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I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is. That is when I became very interested in magic.

— Norm Macdonald

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Nate, regarding your latest article,

I’m sorry to hear you extol the virtues of Tarantino, but we are still friends (and I, out of my profound humility, forgive you), and otherwise, well said. I should say, it seems like the logical necessity of sharing your own movie preferences and enjoyment of certain postmodern works speaks to the very personally expressive nature of the postmodern atmosphere. Maybe that is, to your point, what has the power to make it compelling, that a postmodern author has the power to make an author of every reader — or at least to make every reader feel like he’s the author. Maybe that’s what makes film such a poignant example of where this effect shines, as it mimics reality far more closely and, dare I say, scientifically than literature does, so to digest a film is not so unlike telling a story of your own experience. Films are necessarily experienced visually and sequentially, unlike the written word. As I’ve noted before, films also have a very mysterious kinship with dreams, which can make dissecting them more of a Freudian process. 

Your sympathies with Freud make a bit more sense now, as I would consider Freud a sort of postmodern precursor, a man (not unlike yourself) with a dash of postmodernism, though his dose was taken from its nascency and yours from, as you’ve noted, what may be its deathbed. We are at least as much products of our time as we are its producers. His psychoanalysis constitutes what is still a search for narrative, albeit in the unusual place of the subconscious, revealing the seeds of skepticism and value on the subjective experience, viewed strictly through science, of course, that would blossom in postmodernism. It was this unorthodox and often fruitless approach in Freud and the same arbitrariness as it appeared throughout the realm of modernist scientific enterprise that led to the profound disillusionment with narrative that characterizes postmodernism.

I think also of Jorge Luis Borges, especially his Library of Babel. As a newly minted Wikipedia expert on the subject of surrealism, I know that it is also considered a precursor to postmodernism by more than just myself. (I can sympathize with your unanticipated affection for postmodernism insofar as I am afflicted with a similar soft spot for surrealism.) The quintessential surrealist work of art, The Treachery of Images or Ceci n’est pas une pipe, encapsulates the movement’s continuation of the search for meaning within a representational paradigm — so, not quite postmodern — yet characterizes that search with a certain skepticism of the expected, the rational, and the conventional very reminiscent of the postmodern. It depicts a pipe realistically, but self-awarely acknowledges that it is not itself a pipe, but a depiction of one. It challenges the viewer to consider why he sees a pipe rather than a picture, to examine the mechanism by which he so quickly and instinctually draws a narrative meaning from the work. 

Borges’ Library of Babel is much the same, introducing skepticism to a modernist landscape that had become so sure of itself and its powers of rationality. The library represents the cosmos, brimming with information. Unlike a stricter modernist, though, Borges does not see that information as inherently or obviously unified in any kind of narrative. Sure, the library itself unifies its collection, and the rules Borges details confine the format and structure of the books within, but there is nothing discernible to the “patrons,” who are more like captives, from the books themselves to aid at all in informing their actions within the library or their relationship to it. The library is brimming with information, and the vast majority of it is indecipherable and useless. As Jordan B. Peterson has put it, there is simply too much information in the world to orient action. Pure facts of the universe do not in themselves reveal their value to the observer.

Herein lies the attraction and perhaps the strength of postmodernism. If modernism venerated “pure reason,” then postmodernism to some degree recaptures an acknowledgement of perception, especially through individual bias. Modernism posited that the world was composed of obvious narrative threads discernible through science. Postmodernism understands, at least, that the metanarrative of the cosmos is not something to be discerned with brazen, stoic calculation, but with fear and trembling. This kind of reaction is seen in Kerkegaard’s treatment of Hegel, for instance. But, as you noted, where Kierkegaard appeals to the ancient, postmodernism moves on to the novel at its peril. It should be clear that postmodernism goes too far when it asserts that there does not in fact exist any grand, unifying narrative of the world. 

It is true that many, maybe most of the narratives we perceive depend for their existence upon an audience. Postmodernism, though, since it is not anti- or pre-modern, inevitably comes with some of the strings of modernism attached. Science in the postmodern world seeks to destroy narrative, to explain it into oblivion, to reveal the closest thing it can to an ultimate truth, that the universe and everything in it is just atoms and energy and stuff, swirling around in a chaotic, arbitrary cosmic soup. Therefore, any narrative that can be seen in it is illusory, a result of the same materialist soup-swirling occurring in the brain. My favorite objection to this kind of nihilism, whether or not it places any merit at all on the lived experiences of subjective, isolated, neurological narratives of individuals, is that if narrative exists only in the mind, why does it exist at all? Why is human cognition adapted to story? The obvious answer from a materialist perspective is that it offers survival utility. The better question that follows: why does this work? Why does seeing the world through story help us survive?

The answer is that stories are real. The human brain sees a hammer as a hammer and not as a clump of atoms or a whirlpool of quarks because this move infuses the hammer, or rather extracts from the hammer, valence and purpose. A hammer has a use, whereas a clump of atoms is indiscernible from the rest of its surroundings, from the self, from the cosmos. When a hammer is seen as a real object, discerned from everything that it isn’t, it can be used to a desired and intended effect because the hammer is real. It isn’t just a clump of atoms, it has relevance that exists independent of its recognition. The point of this metaphor is that we see the world through stories because it is actually made of stories. This fact itself does not depend upon an audience. If a tree falls in the forest, it does make a sound. No ear was present to hear the first divine pronouncement, “Let there be light,” and yet the declaration was true and there is light even to this day. A picture of a pipe is a pipe because pipes are real.

