71: Horizontal & Vertical Literature

71

Horizontal &Vertical Literature

PART ONE: The Insight

I confess, I’ve never read Ulysses by James Joyce, considered by many critics to be the greatest novel of the 20^th Century; not that I didn’t try, I just couldn’t get into it and never bothered to finish it. And this intrigued me for many years because I loved Dubliners, his book of short stories, and I especially loved his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There was just something about Ulysses that I couldn’t put my finger on, until Penny gave me her impressions of Ulysses one morning over coffee in my writing den.
She had just read Albert Camus’s The Fall which I had suggested, and Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mocking Bird (we had seen the movie starring Gregory Peck as the lawyer Atticus Finch, for which he won an Academy Award, and she wanted to compare the novel with the movie), and she was looking for another book to read and asked for another suggestion, and I challenged her to read Joyce’s 700 page novel Ulysses.

The first couple of pages were tough going, but she slugged it out and continued reading; and one morning I asked for her initial impressions of the novel.

“I’ve never read this kind of writing before,” she said. “It’s hard to follow.”

I explained why: “Joyce wrote Ulysses in what’s called a stream-of-consciousness technique. If you pay attention, you’ll see that Joyce lets his thoughts flow and merge one into the other; impressions, feelings, sights, sounds, memories, fantasies—everything. One big stream of endless associations; and the whole story takes place in one day in Dublin.”

Penny struggled on, and when she got to page 67 she said, “I finally got the rhythm of the story. It’s like he’s scanning life, going from here to there recording everything; but I haven’t figured out where he’s going, or why.” And by the time she got to page 153 she was well into the story and was determined to finish it; but being unfamiliar with Greek mythology, I informed her that Joyce had modeled Ulysses on the epic Greek poem The Odyssey by Homer, and Leopold Bloom, the main character in Ulysses, in some idiosyncratic Joycean way parallels the trials of Odysseus who fought in the Trojan wars for ten years and was eager to get back home to his wife and son in Ithaca. But it took Odysseus (also known as Ulysses) another ten years to get home because of all the tests that the gods had put him through, for whatever reasons Homer had in mind for him (and Joyce for his analogical hero Leopold Bloom and his surrogate son Stephen Dedalus).

“If there was a buried treasure in that field, I wasn’t going to dig for it,” I said to Penny, not bothering to explain my feelings about Joyce’s insurmountable pedantry, which he confirmed by proudly boasting that he had “put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant,” thereby spitefully assuring the critics that he despised of his epic novel’s literary “immortality.”

“Penny, you can study Ulysses for the rest of your life and still not figure out what Joyce was up to, and I just don’t think his novel was worth my effort.”

“Why not?” she asked, and what came out of my mouth in that spontaneous way that often happens when my oracle speaks for me is the subject of today’s spiritual musing: “Because Ulysses is a horizontal novel, not vertical.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, with a puzzled look.

“I just feel that Ulysses is a horizontal novel, that’s all. A story that takes place in the flat horizontal plane of Joyce’s mind, from one thought to the next in an endless stream of associative consciousness, round and round and round like that horse walking around the statue in his short story “The Dead,” making allusions to Homer’s Odyssey and the Bible and other literary works that the reader has to puzzle through, and for what? What does the reader get out of reading Ulysses? The satisfaction of having finished it? The pleasure of Joyce’s verbal acrobatics and puzzling literary allusions? A voyeuristic look into the mind of Joyce’s conflicted characters and his tormented Catholic soul? Perhaps. But does he bring you any closer to understanding the human condition? Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t; I just don’t think it was worth my effort to work it out, because I suspect that Joyce’s buried treasure is nothing more than a literary illusion. And if you think Ulysses is hard to get through, try reading his last novel Finnegan’s Wake; that’s even more abstruse…”

Listening to Professor Harold Bloom on a podcast interview talking about William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying, he said something about Faulkner’s novel that puzzled me for a long while but which I knew spoke to my insight on Joyce’s Ulysses; he said that As I Lay Dying was “an amazing shot out of hell. Fully the equal of something like Macbeth. Faulkner transcends himself there…”

Professor Bloom has a genius for recognizing that magical quality in literature that he calls “sublime” (he titled one of his books The Daimon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime), a built-in radar system for detecting greatness in literature; but it wasn’t until Penny and I talked about her impressions of Joyce’s Ulysses that Professor Bloom’s comment about Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying finally revealed itself to me.

