Latest / The Catholic Current / Can Literature Be Saved? (Liza Libes) 9/3/26

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Can Literature Be Saved? (Liza Libes) 9/3/26 · The Catholic Current

0:00
This is The Catholic Current with Father Robert McTague.
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One of the reasons we read these great stories is because it can expand
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our moral imagination and help us to expect more of ourselves
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and one another, of God. The key thing about literature in general, it shows us
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not merely who we are, but who we should be and who we shouldn't be.
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I can't remember who it was who said, I read the newspapers avidly, it's my
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only source of continual fiction. If you want
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truth instead of fiction, don't read the newspapers, read the great novels.
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Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTaggart of the Society of Jesus,
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your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
0:41
the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross Studios,
0:43
your local radio station, and the iCatholic Radio mobile app, where we
0:47
proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity and charity.
0:51
As always, let's start with prayer. In the name of the Father, Son, and the
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Holy Spirit. Almighty God, through the intercession of Saint Ignatius Loyola, we ask that you
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pour forth your Holy Spirit upon us, a spirit of discernment that may hear your
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voice and obey your command. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy
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Spirit. Amen. Well, friends, I have 2 points to make. One is that
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I need to expand my horizons. I have
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a very deep education in philosophy and theology and not
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as broad an education in literature and poetry as I would have liked. And,
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you know, I've been doing my Friday series on novel prophecy.
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So that's one. The other point is one of the reasons
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that I like my jobs on some days is that I discover somebody's
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very interesting work and I say, hey, let's have a conversation on the
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air. And more often than not, the people I ask say yes. And this is
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a case today. We want to talk about can literature be saved? And I found
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a young woman online on Substack and YouTube.
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She is incredibly well-read. She's articulate.
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Her writing is crisp and engaging. And she has even more
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to say about literature and problems in the world than
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I do. So we're here to have a conversation. Lisa Levis,
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welcome to The Catholic Current. Well, thank you so much for having me.
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Lisa, I want to start with a quote from John Milton. I think that's always
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a good place to kick things off, uh, because my concern
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is that people— and we see this more and more— people have
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stopped reading and they're all glued to their devices.
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I've been rattling about this for years, but here's a quote from John Milton,
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and I'd like your response to it, please. He says, for books are
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not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them
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to be as active as the soul was whose progeny they
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are. Nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest
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efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred
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them. So says John Milton. Is that part of
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what draws you to literature because you're holding something in your hands that's alive?
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Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think there's a lot of conversation in the
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contemporary world about, you know, how literature isn't relevant to
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us and how, you know, young people can't relate to the characters.
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I saw a video somewhere where a young teacher was talking about
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how, you know, none of her students said they could relate to a particular literary
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character. And I And I started to think that that is not
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at all true. To me, I think a literary work
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is a living and breathing document that in
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many ways says something universal about human nature.
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And because it makes this universal statement about
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who we are as a human species, these literary works
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have stayed with us for, in many cases, centuries. So I think
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that, you know, when you're holding a book in your hand, you get
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a glimpse into another world. You are in many ways transported
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to that world because human beings don't change.
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Human nature hasn't changed since, you know, the inception of humanity.
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And to me, that is why I love literature
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so much, is it tells us something universal by way of the
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particular. I want to talk about the universality because I
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know it's a common theme. People talk about relatable,
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and then there's identity, and there has
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to be representation. And if you're not member of a group
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or class, you dare not write about that group or class because only
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members of that group or class can, can write about that.
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And it seems to me that that presents writing more as
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a mirror rather than a portal or a doorway. What are your
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thoughts on that? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I, I'm currently actually
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submitting my own novels. And one of the things that I always see
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when, you know, I send out my novels to literary agents is they'll
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say something like, if you're not part of this, you know, marginalized group,
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either, you know, don't submit to us or explain why you've decided to take
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on the perspective of, you know, XYZ marginalized identity.
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And, you know, to me, literature has always been an exploration
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of people unlike ourselves. And, you know,
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there is a universality to that, but we ought to be able to identify
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with people from all across the board and not just write from our own
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perspectives. You know, I think there's this resurgence right now
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in the contemporary literary world autofiction,
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because you really can't write anything that's not
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your own experience. And of course, a lot of literature does draw on an author's
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personal experience. You know, Hemingway was out in these bullfights,
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and many of those experiences are captured in his novels. But at
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the same time, I think it's a writer's duty to present
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a, you know, more objective view of the world and not
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just that particular writer's subjective experience. And I
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think it's become a problem that we're only allowed to talk about
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a small sliver of our own experience rather than capture
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the entirety of the human mind. So I think that
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there's been a narrowing of our literature in terms of what
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can and cannot be written. And that's why we keep seeing the same book published
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over and over and over again, because Most writers can't,
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you know, can't say anything else. Alas, alas. Friends, we're talking about whether
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literature can be saved. My guest today is Lisa Leibes. She is an
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author and literary critic. Lisa, let's shift a little
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bit and talk about— there's been in the past year,
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very many statements and studies and editorials, etc.,
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about just the very act of reading itself
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is dying, that nobody's reading anymore. You've heard those
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things too. What have you made of it? Yeah, so I think it's true.
