A few months ago I read an excerpt of Wright’s Awake in the Nightland and it delivered the creep factor of Kubrick’s 2001 with a hint of Lovecraft’s pantheon in its first pages. I don’t know much about Wright but as an ex-atheist, current Christian, he expresses irritation with spiritually didactic literature in a Castalia House interview:
Now that I am in the other camp of the endless war between light and darkness, I confess I am still nonplussed and unamused by preaching disguised as entertainment, whether it supports my side or not. The idea of ‘Christian entertainment’ is a sound one, as long as it is entertaining as well as being Christian. There is an odor of self satisfied smugness and piety which is as repellant as the musk of a skunk clinging to many Christian entries into the literary world, which one never finds in older works, such as Milton or Dante, and never in the works of masters even in so humble as genre as science fiction. I challenge anyone to find anything nakedly and blandly pious or preachy in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers, but there is clearly a spiritual dimension to all their works.
Indeed, although the drive to preach at all times is a symptom of Western spirituality to explain-explain-explain everything instead of allowing mystery to infiltrate a story. I know personally that I come to know certain truths through stories, even the ones that have nothing to do with Christianity—though the “truth apprehension” is not so much head knowledge as it is something deeper. Don’t ask for an explanation because it’s not expressable with language.
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I don’t know very many people who like preachy literature, except the Abeka curriculum creators. They love it. But he’s wrong to claim that one never finds preachiness in older works. There are a lot of classic authors who preach.
I’ll hedge a bit here: When the preaching is of a higher quality than mere entertainment preaching, it sounds to us like something more than preaching. Too much of what we get nowadays is cheap self-help preaching that doesn’t answer much of anything.
I would have to agree with Ed.
I assume he meant a certain kind of novel that comes out of modern evangelical circles and Christian bookstores. They can be very templatey and checklist-oriented, like a bait-and-switch. It leaves the reader feeling a little hoodwinked.
I don’t think he was talking about older novels where the writer had a little more sense, but maybe I was presuming too much of his knowledge of the industry.
The Man Who Was Thursday is a good example of a “good” bait and switch. There’s no mention of God until near the end and it’s rather well done. I wonder if the people of Chesterton’s time thought different of it.
Commoditizing (“templatey”) is the signature of our time in history, and it strikes religion at least as hard as anything else. The difference between one religious entertainer and another is rather slight, whether in the pulpit or in their books. Education (in the US at least) was commoditized beginning roughly this time a century ago, so I’m sure the answer is “yes” — folks viewed things differently in Chesterton’s time.