Modernism was wrong in its supposition that every human narrative is capable by the power of science and rationality of perfectly reflecting the true metanarrative of the cosmos, but postmodernism’s rejection of metanarrative as a reaction is misplaced. Metanarrative is real yet obscure — and as you by now no doubt know, I think that “real but obscure” pretty well describes the whole human experience. Sorry, modernists, we get the plot wrong sometimes. Science is not the plot. Sorry, postmodernists, this doesn’t make the search for it meaningless. There is still a plot. Postmodernism is right to react, but its reaction is wrong. It is too beholden to the paradigm of modernism to be free from “pure reason,” and its attempt to recapture something resembling faith through the pursuit of narrative is doomed by its denial of external transcendence. Like modernism, at its extreme, postmodernism still worships the mind and the self.

Thinking again of books and movies, my wife and I recently watched the Jimmy Stewart film adaptation of Harvey. I highly recommend it, as it has immediately become a new favorite of mine. I think its quality is attested to by the fact that its relevance has seemingly appreciated since 1950. It’s about a man who is thought insane because he is followed by a “pooka,” an invisible giant rabbit named Harvey, and I think it’s a movie about re-enchanting a world disenchanted by modernity. Before Elwood P. Dowd, the aforementioned lunatic, can be injected with a serum (given a very modern number designation by a very Freudian quack) that will cure his delusion forever, a cab driver who frequently brings patients for that same serum laments its effects to Dowd’s troubled sister, Veta. He enjoys the company of the patients he taxis to the sanitarium, saying they watch birds and sunsets together even when there are no birds or sunsets to see, but after the serum, they become normal people, “and you know what stinkers they are.”

Sure, a postmodernist could misread it as being about the supposed truth of Elwood P. Dowd’s “lived experience,” about the transcendence of his internal, subjective consciousness over the external world, but as Elwood P. Dowd says, a pooka is nothing new, but “something very old.” No wonder, as he explains, a pooka can “stop clocks.” Dowd is a man out of time, a relic of antiquity strolling the streets of modernity. The pooka even makes himself known to the head of the sanitarium, opening his eyes to a whole invisible realm that sheds light on his own conscious experience — even when the sanitarium itself, with all its serums and encyclopaedias and psychology, fails to transform anyone in the story, succeeding only in deepening the banal misery it seeks to cure. The sanitarium is like the unwittingly very premodern words of Elwood’s sister, like a photograph, “a mechanical thing” that “shows only the reality” rather than a painting which “shows not only the reality but the dream behind it.” Psychoanalysis fails to trump the ancient wisdom of an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit.

Maybe that’s because pookas are real. Veta learns in the end that the spirit following her brother is no dream, but a reality deeper than “only the reality.” Yes, I’m positive there is a very fascinating archaeo-anthropo-paleo-socio-logical explanation for where pookas come from that some would use as evidence that they exist only in the mind. But maybe the people who gave things like pookas and faeries and will-o-the-wisps their names weren’t engaging in “science.” They weren’t, as modernity suggests, unenlightened, unevolved morons trying to explain the world like we do only without all the fancy microscopes and telescopes and what-cha-ma-call-o-scopes. They didn’t need those things to see the world for what it is. You don’t need an injection of “formula 977” or some Freudian deconstruction of the past or anything science has to offer to know the Truth. Science is all well and good for what it is, but it amounts to “vanity of vanities,” just like everything, apart from fear of the Lord. Truth is invisible, value is invisible, meaning is invisible, yet they do not exist within our minds only. Science can’t find them, and neither can relativism. What strange luck that God reveals them to us, huh?

Maybe, as Elwood P. Dowd says, it is indeed better to be pleasant than to be smart. We become more like God as He conforms the faithful to His character rather than to His power. Morality is for us closer to the divine than knowledge. That’s why His Spirit makes us saints, not geniuses. God’s Spirit enlightens us in a different kind of knowledge than modernists strove after. He doesn’t give us “Enlightenment” knowledge, but enlivening knowledge of faith, virtue, true religion. But for morality to pertain to divinity, it must be holy, set apart from our own subjectivity, exceeding opinions and “lived experiences.” It isn’t relative, it’s true. The God of Israel does not best the gods of the Caananites because He is just a more powerful option among many, but He is more powerful because He is real and they are not.

Anyone can see a pooka, but you have to put down the science-serum-ology and go outside, encounter mystery, maybe have a drink with a stranger — or rather with a friend waiting to be made. God made us to live. Christ came so that we could know God, but Christ isn’t knowledge, He’s Truth, which is the object of knowledge, and which is the same as Life. If knowledge doesn’t transform a man, doesn’t stir him to obey the Greatest Commandment(s), then he ain’t eating from the Tree of Life, he’s eating from the other one.

But, since you like ambiguous endings, and of all the things I am too big for, I am not too big to admit they are often exciting, permit me to humor you with a question, though I imagine you know there is a right answer. And since you know I like to frame things in regard to obscurity, I’ll say that postmodernism seems to put obscurity at the bottom of all things. But is the seafloor made of darkness, or does darkness merely come between us and the terra firma at the bottom? Is obscurity that which is, ultimately? Or does it merely veil the One that is? I think our shared reaction to ambiguous endings, that is, to search and discern and argue, suggests that we like such endings not because they totally reflect reality, but because they realistically whet our appetites for the reality we know must be underneath. We would not debate their meaning if we didn’t know in our bones that meaning is real under it all, nor would we even tell stories at all.

Die Wahrheit ist untödlich,

Garrett L. White