Speaker 1: You asked me at the beginning of this conversation, like,
what do I do with my students? Well, my first thing,
clear away as much of this kind of modern baggage
as possible, you know, I don't care about your feelings.
What does Dante really think? First? And then and then
admit that in this process, Dante might be a little
smarter than you, Like, it's possible, right, because he's sure
is like a heck of a lot smarter than me. Right, Okay,
So then why would he say that about the suicides?
Why would he say that about the homosexuals?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: And to really get them to enter into that question again,
what I'm trying to do is collapse those distances that
are so easy. And I tell you I the number
one thing I see teachers do that draws me up
the wall, which is to give the students the one
thing they don't need from you, and that is your
own cynicism, right, you know, It's like they don't need it.
They have it in space and theirs is probably more
grounded and founded than yours. You know, mister teacher, this.
Speaker 4: Is Jonathan Pechel.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the symbolic world.
Speaker 5: Hello everyone, I'm here with Cale Zelden. Cale is a teacher,
he's a writer, you know, he writes on Substack, but
he's mostly someone who's kind of been swirling around the
things that I talk about, that people around talk about.
He's involved in this little corner and he's also you know,
been he did for a while, like a podcast with Rodreer,
and he's just kind of been swirling around, and so
we thought it would be a great opportunity to bring
him to the About Girl summit, you know, to kind
of hear his voice and to hear him talk about
things that he thinks are important.
Speaker 4: So Cal, thanks for talking to me.
Speaker 1: Absolute pleasure to be here. Thank you, Jonathan.
Speaker 5: And so you know, I think that you know, we
invited you because we know that you have this deep
understanding of story and you're you know, you're looking into
how can we connect you know, our modern world, you know,
with these ancient stories, and so maybe you can tell
us a little bit about what led you down that path.
Speaker 1: On your on your own sure. Sure, I mean, you know,
I've been a classroom teacher for over twenty years and
most of that has been in a high school context,
although I taught a little bit and as an adjunct
and at in low level college seminars, and so I,
you know, my I'm tasked with trying to help students
who don't have a ton of background and do not
have a sort of a deep experience of reading how
to not only understand old books, but you know, to
enjoy them. And so I have found so I've kind
of been in the lab for a really long time,
you know, with you know, it's I run a pretty
low tech classroom, as you might imagine. It's you know,
it's me, it's some students, you know, a pencil, some
chalk and the book, and so you know, I have,
you know, you learn some tricks along the way in
terms of trying to bridge something that is becoming increasingly
a foreign experience or a foreign medium in the context
of reading. And so I feel like I've been pretty
successful with it, and it has driven home to me.
You know this this, you know twenty over twenty years
in the lab, that nothing is more important than connecting
students to a tradition, not only just in terms of reading,
you know, the trade. I can't we have to call
it the tradition of reading, but we do have to
kind of call it that because certainly, in the last
decade or so, we are seeing I think, a real
melting away of young people who have as part of
what they do in a daily or weekly or monthly
basis sitting down with a book and you know, engaging.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: These you know the best and that has been thought
and written over the course of one hundreds and thousands
of years. So so uh. And part of that for
me is, you know, I'm a gen Xer. I was
born in seventy three, and one of the things that
I experienced in my freshman year in college was there
was this entire world that I had been mostly kept from.
Originally that was a kind of a religious sensibility. You know,
I'm a gen x Catholic, and and so what was
shocking to me was to be thrown into the deep
end with Augustine's confessions and even you know, Plato and
Aristotle and especially the church fathers of both the Latin
and the Greek church fathers. I had. I sort of
had this strange experience of you know, of frustration and
I would say anger that the richness of our tradition
was just simply not shared. And so I had to
kind of go on a you know, a mission, you know,
kind of like spelunking in the caves looking for for
this richest and when I found it, it was immediately resonant.
You know, the depth was immediately resonant for me. And
so I think much of my and and of course,
you know, millennials and gen Zeers, I think that that
that experience is probably even more profound in terms of
that cot off, because even in high school we read
some pretty good thing but some Shakespeare. I read a
lot of you know, nineteenth and twentieth century American novels
and you know, a little bit of beay Wolf and
you know, these kinds of things. But it really wasn't
until college that I appreciated this thing that we all
sit atop that had been essentially hidden from us. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, I think I feel probably very similar to you.
You know, my high school was was not great.
Speaker 4: You know, we basically could pick.
Speaker 5: Our novels that we were going to read to do
our book, and so people would just pick whatever. I
think I'd picked Anne Rice or something some some kind
of ridiculous type of type of activity. And it was
only really, like you said, in my twenties that I
kind of rediscovered or discovered this world that I knew
nothing about, and a lot of the reading that I
should have been doing as a teenager, I basically ended
up doing, like in my thirties, you know, where I
knew I how to had to that's some catching up
to do, you know, and kind of delve into the
into the dialogues for example. Really only in my thirties
is when I delved into Plato dialogues, and so, you know,
I think that also as the fact that we in
some ways had to wrestle with this, you know. And
I see the same with my children. You know, it's
hard to get them to be interested in these questions.
I have my daughter, one of my daughters, is definitely
kind of naturally curious and interested in in these in
these types of things.
Speaker 4: But you know, what have you seen, like what how
do you do it?
Speaker 5: How do you get young people to be interested in
the world of ideas and of reading.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, it's a good question. I think one of
the things I do is, I sort of say somewhat rudely,
but I'm kind of working a bit. Is I just
kind of establish at the front of my time with
the students, you know, typically in September. Of course, you know,
is that I don't really care about their feelings, and
not in that kind of Ben Shapiro, you know, of facts,
don't care about your feelings. But but I'm I'm I'm
trying to let the students off the hook in some
kind of backwards way, like I don't care what you
how you feel about Hamlet. You know, I don't really
care how you feel about Dante. I care about your
ability to understand Dante or Chaucer or Shakespeare or Shelley
or whatever we're reading. I care that you can understand
it on their terms first, right that you you know
that you know I don't you know, uh, you know,
like Dante's a perfect example, right you know Dante, Uh,
you know, it's funny, you know, Dante is not that
hard to read. You know, it's not a It's not
like Paradise Loss, for instance, which I just got finished
teaching with my students, and Paradise Lost is a heavy lift.