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I don't know if the reasons that reading is dying
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are the reasons that everyone is saying. So everyone tends to ascribe it to TikTok
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and the internet, and that's all true. I do agree with that. I do think
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that TikTok and Instagram and all of these things are shrinking our
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attention spans. But I also think that there's an aspect of
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it that has to do with the way that literature is being taught, especially in
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our classrooms. Because for me, I developed
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my love of literature when I was a kid. And I don't know if,
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you know, I had come to literature as an adult, if I
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would have had the same experience of being profoundly moved by
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it. Because I think so many of these stories moved me
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because I was young, because I was— they were in many
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ways my first experience of experiencing the world
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beyond who I was and, you know, my small school and my
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hometown. And these literary works, I think, had a profound effect on me precisely
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because I had discovered them at such a young age.
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I'm very fortunate to have been born into a family that values
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literature. My grandmother is the most well-read
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woman I know on the planet. I think she's read more books than anyone
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I've ever met, including all of my English professors at Columbia.
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And we would read so many books together as a kid. She would have me
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memorize Russian poems when I was 3 years old. So I was very fortunate to
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have been introduced to literature in my family. But not
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everyone is fortunate, and I know a lot of very avid readers who discover literature
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through, you know, the classroom or even through, you know,
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something that someone has just told them and it wasn't maybe presented
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to them as positively in their families. So I think in many ways,
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the education system should be responsible for producing
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or for promoting literature in the humanistic light,
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right? And I like to talk about this idea of humanistic inquiry is this idea
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that literature tells us something about what it means to be human.
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We have completely lost that aspect of literature
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pedagogy in our schools. We've lost this idea of objective
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morality, objective truth. So instead, literature is being presented in conjunction
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with these sorts of ideologies. We're made to read Shakespeare
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through a feminist lens, or we're reading, let's say
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we're reading E.M. Forster through a Marxist lens, right?
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So there are all these sorts of ways that we're
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teaching literature, and that is starting to seep into the high
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school classroom. And high school is, I think, when a lot
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of people start to develop an interest in literature at the age of kind of
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14, 15, when they're ready to start tackling these more
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mature literary works. And because they're being presented these works
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of literature as, this is Marxist text, this is an example
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of racism, I think that kills off the interest in a lot of people.
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And I think they say, why should I care about this? Because Because to
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the vast majority of people, if you're presenting a work of literature through a Marxist
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lens, that's not going to be relevant to them. Versus if you say that this
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is fundamentally how we as human beings have experienced the
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world around us for centuries, I think that's a lot more interesting to people.
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And unfortunately, we've moved away largely as a society
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from that model and are moving towards this oppression Olympics,
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as it's called, right? And in my sense,
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that is part of why I think we're not reading anymore is just,
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you know, young people are looking at this and they don't understand why they
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should care. Right. There's the valorization of victimhood. I think
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pedagogically there are 2 errors. One is we're cultivating people
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who expect to be entertained all of
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the time. And then on the other hand,
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there's literature and absolutely everything else has
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to be put into the harness of of serving a political
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aim, and that is really tedious. And then if
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you happen to be a member of the villain class, and I'm
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thinking especially of white heterosexual males, and in particular if they're religiously
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devout, my goodness, well, you can't have
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those authors and you can't have those stories, etc., etc. And then it
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seems to me that that movement doesn't answer the question, well,
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why should I bother with this at all? Friends, when we come back, we're going
11:09
to continue our conversation with author and literary critic Lisa Lives.
11:12
We're talking about whether or not can literature be saved. Remember, rallying cry here
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Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeague of the Society of Jesus,
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Mobile, you help fund programs that defend our Catholic faith. My guest
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today is author and literary critic Lisa Liebes. We're asking Whether
13:00
can literature be saved? Lisa, I want to give you a little quote from
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Saint Hilary of Poitiers, an early medieval cleric.
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He writes this: For he is the best student who does not
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read his thoughts into the book, but lets the book reveal its
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own; who draws from the book its own sense and does
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not export his own into the book, nor force upon its words
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a meaning which he has determined was the right one, before he
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opened its pages. You studied literature at Columbia University.
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that's not the way
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that you were taught. That's correct. That is correct. And the
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medievalists were onto something.
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Yes. So, that is maybe
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the opposite of how, you know, we were taught to interpret literature at Columbia.
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So, there's something in literary theory and literary
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criticism called reader response theory,
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and it's a theory developed in the sort
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of late 1960s, early 1970s, and it attacks
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a lot of New Criticism, which is essentially
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close reading. So, you know, originally the way that we were— that we
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ought to read a text is read it closely and use
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what the text says to help us make inferences about the
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world around us. So reader response theory,
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which was pioneered by a literary critic named Stanley Fish,
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he basically said that, well, it doesn't matter
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as much what the text says as much as what the reader feels about
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the text. So the focus is sort of on the audience reaction.
