A Pilgrim in Narnia

I have a book on the way to print. Woo! and hoo! I thought my dominant feeling would be pride when I finally spoke those words. I probably will feel pride when, in the tradition of authors for the last few hundred years, I share the unboxing video on Instagram. Right now, though, I feel fading relief and growing trepidation as the release of The Spiritual Imagination of C.S. Lewis approaches.

The relief part isn’t that surprising. For the last few months, I’ve been designing indexes between emails that contain 72-hour turnaround copy-edit drafts. This is all after years of writing and editing so many times that it is hard to remain amazed at my own brilliance.

The relief is fading as I look forward to sharing my work with everyone, but that brings on growing trepidation about the public release in new and surprising ways.

Surprising because, I mean, I am constantly sharing my work. There are more than 1,350 posts here on A Pilgrim in Narnia—and not all of those are gems of genius. I have enough blogs, articles, tweets, lectures, and other digital content to fill a case file for most inquisitorial squads—whether their political leanings be left or right, deep or wide, near or far. I think and live out loud. I believe and disbelieve in public. Certainly, I must be comfortable with sharing something I have spent years shaping, right?

As it turns out, I am increasingly weary and uneasy. Part of this dis-ease is the criticism creative practitioners face from those who consume what they create—criticism, I might add, of a “product” they usually get for free. I actually don’t just mean the content carpet bombers who leave their trail of moral decay with beauties like this:

“Yeah, so, like, since you are totally wrong, I only watched the first 30 seconds.”

Or the biggest weapon in their arsenal:

“Bro, you dont have a rite to exist!!!”

I am reconciled to the sad existence of these ruffled-feathered folks. I’ve been largely protected from them. In tens of thousands of YouTube comments, Twitter threads, Facebook discussions, Instagram feedback, Discord chats, and blog responses, I have rarely been the victim of Sicarii-styled social media assassinations. When it does pop up, I let the comments stand. In spaces where I curate the discussions (this website, for instance), I send the adverts for sunglasses and magic purple pills to spam. But when the object of their ire is me, I leave comments online that are mean, ignorant, or unanswerable. What is to them a sign of glory is to me and mine their mark of shame.

In the world of books, though, things are happening that I haven’t had to deal with yet: Amazon, Audible, and Goodreads. Here’s an Audible response from a piece in my field that was a 5-star listen for me (and generally well regarded):

Not being a Black American, I don’t use the word “woke” in my speech. I am always trying to awaken, to be awake, to pull myself out of slumber, wipe my bleary eyes, and see things more clearly. But I suspect “woke” is not a compliment here; it is an insult, or at least a descriptor that means something I don’t mean–something I simply couldn’t mean because “woke” isn’t my word.

I seem out of step with the whole comment, a failure to communicate. I think I understand the words. “Robert” uses “risible” well; I know, because I looked up the word. I checked out “Bretton Woods,” but he (presumably “he”?) is not on my Facebook friends list. So, I’m clearly missing something there.

What do we do with a comment like that? What happens when it inevitably hits me? Well, my plan is to ignore it and look breezy and dismissive at parties when people bring it up. Still, despite my nonchalance, I will feel it. I always feel it.

And even better, this trollishness will see me out from multiple vantage points. I will receive “feedback” that ranges from “Risible Woke Garbage from a ‘scholar’ so inane he doesn’t deserve the compliment of midwit” to “another white Christian male adding fresh frilly butter frosting to the stale homophobic and sexist fruitcake that is C.S. Lewis’s work.”

Now I suspect that these two imaginary critics haven’t read the way I pull things together in Act V of the book. I doubt they got further than the book description. I will [pretend to] receive those sorts of things in good humour.

No doubt, I will get challenging reviews from critics and scholars who have taken the time to actually read the book. Although it has been peer-reviewed, beta tested, and rewritten for precision, there will be errors, omissions, weaknesses, unfulfilled promises, prose that clangs, roads badly travelled, and face-smacking blunders. I will probably worry and ache over these critiques as well, but at least I know what ground I am on when they come in.

I can dismiss the carpet bombers and respond with grace to the informed critics, but what do I do with something like this new-to-me kind of review?

This review of Leslie Baynes’ new book, Between Interpretation and Imagination: C.S. Lewis and the Bible, is not by some hack; Jeremy is an intelligent, well-spoken literary critic and scholar. If you read the review, you will see that he (presumably “he”) has read well and left his notes for us to use in helpful ways. While I disagree with Jeremy on some of the ways he describes what Baynes is doing, it is a good example of open scholarship. 4-stars is a pretty good rating for someone who has fundamental methodological problems with the author’s approach.

But what gets me is this first line:

From what I can tell on Bluesky and Twitter, Baynes has a severe case of TDS, and in 2023 she may have used she/her pronouns in official bio information.