I mean, I've read it now twenty times, twenty one times,
and you know it's still hard for me. You know,
I'm on that page and I'm wrestling with with the
complexity the gorgeous complexity of his language. But with Dante,
you know, it's pretty straightforward. But he starts to say
some things that clearly clash with you know, the the
sort of uh, the ambient moral structures of you know,
postmodernity or something like that. And you know, so you know,
you know, you get, for instance, you get to the
the circle of the suicides, and you know, and it's
sort of a you know, you know, Dante doesn't care.
You know, he's not talking about I mean, he's not
really talking about suicide in the way that we think
of a sort of a depressed kid or a depressed
adult who you know, out of despair, you know, does
him or herself in He's really talking about suicide as
a kind of honor killing, you know, sort of a
self honor killing. And so you know, so if I
if I just let the kids read that canto, they're
going to be, ah, well, Dante's a jerk, you know,
because he is you know, he's not sensitive to you know,
what we go through or something like that. And and
so I want to do as much psych canis, so
put that on the back burner. You know, we can
get there, I mean, judgment ultimately is where we're headed,
and we have to go there, and we can't be
shy about judgment. But before we jump into judgment, you know,
we have to understand Dante on his terms, like what
is he actually meaning? What is he actually showing us
through these images? So I think the So that's number one.
It's just sort of you know, putting the you know,
you know, what is your hot take. You know, I
really don't care about the hot take. Let's let's wrestle
with what we see in front of us. And of
course when you do Dante, it's images, images, images, right,
you know, really, how are these images working on us?
What are they meant to demonstrate? You know, there's a
kind of you know, a language to damage, which of
course deftails perfectly with what you've been doing with symbolic World.
And then you know, I find that with the students,
they have a kind of affected distance from these books
because they know they're old, and you know, they've heard
about Dante before. None of them have read it before,
but they've at least sort of heard of the Inferno.
And so what I'm trying to do with that is
is is not to sort of put Dante sort of
so high up on a pedestal that that you can't
touch him, you know that you can't, you know, explore him.
You can't kind of push back and let him work
on you. So I'm trying to do my best to
bring Dante Dan I don't want to say it like that.
Maybe maybe I'm trying to bring my students up to him,
you know, like on some sort of platform and say, look,
we can touch this, we can fiddle around with the images.
And then and then I think the third thing, and
this is I believe, I really do believe that the
key to all great teaching, especially at the high school level,
is the power of analogy. You know, finding some kind
of an analogy, you know, where where a student can
sort of say something to the effect, oh, I'm just
like Dante, you know. And of course I'm talking here
about Dante the Pilgrim. You know, you can get into
sort of the esoteric about Dante the poet and all that,
but you know, I'm really trying to to get them
to connect to Dante through the power of analogy, and
so to that end, you know, I do my best
to kind of keep up with their references, not to
try to sound cool to them, but to make sort
of connections. And one of the things that I've really
come to love in the last few years. And this
is also in part because my own my own children
are high school age now or one's actually in college,
but I love listening to their language and you know,
hearing you know, I'm a huge fan of slang and
the way that slang kind of wends its way. I
think one of the great upsides of short form video
is the way in which slang and means can be
kind of very quickly seeded, and when you can connect
those that that kind of slang to something that you're reading. Again,
not to sound cool to the kids, but to kind
of poke fun at their language, as if their language
is sort of comes out of Nowhere's actually your slang
has a pedigree, and your slang has roots into the
tradition as well.
Speaker 4: That's hilarious.
Speaker 5: I mean, I think that's a great idea, and it
kind of leads me to my next question. It's actually
a really big one, and I don't know if you
have an answer, because I don't have an answer.
Speaker 4: Like one of the one of the realities.
Speaker 5: Of our world is that you know the roots of
our civilization, you know, whether we think of the Greeks,
the Greek Golden Age, you know, or even before the
American period, and and the kind of Christian foundations, Deal Testament,
the New Testament, Church Fathers. You know, as time moves forward,
we are getting further and further away from these characters.
And at the same time, the amount of information is increasing,
you know, exponentially, and so you know, the when you're
in high school, you know, your teacher might want you
to read care whac you know, in English or came
in French, because there's something that's more that's closer to
to your experience in some ways. But then I remember
that that was my experience, for example, of high school.
And but then there's a kind of eclipsing you could say,
of the deeper tradition and of the deeper past. And
so I mean, I guess my big question is how
do we do it? You know, how how can we
both be aware of this ancient world but at the
same time also be aware of the modern one. How
can we live in these two worlds without spending all
of our time reading too, because that's you know, like
we're not going to I'm not going to read every novel.
You know that every modern novel plus be aware of
the ancients.
Speaker 4: It seems almost impossible.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I mean I all of us have to
pick and choose, right, I mean, I'm the same way.
I mean, I think in contemporary standards, I'm I'm well read.
