you what you're reading and it's Agatha Christie and you just tell them the story. Or you say, it's just Agatha Christie and they know exactly what you mean. The other kind of writing is what he calls writing to which we must interpret. So that's literature or serious fiction and that's what I'm dealing with in this book by and large. Now the key which relates back to Coleridge and to Aquinas and Occam is that the interpretation of fiction, what Issa calls the production of an aesthetic object. So the aesthetic object, it's not the book or it's not the text and it's certainly not the author. The aesthetic object is what the individual through the use of her or his imagination makes of the text in the space between the person and the text. So that's where the aesthetic object is created and in doing that you're engaging in something at the very least banging on the door, knocking on the door of mystery. And consequently at least having some connection to the kinds of things that might be going on in religious thinking's attention to mystery. So I do all that in nine chapters. From the three parts, three chapters in each part, two weeks to write each one, two weeks to relax. So actually that is how I do it. So moving from more theoretical to greater engagement with fiction and actually as I get to chapter four onwards I'm picking up specific works of fiction and discussing them in some in great detail, some in less detail as I go through the book. Anyone I've ever talked to, not academics so much, but anyone I talk to in general about this book and they say, what is it called? And I tell them they say immediately, oh, which novels are you discussing? So I'm not telling you that, but you can ask me later if you like. So there are two key moments I want just to look at or I want to talk about briefly in the rest of this presentation. The first one is this. I want to describe or illustrate a place where an author talks about the work of fiction in a way that mirrors the theory of Wolfgang Ezer, that's the aesthetic object theory, and matches up with what I think is going on in the act of faith. So a work of an author talking about a work of fiction that mirrors Ezer's theory and matches up with what I think is going on in the act of faith. So that's part two and part three which we'll get to in a few minutes. An image to help the reader reflect on the range of possibilities of relationships between the secular and the religious. That is, a work of art that is mysterious and allows a multiplicity of interpretations. So the first question then, find an author who talks about the work of fiction in a way that mirrors Ezer's theory. Well, to the surprise of some of you perhaps, the answer to the first of these questions is Henry James. In a way, I'm asking here a very improbable question. Was Henry James a mystic? Unlikely, you might think. Wasn't he in fact quite the most secular of novelists? But to show you what I mean, I want to look just at one thing he wrote. I want to look at some passages in a preface that he wrote to the New York edition of the Golden Bowl, the final novel that he completed. For those of you who are not Henry James fans or have never read any, let me just parenthetically say, James wrote a preface to each of the novels in this collected edition, the New York edition, that was put together at the end of his life. But he also made some changes in the text. In actual fact, he made a lot of changes in some cases from the novel he'd originally published, you know, 10, 20, 30 years before. So in this particular preface, James is examining the relationship between the author and the novels, which in this case he wrote in the past and which he is now rereading for purposes of criticism. Two things I want to say about this, and I may have to read this because it's a bit... I've tried to make it easy to hear, but I don't want to miss anything. So two things. First, first thing to look at in what James has to say is how he addresses the question of meaning. For James, the significance of the novel does not lie in the story, not even in the characters. Now think about Wolfgang Easter and his aesthetic object. For James, the significance of the novel does not lie in the story, not even in the characters, but in what he calls the matter, that's his word, the matter that lies behind the text. The author's work consists in creating a narrative that somehow gives expression to the matter without ever bringing it to the surface. The readers and writers' relationship to the matter is both accessed through the story, but never entirely grasped or never entirely uncovered. This matter, which is what in the end the story is actually about, is never finally clear to writer or reader, says James. So the writer doesn't really... We know this. The writer doesn't really know the full depth of what he or she wrote, and the reader certainly doesn't. If the reader did, then everybody who read it would agree. And for the most part, everyone who reads something differs to some degree about what it is they've read. If it's a work of interpretation, if it's a work you're taking an attitude to, it's, well, no, it was the butler. The butler did it. We're all agreed. So the author, the story itself, for James, is a means, a mode of access to the ever-mysterious and unattainable matter. The author will succeed by presenting the story in such a way that the reader's imagination is, dare we say, inspired to go beyond the surface, to some access to the matter, probably without ever realizing that it's happening. In James' words, and I'm quoting very few of his words because his syntax is difficult. So in James' words, the author's own garden remains one thing, and