All great literature, in poetry and prose, is part of the great conversation which has animated Western civilization for almost three thousand years. Anything purporting to be literature which owes nothing to this great conversation is rootless and meaningless. It is not worth reading because it was not worth writing. It has nothing to say.

Jan Franczak In Conversation with Joseph Pearce

Joseph, thank you for accepting my invitation to talk about literature. I would like to start with something really basic, namely, why should we read books? Why should we read literature? We have movies, we have TV serials, we have the internet, YouTube… Why bother?

That’s a good question. First of all, in the broadest sense of the word, books enable us to escape from virtual reality into reality. I think that we want to actually live our lives as far as possible in the fullness of reality. And that means we have to unplug ourselves, to disconnect from technology, to disengage from people who are channelling information to us and put ourselves in control. That can mean going out into the garden and watching the birds. It can be watching the sunset. It can be building a bonfire. But it also could and should include the reading of books. And preferably not books on a screen but books where you actually turn the pages and you have a tactile, incarnational experience with the person, the author of the book, that does not have technology as the intermediary.

So you think that, for example, reading an e-book on an e-book reader is not a good idea?

I’m not saying people shouldn’t do it. I think there’s a hierarchy of preference here. And as I’ve said, we should not be living the whole of our lives connected to the internet or connected to technology, plugged in, shall we say. We should disconnect so that we can reconnect to reality itself, to the real thing and not the virtual thing. If we’re already spending most of our working day, as many of us are, plugged into a computer, why would we want to spend our downtime, our own time, plugged into the computer? Why would we want to be plugged into technology from the time we wake up to the time we go to bed! That cannot be good for us psychologically. It cannot be good for us spiritually. I really think that we need to disconnect so that we can reconnect to reality itself. And ultimately the reality itself is reality Himself, Jesus Christ, God Himself, in His incarnational presence. If we are living in virtual reality and not reality, we are disconnecting ourselves from these deepest aspects of reality itself. And I think that’s dangerous. Many of us spend so much time with our gadgets that they become godgets. We actually idolize and worship and spend much more time with our godgets than with our God. We need to not be doing that.

And now to be more specific, why should we read poetry? In our times, poetry is not widely read, nor is it understood. Critics in popular magazines don’t write reviews of poetry. There are no special columns in magazines or newspapers where poetry is published. So why should we read poetry?

Well, the magazine that I’ve edited for 23 years, the St. Austin Review, is an exception to that rule. We publish original contemporary poetry in every issue. I think the key thing about poetry is that it forces us to slow down. Poetry cannot be read at speed so we have to slow down in order to actually engage with it. That’s one of the reasons that it is not very popular these days because people are always in a hurry. They never have time for anything except the superficial. And they do that at speed. Something that requires them to slow down and concentrate is actually very, very good for them.

Over and above the quality of the poetry itself, it has that power to slow us down and to reconnect us to real time. Good poetry is the distillation of language into beauty. It is to prose what great classical music is to lesser music. The greatest poetry is the greatest use of language. It is the beauty of form placed at the service of the beauty of the cosmos.

We need to remember that moving at the speed of light is not real time for human beings. We are actually meant to take our time. There’s only two things we can do with life.… We can either take the time given us or we can waste it. We can’t make time…. As the great poet Gerald Manley Hopkins said, We are soft sift in an hourglass. In other words, each of us has our own hourglass with the sand of time passing through it. We don’t know how much sand each of us has. We don’t have the same amount of sand as others and we don’t know how much sand we have left. But one thing we do know is this: it’s sifting through and in the end we will have no more left and that will be the end of our time on earth. We are soft sift in an hourglass…. When we bear that in mind, we understand that it’s very important for us to be spending our time well. When we die, is Our Maker going to say to us, “Well most of your time you just wasted away. What were you doing? You weren’t doing anything except wasting the time you had.”

Then maybe another question about poetry. Would you say that poetry is difficult? Nowadays it seems that people don’t understand poetry. Why is that?

There is a relatively new acronym ADD – attention deficit disorder – which highlights that these days many of us lack the ability to concentrate on any one thing for any length of time. This is a consequence of being plugged in and living a life of distraction rather than attraction. We’re meant to be attracted to the Good, the True and the Beautiful, not to be distracted from the Good, the True and the Beautiful in the pursuit of trivia at speed and in short spurts. We need to be able to spend time on the things that are worth our time. We need time for prayer and time for praise, including praise for the beauty of Creation. We need time to see the beauty of a sunset, or the beauty of a sonnet, the beauty of God’s Creation and of human creativity.

I would also add that there is a quality in reading which is qualitatively better than the passivity inherent in staring at a screen. Reading requires engagement of the intellect, of the self; screen watching allows the intellect or the self to switch off while the visual images do the work. Reading energizes; technological media merely enervates!