But I look at you know, even people at generation
before Foremone, you know, I think of somebody like I
don't know, like Harold Bloom, Like is there a book
that Harold Bloom didn't read between you know, Homer through
you know, Kerawuac, like probably you know, and you know,
so uh, I know that I'm not going to be
like that, but I kind of think of it in
kind of like levels. In fact, I've been trying to
cook up a book on this. I don't know if
I'll make it happen, but you know, it's like remember
when people used to talk about albums, you know, like
actual albums, and you know, there were the sort of
the hits that were on an album, and then there
was sort of the the next level and then the
deep cuts, you know, And I think we have to
start treating the tradition that way. Like in other words, yeah,
we have to, like like I would say, like you
have to read Dante, you know, you have to read Homer,
you have to read you know, sort of the top
half dozen Shakespeare plays. But you know that's actually not
that hard of a lift, right, and and and then
we could do the same thing, you know, like I
think you have to read selections of Aristotle, and I
think you have to read you know, the Apology and
the Republic, you know, and and and you know with Shakespeare,
you know, Romeo and Juliet, Julius, Caesar, Macbeth, Midsomar, I Stream,
you know, lear Hamlet. You know that, like that's a
pretty good start, you know, Tempest. I want to throw
the Tempest in there as well, you know, like you
you could kind of do that. And I think that
that's something that can actually be accomplished either in a
in a serious high school or even a you know,
a kind of honors seminar, you know, a multi semester
honors seminar at the university level. So you know, I
don't think that you have to read everything, but I
do think that you should. You should have these kind
of layers, like if if you read, you know, you know,
you need to read these six books, Okay, if if
you like what you read, you know, of those six
you know under Homer or under you know, whatever, you
know Dante, then you can read you know, these six
below it. And I'm just picking six at random. I'm
sure it means nothing, you know, but you know, you
can kind of reverse build, you know, a root structure
that will give you a kind of sufficient background knowledge.
You know. You know, you could do the same thing
with like Dostoevsky. You know, I think you have to
read Crime and Punishment. I would love it if you
read Brothers Karamazov, of course, but you know, if if
you had to read one, I would say read Crime
and Punishment because it's a it's a quick it's a
it's a short look yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 4: It's more of a narrative like yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, it's it's got a courtroom drama.
And I think that kind of works, you know, so
you can kind of pick and choose those kinds of things.
And so, but I would argue, you know that part
of being a sane person in the modern world is
to do a deep dive. You know, you you owe
it to yourself to build yourself out and to connect
yourself to the tradition. And so so if we think
of tradition as you know, experiments that have worked, you know,
like the Lindy effect or something like that. Right, there's
there's you know, there's a reason for since that that
we still read Homer. You know, there's a reason, for instance,
that Shakespeare has kind of has kind of risen to
the top and maintained his position. And I'm always insistent
to my students, is this is not some sort of
conspiracy theory. Uh well, maybe it's a good kind of conspiracy.
It's the conspiracy that's based upon co breathing the really
great stuff. Right, And and so you know, we still
read Hamlet because Hamlet speaks to something fundamental about the
shared human condition. So in that sense, I'm I'm a perennialist, right,
I'm not naive enough to think that we're just like
the Greeks, you know, or we're just like the Elizabethans.
We're not, you know, we're moderns and maybe even postmoderns.
And but uh, but that, but at its core, these
books hover over this shared thing. And and again I
would argue that you have a responsibility to to to
plug yourself into this shared thing with the added bonus
that when you do you you you you find yourself? Right,
do you find depths of yourself that were latent but
that can be awakened by these things? And so with
all the noise that that that our kids swim in,
you know, this information overload, this fire hose of short
form video for instance, you know, we have a responsibility
to filter. And it is my hope that that if
I can get a kid to resonate, you know, with
an old book, they might just have a sneaking suspicion
that the the the peculiar kind of depressive feeling that
you get after you've scrolled for forty five minutes is
actually not the same thing. Then when you do a
deep dive into Crime and Punishment, right, you know, there's
this there's this experience that you can get, like I
feel better after I read Crime and Punishment or fill
in the blank, you know, and invariably we all feel
worse when we get caught into a doom scroll.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I said I would never do it again, but
here we are. We are announcing the Symbolic World Summit
in May twenty twenty six. I have so many great
people around me that I'm just excited to do it,
even though I thought it would be crazy to do
it again.
Speaker 3: Our summit's going to be from May fourteenth through sixteenth
in Broadview Heights, Ohio. You can buy tickets at Symbolic
World Summit dot com.
Speaker 1: Kenot speakers this.
Speaker 3: Year our father Josiah Trenham and doctor Mary Harrington, which
is a combination nobody knew that they wanted. But I
think it is going to be absolutely incredible. And of
course Jonathan and I will be speaking, as well as
several people from around the Symbolic World community.
Speaker 5: A lot of people that you like that you've seen
are going to be there, are going to come, We're
going to have book signings.
Speaker 4: It'll be a lot of time for people to meet
and to greet.
Speaker 5: We're also doing Supra as well, and so come and
join us. We can't wait for this, and we're excited
to meet you in person. So this is probably going
to be even more controversial question here I'm going to
ask you, which is that you know, we have this
sense that we're in a transition period. I think you
probably have the same feeling that in some ways the
modern world, whatever that is, whether it's the from the
time of the Enlightenment, whether it's more like the nineteenth century,
there's a sense in which this way that we've been
writing is reaching its end. Things are kind of fragmenting,
falling apart. It's related to technology and all these kinds
of things, you know, as you know, Roder talked about
re enchantment and this kind of collapse of this like
return of certain types of influences.
Speaker 4: On our reality.
Speaker 5: And so one of the things that we've noticed, and
that I've noticed that there's someone who's interested in traditional
Christianity and the Church Fathers and in that worldview, is
that our curriculum is a highly is highly en lopsided
towards the Enlightenment, and the way that we understand what
is a classic book usually starts around at the seventeenth century,
although we have a few things before, and so you know,
you know, so we've been doing this universal history, you know,
episodes on symbolic world, trying in some ways to recover
some of these texts like the Voyage of Saint Brendan
or if you think of, you know, the Apocalypse of
Pseudomathodius that in the Middle Ages were so important, right,
that had a huge or the Golden Legend, let's say
in the.
