The Importance of Language, PART 2
Introducing Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited to the seminarians at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary (March 9-11, 2001), Dr. White discusses in this conference all the implications of the image (TV, cinema, computers) replacing the word (books).
Part 2
A Rival to the Godhead
If the movies and TV, through flickering images, mimic a kind of “raising the dead,” they are sporting an omnipotence that rivals our Lord’s. Only those allowed to do so by God may raise the dead and the film media claim a kind of omnipotence.
Television is omnipresent; it’s everywhere. Try to find a restaurant, a place to have a shot and a beer without 14 screens surrounding you—CNN, ESPN, CNBC, MSNBC—with the volume up so loud that you couldn’t talk if you wanted to. So everybody just sits and stares at those screens which are everywhere—airports, bars, restaurants, every home, even classrooms.
Then, of course, comes the omniscience of the computer. All knowledge is now at our fingertips.
Combine these attributes of omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience and we have made for ourselves a false god. These images are a false god, and we worship it. We love our movies, we couldn’t be without our television, and we behave as though our computer can tell us everything.
Last spring, I was covering Shakespeare’s sonnets in an English honors class. I got a paper from a bright kid saying Shakespeare wrote Sonnet No. 27 to “Marguerite.” I’ve studied Shakespeare for 35 years and had never heard this. Then it dawned on me to try something. I sat at the computer and typed in “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Up came a list of the persons to whom Shakespeare wrote every sonnet. Sure enough, “No. 27: Marguerite of Valois.” I said to myself, “What is this?” and clicked back to “Introduction to Shakespeare.” I clicked back again, “Shakespeare: The Man, the Playwright.” Another click and I found it was a Sir Francis Bacon website put together by some lunatic claiming that Sir Francis Bacon wrote all the works of Shakespeare. Ludicrous! Sir Francis Bacon lived in France before the sonnets were written and knew Marguerite of Valois and so it is obvious that he wrote Sonnet No. 27 to her. Go figure!? For all that, it is an impressively attractive website, for sure, but it’s purpose is to deconstruct. The poor student clicked on it and up came its lies. The computer is a medium for lies that we honor as truth because we are habituated to think, “It’s right there on the screen; it can’t be wrong; the computer knows everything.” We can find everything on the Internet, yes, except the ability to rationally distinguish truth from a lie. That we cannot find on the Internet. In order to have and preserve the ability to reason, we must thoroughly know language. Those born and bred on the Internet suffer a lack of reasoning power and gradually become incapable of distinguishing.
When we follow the Word, we are led to the Ultimate Reality of absolute Truth. Contrarily, however, the image too easily falsely represents reality, deceiving us that it gives us absolute reality while it only captures an image of a reality which is not real. The image itself—especially the screen image—does not endure. It cannot last. The image changes as quickly as time destroys the very object being represented. The reality on the screen is totally unreal; it is not reality. On the contrary, the words of the Sacrament are real. A Shakespeare sonnet represents a reality of beauty, of a higher beauty that can lead one to the Ultimate Reality. When we ask of someone, “Please go to the store and buy me a lemon,” we convey actual and true information to someone and create a bond with another human being in the most simple, practical, and day-to-day way. But those very bonds are being broken when the oral and written traditions vanish.
A Good Story Is Good for Us
Let me make a comparison. The word is to the image as the story is to visceral thrill or excitement. Let me explain.
We know that our Lord, the Word, came to us, and when He did He did not give us more commandments. They were there, of course, and they tell us what to do and not do. But when the Word taught us He taught in parables. When questions were asked, when He wanted to convey information, He taught in stories. And these stories fill the Gospels. They are profound and brilliant and by them we can in the here-and-now know what the Word taught. Our Lord knew that those parables would be handed down because men had memories and language mattered. Our Lord explained significant events using stories, intending them to be remembered and passed on. Would the Creator teach us by this means and fail to create in us a proclivity to listen to stories? It’s the reason why my little niece climbed up on my lap today and said, “Read me a story.” It’s built in. It’s there in children. Deep down, it’s still there in all of us. We have a little free time, we want a story, “Tell me a good story”; “Let’s go see a story”; “Maybe (if I can read) I’ll read a book.” But it’s becoming more and more a “maybe.”
Why do we like stories? Because they’re ordered; they’re easy to remember. In Aristotle’s Poetics, he defines tragedy as the imitation of an action which is complete in itself and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. My students laugh, “I could have written that,” and I say, “No you couldn’t,” because it is a profound idea. A story is the shaping of experience that lets us know there is movement in time from an initial starting point, through a development, to a place where it stops. Every story is a pilgrimage, just as every human life is a pilgrimage—coming from somewhere, moving somewhere, ending somewhere. A good story, properly shaped, will be ordered; it will be shaped along those lines, which is not an easy thing. Story is to literature what melody is to music and what line is to painting. It is that which defines the work of art, and it is the reason why plot is the most essential thing in literature. It is like carpentry. You’ve got to take the materials and assemble them piece by piece until your project is completed. On account of its complexity, it takes thought, discipline, art, shaping, craft, and wordsmithing to write a good story. We respond to a good story, which means it will be well told, makes sense, and of course, approach a truth.