Another important thing is the importance of language as a means of understanding the cosmos and our place within it. The Anglo-Saxons understood that each individual has his own unique word hoard, a store of words that they carry around with them and have at their disposal. Every new word that we learn is real wealth because we need words to communicate the cosmos to ourselves first of all, to be able to see something and know what it is, to make sense of it and see how it relates to other things. We need to know what things are called in order to engage with reality ourselves and to communicate that understanding of reality to others. Reading great poets, such as Shakespeare, enables us to increase the size of our word hoard. In other words, we think as well as we read; we communicate as well as we read; we speak as well as we read; we write as well as we read. Reading well is living well!

It seems to me that reading modern poetry is at times a little bit like solving a puzzle, connecting dots, so to speak, which of course also requires time and patience. Isn’t modern poetry – not all of it of course – like a big puzzle which you have to solve in order to enjoy it fully?

If you are talking about the sort of modern or postmodern poetry which is formless and ultimately nihilistic, I’d say that you are attributing much more to it than it warrants. Something can be puzzling because it has a meaning that is difficult to solve, or it can be puzzling because it is ultimately meaningless. The poetry of T. S. Eliot, especially perhaps “The Waste Land”, is an example of the former sort of puzzle which is worth solving because the meaning it reveals is worth discovering. The latter sort of poetry is not worth puzzling over because it is not worth reading.

And another question about poetry, especially modern poetry. Apart from enriching our vocabulary, isn’t it important to know the classics to be able to enjoy good modern poetry?

All great literature, in poetry and prose, is part of the great conversation which has animated western civilization for almost three thousand years. Anything purporting to be literature which owes nothing to this great conversation is rootless and meaningless. It is not worth reading because it was not worth writing. It has nothing to say.

Let’s go to reading novels and short stories. Why should we read them?

There are three classical understandings of who we are are: Anthropos, from the Greek word for man, he who turns up in wonder; homo viator, man on a journey or man on a quest, or man on a pilgrimage; and homo superbus, proud man who refuses the quest, who refuses to go on the journey, who goes his own way instead. These three labels encapsulate who we are.

Anthropos looks up in wonder. As Samwise Gamgee says in The Lord of the Rings: “Above all shadows rides the sun”. If you don’t look up, you don’t know that. You don’t know that above all darkness there is a light, a goodness which supersedes all evil. In addition, great stories (novels or short narratives) allow us to understand who we are in terms of the journey we are on. Each of our lives is a journey, and if our lives are a journey, they are also, ipso facto, a story. A life journey is a life story. Each of us is living in our own story in relation to other people who are also living their own stories, and we are in in each other’s stories. What stories, fictional stories, enable us to do is to see our own story reflected in a mirror which take us deeper into an understanding of ourselves.

As Tolkien says about stories, fairy stories in particular and stories in general, hold up a mirror to man. They show us ourselves. They show us the homo viator we are called to be and also the homo superbus who refuses the appointed journey, causing chaos, destruction and ultimately self-destruction in consequence.

Can stories written in the past, perhaps a century or two centuries ago, show us a mirror in which we can see ourselves in our modern world?

Even stories written two and a half thousand years ago, by Homer or Aeschylus, for instance, can still show us ourselves. This is because who we are is unchanging. In terms of philosophy, the substance of humanity is unchanging. Accidental aspects of who we are, like the type of clothes we’re wearing or the sort of vehicles we’re travelling around in, might change. But – whether at Homer’s time, Dante’s time, Shakespeare’s time or our own time – we remain homo viator, homo superbus and anthropos. This has not changed. Great literature shows us who we are in that perennial, substantial, essential sense. On the other hand, works of literature that are up to date, that accentuate the accidental aspects of who we are, will be out of date as soon as those accidental aspects pass away. Accidents are temporary but that which is perennial is permanent. Literature which is fashionable will soon be out of fashion but great literature shows us who we are perennially, permanently.

Does modern literature show us this permanence?

The literature of any age will reflect or respond to the spirit of the age. Inferior literature merely reflects the Zeitgeist; superior literature responds to it with the touchstone of tradition. In an age dominated by homo superbus, the spirit of pride will dominate fashionable, i.e. inferior, literature. In such an age, the truly great literature will hold up a mirror to homo superbus, showing him how vicious and ugly he is.

Or maybe modern literature shows us a type of man who doesn’t know where he’s going, a type of man who has lost the sense of direction?

Each of us is always both homo superbus and homo viator. It’s a struggle between pride and humility. This struggle is depicted in great litarature. If homo superbus is depicted as the hero who triumphs over homo viator, the novel or short story is ipso facto wicked. If the novel or short story is about someone who is lost but is looking for which way to go, it is about homo viator.

