The Mountain Goats’ "Sax Rohmer #1" As Tragedy

Around the middle of the last century, T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis found themselves on opposite sides of an important literary debate. Lewis thought that the matter of Modern and post-Modern Literature was inherently flawed. That is to say, he was convinced that no literary device, conceit, or convention was worth it's salt unless it preceded 1517. (This position is analogous to that of many hyper-Traditionalists as regards the Liturgy and Duncan Stroik as regards ecclesiastical architecture.) Eliot on the other hand saw nothing wrong with adopting the style of Modernity, as illustrated by his plays and poetry. Why should these materials, this style be any less capable of incarnating reality than the older? Eliot himself proved his hypothesis to be correct, and it is largely as a result of his literary corpus that I agree with him.

A particular style is relatively arbitrary when it comes to a work of art. That is to say, a particular work of art could utilize any, so long as it appropriately incarnates the vision of the artist. Pop music is no exception. There is no reason at all why it should not be possible to produce art in this style. In an effort to show that it is possible and has, in fact, already been accomplished many times over, here beginneth a new feature here at PopSophia: Tunesday (awful, I know), in which I shall endeavor to feature relatively contemporary music which I believe attains to the level of art.

To start then, a song from The Mountain Goats' album Heretic Pride. The full lyrics are included below the embedded mp3. I suggest reading along as you listen. Here's the direct link to the music video in case the audio doesn't work for some reason.

Fog lifts from the harbor, dawn goes down to day
An agent crests the shadows of the nearby alleyway
Piles of broken bricks, sign posts on the path
Every moment points toward the aftermath
Yeah

Sailors straggle back from their nights out on the town
Hopeless urchins from the city gather round
Spies from imperial China wash in with the tide
Every battle heads to war, surrender on both sides

And I am coming home to you
With my own blood in my mouth
And I am coming to you
If it’s the last thing that I do

Elves move in the tower, wolves howl in the hills
Chalk marks show up on a few high windowsills
And a rabbit gives up somewhere, and a dozen hawks descend
Every moment leads toward its own sad end
Yeah

Ships loosed from their moorings capsize and then they’re gone
Sailors with no captains watch awhile and then move on
And an agent crests the shadows and I head in her direction
 All roads lead toward the same blocked intersection

I am coming home to you
With my own blood in my mouth
And I am coming to you
If it's the last thing that I do

As expounded eloquently by Dustin Hoffman's character in Stranger Than Fiction, if Tragedy were reducible to one fundamental element it would be death. Death as inescapable. “Every moment leads toward its own sad end.” In Tragedy time always seems to be running out. It presses on the protagonist, reminding him there’s only so much left. The Tragic protagonist is pursued relentlessly be the agents of death and damnation. The entire song encapsulates this feeling of impending doom: “Piles of broken bricks, sign posts on the path / Every moment points toward the aftermath.” Enemies are everywhere. “Agents” and “spies” always upon us. Nature itself seems evil and unhinged, turning on itself and the protagonist with ferocity: “Elves move in the tower, wolves howl in the hills / . . . And a rabbit gives up somewhere, and a dozen hawks descend.” Life becomes but a horridly painful struggle. There is no grace, no mercy, no salvation: “Every battle heads to war.” Even more than that, the song speaks to this struggle’s Tragic futility. Ships are engulfed while leaderless sailors watch and do nothing. No one cares about anything or anyone else because there is no meaning. “All roads lead toward the same blocked intersection.” There is no right choice. No matter what I do, I end up gone, swallowed by the Abyss closing in around me. Soon I will be done for. For what? Nothingness awaits me in this life and the next.

Why, then, would anyone still fight? Why not just commit suicide and be done with it if there's no point to anything and it's all going to end up in death anyway. The refrain offers a glimmer of hope—the person waiting at home. To get back to her. It’s going to cost me dearly—blood at least, if not my life. But there’s nothing left to try for except to get back to her. She is Cordelia to my Lear, Antigone to my Oedipus (see Oedipus at Colonus), there to wrest me out of the arms of Nothingness. She is the one agent of grace left in the world, the only chance to make something of life. And death. To give it meaning and purpose. To make the fighting, the suffering, the humiliation that is life count for something. She is the Beloved of Scripture and countless lyrics. She is the Church, the Bride for which Our Lord lived our wretched life and died our wretched death, thereby making it possible for our life and our death to become a participation in the Divine life and death.