Speaker 4: West, these kinds of texts.
Speaker 5: And so I guess my question is, do you feel
like our canon is going to change, that the different
emphasis that we're going to have, or that we maybe
even that we should have, is going to change as
we move forward and we kind of move out of
this enlightenment, the dominant enlightenment, thinking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, you know, I've been thinking a lot about
the novel as a form as a technology, and it's
kind of a remarkable and novel sorry you know thing.
You know, it kind of shows up, you know, and
you can trace the history of the novel. A lot
of people will trace it back to Quixote, and that's fair.
But there's this strange intimacy that a novel affects. That
has been good, but I think we've under indexed the
bad of that. And Okay, I love novels, you know,
but and I know everything before the butt is you know,
a problem. But you know, you know, like, for instance,
I think of something like pride and prejudice, you know,
and and and I I love I love might make
me a weirdo, but I love Jane Austen novels and
you know, something like Pride and Prejudice is kind of
a miracle in terms of her ability to show us
how thinking happens, how feeling happens. I mean, it's it's
a pretty it's a pretty extraordinary thing, you know. Uh,
something like Dante not a novel, you know, has these
little moments where he kind of you know, peers through
the page a little bit and it kind of quickly
goes back into it. So it's not like it's an
unprecedented thing. But uh, and and and Shakespeare gives us
some insights into that, you know, when you just have
a character on stage and there's a soliloquy, you know. Uh,
Milton's portrayal of Lucifer has sort of these similar moments
where you have this sort of strange moment where you're like, man,
I feel and think exactly that you know. But but
you know, so I don't I don't mean to denigrate
the power of the novel, but the novel also gives
us a kind of fake intimacy that or it can
that compels a kind of inward turn that that I
fear can end in a kind of sollipsism. And and
and so I think the novel has sort of done
its trick. I'm not arguing that the novel's over, and
I'm not arguing that you can't go and read a
novel and get some amazing things out of it. But
I don't think it's entirely I don't think it's entirely
where we need to go. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It seems to me that the novel that maybe you
could you could trace sort of intellectual currents that maybe
modernism or or or the Enlightenment, or maybe that's coterminous
with the novel, you know, so rather than tracing it
to descartes that people like to do, which is fair,
you know, that's one way to trace it. That's one
way to make this little sketch. I mean, maybe it
is the novel, and and maybe the sort of the
I mean, because what's so weird in a novel, even
more so than Paradise Lost, is that it can make
you inhabit, you know, a terrible person in a way
that even Paradise Lost, compelling you to sort of get
into Satan's headspace, still affects a kind of distance in
a way that a novel doesn't. And I'm not and
these are I'm just kind of riffing here. I've been
thinking through this quite a bit, but the I think
there's a reason why the twentieth century has this incredible
flowering of the novel. You know, you know, you know,
I still spent a ton of time reading you know,
Faulkner as an undergrad, and I love Faulkner, but I
don't know if Faulkner works for myself, Like I don't
I you know, I haven't tried to teach you know,
Faulkner in a long time, and I wonder if it
would work at all in some strangers.
Speaker 5: I'll tell you the truth. I never read Fuckner. I'm
also from the French world, by the way, which about
to remember. But you know, I actually, just.
Speaker 4: A few weeks ago, UH started to try to read Faulkner,
and I just.
Speaker 5: In this world, you know, I would say that I
felt like he was demanding too much of me that
I wasn't willing to give him. You know, that I
wasn't willing to that he was demanding a lot of me,
and I wasn't. I just didn't have the energy to to.
And it's like it's somebody that the base it on trust, right,
it's like you tell, people are telling me this is amazing,
and so dive into it. And so I'm seeing all
these multiple perspectives and these kind of emotional you know, uh,
autobiographical ways of speaking, and I'm like, you know what,
I don't care.
Speaker 1: Yeah, No, it's funny. No, I to argue for Falkner
just for a second. I think I think he's deeply mythological,
interestingly enough, and and of course the myth the mythos
that he's wrestling with is the is the inheritance of
a destroyed people, right, you know, as a white Southerner,
you know. So, so I think if we can frame it,
if you could frame it like that, again, I get
the lift. I believe me, I I I hear you.
But if you could conframe it in in that kind
of deeper I mean, it's very Greek actually, in terms
of the sort of the haunted house and the you know,
the house of Atreus, and you know, he's really working
those things, but it's so deeply sublimated into what for
most of us has become almost entirely esoteric, right, you know,
whereas for him, he's working out a deeply he's working
through a deeply exoteric tradition that again sits on top
of a presupposition of knowing all of the references. Yeah,
you know, and and so you know, there may be
a time, you know, I could foresee a time that
that Faulkner has a kind of renaissance in three hundred years,
I don't know. But are we here in twenty twenty
six at a point where Faulkner just doesn't connect. That's
a good question. And it pains me to say it
out loud, because because I love Faukner, but the novel
itself presupposes a depth and a familiarity with the tradition.
You know. It's like jazz. You know, I marvel at
these sort of mid century achievements, you know, American jazz,
and you know, it is astounding to me that there
was a sizable I hate to use the word market
for jazz in the mid century. You know. It's it's
such an taxing form, both for the musicians and the composers,
but for the for the for the two of us, right,
you know, And and and it takes a lot to
kind of get yourself into this place where you can
sort of appreciate it. And now it's like, I mean again,
I know I've said these kinds of things on Twitter
before and people get mad at me. But look, well
I love jazz, you know, And it's like and it's like, yeah, yeah, no,
I know you do. I don't doubt that you do.