the garden he has prompted the cultivation of, that other hands becomes quite another. And he's very careful in this preface to insist that you don't push a meaning upon the reader. And a way to illustrate that, I couldn't get the illustrations or I would have shown them to you, is in the New York edition, they added illustrations to at least some of the novels. So there's a passage in this preface when he talks about the danger of illustrations. And of course, the danger of illustrations is rather like the danger of making a movie of the book. That you impose a certain visual facticity and to some degree you limit the role the imagination plays. So James, when he had these pictures put into the story, was very insistent that the pictures should not depict elements of the story. So he might ask, well, why bother, you know, but so he didn't have pictures of the characters or pictures of the events. He might have a picture of a street in New York or something like that that would sort of convey the atmosphere but had nothing to do with the story because he wanted to leave the imagination to play. The second thing about James is his use of the term, so the first was his approach to meaning, his use of the term, the absolute, to designate that which we may encounter in reading or rereading the text. Now he talks about the absolute when he's talking about what he's doing in revision. So as I said, when he does this, when this collected edition is produced, he does considerable revising or rewriting of at least some of the novels. He was, he says, always opposed to rewriting because once you start tinkering with the building, he said, it might let one in as the phrase is for expensive renovations. So when you start messing with it, who knows how it's gonna unravel. However, he eventually realized revision literally does not mean rewriting but rereading. And I beg your pardon for one instance of Jamesian tortured syntax. You may not follow this, but this is what he says about that. This infinitely interesting and amusing act of reappropriation seems almost as enlivening or at least momentous as to a philosophic mind, a sudden large apprehension of the absolute. In other words, it's a revelation. What could be more delightful, he adds, enjoy a sense of the absolute, now it's smaller, not bigger, to enjoy a sense of the absolute in such easy conditions. So he can sit in his study, rewriting his text, and can, he thinks, have something analogous to the philosopher's appreciation of the absolute. Now what does he mean? It's not clear what he means by invoking the absolute here, but it has to have something to do with this discussion of the matter of fiction. Evidently he's not interested in claiming contact with God or the transcendent or even the absolute, but the analogy of absolute small a to absolute large a seems to depend upon some unspoken element of identity, namely that neither the absolute with a large a nor the absolute small a, while it is apprehended or sensed, is ever actually possessed. So we're still in that grasping after a mystery. Nor equally importantly is it arrived at by the exercise of reason. Reason or the imagination can perhaps prepare the ground, but the absolute cannot be commanded. What is so exciting for James in this is surely the renewed encounter with the matter of the fiction. He's gone back to this book he wrote 20 or 30 years ago, and in the sense he doesn't really know what it's about. I could, well again I'm going to skip a piece here. I was going to support his view here with the work of something I do talk about quite a bit in the book with the attitude to the issues of writing today and actually writing as a redemption that David Foster Wallace has written about and in a similar fashion the attitude that Iris Murdoch takes to the notion that writing, that literature, too frequently literature is just about consoling people. She thinks and David Foster Wallace thinks that this is not sufficient, that there's something much deeper going on in serious literature. I quote from David Foster Wallace briefly because it's too good to miss and it's easier to follow than Henry James. I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction's job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people to move people to countenance it since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what's dreadful, what we want to deny. That's David Foster Wallace. Art must address the pain and suffering in life but not simply mirror it. I find it quite striking to see Wallace imply that redemption is where serious fiction is heading. Now for being patient we're going to part three. Now you may contemplate this wonderful picture. If you haven't, I hope you've already been contemplating it. If the preference is look at that or listen to me there's no contest. This picture which is entitled The Wounded Angel is on the cover of the book. It is the title of the book or the main title of the book. It's a pretty well-known picture. How many of you knew it before you ever saw it here? It's a handful, right? It's a pretty well-known but it's really famous in Finland. This is the national painting of Finland. There was a competition in the mid-20th century to name the greatest Finnish painting and the people I guess only Finns were allowed to vote and this is what they came up with. When Ugo Simberg painted this he refused to put a title on it. Later he called it The Wounded Angel which is pretty obvious, right? But he also said that no one or that he also he refused to offer any interpretation of the painting. He basically said you look at it you determine the meaning of this picture for you. You wanted people to interpret it as