Tale As Old As Time

All works of art, no matter what the medium, are at the same time both new and old, both novel and traditional. As William Faulkner put it in his speech upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, one of the artist’s primary tasks is to “[leave] no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed.” All artists ever do is tell a very old story in a new way—for a new time and place. Drawing on their own particular experience of the world, artists retell “the old universal truths” insofar as they have experienced them. To use Michael Oakeshott’s term, artists “re-create” the world and the human condition according to their own experience of it, and insodoing, they give life to and delineate the eternal principles of Truth underlying all that exists.

In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot called this simultaenous perception in the artist of both the universal past and his own particular present the “historical sense.” “The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”

This is the principle which Joseph Campbell picks up on in his work in comparative my-thology. All myths, all great stories are really just different cultures’ takes on the same fundamental ideas and principles. All stories have their foundation in the same basic human experiences, thoughts, and desires. More than that, they have their foundation in the same truths of the world in which we live. That is what artists do, tell very old stories with new characters and new imagery based on their own personal experience of the world. That is what they must do, for art re-creates the world, and the truth in the world never changes, it merely takes on new shapes and faces.

Take for instance one of Campbell’s own favorite myths—the heroic journey. All heroes follow the same simple pattern: Battle, Journey, Homecoming. Though the pattern expresses itself differently across different times and cultures, nevertheless the pattern remains the same. Let’s look at a few specific examples:

Odysseus cleansing his house of the suitors.

Odysseus left his home, wife Penelope, and son Telemachus in Ithaca for ten years to fight in the Trojan War. After his victory, he had to travel another ten years in order to reach home. The point of this journey was that the hero should learn how to leave the Battle behind and prepare the way for a life of peace. Upon returning home, Odysseus finds his house overrun with potential usurpers. He applies the things he learned on his journey to the cleansing of his house, setting it in order once and for all.

In The Divine Comedy, Dante must fight his way through Hell, literally. He must then journey up Mount Purgatory, being purified more and more along the way, allowing himself to be prepared for his eventual homecoming in Paradise, in which he is granted the vision of God himself.

Christ our Savior came down from Heaven to do Battle against Sin by dying on the cross, even to the point of descending into Hell. Like Odysseus, Christ waits in order that the victory he won may be perfectly applied to his Body the Church through his heroic patronage, until the time is right for him to return and set his house in order once and for all.

Like every element of art and literature, this heroic pattern contains inherant within it implications and meanings beyond a simple tale being told. This is not to say that the any work of art proposes to send an explicit message. If that were the case it would be mere propaganda. That being said, by virtue of the truth that lies in its characters and events, it can be more than just characters and events. These characters and events, insofar as they are representative of larger truths and realities, are able to signify them, stand for them, personify and incarnate them.

In this case of the heroic journey, we can draw an analogy to the general experience of Mankind. All men must fight their own Battle for the principles of Truth, Jusice, and Honor. All men must endeavor on the Journey to bring the victory home, work to restore order to their sphere of influence. And it is the Homecoming, the setting into Order of our household for which we fight, and for which we hope. By extension from this analogy, we are all called to be heroes, in our own specific times and places—we are all called to live a heroic life, especially in those mundane things which occupy everyday existence. We must fight for Truth, Justice, and Beauty, sacrifice our lives to the principles which are greater than us, and the people whom we love. More than just being true for us men, however, we have seen how this heroic journey is true universally and eternally by virtue of the Christ having lived it out himself.

It turns out, then, that his is the Truth that poets, painters, composers, and authors have been recreating over and over again throughout history, bringing it to us in new ways, for new times and new peoples. Insofar as any character (fictional or real) is heroic, then, he is Christ-like, and the title of an old film about his life seems all the more apt—The Greatest Story Ever Told.