Posts Tagged Dorothy L. Sayers

That’s the end of Season 2, folks. We’ve had a great time doing the show, and we’re glad you listen. We explain our summer plans in the show itself. Keep listening, and keep reading!

General Introduction
- So long, Season 2
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog?
- Our summer plans and our love for decimal places

Beginning Apophatically
- Literary criticism vs. critical theory
- The Academy and the newspaper
- The professor and the amateur
- The unconscious and the conscious
- Literary criticism vs. book reviews
- Why age is more than a number
- The bleeding edge of criticism

Auden Makes the Rules
- Historical context
- Overcome evil with good
- Subjectivity
- How to tell if a critic is any good
- Development of taste
- The pleasures of the text

Old Stuff
- The extreme POETIX! of  Chuck “Ham-Bone” Aristotle
- Dorothy Sayers’s internalization of Aristotle
- The gaping hole of the Anglo-Saxon period
- Boethius and his epic, tragic harlots
- Philip Sidney to the rescue!
- Milton’s dismissal of fiction
- The Calvinist aesthetic defense of Scripture

The Aesthetes and Decadents
- The critic as artist and the artist as critic
- Creation vs. criticism
- Rules for independent critics
- Why Wilde would like Lester Bangs
- Complicating, not explaining
- What does “art for art’s sake” actually mean?

A New Kind of Criticism
- Connection to the Southern Agrarians
- Reaction to the Old Historicism
- Text as self-contained and unified
- Why the New Critics overreacted
- New Criticism as all-consuming blob

Mythological Criticism
- Deeper into Tolkien
- The Mythography Project
- Finding patterns in mythology
- Frye’s embrace of archetype
- The Gospel’s role in myth criticism

Heroic Criticism and American Studies
- The Heroic Critic as true believer
- Defining the newly emergent America
- Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination
- The difference in seriousness
- Intellectual decline
- [] you, you bourgeoisie pig!
- Defining Americanism(s)

Jiving Criticism and Art
- Why poets can’t write well about poetry
- Historical moments
- The need for critical distance
- A fist-fight breaks out!!
- Artists who do great criticism
- Is this a difference in eras?
- The problem with self-accounts
- Michial prepares for hate mail from creative-writing students
- Does scholarship create better writing?

Getting Personal
- To what extent is our academic output literary criticism?
- Auden makes David self-aware
- Nathan’s Hegelian synthesis
- Michial tries to complicate, not simplify

Post-Theory Criticism
- The Emmanuel Laboratory
- Nathan as the singular Voice of Criticism
- David fights to stay in the middle
- The non-academic return to Auden’s world

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Mariner, 1956.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeill. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Two volumes.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco: New World Library, 2008.

Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. 47-59.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Frazier, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frye, Northrop. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.

Jung, Carl. Jung on Mythology. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Two volumes.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 619-669.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Three volumes.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: Greenwood, 1979.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 212-251.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 5-48.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Waking Lion, 2008.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 241-297.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin, 1996.

So, we got some interesting email comments this week from Sam Mulberry, which Nate explains at the beginning of his own response post. (Go ahead and read it, if you haven’t yet. I’ll wait!) Sam makes some important distinctions between sports and art, the chief of which is the relationship of final outcomes with a shaping will: a game becomes what it will be as the players compete in the moment, and its conclusion isn’t determined by any single human intent; art, too, is realized in time, but also (in some way) present from the beginning within the artist’s imagination. Therefore, while we CHPers may talk of “narratives” in sports, what we really mean are the imaginative ways fans and even analysts make sense of the outcomes of games, seasons, and careers. What appears on an ESPN blog twenty minutes after the game may be a story, but the game itself is not.

Still, as I think Nathan has shown, we spectators seem bent on wrenching intractable events into plotlines, before, during, and especially after the events take place. The statistics and their trends are forgotten, but the plotlines remain. Narrative is an irresistible habit, and our attempts to overthrow a recognized plotline only substitute one less obvious. So, while Sam is right to assert a distinction between sports and narrative art, it’s a distinction we instinctively resist.

But that’s all review of Nate’s post! What I’d like to address is a parallel phenomenon on the narrative pole of our event/art binary: namely, the independence of fictional characters, who, arising in an author’s mind, seem to develop an existence of their own. This may seem strange to anyone who has not attempted fiction, but I assure you it’s a real thing; indeed, it’s a commonplace among authors. It’s also one of the major concepts in Dorothy Sayers’s Mind of the Maker, which I cannot recommend highly or often enough. According to Sayers, “unless the author permits [characters] to develop in conformity with their proper nature, they will cease to be true and living creatures.”

[T]he free will of a genuinely created character has a certain reality, which the writer will defy at his peril. It does sometimes happen that the plot requires from its characters certain behavior, which, when it comes to the point, no ingenuity on the author’s part can force them into, except at the cost of destroying them. (67)

This is what we mean when we say that a character’s action was “in character” or “out of character.” It’s also one of Aristotle’s principles regarding characters in his Poetics:

As in the structure of the plot, so too in the portraiture of character, the poet should always aim either at the necessary or the probable. Thus a person of a given character should speak or act in a given way, by the rule either of necessity or of probability; just as this event should follow that by necessary or probable sequence. (XV)

I must stress, though, that Sayers is not legislating consistency of character as an external standard, in the same way that Aristotle’s insights are often treated (or dismissed) as “rules.” Her observation is from experience: she feels her character’s life pulse beneath her pen’s nib, and knows that, as when one holds a small creature, too much force can end that delicate vitality. We’ve seen this character death often enough in film—a forced romance, an unbelievable change of heart—as we become unhappily aware that we are watching actors recite lines. The spirit has returned to wherever the wind goes, leaving a sad lump of man-shaped clay.