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And the idea was that the value of
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the text lies in its relation to you as an individual.
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And this really picked up a lot of steam in the literary academy again around
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the sort of 1970s and segued into
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a lot of the postmodern thought that was happening around the time.
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And postmodernism basically did away with this idea
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that literature should be a work, or should be interpreted as
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a work of objective morality, that literature ought to teach us something about, you know,
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how to be good citizens or how to live our best lives,
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so to speak. And again, originally, that is how literary
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theory was pioneered. That is how we had always thought
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about literary theory, is this idea that— or just the interpretation
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of literature— is this idea that we ought to learn something about ourselves
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through what the text tells us rather than imposing our existing worldviews
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on the text. So what's happening in the academy today is it's
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almost as if these literary critics and students of literature, they're coming
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in with their preordained ideologies, and they're
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finding texts that sort of match their ideologies rather than allowing the
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text to speak for themselves. And then that creates these sorts
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of literary works of literary criticism that have very little to do with the
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actual work of literature, because the the self is in
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many ways being imposed on the text rather than, you know, the text
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being allowed to speak for itself. Well, as I read your accounts of
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your studies, my understanding, you got an undergraduate and a graduate
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degree and then pulled out of doctoral studies. And one of the things
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that really struck me hard was,
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in a certain sense, a rewriting of both the authors and their
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texts. You know, Shakespeare was really a woman and maybe even Black.
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And Jane Austen is complicit in British
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imperialism and slavery? How did they try to make that
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pitch? So that— the latter claim comes
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from a critic named Edward Said. And he
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has a couple of books, most notably
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his book Culture and Imperialism, where he argues that Mansfield
16:51
Park is a novel that demonstrates Jane Austen's complicity
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in British imperialist expansion. And he hyperfocuses on
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one line where one of the characters has a slave plantation in,
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I believe, Antigua. And he argues from there
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that, oh, well, this means that Mansfield Park is kind
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of organized as an imperial estate, and the entire
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estate at Mansfield Park is the estate that they're at for the duration of
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the novel. The entire estate is organized like a slave plantation,
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and, you know, there are certain masters, and then other
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of the characters are subservient to the masters, and everything is kind of an
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economic exchange. Mansfield Park is a novel
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that is about kind of truth and
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morality in many ways, and about,
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you know, just love and finding your person.
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And like many of Austen's novels, and I think, you know, reading into
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it to that extent, and in the essay, I think it's called Jane
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Austen and Empire, right? Making it about empire is just such
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a stretch. And I think, you know, deviates so
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much from the themes of family,
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And, you know, now if you, if you pull up the Wikipedia page for
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Mansfield Park, the number one thing that comes up is, you know, it's about the
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question of slavery, when really there's only one line in the entire
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novel about slavery. So, you know, the fact is that literary
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critics have just made these novels into
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projects that suit their own caprices rather than,
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you know, objective interpretive works. On the one hand, I think I'd find
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that exhausting, but also disappointing. I mean, based on
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the things I've I've read and watching your videos and so on. I mean,
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it seems to me that, you know, somebody raised you right in that you,
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you came to expect to find truth, beauty, and goodness in literature,
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and not only wanted to savor that, but also teach people
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to find those treasures too. What kind
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of disappointment did you experience when you showed
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up at Columbia and saw that truth, beauty, and goodness were not on the menu?
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Yeah, I mean, I think it was— at first I didn't quite understand what was
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going on. I was 18 years old. Um, I, I didn't have,
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you know, the vocabulary to understand, you know, the history of how we
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had gotten here yet. I did a lot of research during my time at Columbia
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to figure out, you know, what had happened. But at first I think I was
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just very confused because it's— the focus seemed to be in the wrong
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aspects of literature. I had always focused
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on the way that an author crafts a particular sentence
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or the atmosphere of a particular novel, and most importantly,
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what a particular novel has to teach us about ourselves.
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And there was very little conversation about any of that.
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Instead, the conversation was, what does this say about capitalism
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in our society? I had one professor who I was
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a sophomore in 2016, that was when the BLM
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catastrophe was starting up. One of my professors was comparing
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one of the works of literature we read to the Black Lives Matter protests.
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So it was very much taking these classic works of literature and
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putting them into the context of the contemporary world
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and ignoring all of these things that literature had to teach us about
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the world around us. I mean, we read
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Crime and Punishment for one of my introductory English
20:22
classes, and there was really zero talk about redemption.
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And we basically just ignored the entire epilogue where it's
20:30
that big redemption chapter, and we just talked about what Crime and Punishment has to
20:34
say about masculinity. And it's like, okay, well, you can
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read, you can talk about that if you'd like. There's maybe some
20:42
material in there, but if this is your first read of Crime and Punishment,
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especially when you're presenting this work of literature, this work of
20:49
great literature to a bunch of 18-year-olds who are in
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many cases reading great literature for the first time in their lives,
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you don't talk about masculinity. You talk about the bigger overarching themes
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of loneliness and isolation and how that redemptive spirit
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finds its way into your life and in many ways can rescue you.