every viewer thought best which would allow you I suppose to look at it and say just a picture of two boys in some kind of public park carrying an angel on a stretcher but I think you would want to know a bit more than that. Aside from the setting that is the background setting you can see a kind of park and a river or maybe a fjord or something in the background. Aside from the setting which is a well-known spot to Finns I'm told if you look at this painting they know where this is happening. Everything else in this picture invites questions. Why are two young boys transporting an angel? Is the angel a he or a she or more theologically sophisticated neither being pure spirit? What has happened to the angel? One wing is damaged suggesting a fall from the sky like Icarus there's blood on the wing here and there's what looks like a little chunk disappeared from it there. So it's clearly something happened here. Why is the angel clasping a small bunch of white flowers in one hand flowers that are also blooming on the ground the same flowers. Then there's the white bandana around the angel's head or is it a bandage? Is the angel suffering from a head wound or perhaps blindfolded? Turning our attention to the two boys we see that they grasp the poles of the stretcher quite effortlessly because angels are after all presumably weightless. The boy in front dressed all in black tramps doggedly along staring ahead a serious expression on his face. What is he thinking or is he just focused on getting there? And where is the there towards which they are heading? Is there medical care suitable for angels somewhere in the neighborhood? The boy who's bringing up the rear is decidedly more enigmatic. He's paying more attention to us than to the path ahead. When we see the picture for the first time it's probable that it is his gaze to which our gaze gravitates. He's the one who draws us into the picture. His gaze is in some way the conduit of the claim the picture makes upon us. But what is he thinking? He's looking serious, of course, but is it not the case that there's also something accusing in his look? Is it entirely fanciful to see him effectively saying something like why did you do this? Or even, this is your fault. There's really no doubt that the way in which he's looking out at the one viewing the painting is the reaction and response. So there's lots of ways to interpret this. I'm just going to give you very quickly four obvious ones. You probably have your own already. One viewer might see it as a statement about the relationship between the secular and the sacred. The two boys represent the everyday world at its helpful best. There is someone in need, then we must meet that need, however odd or unusual be. The angel in contrast can represent not only something spiritual or holy or unworldly but also the fragility that goes with it. Or some may want to see the picture as an image of the interdependence of the secular and the sacred. Clearly, the angel is depending upon the people in the secular world for help. And I suppose if you push it a bit in a sort of popularly religious way you might argue that the two boys are gaining merit by the way in which they are addressing the needs of this otherworldly being. Or some might prefer to see it as a warning about the damage we can do to the sense of the sacred and the way in which innocence can teach us a lesson about how to heal the injury we have inflicted. That's becoming a deeper and a more cultural comment I think. Or still others will see the painting confirming the powerless condition of anything spiritual in today's godless world. Where the boys are surely more vigorous than the angel. So the components of the painting and the psyche of the individual interpreters will lead to one of these or doubtless many other possible solutions to the meaning of the painting. Any interpretation beyond the naive realism of it's just a picture of two boys carrying an angel who crash landed or Kirsty fell off the ladder at the school's Christmas pageant and is being rushed to hospital. Beyond those recognizes the open endedness of possibilities but we can also look for insights into the connections between the act of faith and the act of reading. Viewed as a commentary on the act of faith this picture puts in the foreground two modern challenges. Faith is always in tension with doubt and the secular and the sacred have an unusual relationship to one another if viewed from an earthly vantage point. The issue of faith and doubt would lead us to focus on the figure of the angel. The wounded angel serves very well as an image of what happens to spiritual beings when those to whom they are directed falter in their belief in angelic reality. So it could be loss of faith that wounds the angel. When the imagination can no longer ascent to them they fall to earth. Bit like, I don't know, Simon Peter unable to walk on water. And then we notice that sucker for the wounded is provided by children. By those who perhaps still find it easier to believe. If on the other hand we focus a little more on the painting as a statement about the relationship between the sacred and the secular then we may see the angel more as a figure of the weakness of contemporary faith and the picture as a whole commending us to the need for a closer relationship between the things of the spirit and earthly reality. Pressing a little harder we can also think of the angel as a messenger sent this time to alert people of faith to their need to carry and be responsible for faith in the everyday world. Two boys carrying a wounded angel nicely contrast with the Deosix Machina who arrives from heaven to settle every issue. Looked at from either side of