But characters are not always such frail things, and sometimes they fight back. To this, I can bear testimony. I’ve described myself before as a frustrated fiction writer, and this is one of the things that frustrates me. A story I’ve had simmering on a back burner for three years can serve as my case in point. It involves a sequence of improbable (or impossible) events: a Restoration-era Englishman, shipwrecked and cast ashore on Japan, is swept into a quest to kill a surviving dinosaur. (Makes sense to me!) But a problem has arisen: my protagonist steadfastly refuses to rise to the occasion. He has been given a sword, but he is no good with it. Like Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he insists on going about things in his own idiom, but he hasn’t told me what that idiom is. I could “decide” that he will now be the Greatest Swordsman Who Ever Lived, but then he will be a Mary Sue, not who he is. And, though it is hard to explain, he’s convinced me that this is his story, that I shouldn’t just exchange him for another, more predictable hero. So, I wait, letting the story gestate until my protagonist has figured out what he wants to do.

But isn’t the story the important thing? After all, that dinosaur isn’t going to kill itself! The plot must carry on, right? No, it mustn’t—not this plot. This is my Englishman’s story, not the dinosaur’s, and I tell it for love of the protagonist, not just a boyish desire to see samurai battle a dinosaur. It’s because I love my creature, you see: I’m proud of him, and will be still prouder when he comes into his own and I can show him off. Again, Sayers agrees, which convinces me I’m on the right track:

[T]he creator’s love for his work is not a greedy possessiveness; he never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work. The more genuinely creative he is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself. (130)

My Englishman’s recalcitrance is a kind of success, you see. That he fights me shows that he is something more in my imagination than a daydream proxy or a stereotype, and that is satisfying. The Hawaiian policeman, on the other hand, is a failure: though I need him to thwart the scheming shark-god cultists, he remains a limp two-word description. But that’s another story!

Our theme song this week is Chagall Guevara’s “Murder in the Big House” from their self-titled 1991 album–a forgotten gem.

General Introduction
- The Christian Humanist Circus
- Responses to listener email
- Our attempts at creative writing

Getting Down to It
- Bringing respect to detective fiction
- Let’s leave phrenology out of this

Mysteries in the Hebrew Bible
- Oh, Susanna
- The evolution of Hebrew Law
- Bel and the Dragon

Crime and Punishment in the Old World
- Trial by torture, combat, and ordeal
- Catching the conscience of the king
- Ann Radcliffe as Scooby Doo predecessor

An American Invention
- Poe’s “tales of ratiocination”
- Michial gets to say things in French
- Dupin’s “intuitive science”
- Poe shatters his own conventions
- Relationship between mystery and horror

Sherlock Holmes
- Why do we remember Holmes and not Dupin?
- The romanticism of “The Purloined Letter”
- Sherlock Holmes, Victorian über-mensch
- Some love for Dr. Watson, the reader’s surrogate
- “Hello? 911? This is Robin!”
- Humanizing Greg House
- The homo-erotic turn

The Wounded Detective
- Relationships, not crimes
- Lampshading Bones
- The deep-seated tragedy of The Wire

Father Brown Breaks the Pattern
- Religious not-belonging
- Beating the purely rational
- The devils in the detective’s heart

Justice and Law
- Why PIs don’t trust the police
- A preference for local law enforcement
- The strange conservatism of detective fiction
- Our need for an outsider
- Going maverick—going rogue
- Michial Farmer’s Existential Detective Agency

A New Kind of Detective Fiction
- The Crying of Lot 49
- The fruitless search of Oedipa Maas
- Trying to find patterns in the static

Jessica Fletcher and Lord Peter Wimsey
- Satisfying Sam Mulberry
- Michial gets the sad trombone
- Dorothy Sayers turns down the invitation
- Why detective stories aren’t like real life
- What is it with Catholic intellectuals and mysteries?

Procedurals
- Technology gets ahead of the real world
- Oracular and magic computers
- The King of All Procedurals
- Problems in the real world
- Another Farmerian rant about democracy

Our Recommendations
- Monk
- Kinky Friedman’s Roadkill
- The Wire
- Father Brown
- Lord Peter Wimsey
- Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, David A. and Susanna Natti. Cam Jansen: The Mystery of the Dinosaur Bones. New York: Puffin, 2004.

Chesterton, G.K. “The Blue Cross.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 9-22.

—. “The Hammer of God.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 118-130.

—. “The Secret Garden.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 23-38.

Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. New York: Berkley, 2004.

Dixon, Franklin W. The Hardy Boys Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. New York: Mariner, 2007.

Friedman, Kinky. Roadkill. New York: Ballantine, 1997.

Hope, Laura Lee. The Bobbsey Twins at Pilgrim Rock. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1956.

Irwin, John. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Keene, Carolyn. Nancy Drew Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 388-396.

—. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 397-431.

—. “The Mystery of Marie Rougêt.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 506-554.

—. “The Purloined Letter.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 680-698.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.

Queen, Ellery. Ellery Queen: Five Complete Novels. New York: Avenel, 1988.

Radcliff, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories. New York: Harper, 1986.

—. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sobol, Donald J. Encyclopedia Brown Boxed Set. New York: Puffin, 2007.

Stout, Rex. The Rubber Band / The Red Box. New York: Bantam, 2009.

Warner, Gertrude Chandler. The Boxcar Children, Books 1-4. Park Ridge, Ill.: Albert Whitman, 1990.