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And there was zero conversation about any of that.
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And again, to me, I felt that something was off. And I
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spent a lot of research on the history of literary criticism to figure
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out what was going on. But I think it can be very off-putting,
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especially if you're not aware of what had happened.
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So that's a little bit of how I felt back as a kid.
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I want to draw an analogy. I mean, my sister is a
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one-woman civilization. I mean, she paints, she draws, she sculpts,
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she can work in in every medium imaginable. My medium is words,
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and my earliest memory, I'm just fascinated by
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words and how they sound and how language works. And I
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studied a lot of languages, not in any depth, but I love to play with
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words. I love how they sound. I love how they— when I taught rhetoric,
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I insisted that we had to start every class reciting a poem,
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and the students rebelled. And I said, no, no, You have to enjoy how the
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words taste in your mouth. And that will give you
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the delight in speaking poetry, and that will delight
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your hearers. And so, I've been a preacher for 30 years.
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I'm an author myself, nonfiction. But there's a craft
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to language and a delight in words.
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Was any of that given to you in your graduate studies at Columbia? We very
22:35
rarely talked about how authors craft sentences,
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and part of that is, I'm sure that there— I think
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there's been a divide between the study of writing and the
22:47
study of literature, which I think is very unfortunate. Creative writing departments have
22:50
in many ways sort of isolated themselves from the study of literature, and literature
22:55
departments have isolated themselves from the study of writing. To me,
22:58
it's one and the same. I don't think that these
23:02
2 departments ought to be different, and because of that, there's again
23:05
this disconnect between contemporary literature and classic literature
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because no one at this stage who, you know, goes through, let's say, an MFA
23:13
program is reading any sort of literature. But, you know, we never talked
23:17
about the beauty of, you know, we read Paradise Lost,
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we never talked about how Milton, you know, crafts his beautiful poetic
23:25
work. We just talked about, again, these big themes as they related
23:29
to something in contemporary society.
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And I think that's a big
23:37
loss. And when I brought that up, I did bring it up in one of
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my seminars, I said the beauty of Shakespeare is that he's
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able to craft beautiful sentences and beautiful poems.
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I was called a white supremacist for making that observation
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or for saying that Shakespeare is more beautiful than
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many other writers because the idea was that I was elevating the
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English language above all other modes of writing.
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And so So you can't talk about beauty because to insist
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that one work of literature is more beautiful than another is to
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claim that there exists some sort of objective standard of beauty,
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which is again a big faux pas in these people's minds.
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Oh my goodness. No, no. Apparently beauty is the
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love that dare not speak its name. No, God bless you for enduring as far
24:27
as you did. I would have found that exhausting and tedious.
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And I think of my good Jesuit friend, Father Joseph Fessi,
24:35
who takes it as a badge of honor that he has no familiarity with
24:38
popular culture since Oklahoma! was on Broadway.
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I think God has spared me because I've never had much of an inclination
24:46
to read very many contemporary novels,
24:49
and I think I would have given myself a skull fracture
24:53
banging my head against those walls. Friends, when we come back, we're going to continue
24:57
our conversation with author and literary critic Lisa Liebes.
25:00
We're asking the question, can literature be saved?
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Here on the Catholic Current, we engage issues seriously and faithfully,
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Support us at thestationofthecross.com. We're talking
26:52
about whether literature can be saved. My guest today is author
26:56
and literary critic Lisa Libes. Lisa,
26:59
I want to talk about the importance of books,
27:02
not only in one's life, but in one's home. You know, Cicero said,
27:06
a room without books is like a body without a soul, but recently,
27:10
I found a longer quote from Russian author Alexander
27:14
Dugin. Allow me to read it, please. He says, for some reason,
27:17
there are fewer and fewer bookcases and bookshelves in our lives.
27:21
A room without books can only be a kitchen or a laundry room.
27:24
Books are the most important residents in our homes.
27:28
It's by bookshelves that you get a 3-dimensional portrait of
27:32
the dweller. If there's no portrait, there's no dweller, only an
27:36
empty space. It doesn't matter if it has posts, money, success, or nothing of
27:39
the sort. So says Alexander Dugin. My claim is
27:44
that having books in your home is essential.
27:48
It's self-revelatory, and it's indispensable if you're raising
27:52
children. What are your thoughts on that, please? Yeah, absolutely.
27:55
So, you know, I was, I was raised with very many books in my household,
28:00
and I think it definitely made me into the person I was today.