the question the painting stimulates the viewer to recognize that while faith has an intellectual component embracing the meaning of the whole requires us to surrender to the ambiguity or better to the surplus of meaning laid out before us. The act of faith is an act of the will informed to some degree by the reason through which the holy itself draws us into a loving embrace whose reality can never be rationally explained. This is why in the end the various efforts at interpretation we have just considered pale into insignificance beside the quiet contemplation of this work of art. We can certainly reap benefits from asking what is this painting about and pursuing these kinds of reflections but we're still left with the question that escapes rational response, yes but what is it really about? There's a mystery here that Simberg himself could not control the matter that escapes full comprehension. So I hope in conclusion you can see something of what I'm doing here. It's a much bigger book, it's a much bigger argument. I write about the decline of imagination among people of faith. I discuss about ten books to illustrate how these ten books many of which are quite secular in appearance that these ten books both aid the secular imagination in gaining a feeling for transcendence and aid people of faith to overcome the kind of polarization that is often their way of addressing the relationship between religion and the world. So there's an isomorphism between the structure of the act of faith and that of reading serious fiction. Both rely on the constructions of the human imagination to approach something fundamentally mysterious, a meaning or matter that we never finally grasp. But in this structure both are knocking on the door of the transcendent. The more of metaphor the surplus of meaning serves an important purpose for both the religious and the secular imagination. The former is aided that is the religious imagination is aided to overcome a simplistic and fundamentally unimaginative grasp of what faith is while the secular imagination is perhaps made more comfortable with and humbler in the presence of mystery. The former would say that the grace of God is present in all human activity. The latter is made aware that there might just be something more than we can comprehend. And I for one I'm not at all sure that there is much difference between the two. Thank you. Anybody have a question other than which books I discussed? Marianne, I couldn't see her. Paul, could you speak a little bit about your choice? No, why the genre? Why you chose the novel? I'm in the middle of teaching Dante's comedy and of course right in the middle of the whole thing literally in the middle of purgatory. There's a whole discussion one side free will on the other side love and in the middle of them is imagination. So which works perfectly with your argument that I'd like to hear about your choice of the novel. Which my students think that the comedy is a novel so I'm working on that. My students think that a work of theology is a novel which sometimes it is but the short answer is we all write about what we know about. I have spent way too much of my life as my wife here will tell you way too much of my life reading novels rather than doing what I was supposed to be doing reading Karl Barth or something like that and you know I thought it was time to cash it in and funny it almost is time to cash it in actually but so yes of course I mean I could have gone to Dante if I knew Dante even half as well as you do. I could certainly have gone to Shakespeare which I know pretty well although and it's hard to find really a more secular author than Shakespeare although people want to baptize him but I chose fiction because I know it best and I chose the novel because that's really what I read. I suppose there might be certainly there would be ways I think of justifying the choice of the novel over the short story although I'm not ready at this moment to do that but I think that the kind of things I'm identifying in the novels I chose take a while to work out so that's my answer to that question Ellen yeah well I do talk about this in the book quite a bit more than I had a chance to do now. I'm very insistent in disagreement with a lot of people who look at this that the angel is not blindfolded some people look it's hard for you because you're a long way away I know but basically you see this is it a bandana or a bandage I said that right and I think if you look at it superficially or from a distance you might think well she banged her head too but when you get close to it you can actually see the eye and if you've got the bandana over your head your eyes working what is she doing? she's looking at the earth so she's connected so for me this is an image of the connectedness of the secular and the sacred you can see you can see and I mentioned this a little bit you can see connectedness in the fact that she has this little bunch of snow drops or something like that which have obviously been given to her picked for her by someone down here so again there's a connectedness there there's connectedness in the way that they are carrying her to safety let's say and this guy is definitely saying that you people out there are not participating in this connectedness that's really but again I want to say that tomorrow I might have a different story there's a lot in this picture and it's not that I'm right and somebody else isn't although I think people who think she cannot see are missing something and if they get close enough to the painting they'll be okay I think it's fascinating can I just use the microphone Leigh thanks I think your talk is fascinating and I wish that we could