It just came to me one day while out walking that “an amazing shot out of hell” alluded to vertical literature, because the author transcends himself as Professor Bloom felt Faulkner had done in As I Lay Dying; but this is such a complex concept to convey that I don’t know if I can do it justice, so I’m going to abandon to my creative unconscious to explain the redemptive power of the transcendent function of the creative process, and I beg the reader’s indulgence as I wait for divine law of synchronicity to come to my assistance…

I put aside today’s spiritual musing to let my day unfold accordingly, and I began reading for the umpteenth time C. G. Jung’s memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections (diving right into his chapter “Confrontation with the Unconscious”); but I was not more than ten pages into the chapter when I got the strongest urge to pick up Glenda Green’s book Love without End, Jesus Speaks, which I had read three times already; and being true to these urges when they possess me, I put Jung’s memoir aside and began re-reading the incredible true story of Glenda Green’s experience of painting her portrait of Jesus.

 I began reading Glenda’s book again without expectations, because I knew from long experience that one cannot plan synchronicity; the most that one can do to tease out the guiding principle of life is to just let life unfold at will and listen to those nudges and urges when they come; but when I got to the end of Chapter 2, I sensed something happening.

Glenda was talking about how the inspired image of Jesus that was fixed in her mind (how this image came to her can only be appreciated in the full context of her story) began to fade and disappear from her mind the moment she put the final touches to her painting: “Almost in panic, I looked inward to the point where it had been joined in my consciousness, but the ‘chord’ had been severed. Setting my brush down, I smiled, then smiled bigger, unable to suppress the joy I felt. As I beheld the vision departing, I also witnessed a beginning. For as the visual image faded, the love and energy of its essence settled in upon the canvas. The painting was finished, but its life had only begun.” And then the author added something that confirmed my intuition about the redemptive power of the creative process: “Many who have seen the painting feel a living presence within it. The Lamb and the Lion is more than just linen and paint. It is now a conduit for the life force of the original vision…” (Love without End, Jesus Speaks, pp. 19-20. Italics mine).

The moment I read this, a thought came to me like a shot out of the blue and I picked up my pen and wrote on the blank margin of the page in Glenda’s book: “Does this apply to all creative works? To poetry? Stories?  To music? Sculpture? I think so!”

There it was, confirmation for my intuition on the redemptive power of vertical literature! But little did I expect my confirmation to be validated even further in the next chapter when Glenda used the exact same words that I had used when I tried to explain to Penny the difference between horizontal and vertical literature; but I have to set up the scene first to provide the context for this amazing coincidence that the merciful law of divine synchronicity had just given me through Glenda Green’s amazing story…

It was Sunday, July 19, 1992, and Glenda Green and her husband were showing her portrait of Jesus at St. Francis of Assisi Episcopal Church in Willow Park, Texas. Pastor Father Hermann had heard of The Lamb and the Lion and asked Glenda to present it to his congregation and tell the story of how her painting had come to be, but as Glenda and several parishioners set up the painting in the fellowship hall tragedy struck: a floodlight fell from its tall tripod and crashed into the canvas!

The light fell into the left side of the painting, landing right into the split trunk of the old oak tree causing a four-inch dent in the canvass and a one-inch tear at its center. Everyone was mortified, but being an art historian and past museum professional Glenda knew the painting could be repaired; but even so, the dent would always show and she was heartbroken.