But it's it's also incumbent upon us to admit that
it is esoteric, and and you know, it takes a
long time to build a structure in which we can inhabit,
to experience it and appreciate it at its depth.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, I think that all of that is is right,
Like the psychologization of the person in the novel is
so you know, it's something that I think if you know,
if you imagine in the ancient world would have just
been befuddled, like to see this kind of psychologization of
the person. Although it's not that there weren't deep psychological
insights even in Homer or in the ancients, but you know,
this kind of autobiographical.
Speaker 1: You know what, you know what it is, Jonathan, I
think it's as we become less and less of a
liturgical people, novels, novels drain liturgy in some interesting kind
of way because it's it's you know, one of the
things I love about you know, Shakespeare or Homer is
that it the language itself is liturgical, you know, and
I know that both of us come you know, we
inhabit liturgical traditions, and so you know, we spend portion
of every week sort of plugging ourselves back into this
chirotic performance. I don't want to call it a performance, but
you know this chirotic work, right that that that as
we become more and more and more low as a church,
right broadly understood here because all of us North Americans,
whether we want to admit it or not, you know,
are are by default low church people. You know, the
two of us have to kind of plug ourselves back
into high church sensibility. But but but you know, when
you when you encounter you know, the Iliad or the Odyssey,
you see this, you know, you're plugging yourself back into liturgy.
And if you even think about the way that you know,
an ancient audience would have experienced Homer, it would have
been liturgical. You know, there would have been the the
the bard uh in the front, you know, reciting uh,
you know, the litanys and and the refrains and and
all these things. And and I and I and I
do not like when people say, oh, you know, the
epithets and Homer are just like memory devices. It's like, no, like,
I'm it's you know, is is is allelujah and amen.
A memory device, you know is thanks be to God,
A memory device will not really or not not exclusively
not only hm hm.
Speaker 5: And so then the question is, in some ways, what,
you know, how do we reintegrate these these elements back
into you know, the story. One of the things that
I've been playing with, been doing, you know, in the
fairy tales we're writing, is that in some ways I
feel like like character arcs for example, that are the
kind of superficial, not superficial, but like the most immediate
aspect of modern storytelling. Yes, that they that they actually
have something that is useful, that something that I think
can be that that can be carried oh, you know.
And so going back into the fairy tales and having
character coherence, for example, which is something that you know,
the answer fairy tales maybe did care about, like to
ask yourself, like, what's motivating the characters in the way
that they're acting, you know, and so trying to kind
of integrate that to maintain the fairy tale but integrate
this modern sensibility of motivation and psychological you know. And
so the question is like, what do you think how
do we integrate this stuff into the future. What do
you see as the things that we should be doing
or that we're moving towards.
Speaker 1: I think you're right. I think there's been an almost
a kind of fetishization of character and psychology over and
against story.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: I was rereading Lewis on on Stories and his essay
or his address on Stories, and he's steering it back
into this question because I think, you know, Lewis is
such a fascinating character to me. I'm sorry, you know,
because he's one of the few people who could see,
you know. I oftentimes think that Lewis's genius was that
fairly early on, like the early nineteen thirties, he was
able to kind of speed run both modernity and postmodernity,
and he recognized that it only ends in the abyss.
And so if you look closely at his own career
as an academic but also as a storyteller, I think
he intuited and then did a good job of making
sense out of the pitfalls that I think we're acutely feeling,
you know, eighty five ninety five years later. So I
so I'm a Lewis stan I love him. I think
he's brilliant. And I have to admit that as a
young English major and in graduate school, I was totally
I was a total snot about Lewis. You know, I.
Speaker 4: Thought, like you didn't like him?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thought he was unsophisticated. I thought he was
kind of like a And you can see this even now, right,
It's the kind of thing that Christians feel safe talking
about because like Lewis is one of us, you know,
that kind of thing. And so I think I bought
into that kind of snobbery about how serious he is.
And of course it was total arrogance on my part,
because all you have to do is just pick up
a few of his essays, pick up you know, miracles
or or I mean abolish of man. I mean, you know,
it's like this is a first rate thinker. He has,
you know, seen it all, and he has pre seen
it all in a way that I didn't really appreciate
until gosh, like honestly less than a decade ago, you know, So,
for whatever reason, less than a decade ago I I
sort of decided to do it a deep dive into
Lewis and I'm ashamed, you know, I have to atone
for for for my snobbery in his regard. But anyway,
in on stories, he he talks about the the fix
the modern fixation on character, over and against what he
says stories as stories, which I think is is what
you have intuited and grasped with your own project about
retelling fairy tales, you know that, you know, I mean,
how much time should you really spend getting into the
inner psychology of Rapunzel? Well, you know, it's it's like
like you could imagine some bad contemporary film on you know,
you know, the adult take on Rapunzel.
Speaker 4: In the Woods is basically like the bottom of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, and and exactly right, it's a it's a
bottom that actually has a floor, right, it's not it's
not bottomless, it has a floor. And at the end
of the day, it's kind of just not ultimately compelling,
right that that that this this the the simplicity of
the story actually does this profound work upon the soul
that fixating on you know who Punzel had a crush.
All I got making this whatever, like whatever, right, you
know what is why does my mom always you know,
make me eat peas I wish I could eat you
know whatever? I mean know you know, you know these
kinds of things. It it it's a false ironic sophistication.
You know that irony was supposed to be revelation, but
it has turned into like obfuscation or something like that.
And and so Lewis I think names he says, you know,
there's a peculiar way in which you know, I think
he says, like, you know, a pirate is a pirate,
and a giant as a giant. In other words, there's
something about these these these creatures that that invite you
into a kind of depth that a piece of internal
monologue just doesn't do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I think that it's funny because you mentioned
how don Quixote is possibly you know, the first novel,
and you know, I mean, don Quixote is a comment.