have more of this kind of lecture and talks on campus so that we could all share our ideas and just you know I just like it I do have a question about the connection between visual art and narrative fiction because you first talked about Henry James and then you use this finish right finish painting and also you cited Scorsese's line which is what cannot be seen is actually sometimes more important than what is shown this line is used by art cinema filmmakers they're saying that you know what we are showing on screen actually is less important than what is hidden behind images so I just want you to tell us more about how you make connections between visual art and narrative fiction in this book I am not spending much time at all making connections between visual art whether it's painting or the movies or whatever and fiction this is the only picture I talk about in the whole book and the reason I selected it is because you'd have to read the sections in the book I hope you will but it's a testimony to the importance of close attention to text this is a text I mean the movie is a text too but it's a testimony to the importance of close attention to text which when you go to the other part of the story that I'm trying to the argument I'm trying to make here which I really didn't have time to talk about when you look at the fact that today people of faith don't explore it this is a gross generalization people who claim to be people of faith settle for something less than an attention to mystery and people don't read serious fiction so what's going on there if there's a common problem it is the problem of we see this all the time I'm sure we're infected with it ourselves and we see it in our students the problem of the inability or unwillingness to pay close attention to what's before us so the novels that I discuss I'm trying to pay close attention and encouraging people to play close attention actually personally I'm too impatient so it's a very good exercise for me to do this but I read a book I always know exactly how many pages there are until I finished it which is a terrible disease but so this is I prefaced the discussion of this in the book with a little discussion of what's going on in looking just the act of looking at things and if I come back to your point about movies which I don't know anything like as much about to me the challenge with movies is that they may very well have more under the surface than we can see but some movies perhaps it's not the art movies I don't know many movies inhibit the imagination rather than encourage it now so there's sort of many novels but so I guess if I was talking about movies I probably would want to distinguish between movies to which you take an attitude and movies that invite interpretation and then we're back to the same issue yeah I think that's all I have to say about that say this say that again and say with a microphone so that everybody can hear you so uncomfortable with microphone it's just because I was thinking about what you said at the beginning how Henry James dislikes illustration because illustration tends to specify things that he wants to keep ambiguous and so that it has a richer meaning so it just looks like his novel is twice removed I don't know how to put this you know there are novels that can give you details but you know show but doesn't tell just show you all these things but what's really the meaning of the novel is actually behind the details so what is his fiction like what is his fiction like yeah and why doesn't he like all the people who write in English he is the one when you finish a novel you scratch your head and say well now what's that really about you know he writes enormous detail and goes into enormous detail in conversation and he wants to tell a story all novelists want to tell a story but he wants to tell a story that really isn't obvious or clear and if you want to get a sense of Henry James without actually waiting through 500 pages of the golden bowl you could read the turn of the screw which is a novella that is immensely detailed and I defy you to come up with one explanation at the end of it but just one more thing I don't discuss Henry James's novels in this book at all well all I'm discussing there is his understanding of what's going on in the act of writing because it happens to conveniently coincide with the other points I'm trying to make and I think it's right actually that no novelist can really claim when he or she puts the final period on the page that they have written a complete work that they fully understand and that others who come along will fully understand in the way in which they intended it that's about a definition of boring I think and also a definition of being remarkably arrogant this is two minds the text is itself the meeting point and the barrier between two minds we don't or I don't believe anyway that really when you turn to a text to read it it is productive to start asking what the author intended what's productive is to immerse yourself in the text to wallow in this imaginative space and what you come up with as a meaning of course the text delimits what will be legitimate interpretations but that's a huge area and you know when you read the turn of the screw and you perhaps come to a conclusion eventually that you know what's going on or you think you know what's going on I don't think that means that you're any closer to what Henry James thought and it certainly doesn't mean any closer to the meaning of the text Nels thanks for this wonderful talk thank you for this talk it's very very compelling so really interested in that process of revelation whereby the reader of serious fiction inhabits this space you