I have to say that I don't really think contemplative realism has coalesced yet. Much as I have read about it and much as you and I have discussed it, it still seems to me like an amorphous cloud of ideas that has not yet coalesced. And the evidence of this is precisely the difficulty of saying whether a given work is contemplative realism or not.
I have read, and quite enjoyed As Earth Without Water, but if you asked me to point to what made it a work of contemplative realism, as opposed to any other modern literary novel, I would be at a loss. But let me suggest a project that might clarify things, at least for me, and perhaps for others. Let me suggest four works on a similar theme and ask you to compare them and say which is a work of contemplative realism and which is not, and to explain why. The four works I would propose are:
Hi Mark, this may be fair enough, and thanks as ever for the kind words about the novel. This Substack, as I've said, is an attempt to flesh out some aspects of the cloud of ideas.
The project of comparison you describe here, to be done well, would have to be at least four posts -- probably really more like four chapters of a book. And even once done, I'd be reluctant to pronounce magisterially on the results, saying "this counts, this doesn't." But I find it fun to open up a text--so, with your permission, I'll keep the thought alive.
As Earth Without Water is a funny example because at no point during its writing was I sitting down and consciously thinking: hmm, how can I make this work sound more 'contemplative realist'? That expression didn't exist yet. Instead I was concerned with certain experiences and with finding my own way of rendering them faithfully. Which, as you and others have pointed out, is just what any writer does, regardless of what if any aesthetic categories they find helpful to describe their work.
Fair enough. You speak above of motivations and aspirations and aesthetic goals. And that is fair enough. We all have those as we work. And yet, if we are honest artists, what we actually produce is an encounter with the concreteness of our own subcreated worlds, which does not come from the same place as the motivations, aspirations, or aesthetic goals that we may set for ourselves in propositional terms. That difference, after all, is why we write fiction at all and not merely essays.
Thus while I express my aesthetic goal as writing "serious popular fiction" and I can describe what I mean by that at length, yet when I am writing I am not actively thinking about how to hold serious and popular in tension in every sentence I write. I am trying to follow, or sometimes to lead, the unfolding of the subcreated world of my imagination and the people who have inhabited it. That is the work of a very different part of the brain.
Writers often talk about the rebellion of their characters, that moment when a character simply refuses to do or say the thing you had planned for them to do or say in your outline in order to take the plot where you wanted it to go. In some sense our motivations, aspirations, and aesthetic goals are scaffolding just as the outline is scaffolding. And as a military plan never survives the first encounter with the enemy, so the aesthetic plan never survives the first encounter with the product of an honest imagination.
It occurs to me, therefore, that one might regard contemplative realism as a creed rather than a style. A work of contemplative realism, or, to be more precise, the work of a contemplative realist, might then be thought of as work created while believing the CR creed, which may or may not leave any discernable hallmark on the work itself.
In that sense, one might be able to say that a certain work -- Alice in Wonderland, let's say, or Harry Potter -- are not works of contemplative realism since they clearly violate some aspect of the creed. But there might be many works, past and future, that, while not produced by a believing contemplative realist, nevertheless do not violate any of its precepts.
Which, if true, would leave you with a problem in defining the canon of contemplative realism. Is the canon defined as all the works that do not violate the precepts of contemplative realism, or is it defined as all the works produced by believing contemplative realists (even, perhaps, if they, accidentally or knowingly, violate some precept of the creed, as Henry James accused himself of violating the precepts of realism in The American)?
And that, it occurs to me, is the same problem we have defining Catholic literature, and perhaps other literary schools as well.
For sure, we've talked before about the desire for a definitive definition (is that a redundancy?). I think it's wise of Joshua in the original text not to insist on one, and in the video I shared with you to give one that's quite expansive. Because that is the spirit in which I want to work here--expansive, accessible as possible. And given the conversations we've also had about (in your own fine phrase) not "seeing a walled garden where there is just a garden," I hope that my reasons for hesitation at least make some sense to you; I don't want to leave the impression of a wall where no wall has been or should be built.
Anyway, thank you for being here and engaging so deeply; I don't disagree with the thought that the aesthetic plan, like the military one, is provisional and contingent. That said, an artillery strategy is not the same as a mathematical theorem, and what we're doing here is much more like the latter than the former.