It's a it's a comment on something that was sincere,
like chivalry was a sincere part of society, like it
was a posture and a way of viewing the world
and of viewing relationships. And don Quixote is a you know,
it's a comment on that and so there is this
this this irony that is inscribed in that tradition, and
you know, and you see it, especially in the twentieth century,
you know, this kind of this idea of a this
notion that we always have to to to suspect the
fourth right, the fourth right, let's say, attitude of people
that there's always some secret intention behind that.
Speaker 4: You know, there's a deep psychology, there's trauma, there's.
Speaker 1: And it's twisted, right, And it's a twisted psychology, right right,
you know, because I think, you know, Lewis as a
as a great medievalist, would recognize that, you know, the
power of allegory, right that that in other words, you
do kind of hide in the story. But what you're
hiding in the story seems to be of a different
nature or quality than what a modern or contemporary novel
you know, hides.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Well, ultimately what you want in the allegory is
more like an analogy.
Speaker 4: At least that's the way that I see it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I I I right, I. I you know,
I think that I don't want to pick a fight
with Tolkien, but I keep doing this to you. But
I think his you know, sort of broadside against allegory
has been really misunderstood.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think it's misunderstood too, But I think he
sees it. I think that the way that he criticizes symbolism,
for example, is actually how I view symbolism. That is,
he says, my stories are applicable, you know, And so
what it is is that there is a deep structural
analogy in his work and then you can apply it
to the world. It's not like the Hobbits mean this,
you know, that can in this you know. It's it's
more of this deep structural and in some ways I
think that he that that he he actually had a
very deep understanding of story in that sense, and I
think that's what fairy tales are by the way that
it's not that, you know, you could say, like if
you if you look at the coming of age aspect
of the of the of the the princesses, like of
snow White, you say, what is it about sex? The
answer is what can be applied to sex? Is it
about growing up and taking responsibility? And so yeah, is
it about finding love? Like It's like all of these
elements of this story can be then applied to your
life and apply to people's lives, but they're not. It's
not like, you know, if you say, well, when she
when she you know, let's say, when when sleepy Bee
pricks her finger, is that her loss of virginity?
Speaker 4: Is it her menstruation? With neither of those? It's her
pricking her finger on a spindle? Can it be?
Speaker 5: Is there an analogy to those other things? Well, yes,
of course there are, you know, And so that's the way.
That's the way in which I think that, hope. But
like my sense is that, I mean, my sense is
that that in some ways is the future of like
it's somebody. It seems to me like that's the future
of storytelling for us now, you know, as we kind
of exit this long and like I can you know,
if I think of the French novels, like, dude, I
will never read by Zach, Like I'm not going to
read these people, Like it's just not going to happen, right,
you know, so.
Speaker 1: And you know what and you know it and like
that's okay, right, you know, I think I I subscribe
to a kind of living notion of tradition, right, And
there are times where where novels go away stories sorry everything,
you know, they go away and they kind of come back.
And I think that that's fine, right I I I
don't want to set up a kind of house of
bones in which we you know, these are the thirty six,
you know, real ones, and and you know, you know,
so I I do think that there's a kind of
fluid quality to the patrimony. You know, that there are
times and places for these things, just like you know, look,
I'm sure you've had this experience where you know, you
picked up a book in the last couple of years
that you didn't terribly care for when you were twenty,
and you read it now you're like, oh, oh, you know,
and so for whatever reason, you know, it now resonates
with you. And so I think we can understand that
that that in a bigger sense, I mean, I think,
you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about, like,
what is this whole modernism thing, you know? And I
don't mean that theologically, I don't and I don't mean
it in the way that literary critics mean modernism. But
this this thing we're talking about and the modern world
seems to be like modernism is a solvent, right that
that it that it's it's like an acid that that
is at least conceives of itself as kind of getting
down to a kind of base layer. And I think
that that's. Yes, it's a solvent, right, it's a corrosive force,
But it doesn't solve in the way that everybody in
modernity wants to solve for X.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 1: You know that it that that stories, as it turns out,
are actually a much more helpful way of understanding and
grasping and seeing than you know, these sort of myths
of subtraction. Yeah, and I think that novels, insofar as
they participate in that subtraction, will will go away. But
there are certain novels that that very much take up
the baton of, you know, like the epic as a
kind of genre. You know, I think of something like
Moby Dick. You know, Moby Dick is probably my favorite novel.
And it's you know, kind of like calling it a
novel is is to is to that doesn't really say
much to call mobi like, you know, Moby Dick. And
you know, the sun also rises by hemingway. You know,
it's like, wait, those are both novels? In what world?
Are these both novels? Right? And in course superficially their novels.
But I think, you know, Moby Dick participates in you know,
the Epic as a kind of sensibility, and it is
trying to do something with a novel that has not
been done before. And so it is more akin to
the things that Shakespeare is doing with drama, or what
Dante is doing with comedy, or what you know, Homer
is doing with the epic. It's it's it's it's seeing
itself in that kind of larger tradition. And it's almost like,
you know, you brought up Quixote earlier. You know, what
is so fascinating about Don Quixote is that he's writing
it as it's already a phenomena, right it's a critique,
right of of of of of chivalry and these kinds
of things. And then in the second half it's a
it's a commentary on the reaction that people are having
to the first parts of Don Quixote, you know. And
and so you know, if that's the birth of the novel,
you know, is the I And this is something I've
actually been kind of wanting to ask you, like, is
at the end of the day, is is modernity the
same thing as post modernity.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I thank you, because you're right.