28:05
You know, when I was young, my, my My family comes from the Soviet Union,
28:08
and my mother had always insisted that
28:12
I learn to read Russian. And it was something that I had
28:15
protested against because it was much more difficult. There were more letters,
28:19
the alphabet was different. But I am very,
28:23
very grateful that she forced me to sit down and we read books almost
28:26
every single day of my life. You know, my grandmother had
28:30
me memorize a lot of Russian poems when I was a kid, and I'm very,
28:33
very fortunate to have access to the the great Russian works of literature
28:37
in their original today because, you know, my parents were so insistent about
28:42
books and reading in my childhood. And yeah,
28:45
I think it's shaped me in so many different ways.
28:49
You know, I think it's important to, again, discover books when you're young because
28:53
I think they have a different effect on you as a child than
28:57
if you read them as an adult. And, you know, obviously both are equally as
29:01
valid, but I think if you introduce books into a
29:04
child's life and a child's home, it really has a radical
29:08
impact on their intellectual development. When I was teaching,
29:12
I didn't have in-class exams because I think that could just be a challenge to
29:16
short-term memory. You had to write essays, and you'd
29:20
have 2 weeks to write a 3 to 5 page essay, and you
29:24
can come and see me to review your essay as often as you want.
29:26
And at least initially, almost no one took me up on that. They learned their
29:29
lesson. But I found as a teacher that within
29:33
the first paragraph, I could tell whether
29:37
or not the student had a serious habit of
29:41
reading. And those who didn't,
29:45
their writing was just a series of unrelated
29:50
assertions. There was no
29:54
charm. There was no insight. There was certainly no
29:59
craft What happens to you interiorly
30:03
when you begin to make a habit of reading good writing?
30:07
Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the reasons
30:11
that I am so adamant about reading great literature as opposed
30:15
to a lot of the contemporary slop that's coming out today, if I may
30:19
so call it, is because reading great literature eventually
30:23
cultivates your own internal voice, right? So when,
30:27
when you write, I like to think of your own writing voice as the
30:31
conglomerate of all the great books you've read or all the writing that you've read
30:35
in your life. When I'm reading a great work of literature and
30:38
then I sit down to write my own literature, as I
30:42
do fairly often, I almost feel that author
30:46
spirit sort of hanging around in my brain in some way.
30:49
So I think that you almost start to develop your own inner
30:53
voice. And it, again, it becomes a conglomerate of
30:56
all the great books that you've read because you—
31:00
it's sort of like learning a language, right? When you're learning a new language,
31:04
you need to read a lot in the language, you need to speak a lot
31:06
in the language, it eventually becomes second nature. And I think that in many ways,
31:10
you know, learning to write well is like learning a new language. It's like,
31:14
how do we put together sentences? How do we think of,
31:18
you know, more abstract ideas? Um, I think,
31:21
you know, I do work with students actually at my day job, and I
31:25
teach them how to write college essays. And most of my students,
31:29
you know, they, they really have trouble developing their
31:33
ideas from point A to point B. They almost don't understand how to
31:38
explain certain thoughts, and they don't understand
31:41
how to, you know, back up their ideas with evidence. They don't understand how to,
31:45
you know, transition from one thought to another. And to me, that's something
31:49
that I never learned. I never, you know, sat in a class where
31:52
I was taught, you know, this is how you transition from one paragraph to another.
31:55
It's something that I just picked up naturally from reading. And I think it's,
31:59
it's, again, it's analogous to learning a language, the immersion method of
32:03
learning a language rather than learning all the grammar. You just kind of immerse yourself
32:07
in that world and eventually your, your writing voice shines. Well, you know, Aristotle said
32:10
in the Nicomachean Ethics that the virtuous man shows
32:14
us what's possible in human behavior, that,
32:17
oh, so that's what it's— that's what it looks like to be good. That man
32:20
over there, that's what justice looks like. Well, by analogy, isn't it
32:25
the case that when you read good writing, you say, oh gosh, I didn't know
32:29
language could do that. I didn't know that you could tell
32:33
a story that way, and some sentences
32:37
just stop you in your tracks.
32:40
And then you say, gosh, I wonder if I can do
32:45
that too. Is it fair to say that we're
32:48
robbing young people of that opportunity? Because I know under the
32:53
Obama administration with the Common Core curriculum, one of the critiques of
32:57
education was that students were reading too much literature and
33:01
not enough technical manuals and legislation.
33:05
I was horrified at that thought. I'm wondering what yours
33:08
are. Oh yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, people will say,
33:12
oh, reading literature is useless. What does it have to do with anything?
33:15
And I think reading literature is the reason that I am able to
33:19
think about all other aspects of our world, because reading literature just by
33:23
default teaches you to think critically. And when you see a beautiful
33:27
sentence, when you see a sentence that expresses an idea in maybe an
33:31
out-of-the-box manner, it compels you to think about the
33:34
world in a way that you wouldn't have expected from a more straightforward
33:38
piece of writing. And the thing with any sort of more technical piece of writing,
33:42
or maybe a newspaper article, is it is straightforward. It's there to
33:46
deliver information. Literature is not there to deliver
33:49
information. It's there to have us cultivate
33:53
a sort of creative imagination. Right, or a moral imagination,
33:56
as you've mentioned. And I think that's, again,
34:00
my main beef with contemporary literature today is it delivers information.