know between the reader and the text in which revelation happens and going back to your point about revelation versus knowledge so that revelation of the novel and maybe the novel is particularly more secular a form let's say than visionary poetry so maybe that's even more the point but it's not necessarily a platonic moment I mean in other words the revelation that happens between reader and text is a process by which some meaning is revealed a process that is like the creative or faith in a creator or like faith in the divine but it isn't necessarily itself a revelation of something divine right I mean it's just that and is that your connection with Coleridge's idea of the secondary imagination that the creative power is itself a kind of reiteration of the original creative mind we didn't go into that but for Coleridge the secondary imagination as I understand it is the work of the artist so the primary imagination is the possession of everyone although they may not be able to channel it focus it tap into it the artist has the capacity to create a work of fiction or poetry I think he's probably thinking of poetry more than anything else through the reading which the person's primary imagination can be sort of enlivened but to come to your question particularly I mean I didn't actually in talking with the exception of the very beginning I didn't really use the word revelation because revelation is something coming to you from somewhere else right so in the act of faith sure in religious experience if we're not talking simply about you know the scriptures as the revelatory texts something can be revealed to you this is the way religious people would put it I think something can be revealed to you through your contact with the divine but I avoided the word revelation I'm not sure why but in in reading a book I think we're doing more this is where there'll be a difference and I've seen several points in the book the act of faith and the act of reading fiction they're not the same thing they just have some similarities and some interconnections so for me um reading fiction is a is an activity in which there are equal partners the text and the reader playing together in this space that they have between them in the act of faith they're not equal partners I'm afraid that's interesting because after all what we often call that process that allows the readers to suspend other cognitive functions to be caught up in the moment is the willing suspension of disbelief that's what allows the imagination of fiction that's interesting yeah I'd have to think a bit more about that but you're right Wendy was out recently in American Pastoral I think comes out this week um and but definitely whatever you think of Philip Roth the film Indignation does not really capture the it kind of reifies the imagination that you're talking about I mean it really shuts down for me what you can get from reading that novel and I suspect that will happen with American Pastoral too so it makes me wonder what happens between the imagination of fiction when it gets represented it's all the same thing with representational paintings too and what one does with it but anyway the film seems to me even harder to keep that space open than even a painting which can be more ambiguous I mean I agree with you I think I would say the best that a film can do is be entirely different and some of them are I mean they may have the same setting etc but they're not trying to replicate yes you Henry James I also highly recommend Daisy Miller it's one sitting it's like a long short story but I think that for being so convoluted it's brilliant and he's so funny so thank you for that and he's a master of ambiguity I mean certainly a turn of the screw half my class thinks that it goes surreal and the other half thinks that the governess is crazy I think it's somewhere in between but he allows for I think both readings but I also want to thank you for attention to this beautiful piece which reminds us how much our angels keep it beating I also wanted to ask you though if at all aestheticism factors into this because I'm thinking of Oscar Wilde he's been on my brain a lot and I know James hated him and he thought he was fatuous and sort of vulgar but he following Peter is thinking that art should just be for aesthetic pleasure and it shouldn't have no meaning but he was really also getting his ideas from Peter and I'm objecting to rescue him before just one thought if I answer that talking about movies Beth and I, Beth's reading the turn of the screw right now because we happen to see on TV a movie called The Innocence which is actually not bad as a version because it does still leave you at the end not too sure what's going on on the aestheticism thing I'm not big on aestheticism but but I don't think that I mean when you said that I immediately thought of the fact that one of the novels that I discuss at some length very affectionately is a novel by Jim Harrison who's a anybody read Jim Harrison yes Dennis has a novelist who most of his work has this focus the UP Michigan he is a man who just died actually but was a man who was a great keen outdoorsman a great fisherman a great hunter a great philosopher and in his novels a great believer that 18 year old women would throw themselves at this 65 year old man on site it happens all the time who knew so actually these are actually quite rival novels and then I also write about Gloria Naylor's book Bailey's Cafe which is anything but aesthetic I mean there's an aesthetic thing in it but so I don't really think about that Oscar Wilde does not appear in the book although he's a favorite of mine thank you if you didn't get a drink before you can get one now