Speaker 5: That in the in the two quote novels you have,
you have the modernity and the postmodernity. The second one
is the postmodern, like ironic memory of the first one
and inversion and play on on on the slippage and memory. Yes, yes,
it's all there in Kyote for sure. Uh. And I
think that if you look closely, I mean the postmoderns,
if you look at the postmodern theorists like Leo t
like all of them, they didn't see themselves as they
saw themselves as you know, basically it's all there. It
was all there for them in Heidegger anyway. So it's
like who's modern and who's postmodern? And if you look
at some of the some of you know, some of
the modern, the famous modern texts like Gargan for example,
like these are postmodern, these are postmodern texts. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember, Okay, I remember in graduate school because I
had to, you know, so as an undergrad I had
a basically basically a kind of great books program. My
my professors would call it a non great books great
books program, because we didn't limit ourselves to primary sources
but we did major secondary sources and commentaries. We read
you know, Eliotti and you know, a bunch of the
twentieth century sociology. And so it was a it wasn't
like the University of Chicago Great Books programs. But anyway,
you know, so we read uh Pantagrul and and and
and and all this this medieval stuff. And I remember
going to graduate school. Of course, when I went to
graduate school in the mid nineties, of course, it was
all Derrida and and and the Atard and demon and
uh Lacan and you know, all all that stuff, right,
and uh because I had had this deep education in
the tradition, and because I had read deeply in philosophy,
both ancient and you know, Postcontian philosophy, Heidiger especially. I remember,
I remember laughing in my seminars because you know, my
my contemporaries were reading you know, dere Da for instance,
as if he was sort of saying something new, like
postmodernism was like now. And I'm like, have you read
any of the medievals? You know? And of course, and
again I this is not because I'm awesome, this is
just because I was graced with a real education. I'm saying, guys,
you just you know, you what you've effectively done. And
this is you know, is like their timeline. It's like Homer, Plato, Aristotle,
some Roman stuff that we don't really like to talk about. Okay, fine,
will read Augustin and then they'll just like skip the count.
You know, it's like they just skipped over fifteen hundred
years of intellectual work, tradition. And I found it even
doubly ironic because here they are all obsessed with the
logos right and logo centrism and all these kinds of things,
and yet they ignored an entire tradition that's based upon
you know, in the beginning was the word it was?
It was such a it was it was an exercise.
I was continually frustrated because it was naivete massed as sophistication.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I think, you know, I think that it's
often in the second rungs like that was a far
more sophisticated writer. He wrote a tech called Circumfessions in
which he kind of deals with Augustine and there's.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah he like Darren, I knew his stuff, Yeah, yea, yeah.
I talked about the practitioner.
Speaker 4: Like all the all the people in the school.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, but like if you want to post
modern text, dude, like Ovid's Metamorphosis is a postmon text.
Speaker 4: Yeah, in terms of what it's doing, it's doing the.
Speaker 5: Same thing as a lot of the ironic you know, subversion, subversion,
commentary upon commentaries that we see in you know, in
the eighties for example.
Speaker 1: And Jonathan, what what book is Shakespeare absolutely obsessed with
of it? Metamorphosis. It's the one that he references over
and over it over and over again. So is that
is Shakespeare postmodern? But like, how are we how are
we sketching these frames? You know?
Speaker 5: And I think that that's why, like I mean, obviously,
this is why I do the things I do, which
is that I think that if we kind of back
up and we have a kind of full symbolic vision
of reality, we understand that there is on the edge,
you know, a place for that kind of snake eating
its tail, you know, where things slip and things things become, uh,
move into this unformed, unformed play. So this this kind
of commentary and ironies and double ironies and all of this,
and this is actually part of it is like I said,
it's literally it is definitely in Shakespeare.
Speaker 4: You see it.
Speaker 5: You know, there is this kind of self referential aspect
to some of Shakespeare's parts of some of Shakespeare's play
that are part of the kind of postmodern thinking. And
so that's why I'm not anti postmodern. Like, what I
want is to use to understand the aspects of that
they can be reintegrated in a fuller kind of traditional
way of thinking. Right.
Speaker 1: I always used to say to my fellow travelers in
graduate school, you know, my friends, who are you know
you could ever admit out loud, you know that you
might be you know, conservative or anything like that. Right,
But I love the postmoderns because they they are, in
my way of thinking, recapturing a kind of medieval sense
of play and and the idea of narratives and and
and subversions and whatnot. It's just that at the end
of the day, I believe in the logos, and they
don't really you know that that that that the what
is it? You know, the the infinitely deferred Oh gosh,
what the signifier?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: You know that right? A different also and you know
that that that that I don't think that I think
that the signifier ends in the logos himself, and not
in any kind of like pietistic sort of way, but
like really kind of way. And so therefore I could
read you know, Heidegger and and and all these guys
with with joy, even because I could tell what they were.
You know, I think that they were trying to poke
back at the Enlightenment and the sort of the sureties,
uh and the arrogances of of of the Enlightenment and
post Enlightenment.
Speaker 5: So I want you to give us a little bit
of a preview of your talk, and it's related to
what it is we're talking about in some ways trying
to find solutions. What is it in the tradition that
we need to to care to say, gathered together and
carry forth? And so maybe you can tell us a
bit about what it is you're going to talk about it,
the Simbako Summit, it and how it connects to all
of this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I I want to talk you know, uh,
true to billing, I'm going to talk about the epic.
But I want to talk about epic not as you know,
a kind of literalist might say that, well, you know,
they're you know, these are the five great epics in
you know, so you know Homer and Virgil and and
Paradise lost. Right, you know, that's sort of the the
sort of the those are the sort of the four
pillars of how people conceive of the epic and love
all of those. And and what I'm going to say
here is not an attack at all on that, but
I want to steer a little bit more into well,
what exactly is the epic? Like, what is this this
genre that that is a perennial and independent of what
we might call formal components. You know, is it written
in pentameter? Is it you know, does it have twelve
or twenty four books? Does it have you know, these
these sorts of things. And so, rather than looking at
the formal elements of epic, I want to go under
the covers a little bit. And you know what as
the epic represent and for me, epic represents this peculiar
genre by which we derived the sense that existence itself
has meaning, right, that that this is the place where
where the human has to transcend his sort of mortal
limitations and reconnect to you know, ultimately to the divine.