34:04
It's written for people who want to be informed rather than transformed,
34:09
right? So I think that's the
34:13
problem, is that we're increasingly teaching people that
34:17
writing is just a method of delivering information. And that's
34:21
one of the the, you know, one of the purposes of writing, but that's not
34:24
the sole purpose. It's not just to deliver information. It helps
34:28
us expand our mind. It helps us think critically about the world. And that's
34:32
the danger with creating too many simplistic and straightforward sentences,
34:36
is that we're not compelled to think about anything beyond,
34:40
you know, our own worlds. I, I want to— you had an essay
34:44
published August 31st on your Substack about how to write
34:48
a novel, and you were talking about the contemporary trend of short,
34:52
simplistic sentences, not asking people to concentrate
34:56
too much, I think, as one editor had suggested. And there, you had
35:00
a line in the essay, which is ending up in my book of commonplace quotes,
35:04
by the way. And so the result is a novel that is
35:08
easy to consume, but difficult to contemplate. I think that's
35:12
a delicious sentence. Can you unpack that for us, please? Yeah, so I think I'll
35:16
give an example of a post I made. Today.
35:20
There's this book that won the Booker Prize last
35:24
year, which is a very prestigious literary award, and I'll read you part of
35:28
the first chapter just to illustrate what I mean here. So the
35:32
chapter goes, what's your name again? The girl asks him. He tells
35:35
her. She tells him her name. You all right? She says.
35:39
Yes, he says. They talk for a few minutes. She talks anyway.
35:43
There are also long silences. So yeah, I don't
35:47
want to continue No, no, this sounds like coffee shop journal
35:50
entries, you know. That's, that's right. And it's not,
35:53
you know, literature I think is beautiful, it's lyrical, it's profound,
35:57
and it, it's meant to sound musical, I think, when, when read out loud.
36:00
And every, every sentence should tell us something about the human condition.
36:04
And what you have with this sort of writing is it's not only choppy but
36:08
also fundamentally soulless, I would say. It's stripped
36:12
of all emotion. And when I read literature, I want to learn
36:16
something about myself and I want to read about real human interactions.
36:19
And to me, this almost feels like robots cosplaying
36:23
as human beings in some way or another. And I
36:27
think that's part of why
36:31
people don't read anymore is that they open these books and they're just not moved
36:34
by them. To me, the mark of a great work of literature
36:38
is I I'm transformed, I'm moved in some way.
36:41
A lot of great literature brings me to tears. Um,
36:45
sure. I'm currently rereading The Brothers Karamazov, which is
36:49
probably my favorite book of all time. And,
36:52
um, I'm just at the part where Father Zossima has passed away.
36:56
Um, and the 3 chapters that lead up to his
36:59
death are some of the 3 most profound chapters written in the
37:03
history of literature, I would say. And every time I read them, I'm literally to
37:07
tears because they— and I've read them many, many times— they
37:11
tell us something about who we are. And because Father Zosima
37:16
delivers them so effectively, by the time he dies, I always cry, even though I
37:19
know he's going to die at the end of those chapters. And I think that
37:23
I don't have that same effect when I read contemporary
37:27
literature. And I think that's why,
37:31
you know, it's it's so unfortunate that we've
37:35
reached this stage in our society where we just have
37:39
he said, she said, and then that's the culmination
37:43
of great literature and these books are winning awards. I think there's deeply wrong with
37:47
the society that starts to dole out literary awards to works
37:53
that in many cases produce sentences that any second grader
37:56
could have written. I also think there's a question of theme, and I
38:00
draw an analogy. I lived in London for a few years, and I spent a
38:04
day in the Tate Gallery in London, and there's the new wing and the old
38:07
wing. And in the old wing, you had, you know, the old
38:11
masters, and among other things, they were familiar with Scripture,
38:15
and they were familiar with Greco-Roman mythology,
38:19
and that became the basis of some very
38:23
great art, you know, really great themes taken from a variety of
38:27
perspectives working in different media, etc. And then
38:31
you go over to the other side and, you know, there's a railroad
38:34
tie with a nail in it or, you know, the notorious, you know,
38:37
banana duct taped to the wall. And I said,
38:40
these are— this is the work of people who have
38:44
never had their shallows deepened at all.
38:48
I don't think you can be inspired or experience
38:53
inspiration and longing and aspiration and hope and
38:57
tragedy and then just take a banana and tape
39:02
it to, uh, to a wall. And I think the same can be said for
39:06
music as well. I know in one of your videos somebody, I think, asked you
39:09
about, uh, rap music. My take on it, I borrow from George
39:13
Will, who described it as pathetic verbal slouching.
39:17
Uh, and my rule of thumb with artwork is that if I can do
39:20
it, you know, which is just throwing paint against the wall, then it's not
39:24
good art. So I think part of the tragedy of the culture we're
39:28
living in now, especially for our young people, we're giving them
39:32
so little to aspire to.
