Theological Thought Experiment

The Great Divorce 

by C.S. Lewis

“There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself … as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.” ― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

A theological thought experiment, "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis is more of a profound and imaginative investigation of the afterlife than a story. It imagines a bus ride from the gloomy suburbs of Hell to the colorful foothills of Heaven. With its allegorical portrayal of sin, grace, and the ultimate, insurmountable divide between choosing self and choosing joy, this small book, which was first published in 1945, never fails to enthrall and challenge readers.

Through the eyes of an unnamed narrator, the story is told from the perspective of a grey, perpetually twilit town whose residents are petty, self-centered, and ultimately insignificant. A journey to a different nation, a place of astounding solidity and reality, is provided by a celestial bus. The "solid people"—spirits from Heaven—welcome the "ghosts" from the grey town to this celestial setting and encourage them to stay and travel towards the mountains, towards a higher reality.

The interactions between the solid spirits and the ghosts form the central plot of the book. Every encounter functions as a moving short story, highlighting a specific transgression or material attachment that keeps the ghost from accepting Heaven. Lewis deftly analyzes the subtle and sneaky ways in which people cling to their brokenness, from the whiny woman who can't let go of her right to complain to the possessive mother who confuses her obsessive love for genuine affection.

A Pious Man

Job

by Joseph Roth

"One must write, even when one realises that the printed word can no longer improve anything. To the optimists, it might seem an easy thing to write. To the sceptics - not to say: the hopeless - it’s more difficult, and this is why their word weighs so much heavier. These are, so to speak, voices coming from the beyond, haloed by the radiance of futility." - Joseph Roth

Rereading the novel Job has led me to find it even more relevant as a retelling of the Job story from the perspective of the Jews from the netherland border between Poland and Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. It was published in 1930 and marks a turning point in Roth's career. With this novel, Roth takes a transformation of socio-politically motivated journalism to author as a poet of conservative myths. Roth takes for his presentation of Jewish existence within the elements of traditional storytelling. "Job" for Roth meant his breakthrough as a novelist.

Mendel Singer is a pious, God-fearing and ordinary Jew who lives in the idyllic Schtetl Zuchnow and performs there with his family a modest life as a village teacher. But the rest of his life will not be long because it through a chain of hard blows from the meaninglessness of his existence is torn by fate. Still he believed humbly that misfortune was just a test from God. The first blow hit him when his youngest son Menuchim is born with epilepsy. This was followed by the drafting of his oldest son Jonas into the military, with which his traditional Jewish faith did not agree. His second son Schemariah flees to America. Ultimately, Mendel Singer must discover that his daughter Miriam is with Cossacks, French, and what the strictly devout Jews considered the epitome of depravity. The Singers decide to emigrate to America. This trip can only be bought while leaving his youngest son Menuchim behind. In New York Mendel meets a new fate: He loses both sons in World War I, and his wife dies from grief over it. When his daughter becomes insane, he loses his strength, to tolerate and to believe, leading from humility and piety to rebellion and spite; Mendel loses his faith in God. From now on he no longer prays and lives quietly and inward. But now he learns the grace of the Lord; and the prophesy of a rabbi's wonder that his sick son Menuchim would become healthy is fulfilled. When the gifted composer and conductor Alexei Kossak (really Menuchim) comes to America he introduces himself to his father.
Joseph Roth tells the story of Mendel Singer in a language both allegorical and with biblical directness, whose theme is one of divine visitation and the wonder of God's grace. 

Roth's answer to the question of the meaning of suffering in the spirit of the Bible is the answer of a skeptic, whose life was visitation, the redeeming grace one fervently longs for, but does not to believe they could find or receive. The resulting novel stands in good stead beside his magnificent historical novel, The Radetzky March.

Allegory of Isolation

Concrete Island 

by J.G. Ballard

"He realized, above all, that the assumption he had made repeatedly since his arrival on the island – that sooner or later his crashed car would be noticed by a passing driver or policeman, and that rescue would come as inevitably as if he had crashed into the central reservation of a suburban dual carriageway – was completely false, part of that whole system of comfortable expectation he had carried with him. Given the peculiar topography of the island, its mantle of deep grass and coarse shrubbery, and the collection of ruined vehicles, there was no certainty that he would ever be noticed at all." (p 43)

I was aroused and taken in by this short novel -- a nightmare fantasy of contemporary society from the versatile pen of J. G. Ballard.  The story opens with a crash that results in hero Robert Maitland marooned on a seemingly deserted traffic island just outside London watching the unconcerned motorists stream by. He gradually comes to the realization that his world of normal expectations had disappeared in this island that seemed almost in an alternate universe in spite of his sensations that reminded him of the world he had left behind.
This modern-day Crusoe encounters two inhabitants in his explorations -- a Sadie Thompson-ish neurotic runaway and a mentally defective ex-circus acrobat with the "natural dignity of a large, simple animal" -- whom he manipulates brutally in order to survive. He tells himself, "I am the island" and in case you missed that, the little tart reminds him later, "You were on an island long before you crashed here." Escape, then, becomes problematical: from where? to what? and on what terms? The "conspiracy of the grotesque" that traps him is more than Maitland's trial -- it's his only destiny, and perhaps no more than technological man deserves. Ballard handles this kind of reductive moral fable with incomparable finesse, investing the narrative with savage horror that eats away at banal appearance and reveals the skeleton beneath the skin.  It is an allegory of horror in the sublime substance of isolation in a world gone awry.


