Michael O'Brien, Make Up Your Mind!

Frequent commenter Brendon has expanded one of his well-thought-out comments on fairy tales in the post, "Fairy-stories, the Good and the Beautiful." This fine post arose out of a discussion here on the rights and permissions of fantasists regarding the physical appearances of characters.

Clear thinker that he is, Brendon gets things straight: he argues that exterior appearance can be used in fiction to depict interior disposition, but he carefully distinguishes between appearance, disposition, and action. Brendon defends the fantasist's right to use apperance as a symbol of interior disposition, but warns us against equating physical beauty with interior goodness, which he describes as a category error.

More muddled on the subject is Michael O'Brien, who writes in A Landscape With Dragons:

Generally...it is true that the exterior forms that many traditional authors give to the morally or spiritually ugly characters tend to be ugly forms. Likewise, beautiful forms tend to express a beautiful interior life. This is a literary device that works well to reinforce the child's budding awareness of interior ugliness and beauty....

We have lost our sense of the holiness of beauty. By the same token, when exterior beauty is in harmony with a character's interior beauty, then the sign of the value of the tale or the character is greatly enhanced. Similarly, when worship of God is done poorly, it is not necessarily invalid if the intention of the worshiper is sincere. But when it is done well, it is a greater sign of the coming glory when all things will be restored in Christ....

Clearly, God is better glorified by a humble hunchback mumbling badly phrased prayers in a ditch than by a proud aesthete singing hymns perfectly, solely as an art form.... But what if the beautiful heart of that hunchback were to dwell in the developed art of the aesthete? Would not a greater glory be rendered to God by the restoration to harmony of both substance and form? [pp. 35-36, emphasis in original]

What Brendon says, correctly, is that goodness is beautiful and can by represented in literature by physically beautiful characters. What Michael O'Brien says, accidentally (I hope!), is that beautiful people are intrinsically better than homely people and capable of greater worship. Poor, poor, confused man. And did you note his use of the word necessarily in the third sentence of the second paragraph? Fumbling worship is not necessarily invalid if it is sincere, he says. It might just squeak by.

While I'm at it, I must quote O'Brien one more time because it's so much fun to watch him contradict himself. Observe his essay, "The Problem with Harry Potter," in which he writes, "In a consistent display of authorial overkill Rowling depicts...'bad' characters as ugly in appearance." Now compare that to the first paragraph quoted above, in which he praises "traditional authors" (whoever they are) for depicting evil characters as ugly.

In the dark and ugly landscape in which Michael O'Brien dwells, it is good and right to depict good characters as beautiful and bad characters as ugly--unless of course J. K. Rowling does it, for in Michael O'Brien's dark landscape, Rowling can't do anything right. Chesterton once complained that in the minds of some non-Christians, any stick is good enough to beat Christianity with. And in the minds of some of today's Christians, any stick is good enough to beat Harry Potter with.

Finally, as for the rights and permissions of fantasists, the solution to this and similar dilemmas is simple. To the Christian writer of fairy tales, fantasy, and sf, no other command do I give you than this: "Love God, and do as you please."

A Landscape with Misplaced Commas

Sooner or later, I am going to start a series critiquing Michael D. O'Brien's narrow-minded, anti-fiction A Landscape With Dragons (no really), but I haven't quite finished amassing source material in the middle of my living room floor, and then there's taxes and Josephus and...well, you know how it is.

Anyway, when I finally start in, I'm going to be sore tempted to criticize something that really has no place in my criticism. I decided I should get it out of the way now so I won't desire to do it later when I shouldn't. Here goes:

I don't know if this is O'Brien's fault or the fault of an editor at Ignatius Press, but for the love of St. William of Strunk, the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks! Take a look at this dialogue from O'Brien's first chapter (all of it sic except my comments in brackets):

"What kind of a monster is it?" [my mother] asked.

My little brother wasn't exactly sure, but I was.

"A dragon", I said.

[A terrible monster who sneakily moves commas where they don't belong!]

"Why don't you draw the dragon."

[Why don't you use question marks?]

"No, No, we would be too askaired!"

[So askaired that we capitalize no twice in a single sentence!]

"It's okay, I'll be right here", she said calmly.

[But it's not okay, Momma! The dragon's moving your commas, too!"]

Whew. Thanks for bearing with me; I know I'm not the world's greatest grammarian, but some things I still have to skewer. Incidentally, did anyone really use the word askaired when he was a little kid? Didn't think so.

In case you're wondering what's going on in this charming scene, I'll tell you: O'Brien is here explaining the basis of his belief that dragons are inherently evil and must always be depicted as evil in works of fantasy lest O'Brien brand the fantasist as an evil tempter who wants to lure children into Satanism. The basis of O'Brien's idea is twofold: first, O'Brien's children have had bad dreams about dragons, and second (as he depicts here), O'Brien had a scary dragon in his closet when he was little; therefore, dragons are evil.

I admit, logic like that is hard to beat.

What is particularly sad about all of this is that O'Brien, who condemns the fictional magic of Harry Potter, can't recognize real magic when it's right in front of his face. His own mother, as he proudly describes in this scene, dispelled the dragon in his closet through a ritual of sympathetic magic: she had young O'Brien draw the dragon, and then she burned the image to kill the monster in the closet. Somehow, O'Brien doesn't recognize this as a magic ritual. This isn't hypocrisy, but inexcusable ignorance.