39:36
There's not an opportunity for heroism. There's not cautionary
39:39
tales regarding depravity. It just
39:43
seems to be the merest form of entertainment,
39:47
a way of killing time, just kind of tick-tock literature,
39:51
if you will, on the page. Friends, we come back, want to continue our
39:55
conversation with author and literary critic Lisa Liebes. We're talking about
39:59
whether literature can be saved. After the broadcast today,
40:03
go to thestationofthecross.com, get our resources list,
40:05
download our audios, podcasts, be part of the conversation.
40:09
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40:14
The channel is The Catholic Current, and you can influence the conversation.
40:18
You can contact us at thestationofthecross.com/askfather.
40:24
You know, for those of you who are teachers, those of your students, and especially
40:27
if, if you're parents, what are your thoughts about literature
40:32
as a way of forming souls, of forming young minds and hearts? We want
40:36
to hear from you. That's thestationofthecross.com/askfather. Ask Father.
40:40
Back in just 2 minutes. Please do stay with us.
41:01
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41:05
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41:12
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41:20
Praise be Jesus Christ. This is Father Robert McTeigue of the Society of Jesus,
41:23
your daily host for The Catholic Current, where we bring Christ to the world and
41:27
the world to Christ. You're listening to us from the Station of the Cross studios,
41:29
your local radio station, the iCatholic Radio mobile app.
41:32
We proclaim the fullness of truth with clarity and charity.
41:36
My guest today is Lisa Levesque. She is an author and literary critic. We're talking
41:40
about, can literature be saved? Lisa, I, I know that I had a very good
41:44
education. I was in school a long time. I told my students I was in
41:48
school until 23rd grade, but I also know that there were gaps
41:52
in my education that includes literature and poetry.
41:56
I went through your list of 100 must-read novels And
42:00
I will admit shamefacedly that I've only read 14 of them.
42:03
And some people might say, hey, Lisa, hey, Father, you convinced us we've
42:08
got to discover or rediscover literature, need a companion,
42:11
a guide, and a map. Uh, so how
42:16
about you? What would— you know, if you were going to guide people through,
42:19
how would your work begin to help them? Yeah, absolutely. So, um, you know,
42:23
I, I write a Substack called Pens and Poison where I talk about
42:26
great literature and also the sort of current state of our
42:30
culture. And why our literature no longer
42:34
aspires to the standards that we've held literature up
42:38
to for many centuries in our society.
42:41
So on Pens and Poison, I write about,
42:44
I have that list that you mentioned, the definitive 100 classic
42:49
novels to read before you die. I do a lot of writing about
42:52
Russian literature as well. I think one of my most
42:55
popular essays is my guide to Dostoevsky.
42:59
Translations. So I have this piece where I talk about which
43:03
translation to read if you'd like to read Dostoevsky. And I think Dostoevsky
43:07
is my favorite author of all time, so if you're interested in getting
43:11
to know Dostoevsky a little bit, I do have many articles about him.
43:14
I have, you know, especially I like to look at the
43:18
ways in which the original Russian
43:22
language, or looking at aspects of the Russian language, can enhance your
43:25
reading of Dostoevsky, even if you are reading him in English.
43:29
I also do have some personal essays where I
43:33
discuss some of my personal experiences at Columbia,
43:37
where I talk about some of the ills that are
43:41
happening on college campuses today,
43:44
especially in university English departments. And I talk about
43:48
why great literature should be an appeal to morality,
43:52
why we should read great literature,
43:55
and what sort of writing writing we should aspire to today as,
43:59
you know, the writers who will carry the torch of the tradition
44:03
of great literature. You know, unfortunately, I think, again, there's been a disconnect between
44:07
the great literary tradition of the West and what is being produced
44:11
today in our contemporary literature, as it's
44:15
called. But a lot of my work aims to, you know, restore literature
44:18
back to the tradition of humanism and to,
44:23
you know, hopefully inspire authors of today to read
44:27
a lot of great literature in order to produce literature of their own. You know,
44:31
I've described myself often as a recovering academic.
44:35
I spent most of my adult life on university campuses,
44:38
first as a student and later as a professor.
44:41
I have a love for learning, for higher learning.
44:46
The classroom is almost a sacred space for me.
44:49
It breaks my heart because it seems a lot of higher education Um,
44:53
I'll just say it's fallen from lofty heights.
44:56
I'll leave it up there because otherwise I'll get up on my soapbox. I understand
45:01
you have a, um, a business called Invictus which guides
45:05
young people in applying to colleges. Did I read that correctly?
45:09
Could you tell us about that, please? Right, that's right. Yeah, I also do college
45:12
counseling. Um, that's my, that's my day job that pays the bills.
45:16
Um, but, okay, you know, as with anything I do, I,
45:19
I like to put a little bit of a literary spin on it. So,
45:22
you know, the, the company was named after after the great
45:25
poem by William Ernest Henley, Invictus.
