Monday, April 3, 2017

Guest Blogger JONATHAN TAYLOR on MUSIC and FICTION . . .

Christal Ann Rice Cooper




Excerpt from KONTAKTE and Other Stories
By Jonathan Taylor
Preface: On Musical Fictions

All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.  (Walter Pater, The Renaissance)


Over the last 250 years, thousands of short stories, novellas and novels have explored musical themes, or revolved around musical characters. The late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly, are full of such stories and characters. Wackenroder’s ‘Joseph Berlinger,’ Hoffmann’s tales, Poe’s fiction, Balzac’s musician ‘Gambara,’ Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Hardy’s stories, Du Maurier’s Trilby, Leo Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata, all include musical images, themes and characters. No doubt this literary fascination with music and the figure of the musician originates in their Romantic elevation to the highest spiritual realms by philosophers like Schopenhauer and Pater, and real-life musicians like Richard Wagner. 













As Friedrich Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals:                                          
With this extraordinary inflation in the value of music, which seemed to follow from Schopenhauer’s philosophy, the musician too suddenly rose in value: from that moment on he became an oracle, a priest, even more than a priest, a sort of spokesman of the ‘in itself’ of things … from that time on he ceased to talk just music, this ventriloquist of God – he talked metaphysics.


Some things have changed since Nietzsche wrote this in 1887, but the fascination in fiction with music and musicians remains. There are numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors who write about music and musicians, from Thomas Mann and Anthony Burgess, to Roddy Doyle, Rose Tremain, and Nick Hornby; there are whole anthologies of stories about music, such as those edited by Peter Wild, and inspired by The Smiths and The Fall; there is even a publisher in New York, Coral Press, which specialises in publishing ‘musical fiction’.










There is arguably a difference, though, between earlier and later portrayals of musicians in fiction: Thomas Mann’s composer in Doctor Faustus cuts a very different figure to some of the more idealised portrayals of musicians in the high-Romantic era.

Wagner’s posthumous association with Hitler and Nazism, coupled with his own egotism and avowed anti-Semitism, have inevitably had their effects on later fictional musicians. Arguably, one such effect is a disillusioned, and partly self-conscious, turning away from perceived Romantic ‘high’ cultural models of music and the musician – so that many writers of the later twentieth-century preferred to focus on ‘popular’ music and musicians of one kind or another.

Of course, this survey is all rather generalised, and history never quite works in such a linear way. The emphasis on popular culture, and the corresponding suspicion of musicians and musical power, was actually with us long before – in the nineteenth-century fiction of Poe, Balzac, Du Maurier, and Hardy.





Conversely, the later twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have not entirely turned away from earlier idealisations of music; Vikram Seth’s beautiful writing on music, for example, owes a great deal to Romantic conceptions of music, translating Schubert’s or Bach’s music into the rather blunter medium of the English language.





Many fiction writers have attempted this – to write musical fiction which is not merely about music, but which somehow echoes that music within the constraints of written prose. This is the kind of musical fiction which interests me – fiction which is not just musically themed, but which, in its style, its punctuation, its cadences and its imagery, attempts to capture the strange and elusive narratives of music; and not just any music, or music in general, but the particular music with which the fiction is concerned – whether that music is Stockhausen or The Smiths, Puccini or Piaf.





Short stories, I think, are particularly good at this, partly because the time taken to read a short story is often similar to the time taken to listen to a piece of music; one can mirror the narrative structure of the other quite closely. The very compression and intensity of short fiction means that it lends itself more readily to the portrayal and simulation of the compressed intensity of musical works.

In stylistically simulating musical techniques, fiction often comes very close to poetry, which, after all, self-consciously uses musical elements of language as part of its repertoire. Like poetry, musical fiction will often use alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhythm, allusion, refrains, even rhyme, to simulate the music it is describing. And the more like poetry it becomes, the more musical fiction inevitably starts to bend and then break some of the basic ‘rules’ of prose, such as conventional uses of grammar, punctuation, lineation and paragraphing. To attempt to describe music, to encapsulate its fluid structures and timbres, it would often seem necessary to write in a more fluid, flexible, poetic way; and examples of this kind of poetic prose abound in musical fiction.


However weak we may feel that words are in comparison to music, many composers have struggled in the opposite direction to that of writers, attempting to connect their art form with written language. Schubert’s songs, Wagner’s Gesamtskunstwerk, Berlioz’s, Liszt’s and Strauss’s tone poems and other programmatic works – all appropriate written narratives and texts, and, in their very different ways, attempt to shape these narratives and texts into music. 




This act of shaping material from words into music had – and maybe still has – the same kind of distorting effects on musical language as the reverse has on written language. The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century composers most credited with writing music informed by written texts are the same composers who are usually credited with stretching, bending and sometimes even breaking conventional musical language. It would seem that the very attempt to cross between different art forms necessarily distorts, bends, breaks and transforms the languages of those art forms. But then, I believe that this is precisely what artists of all kinds – whether musicians, short-story writers, novelists or poets – should be attempting to do: challenging, subverting and reinventing the conventional languages of their chosen art forms.



(A version of this Preface was originally published on Thresholds: International Short Story Forum, 2013. http://thresholds.chi.ac.uk

The quotation from Nietzsche is in The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p.83)



Friday, March 31, 2017

The Movie THE SHACK: Guest Blogger Rev. Karen Heyburn: "Shacking Up With God!"