And so I think that this sensibility about the epic
is exactly the genre that we are lacking as a
as a sort of you know, twenty first century people,
that we are a people that has been divorced not
only from our epics, whether that be Scripture or Homer
or or what have you, but but rather we have
been disassociated from the sensibilities of the epic itself. Right,
And so you know, we Jonathan, you talk a lot
about you know, sort of postmodern irony or modernist irony,
and you know, the epic is sort of the anti
irony uh effort that reconnects us, you know. So you know,
Moses is a is a perfect example of an epic hero.
You know, he uh functions as a kind of hero,
a suffering servant who is called by in this case God.
I am right, but but you can see the same
thing that you know, Virgil is called by the gods
for this epic calling. And so every epic hero has
their temptations to sort of settle. But there's something about
settling that is anti human. And and so I think
that in some way our modern world is sort of
one that preaches the kind of settling. You know, that
we can't really know the gods that that that there's
no such thing as calling, that that that that God
or the gods really don't care all that much about us, right,
And so if you look at Homer or or or
or Aneas, you know that that there's there's this this
suffering quality to the hero that it's not free. Right
when you're called by the gods, it is an invitation
into suffering. And you know, as a Christian, it's very
easy for us to see this, right that that to
suffer is to be heroic, and and to suffer is
to heed the call of God.
Speaker 5: I think that that's that's amazing because in some ways
this is the place where we are. I think every
one of us is looking to move out of post
modern irony, you know, and to understand its function, but
then to not live in that irony, because to live
with that detachment and that irony is literally what makes salienated.
So how can we, you know, how can we kind
of you know, because even I like I'm a modern
I'm a modern guy, you know, I have this reaction
when someone tries to get me.
Speaker 4: I feel like I'm being sold something.
Speaker 5: I feel like I'm being you know, you know, I'm
being kind of tricked into following something. But I also
have that deep intuition that you're mentioning, which is, you know,
when Christ was crucified, there's nothing ironic in the express
in his experience of it. There was there was some
irony in the crucifixion because everything in it, right, there's
a like he was truly there and truly participating and
truly giving himself to that moment. Uh and where and
and that's really what we need in order to move forward.
Speaker 4: I totally agree.
Speaker 1: Right when we can again look at the crucifixion, we
not to just the two of us, but when we can,
for instance, look at the crucifixion and and not feel cringe,
we will know that we are finding our way back
to an epic sensibility, because without the epic, we don't
mean full stop. We don't mean without the epics, you know.
And and so you know, I think that you know,
there have been lots of forces that have sort of
created this irony, you know. But what I see in
your project is how to be not ironic anymore like
post ironic.
Speaker 5: That's right, you know, right, that's a good way. That's
I rarely heard what I'm saying what I do so
eloquently phrased, which is Donathan just wants us to stop
being ironic, or at least to not make that our
main I.
Speaker 1: Remember, and there and there are so many different idioms
of irony that you can play in, right, you know.
So there's the academic form of iron, which is to
sort of keep everything at a distance. Well, this was
written by the Jay redactor and you know this this
and you know who was Homer really anyway? And you know,
and and for what Virgil was really doing was this
he was kissing ass or you know, Shakespeare was trying
to you know, curry favor with the current sovereign and
you know all that kind of stuff are just these
ironic distances, distancings from the thing itself, right, and and
if you recall, I mean this is something again I'm
going to bring up Lewis again. But you know, Uncle
screw Tape tells Wormwood, you know that, you know, we
don't we no longer need to worry about people reading
old books. And he says, because we have thoroughly conditioned
you know, the priests of academia, you know, the professaoriat
into what he calls the historical method, right, and and
the historical method and it is such a blistering, uh
undressing of what the academic process is. And you know
it's like, you know, well, well, we'll do a review
of the literature. You know what what is the you know,
what was what is the current state of the literature?
You know, like, well, what what are the you know,
the redactions with all these kinds of things, all of
them meant, of course, to disenable a genuine reaction to
the book. So you know, to go back, you asked
me at the beginning of this conversation, like, what do
I do with my students? Well, my first thing, clear
away as much of this kind of modern baggage as possible,
you know, I don't care about your feelings. Let's you know,
what does Dante really think? First? And then and then
admit that in this process Dante might be a little
smarter than you, Like, it's possible, right, because he's sure
is a heck of a lot smarter than me. Right, Okay,
So then why would he say that about the suicides?
Why would he say that about the homosexuals? You know,
you know, and to really get them to enter into
that question again, what I'm trying to do is collapse
those distances that are so easy. And I tell you
I the number one thing I see teachers do that
draws me up the wall, which is to give the
students the one thing they don't need from you, and
that is your own cynicism. Right, you know that, you
know that when you it's like they don't need it.
They have it in space and theirs is probably more
grounded and founded than yours, you know, mister teacher. But
give them the thing itself, right to give them that,
you know, because I think irony and the way that
we're talking about irony here. You know, I'm not talking
about the irony of like a done poem or anything
like that, but the kind of iron that we're talking
this sort of distancing mechanism is poison.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Wow, well, Cale, thanks so much for talking to me,
and I'm looking forward to seeing you at the Sobagra Summit.
Speaker 4: Hope everybody will be there.
Speaker 5: It's going to be it's gonna be a lot of
fun because there are a lot of people that aren't
even actually speakers, are just going to be there, like
just some great people that we all care about, and
it's going to be like a big I hope, feel
like a big family reunion. That's my that's my hope.
And so thanks Cale, and I can't wait to see
you again.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: The problem with history is that you are in it.
Patar teaches us how to read power symbolically, asking whom
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