But now, even narrative is being destroyed. Narrative is versatile. It can be as simple as Jack and the Beanstalk, “Once upon a time, there was a boy named Jack and his mother told him to take the cow to town and sell it,” or it can be as complex as a Dostoyevsky.
At the insistence of some of my students, I watched the movie Gladiator. It wasn’t just that I loathed it, that I was bored to distraction, because I’d figured out the entire plot 20 minutes into the thing and there was another two hours to go. It was that it dawned on me how movies are made. For years I had been joking, “All you do in a successful modern movie is blow something up, then throw two people in a bedroom, then blow something up, kill somebody, go back into a bedroom, then stage a car chase at the end where everything blows up.” But as I watched Gladiator, I became aware of why this is so. The reason is made plain by the fact that modern society has come to use digital clocks rather than analog timepieces. We have been habituated to looking at individual points in time disconnected from the flow and sweep of the big picture. On an analog clock face, you will see the big hand going round, the small hand going around, and the second hand going around which turns the minute hand. There is the sense of flow. The analog clock is an illustration of good narrative because it shows time as movement from someplace to somewhere. A digital readout displays isolated moments of time that don’t connect—8:21am, 8:22am, 9:04am. It is, if you will, the fast-food experience—Hungry, Eat, Big Mac, Buy, Swallow—as opposed to, “It’s dinner time, David. We’ll have the soup I made from scratch with last night’s chicken. And we’ll have salad if you wash out that Romaine from the garden. I bought the thickest roast from the Jones brothers—wait until you see it!—and I’ve baked the last of this year’s potatoes....Remember how difficult the crop was? Then, I’ve got your favorite for desert, including the brandy. And, while we’re eating tonight, I have this great question that came up today when I was over at the Jones Farm.” But feeding ourselves is now an animal activity like a seal barking for fish. Movies are now working in the same way: I go in, I sit down, I want a thrill. If something hasn’t blown up in the first ten minutes, I’m out of there. That is why a movie like Gladiator opens with this gigantic war scene. I didn’t know who was fighting whom, why, what had gone on, but they were slicing and dicing. Blood was squirting and I was asking myself, “Who are these people? Do I know any of these people? Do I care about these people? Is there a reason for all this?” In the background was some deep-voiced mumbo-jumbo. But the overall experience had no substantive relation to history; it had no relation to art; it had no relation to humanity. The only relation was between an image on a screen producing a visceral thrill in the one watching. What I’m getting is excitement, a blood-rush if you will. The movie maker is thinking, “We’ve got to keep the audience excited, so every ten minutes we’ve got to have an explosion, or impurity, a car chase, a murder...something to keep them excited.” Decades of this pattern have resulted in my students’ failure to respond to narrative.
In order to have a narrative you’ve got to have a proper exposition at the beginning of the book. You have to set up characters, places, time, background; we have a history, certain threads need to come together so they can be woven into a tapestry. My students have no patience for this. They can’t remember from one chapter to the next. The great books are closed to them because their ability to respond has been taken away from them. A colleague of mine who teaches Victorian literature said to me, “I went in to teach David Copperfield, but they can’t read it. I read Copperfield in ninth grade. I wasn’t particularly bright, but it changed my life.” My friend meant they couldn’t remember who the characters were or lock on to a sequence of events. They say, “Nobody’s blown up. Nothing’s happening. This is boring.” Of course, the vocabulary of the great books is now beyond them, too.
That ability to respond to a carefully crafted story is dead. They can only respond viscerally. They have been made Pavlov’s dogs. Ring a bell, they’ll salivate. Lop off a head, they’ll get excited: “Oh, it’s a great movie. I loved it!” Simultaneously, there is no way a parable can touch them. The vehicle of a parable is language, not images. And, at the most profound level, if there was ever a great narrative, a hugely Important Story, it’s the one that begins before the beginning, progresses through centuries, and as we know will have a definitive end on earth (though continue for eternity). The works of God form the greatest story ever told, but it is lengthy narrative and they cannot grasp it, nor do they want to grasp it.
I can no longer go to the movies. I cannot follow what is going on. That world is as closed to me as my world of Shakespeare and Dickens and the Scriptures is closed to them.
Speechless
Those things that they know—like Gladiator and The Matrix—will not be much use for teaching them what you need to tell them, what they need to hear. Faith comes by hearing, but they are going to have trouble understanding, because they are not used to serious language. The problem the soldier of Christ is facing has increased a hundredfold. We are facing a very formidable task. I wish I could offer a quick and easy solution, but I can’t.
However, God will not abandon His people, and you must establish a prayer life. You must hold to what is true. You need to be prepared to be reviled, discounted, and attacked when you say those movies stink, to get rid of the TV, and that the computer is loaded with filth and lies. Try to engage the simplicity of our Lord’s parables which are tiny, simple narratives. Repeat the same buzz-phrases until they stick inside young skulls. Most importantly, trust in our Lady who loves all her children and will be there for them. We know she is going to crush the serpent’s head. It will end this world of images that he has set up that holds us all enthralled. In the meantime, you must win the mental universe of as many souls as possible. You need all of God’s strength, all of your seminary training, a devout life, a recognition of what has happened in the world and who is prince over it, absolute faith in God, a willingness to suffer and die for the truth, and total devotion to the Blessed Mother whose Immaculate Heart will triumph.
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