Let’s go to plays, drama…. Is it better to read them or to see them performed in the theatre?

That’s a great question and a complex one. Shakespeare said: all the world’s a stage and each must play a part. So what is true of narrative fiction is true of drama: that it shows us ourselves, on the journey, in the story. Of course, plays are meant to be incarnated on the stage through being acted. The problem is, to use the words of T.S. Eliot from his poem The Hollow Men, that “between the potency and the existence falls the shadow”. Between the potency, the power and potential of the original work and its incarnation on the stage, a shadow falls. And that shadow is usually the will of the director or the producer who can manipulate and distort and pervert the playwright’s intentions. What’s being presented on the stage might be a perversion or an inversion of what the playwright wrote and intended. In the case of Shakespeare, this is what I call “Shakespeare abuse”.

I’ll give one example, an egregious one. Before I moved to the United States, I saw in England a performance of The Merchant of Venice in which every Christian character was depicted as a skinhead. None of the words were changed but the way they were said was changed, and the skinheads punctuated their words by spitting at Shylock and kicking him. So here’s an example of how, without any words being changed, a director of a play can completely destroy and desecrate Shakespeare’s work of beauty into something ugly and agenda-driven.

I saw a similar performance of The Merchant of Venice here in Poland. It seems that this is an international problem. It was exactly the same: the Christian characters were shown as football hooligans or something of that sort. I remember them drinking and afterwards smashing the empty bottles.… After reading your books I constantly keep thinking about The Merchant of Venice as an example of how a play can be distorted on the stage and misinterpreted, being misread by a director.

You are correct of course that a director is interpreting or misinterpreting a play. My second book on Shakespeare was called Through Shakespeare’s Eyes. It argued that we are meant to see things objectively. We are meant to try to discover the truth in them. We must not subject truth to our own pride and prejudice. This means that a true or objective interpretation of Shakespeare requires an effort to understand what Shakespeare’s doing in the play. And then being faithful to that understanding. And we can’t understand what Shakespeare’s doing unless we understand Shakespeare’s own understanding of theology and philosophy within the context of the times and culture in which he lived. This allows us to see the dramatic substance of his work. A director must be true to this substantial truth. He is then free to change the accidental aspects. For instance, it doesn’t matter if Hamlet is set in Napoleonic times or in the 20th century. The truths in Shakespeare’s plays are perennial, substantial. The clothes that are worn are accidental, philosophically speaking. Clothes change but tyrants are tyrants. There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark, says Shakespeare. He’s really talking about contemporary, turn of the 17th century England. But he could be talking about Germany or Russia in the 1930s. He could be talking about any sort of times because secular tyranny, the corruption of Caesar and the imposition of Caesar’s corrupt will on those who are less powerful, is something which has been going on from time immemorial.

In Hamlet and many of his other plays, Shakespeare is showing timeless political truths about rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and rendering unto God that which is God’s, and the willingness to lay down our lives for our friends and country as Hamlet does. These are the perennial lessons and if we don’t interpret the play to reflect these lessons, we are betraying Shakespeare and abusing his genius.

To conclude, I would like to ask a final question about readership. Are you worried about polls, surveys that show a decline in the number of people reading books?

I would say, first of all, that we are living in a time – to paraphrase Oscar Wilde – of the long and not so lovely suicide of the decadent West. The ideologies and philosophies of the so-called Enlightenment are unravelling, decaying, decomposing. They’re in the process, to use their own terminology, of deconstruction. So we shouldn’t be surprised that true civilized values, such as the reading of great books, are in decline at such a time. What’s necessary is for us to be the sowers of seeds, mustard seeds, to preserve, conserve and spread the culture of Christendom. If we do so, the future is ours. When the decadent West finally gives up its ghastly ghost, when it dies of its own too muchness, what will be left? What will be left is the resurrection of the Church. As Chesterton says, the Catholic Church has died many times and has risen again because it worships a God who knows the way out of the grave. Chesterton is right. You can look at certain times in history that are at least as bad as the times in which we find ourselves and if you lived in those times you’d probably think, “Well, this is the end”. And it wasn’t. The end will eventually come, of course, and it could be next week and it could be next millennium. It is not for us to know. We only need to be good and faithful servants. The end of the world for each of us is when we die, and that could be tomorrow. That’s the only end of the world that we need to worry about. We only need to remain good and faithful servants between now and then.

Thank you, Joseph, for this conversation.

My pleasure. Keep up the great work you’re doing in Poland. You’re a source of inspiration for people many thousands of miles away.

God bless you.

You, too.

This conversation was first published in the Polish journal, PCh24 (Polonia Christiana). This is its first publication in English.

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The featured image is “The Hunters at Rest” (1871), by Vasily Perov, and is in the pubic domain,  courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.