First, context suggests to me that TDS isn’t related to a chromosomal deficiency or tax lingo, so I had to look it up. After getting 38 unlikely results, ChatGPT asked me to clarify. I said, “maybe political?”, and this was the result:

This “TDS” assessment puzzles me on a number of levels, but mostly, what does the sitting American President have to do with it? Prof. Baynes does talk about Trumpkin, a feisty and skeptical Narnian dwarf who turns out to be a pretty good egg. Is there a Trumpkin Derangement Syndrome I don’t know about? Do I have Trumpkin Derangement Syndrome? Presumably, “Trump” is a typo. Otherwise, the comment simply isn’t related to the content. It’s just not in the book.

Moreover, the content that Jeremy is most critical of was completed and through peer review long before the 2016 American election cycle. A good portion of the book’s most controversial material concerns whether Lewis read three particular scholars well. Whether or not Dr. Baynes, Lewis, or whoever is a chauvinist or allergic to a certain kind of political leader is irrelevant when the data are there for us to assess.

And then the other comment:

. . . she may have used she/her pronouns in official bio information.

I don’t get it. Should she have used “he/him” pronouns instead? Or is Baynes’ “she/her” choice confirming a binary view of gender, and everyone should be using “they/them” pronouns? Should I say of Dr. Baynes that “Ze needs to change zir pronouns?” Though I feel that sentence lacks poetic elegance, these pronouns might become normal. Pronouns move and change, but I confess, I don’t resonate with our generation’s pronoun obsession.

Whatever the nature of Baynes’ pronominal sin, I am no doubt guilty. I use others’ pronouns and try to get them right. I put pronouns in my bios and sigs (when I remember) because I don’t want you to feel awkward if you use the wrong one. I remember living in Asia, how embarrassed people were when they introduced me as “she.” To presume that everyone who reads “Brenton” thinks “he” is arrogant of me—or, at least, ignorant and provincial. Truly, I wish my students would clarify their pronouns so I don’t look like a jerk in front of the class. I just can’t learn all the names in the world.

As far as I’m concerned, you can use whatever pronouns you want—or you can be like Jeremy and be against the use of pronouns—so long as you read my book. Or, at least, that you buy it. Or have your library buy it.

Besides this personal confusion-based response to the claim of Trumpkin Derangement Syndrome and pronoun use, I want to say two things.

First, “TDS” and “pronoun use” are clearly code words of some kind. A secret handshake. A Speakeasy invitation that is completely unknown to me. The critic is using code because it speaks to some people and not to others. Fair enough: we both pay the same fee to use Goodreads; it’s Jeremy’s space as well as mine. But it leads me to this critical question:

Do Americans know that they are local? Do they know that for most of the world, “the President” is not the person who has a desk in the White House? Or that there are countries in the world with more than one house that is white? When you–for Americans are 3/4 of my readers–say words like “our culture” or “the current trend” or “new modes of” or “what this language means”–when you make a comment about “our place” within society–do you know that you are a citizen of one of many nations? The US is an innovative and spunky, but small and specific, part of history.

And, after all, C.S. Lewis was not American, so why are critics speaking in American code? I suspect it is because American commentators and critics don’t always know that they are local. Their use of codewords (TDS and Bretton Woods) and pronouns (we vs. them)–like their metaphors, memes, and referent points social leaders use–describe folks in the neighbourhood known as the United States of America. It is clan-ties language, band-of-brothers language, the patterns of speech for American gated communities of the mind.

It is an unobtrusive little vice which she shares with nearly all women who have grown up in an intelligent circle united by a clearly defined belief; and it consists in a quite untroubled assumption that the outsiders who do not share this belief are really too stupid and ridiculous. . . . Her [confidence], which she supposes to bedue to Faith, is in reality largely due to the mere colour she has taken from her surroundings. It is not, in fact, very different from the conviction she would have felt at the age of ten
that the kind of fish-knives used in her father’s house were the proper or normal or “real” kind, while those of the neighbouring families were “not real fish-knives” at all.

The Screwtape Letters XXIV

Second, it is time to discuss how Lewis handled this kind of thing. Not just social media sting-and-fade attacks, exactly, but where reviewers and critics try to attack the problem beyond or behind the content.

In my own book, I tackle literary provincialism from a different angle—when we fail to assess, respect, and bridge the gaps of space, time, and culture between us and the things we read. Lewis makes fun of the idea that people don’t always know they are local by comparing them to English tourists who go to foreign places but stay at an English hotel, eating their English breakfasts with fishknives from home and doing their best to make their destination the same as their home. Lewis challenges our expectation that the author’s consciousness, scruples, language, and moral instincts are like our own.