45:29
And one of the most famous lines is, I am the master of my
45:32
fate. I am the captain of my soul. So I think we really started the
45:36
company with that in mind, that, you know, young people can really be the
45:40
masters of their own fate. They can take fate into their own hands, and they
45:43
can, you know, forge their own futures in the way that they want to.
45:47
And part of what I believe helps you forge your future is learning
45:51
how to write very well. So we teach young people how to write.
45:55
We, um, you know, work with college essays, we work with the college admission process.
45:59
I'm very much immersed in this education world, which is part of
46:03
why I complain about it a lot, because it does mean a lot to me.
46:05
And I think that, yeah, education, you know, it, it gave me
46:10
all of the things, all the great things that, you know, I, I love about
46:14
myself. It gave me the, the intellectual foundation to be able to appreciate
46:18
the great works of literature. And I see that there been a clear decline in
46:22
terms of, you know, educational standards. So part of what we do at Invictus is
46:26
we try to, you know, bring some of that back and to teach students to
46:30
love writing again. I may ask a question about college applications
46:34
and, and so on. I'm someone who doesn't think that college is necessarily
46:37
the indispensable route to pre-professional credentialing. I don't think
46:41
that's what university education is, is for. I remember
46:45
when I was a freshman and this goes all the way
46:49
back to 1979, and I thought it was odd that
46:52
some of the students were taking remedial grammar or reading and writing
46:56
classes and remedial math classes, and I was told, oh,
47:00
it's okay, it's not the— it's just the basketball players,
47:03
you know, and then later as a faculty member, well, you know, it's just the
47:07
scholar-athletes, but then later on it seemed
47:11
to be nearly everybody was going
47:14
into debt to go to a university so they could
47:18
do high school properly this time. Do you have anything
47:22
to say about preparation for college and who's ready and who's
47:26
not? And, you know, what should you do first? What kind of guidance do you
47:30
give there? Yeah, I mean, I think it's our high school system,
47:33
unfortunately, has gotten to the point where so many students are coming
47:38
into college, they're no longer prepared. And, you know, I'm not talking about
47:43
random schools in the middle of nowhere. In many cases, these are elite universities of
47:47
America, or what were once elite universities. I mean,
47:51
there's been a lot of chatter about the University
47:54
of California, Berkeley, UC Berkeley, where students are
47:58
coming in not knowing basic math. And this is, again, not some random university
48:01
in the middle of nowhere. It's Berkeley, right? Which is supposed
48:06
to be one of the most prestigious institutions for the study of science and
48:09
mathematics, and specifically engineering as well.
48:13
So the fact that students are coming in, they can't do basic math, is,
48:16
is alarming. And part of what's happening is that
48:20
the, the sort of entrance exams that students
48:24
need to take to get into these schools are becoming dumber and dumber every
48:27
year. And the reason that they're becoming dumber is that that's how these 2 exams,
48:31
the SAT and the ACT, compete with one another. So the
48:35
SAT will become easier, and then the ACT will make their exam
48:39
easier so that more students register for the ACT, and then the SAT will become
48:43
easier easier to compel more students to register for the SAT. And it's this continual,
48:49
I guess, push and pull between the two of them.
48:52
And eventually you can get a very high score on these exams.
48:55
You can go to a relatively easy high school. You know, there's a lot of
48:58
grade inflation at a lot of these high schools, so you can do well on
49:01
paper academically and get into a really, really great school,
49:04
but not have that much in your brain. And I think part of
49:08
it is just we've, we've lowered academic standards because there's, you know, so much talk
49:12
of equity and all of this. But, you know, to me, again, if you want
49:15
to bring up equity, it should be pulling everyone up to a certain
49:19
standard rather than bringing everyone down. And I think that's kind of the,
49:23
you know, the most unfortunate aspect of our education is that we've brought
49:28
everyone down to a base level rather than attempting to pull
49:32
everyone up to a certain intellectual standard. Well, you know, one of
49:36
my favorite authors is Josef Pieper, and he talks about the virtue of magnanimity,
49:40
the orientation of the soul towards greatness,
49:44
and the readiness to do what's necessary to achieve that greatness.
49:49
Lisa Leibas, thank you for a fascinating conversation. God bless your
49:53
very good work, and I do hope you can join us again before long.
49:56
All right, well, thank you so much for having me. I'm Jesuit Father Robert McTaggart,
49:59
your host every day of The Catholic Current. You want to join us tomorrow?
50:02
That's Friday. You know what that means, The Catholic Current. We have another episode
50:06
of Let's Talk About This, and we look at complex issues together. I'm continuing my
50:10
series on novel prophecies. This is going to be part 8. We're going to
50:13
be reading Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here,
50:17
a book written in 1935 that I think says a lot
50:21
to us today. After the broadcast today, go to thestationofthecross.com,
50:25
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50:42
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50:46
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Go in peace, and please do pray for
50:49
me, for I am a sinner.