After the showing they put the painting in the case and drove home with a heavy heart, and the next morning she awoke with a sense of dread. “Why?” she asked herself, unable to comprehend the tragedy after such a miraculous experience painting it. She could not fathom it and felt absolutely terrible, but as she carefully glided the painting from its case she got the shock of her life—the injury was gone! “There was only perfection; no dent, no loss of paint!” she wrote, absolutely astonished.

Another miracle. In the following weeks and months, she gave a lot of thought to this incredible event; but she could not fathom the miracle through cause and effect alone because she knew that miracles could not be explained that way, and this is how Glenda Green finally made sense of the tragic tear in her portrait of Jesus and its miraculous redemption:

“There is a strange aspect to the way I remember the event—almost as if there were two sets of experiences symmetrically connected on different dimensions of reality, delicately separated by the thinnest veil. One side of the veil—the one supported by physical perception—I can recount in vivid detail every moment of the shocking event on that Sunday. No doubt my recollections would closely agree with those of the other witnesses. On the other side of the veil, however, there exists an expanded consciousness which retained a perception of the painting’s wholeness despite the assault!

“It seems as though my normal perceptions of reality which extend horizontally had been intersected by a vertical insertion of a higher truth and power. Such thoughts caused me to wonder if perhaps the whole of universal reality performs its endless creation around the intersection of timeless moments where horizontal plausibilities cross in perfect harmony with the vertical possibilities for ascending or descending consciousness” (Love without End, Jesus Speaks, Glenda Green, p. 26, Bold italics mine).

“We know pain all too well, and yet there is perfection coexisting with it,” concluded Glenda Green, confirming what I had so much trouble articulating—the co-existence of parallel realities: the horizontal existential reality of time and space, and the vertical reality of ascending possibilities that my creative unconscious recognized as a criterion for literature.

That’s why as brilliant as Joyce’s novel may be, Ulysses didn’t cut it for me as vertical literature, because I just felt that there was no hidden treasure buried in that field; and by buried treasure I mean the vertical reality of ascending possibilities that come when the writer has engaged the redemptive power of his transcendent function.

Like Sartre’s play No Exit, I felt that Joyce was also trapped in the horizontal existential plane of life in his own brilliant mind, and regardless of his novel’s literary excellence, which was more than enough to satisfy Professor Bloom’s criteria for greatness in imaginative literature (aesthetic splendor, cognitive power, and wisdom), my creative instincts told me that Ulysses was horizontal literature and not my cup of tea, which explained why it resisted all of my efforts to read it.

But this is the mystery of the transcendent function in literature, which provides what Glenda Green called “a vertical insertion of a higher truth and power” that can only come with truly inspired writing that transcends the horizontal plane of the mind. Joyce provided horizons of insight into the human condition in his analogical Dublin novel, but was his truth of the human condition a vertical truth that unlocked the door to the writer’s prison? Was Ulysses a shot out of the private hell of Joyce’s hubristic, guilt-ridden ego and word-intoxicated mind? Maybe, maybe not; but I certainly don’t think so.

And that’s the secret of horizontal and vertical literature: the former reflects the existential human condition, and the latter transcends it. Ulysses reflects the existential human condition in as many ways as Joyce had experienced it, including sexual debauchery which caused his novel to be banned in the United States for years, but it does not transcend it; and if I’m wrong in my intuitive feelings about Ulysses I know that one day the omniscient guiding principle of life will correct me, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

PART TWO: Creative Confirmation

          Late in his life, Carl Jung wrote to a friend in England that he had failed in his life’s task to make clear that there was a buried treasure in the field, which by buried treasure he meant our soul, that vital spark of divine consciousness that we are all born with, and with some trepidation I confess that I have also failed to make clear in today’s spiritual musing what I meant by buried treasure in the field of vertical but not horizontal literature.