Christal Cooper



Guest Blogger 
Rev. Karen Heyburn
Shacking up with God


“Moses said to God, ‘Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your fathers has sent me to you,” and they ask me, “What is this god’s name?” Then what shall I tell them?’ God said to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.” Exodus 3.13-14



       The film, “The Shack” ( http://theshackbook.com)has been released. It is based on the book by the same name written by Wm. Paul Young.  There was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth about the book in some Christian circles.





Now there is more of the same about the film. Pastors are telling parishioners not to see it and admonishing staff and volunteers not to arrange movie nights for their various small groups. Although the film had not even been released for public viewing, the bells of all Christendom began a cacophony of clangs and bangs. This should really come as no surprise. Do we Christians agree on much of anything these days, except that each of us is right and the rest of us are wrong?


This book, and the film that follows it, is an allegory. Allegory is a story that contains a moral or political virtue that must be revealed through the thinking of the reader.


It is also analogy. Analogy is an example comparing some event or situation with another in some significant respects. It is a way to understand something that is otherwise a challenge to understand.


The best example of an Analogy is the understanding of God. Who or what is God? How do we understand the Eternal, the Divine? I don’t want to get into the philosophical exercise. Christians believe that God is One. There is one God. We believe that God is evident as Three in One, “Father, Son, Holy Spirit”. We call this the “Trinity”.


At any time, we may encounter God in any of these three ways, and in those encounters we meet all three. Are you still with me? Good, because theologians throughout the history of the Church have wrestled with this idea and even they don’t all agree. Entire forests have surrendered their lives for the books written specifically about the “Trinity”.


       Imagine explaining this complex concept to children! Many have tried. Years ago, someone came up with the idea of an apple. The apple has three parts: the skin, the meat, and the seed. All three of these are still the apple, even though they are different, they are the same. Except they aren’t. The skin of the apple is just that. The skin of an apple. Bite into it and all you will experience is the skin. The seed is an unrealized apple, yet no matter how hard you may try you can’t eat it and taste an apple nor does it impact you as an apple does. The meat of the apple? Well, an apple with parts missing! No matter what analogy, allegory, metaphor, or example we use to explain “Trinity”, they all fall short eventually. “Trinity” is a mystery of faith.


Some theologians and Bible scholars root this mystery in Scripture, citing as example Matthew 28.18-20, the “Great Commission”.


Others cite Mark 16.15-16 as evidence that the Three in One concept is not Biblical at all. Truthfully, every aspect you might want to embrace may well be supported by proof-texting Scripture, finding verses that seem to say you are right!


Young explores several moral dilemmas in the book, chief of them may well be why bad things happen to God’s people. He takes us into a world that might help to explain how we hold onto faith when the world is falling apart around us. These are powerful issues, and Christians struggle with them each day.


Young isn’t trying to write a theological treatise here. He is exploring creation and our place in it. He is asking us how we might faithfully endure and comprehend grief, guilt, loss, pain, joy, suffering. How do we make sense of the patterns and anomalies within creation?  He is attempting to simplify a complex concept and perhaps make it more accessible to Christians and non-Christians alike.


It is a story. It is an engaging way to explore the issues of faith. Reading the book presents the reader with questions and invites that reader to think about the possibilities for answers. The best books do provoke thought and conversation for those who read them. I suspect the film will do the same.




Does Young present God as three separate “persons”? Yes. And, no. Young invites us to move away from a male-focused concept of God and into a mystery the Church is reluctant to explore. Does God have a gender? The introduction God gives to Moses for the Israelites would seem to say “no”. God decides who or what God is. We can have images, we can have metaphors, yet the fact remains that God is greater than any term or concept we can produce.


In the John gospel, Chapter 14, Jesus prays that we might all be one. He claimed to be returning to his “Father” and that the “Father” would send the Holy Spirit as a “replacement” for Jesus among humanity. That seems to indicate separate yet equal expressions of God.


Although Young presents us with God in three different ways, as a means for exploring what and who God is in relationship with us, it is clear that God is present and interacting with the lead character through each of those different ways. Keep in mind that we have already suspended reality in accepting that the character has received a letter from God and has entered a place wherein God can be encountered without Mack needing to turn his face away as Moses was warned to do.


This is a story. A narrative that intends to evoke conversation and thoughtfulness. I know that there are pastors and Christian educators who will not want to discuss this story, and discourage their flocks from seeing the film. That is regrettable.


It is a perfect vehicle for a roundtable small group discussion. Allowing folks to share what they have experienced in reading or watching, and then listening to their stories of encountering God, is perfect food for discipleship. Theologians and Bible scholars argue and debate doctrine and dogma. The rest of us find ways to support folks on their faith and life journeys. Those debates and arguments help to inform our approach but should never be the goal of our approach. Many of us truly love the debates.


Folks in our care just need to know that they are loved. They are loved by God and that love is manifested through the rest of us. They want to know that their struggles for answers are not theirs alone. They need to know that we are one in the body of Christ and that they are free to explore and debate historic doctrines and Church dogma. They are also free to shrug their shoulders and go on loving God and one another.


That’s what matters. Loving God and loving one another. The book, and no doubt the film, focus on that love.  Surely, we can agree to that, can’t we?         

                                                       

Karen is a retired pastor, Christian Educator, and church musician. She has a BA in Humanities from the University of Akron, and an Mdiv from Methodist Theological School in Ohio.
She loves her children, their spouses, her grandchildren, family pets, and her spouse, who keeps her slightly crazy.
     Karen loves to learn, to cook, and be an encourager for others. She takes delight in helping people reach their goals. She struggles with a need to be perfect, even while not expecting perfection in others. She's an incurable dreamer, who sees "the big picture" and often gets lost in the details. Her obituary will say of her, "She had an idea."