Concrete Island: A Novel by J. G. Ballard. Picador, 2001 (1973)

Kafkaesque or not?

Some Novels of Jose Saramago

“Words are like that, they deceive, they pile up, it seems they do not know where to go, and, suddenly, because of two or three or four that suddenly come out, simple in themselves, a personal pronoun, an adverb, an adjective, we have the excitement of seeing them coming irresistibly to the surface through the skin and the eyes and upsetting the composure of our feelings, sometimes the nerves that can not bear it any longer, they put up with a great deal, they put up with everything, it was as if they were wearing armor, we might say.”  ― José Saramago, Blindness



José Saramago, Portugal's only Nobel winner (1998) was born on this day in 1922. In an interview several years before his death in 2010, Saramago said that he thought the best place to start for anyone unfamiliar with his unusual novels would be Journey to Portugal, his 1981 travel book (If this book is as good as Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk I would agree, but unfortunately I have not read the Saramago work). Perhaps he's right, but I am more familiar with his novels, especially The History of the Siege of Lisbon, Blindness, and All The Names. 


 All The Names is the story of a middle-aged civil servant  named Senhor Jose, who works as a clerk in the Central Registry for births, marriages and deaths. He is the only person named in the story–all the remaining characters in the novel are referred to by their titles or descriptions: The Registrar, the woman in the apartment, and so on. It is an interesting literary device, given the title of the book, but not surprising if you read this as an allegory.  Senhor Jose, still a bachelor in his fifties, lives a quiet life with no social life, or family to visit. At his work and the hierarchical structure and discipline of the institution does not allow for personal exchanges of any kind. He has spent a lifetime alongside co-workers that know nothing significant about him. In order to maintain a connection with humanity, he clips articles out of newspapers and magazines and keeps his own personal registry of stranger’s lives. He secretly cross-checks his files with those of the official labyrinth files at the Central Registry. One day the filing card of “an unknown woman” sticks to the other files he has surreptitiously borrowed for his hobby. The file of the unknown woman begins to haunt his life. In response he steps out of his lonely existence to try to track her down and , in doing so he becomes a sleuth and a forger and much more. The tension through the novel builds as we begin to learn more about the unknown woman and this tension exhibits itself in Senhor Jose, who comes under the suspicion of his boss. The remainder of the novel takes on a Proustian stream-of-consciousness internal monologue with the reader drifting in a sort of haze of metaphor and allegory that is the most beautiful consequence of this novel. It has been compared to a Kafkaesque experience. 


In the novel Blindness Saramago uses a quotation from the Book of Exhortations as the epigram: "If you can see, look. If you can look, observe". Near the end of this novel, when the blind people are getting their vision back, he has one of his characters remark:" I don't think we did go blind, I think we are blind, Blind but seeing, Blind people who can see, but do not see" (p 292). These two quotations suggest the political and philosophical intention of the novel.  The greatest problem with an allegorical novel like Blindness is that it grants too much freedom to the reader. It allows too many interpretations. Saramago uses blindness as a metaphor for both personal misfortune and social catastrophe. The story begins when the first blind man loses his vision in his car while waiting for a traffic light to change. The man who helps him get safely home goes back and steals his car. The next day the wife of the first blind man takes him to see the eye doctor. Within a few days, the wife of the first blind man, the car thief, the doctor and all of the patients in his waiting room also go blind. The only character in the novel that miraculously avoids the affliction of blindness is the doctor's wife. Saramago's writings have often been discussed as an example of "magic realism". However, it has been suggested that Blindness has more in common with Kafka's allegorical novels than it does with works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie. The fundamental problem posed by allegorical novels is how to locate their political and social meaning. Saramago provides his readers with few clues to guide interpretation. 


 My favorite of Saramago's novels is The History of the Siege of Lisbon in which Raimundo Silva, a proofreader at a Portuguese publishing house alters a key word in a text to make it read that in 1147 the king of Portugal reconquered Lisbon from the Saracens without any assistance from the Crusaders. After doing this he is inexplicably encouraged by his supervisor, Maria Sara, to rewrite the entire history of the siege. From this kernel the novel develops into a complex meditation on the meaning of both history and words as well as a romance and parable of life under authoritarian rule. Saramago's prose style does take some extra effort to adjust to with long paragraphs and serpentine sentences, but it is worth the effort and, like Faulkner and others with complex prose styles, repays the reader who perseveres. While I have not read all of Saramago's novels this one stands out among those I have read as his best.