          There is something mystical about creative writing that speaks to the buried treasure in the field, because truly inspired writing comes from that spark of divine consciousness that is at the core of our being; this is what I believe Professor Bloom meant by calling William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying “an amazing shot out of hell” and why he felt Faulkner “transcends himself there.”   

          Why would Professor Bloom say that Faulkner had transcends himself if not to imply that As I Lay Dying transcends the human condition like “an amazing shot out of hell”? By exploring the human condition in As I Lay Dying, Faulkner engaged the redemptive power of his transcendent function and imbued his story with a “vertical insertion of a higher power and truth,” which defines what I mean by vertical literature.

But I have a much better example of a writer engaging the redemptive power of his transcendent function to dig up the buried treasure in his field, who coincidentally just happens to be Ernest Hemingway who harbored a deep resentment for William Faulkner because Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature five years before Hemingway; Faulkner in 1949, and Hemingway in 1954.

          I behooves me first however to make absolutely clear what I mean by vertical literature as opposed to horizontal literature before I illustrate how Hemingway engaged his transcendent function to dig up the buried treasure of his African safari experience in his two vertical stories “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” that were both inspired by the same safari experience that Hemingway used to write his horizontal story Green Hills of Africa; and without going into too much detail, which would be a spiritual musing in itself, suffice to say that vertical literature redeems man from the human condition while horizontal literature does not.

There is redemptive power in vertical literature that can only be realized when the author engages the transcendent function of his imagination to form his story for him, because the guiding principle of imagination transforms the reality of the human condition into a deeper perception of the experience and thereby raises it to a higher level of truth and meaning, thus redeeming it from itself. But this is such a difficult concept to convey that the only way to reveal the redemptive power of vertical literature would be to illustrate how a writer does it; in this case, my literary mentor Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway wanted to see if a memoir could compete with a work of fiction, and in the foreword to his book Green Hills of Africa he wrote: “The writer has attempted to write an absolutely true book to see whatever the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action can, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination.” But, to Hemingway’s chagrin, his experiment failed miserably to compete with a work of the imagination, and the stinging critiques of Green Hills of Africa sent Hemingway into deep depression.

But Hemingway was a fighter, and to vindicate himself with his  critics he went back into the ring (Hemingway always used the boxing ring as a metaphor for his writing, shadow boxing with the great writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) and he took the same African safari experience that he wrote about in Green Hills of Africa and milked it of all the literary virtue that he could get by writing two redemptive stories that define the very essence of vertical literature: “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

These two stories are poignantly personal. In fact, Hemingway admitted that “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” was his most autobiographical story; and, as I have already explored in my book The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway, he wrote these two stories to redeem his compromised self, which was why Hemingway loved writing more than any other activity in his life, including deep sea fishing in the Gulf Stream from his thirty-eight foot motor yacht and true love of his life which he had christened “Pilar,” because through creative writing Hemingway became Hemingway. To be true to his art, Hemingway had to be true to himself, which is why he began every story with “one true sentence.”

Take Francis Macomber, for example. He is not his own man. He cowers to his wife but cannot leave her, and she humiliates him completely by having sex with a real man, their hunting guide Wilson; but Hemingway redeems Francis’s Macomber’s honor with one hunting incident that salvages his dignity, and with imaginative genius Hemingway ends his story by leaving the reader to determine for himself whether his wife shot her husband on purpose or accidentally killed him. And in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Hemingway’s fictional self, the writer Harry reviews his compromised life as gangrene in his leg threatens to end it as they wait for the rescue plane from Nairobi that he knows won’t arrive on time. Harry sees that he has wasted his talent through procrastination and luxury from a marriage to a wealthy woman that he no longer loves, and as he faces his final hour he reconciles with his self-betrayal, which characterizes the redemptive power of vertical literature.