What I didn’t deal with in the book—despite the advice of one wise anonymous peer reader—was the Bulveristic tendency of our age. C.S. Lewis names and diagnoses Bulverism in God in the Dock.

As he has never existed, you may not have heard of Ezekiel Bulver. In his “biography of an imaginary inventor,” Lewis describes how young Ezekiel’s intellectual destiny was sealed when he overheard his parents arguing. His father was certain that two sides of a triangle are together always larger than the third. His mother responded with the tu quoque, “Oh, you say that because you are a man.” Upon this knockdown argument, E. Bulver had an epiphany:

“…there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.” That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century (God in the Dock, 273).

This is “Bulverism,” a crucial move by poor debaters, pop psychologists, Twitter evangelists, ideologues at large, and new-generation politicians. The Bulveristic move is used to ignore the key steps of an argument and strike at the “real” issue: what sorts of my opponent’s social moments, institutional credentials, cultural backgrounds, political leanings, or psychological factors make me certain the other person must be wrong? “Bulverism” as a phrase never stuck, though it might be the only one of Lewis’ made-up words to have its own Wikipedia entry, perhaps because it illustrates certain kinds of logical fallacies.

Despite its slow fade from the cultural word-hoard, Lewis was clearly prophetic on this point. We live in a Bulveristic moment of history, confirmed almost every time you hear phrases like “left-wing radical,” “extremist,” “woke,” “elite,” “fascist,” “white male,” or “alt-” anything (other than alt-country).

Of course, I am probably just saying this because I’m a man—and I know I’m a man because I use he/him pronouns in my email signature.

The “woke garbage” reviewer I talked about above is committed to Bulverism. You just say that because you are this kind of person or in a certain kind of movement—or even because you are for or against this person or movement. Of course, that’s what you believe—look how you were raised. You just say that because you are a dead white man, an Australian, a Muslim, or left-handed. You just say that because you are a fanatical bridge player, a bicycle helmet wearer, an Obsidian Duolingo champion, or a reclusive cat lady. You just say that because you are a (wo)man, (pro)trans(phobic), (neo)liberal/conservative, (anti)socialist, yacht(-buying/-burning), (pro/anti)capitalist, (right/left)-wing, (anti)Christian (pro/retro)gressive elitist who subscribes to the New York (Post/Times).

I know who you are, whoever you are. You are guilty by association.

Unlike our ambush artist above, Jeremy has written an otherwise fair review with clear examples. In fact, he’s gone further by providing us with resources to read well, including links to longer reviews that tackle particular arguments. He has actually read the friggin’ book, but there is no indication that our hit-and-run “woke garbage” Audible troll above honestly dealt with the arguments. I suspect that Jeremy has views about schools of biblical scholarship that would be worth going for a beer to talk about because, in my mind, they need some nuance. But he has read the book.

What happens when he reads my book? I used to worry that people wouldn’t like it, or that I’ll be faced with disagreement. When I started writing this book, I was thinking about people who would dismiss me because C.S. Lewis is just a fantasy writer or a children’s author, just a hack pop theologian hyping to a withering American evangelicalism with his Disney-ready content. In the university context, I thought I would face dismissiveness for writing about religious studies and spirituality—shrinking disciplines in our world of higher education.

Now, though, I’m worried about Ezekiel Bulver and his ilk. I don’t know the secret handshakes of the other side. I don’t know the codes. I wasn’t even writing the book with a side in mind. I just believed that Lewis could embiggen our spiritual imaginations (to rewrite Jebediah Springfield’s aptly inept phrase). I challenge many social and moral points of view in the book, but it is based on my belief that the problem isn’t “them over there,” but the way we imagine “them over there.” Lewis wrote his most biting satire, The Screwtape Letters, by searching his own heart, not by scanning Instagram comments. One of the poisonous gases to our spiritual imagination is that we think in us vs. them terms. Whatever I say, I know that us vs. them thinkers will “know” what my book says from scanning the Index, analyzing my Netflix history, hunting through the garbage like a pack of hounds, or reading the details of my social media signature.

Perhaps I should not worry so much. Jeremy will read well, no doubt. I would be flattered if he took the book seriously at all. If the Baynes review is typical of his scholarship, he is the most generous representative of a Bulveristic mindset. And maybe he is right that we should rethink our pronoun usage. It could be that there is Trumpkin Derangement Syndrome in me that I haven’t addressed.

Still, I’m throwing my work of a decade into a world that uses language that I cannot read, where I am expected to respond in certain patterns to problems I never knew existed, with expert command of a moment I cannot anticipate.

I feel a bit like Piglet: “It’s a little Anxious,” he said to himself, “to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water.”

But, then again, perhaps I just say this because I’m a [fill in the blank].