I have to say that I don't really think contemplative realism has coalesced yet. Much as I have read about it and much as you and I have discussed it, it still seems to me like an amorphous cloud of ideas that has not yet coalesced. And the evidence of this is precisely the difficulty of saying whether a given work is contemplative realism or not.
I have read, and quite enjoyed As Earth Without Water, but if you asked me to point to what made it a work of contemplative realism, as opposed to any other modern literary novel, I would be at a loss. But let me suggest a project that might clarify things, at least for me, and perhaps for others. Let me suggest four works on a similar theme and ask you to compare them and say which is a work of contemplative realism and which is not, and to explain why. The four works I would propose are:
* As Earth Without Water
* Monk Dawson
* Mariette in Ecstasy
* In This House of Brede
Hi Mark, this may be fair enough, and thanks as ever for the kind words about the novel. This Substack, as I've said, is an attempt to flesh out some aspects of the cloud of ideas.
The project of comparison you describe here, to be done well, would have to be at least four posts -- probably really more like four chapters of a book. And even once done, I'd be reluctant to pronounce magisterially on the results, saying "this counts, this doesn't." But I find it fun to open up a text--so, with your permission, I'll keep the thought alive.
As Earth Without Water is a funny example because at no point during its writing was I sitting down and consciously thinking: hmm, how can I make this work sound more 'contemplative realist'? That expression didn't exist yet. Instead I was concerned with certain experiences and with finding my own way of rendering them faithfully. Which, as you and others have pointed out, is just what any writer does, regardless of what if any aesthetic categories they find helpful to describe their work.
Fair enough. You speak above of motivations and aspirations and aesthetic goals. And that is fair enough. We all have those as we work. And yet, if we are honest artists, what we actually produce is an encounter with the concreteness of our own subcreated worlds, which does not come from the same place as the motivations, aspirations, or aesthetic goals that we may set for ourselves in propositional terms. That difference, after all, is why we write fiction at all and not merely essays.
Thus while I express my aesthetic goal as writing "serious popular fiction" and I can describe what I mean by that at length, yet when I am writing I am not actively thinking about how to hold serious and popular in tension in every sentence I write. I am trying to follow, or sometimes to lead, the unfolding of the subcreated world of my imagination and the people who have inhabited it. That is the work of a very different part of the brain.
Writers often talk about the rebellion of their characters, that moment when a character simply refuses to do or say the thing you had planned for them to do or say in your outline in order to take the plot where you wanted it to go. In some sense our motivations, aspirations, and aesthetic goals are scaffolding just as the outline is scaffolding. And as a military plan never survives the first encounter with the enemy, so the aesthetic plan never survives the first encounter with the product of an honest imagination.
It occurs to me, therefore, that one might regard contemplative realism as a creed rather than a style. A work of contemplative realism, or, to be more precise, the work of a contemplative realist, might then be thought of as work created while believing the CR creed, which may or may not leave any discernable hallmark on the work itself.
In that sense, one might be able to say that a certain work -- Alice in Wonderland, let's say, or Harry Potter -- are not works of contemplative realism since they clearly violate some aspect of the creed. But there might be many works, past and future, that, while not produced by a believing contemplative realist, nevertheless do not violate any of its precepts.
Which, if true, would leave you with a problem in defining the canon of contemplative realism. Is the canon defined as all the works that do not violate the precepts of contemplative realism, or is it defined as all the works produced by believing contemplative realists (even, perhaps, if they, accidentally or knowingly, violate some precept of the creed, as Henry James accused himself of violating the precepts of realism in The American)?
And that, it occurs to me, is the same problem we have defining Catholic literature, and perhaps other literary schools as well.
For sure, we've talked before about the desire for a definitive definition (is that a redundancy?). I think it's wise of Joshua in the original text not to insist on one, and in the video I shared with you to give one that's quite expansive. Because that is the spirit in which I want to work here--expansive, accessible as possible. And given the conversations we've also had about (in your own fine phrase) not "seeing a walled garden where there is just a garden," I hope that my reasons for hesitation at least make some sense to you; I don't want to leave the impression of a wall where no wall has been or should be built.
Anyway, thank you for being here and engaging so deeply; I don't disagree with the thought that the aesthetic plan, like the military one, is provisional and contingent. That said, an artillery strategy is not the same as a mathematical theorem, and what we're doing here is much more like the latter than the former.