Hemingway took his African safari experience and asked the creative writer’s question: what if? And by engaging the redemptive power of his transcendent function, Hemingway transformed his safari experience into a deeper perception of his life and redeemed himself; but not only to himself, but to all of his scathing critics (a pattern that Hemingway repeated when he wrote Across the River and into the Trees that the critics savaged and from which he redeemed himself with his novel The Old Man and the Sea that won him the Nobel Prize for Literature), and this led Hemingway to conclude that imagination enhances the truth of a story exponentially, which another Nobel Laureate Alice Munro confirmed when she said: “Memoir is the facts of life. Fiction is the truth of life.” Or, as Karen Blixen (Out of Africa) said: “Art is the truth above the facts of life.” And that’s the distinction between horizontal and vertical literature that I saw in Joyce’s Ulysses—a great novel about the existential facts of the human condition, but no redemptive treasure.         

PART THREE: The Analogy

I went online one night and did some more research on Joyce, and I listened to three or four Joycean scholars who taught Ulysses for many years (one professor finally gave up because he felt his students weren’t literate enough to appreciate Joyce’s novel), and they all praised Ulysses for its literary excellence and complexity, and I also listened to lay readers sharing their impressions on the great novel; but nothing anyone said was enough to induce me to try reading Ulysses again, because I still felt it wasn’t worth my effort.

The following morning, I shared my feelings with Penny that as brilliant as the novel was, all I got from the scholars and lay readers was that Ulysses stretched their mind and gave them a rich vicarious literary experience, and Penny, who had worked her way through 425 pages already and who one mornin said to me, “There’s another twenty pages of nothing, just words that don’t mean anything to me,” took a sip of coffee and replied, “I can see that. I still don’t know where it’s going, or what it’s about; but I’m going to finish it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I started it, and I’m going to finish it,” she said.

“But what’s the point?” I asked again, frowning.

“To say that I read it, I guess,” she frankly admitted.

“That’s not reason enough for me,” I said; and later, as Penny was making her lunch for work an insight came to me that rendered my feelings about Ulysses into a telling image, and I went downstairs to share it with her—

“An image just came to me that may help explain my feelings about Ulysses. It’s a metaphor, actually. Do you want to hear it?”

“You’re going to tell me anyway, aren’t you?”

“Of course. Okay, the image that came to me was about you going fishing one morning. You pack a nice lunch and get your rod and tackle and drive out to the path in the woods that leads to Lake Ulysses; but as you walk to the lake you meet an elderly man walking down the path and you stop and chat. He asks you how long you’ve been fishing Lake Ulysses, and you tell him three or four weeks, which is how long you’ve been reading Joyce’s novel; and he says to you, ‘I’ve been fishing Lake Ulysses all my life, and I haven’t caught a damn thing yet. But it’s a great lake to fish in. That’s why I keep going back there.’”

“Well, I don’t know if I’m going to keep fishing there after I finish reading Ulysses, but I’m going to finish it because I started it. I don’t like to leave things unfinished.”

“That’s your nature, sweetheart; but I can’t see the point of fishing just for the sake of fishing. That’s like putting a positive spin on Sisyphus. I spent my whole life trying to find an answer to the Preacher’s question, ‘what profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun?’, and I just don’t think you’ll find it in Lake Ulysses; that’s why I can’t be bothered to go fishing there. And to tell you the truth, I honestly think that Joyce has done some serious leg pulling with this novel, and I think he’s the one doing the fishing.”

“I don’t care, I’m going to finish it,” Penny said, and left for work; and I went back upstairs to work on my new story, which I hope will be vertical literature.

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PLEASE NOTE

This will be my last spiritual musing. I have to attend to some chores this summer, but I will be back in the fall with a different format, poetry and short stories, two genres that I would love to explore more fully. My fourth volume of spiritual musings will be called The Armchair Guru and will be available through Amazon. I enjoyed the creative challenge of writing my spiritual musings, but they have served their purpose and it is time to move on. Thank you for following my blog, and the fates willing I’ll see you again when the snow flies. Have a safe and wonderful summer