RESPECTING THE SECOND MASTER PT. 2

 At the end of my previous half-a-review of John Lyden's FILM AS RELIGION, I wrote:

Similarly, in a section devoted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz-- the scholar with whom Lyden most strongly agrees, albeit one I've not yet explored-- Lyden strongly rejects the tendency toward "sociological reductionism" seen in scholars like Malinowski and Levi-Strauss. Lyden follows Geertz in affirming "that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are." The pairing Lyden calls "the ideal and the real" is in essence identical with what I called above "the objective and subjective worlds." Because Lyden is attempting to see ways in which the enactment of tribal myth-rituals mirrors the much later development of cinematic enjoyment, I'm not surprised that he's aligning himself with the model that best supports that analogue-- and at this point in reading the book, I have no reason to oppose that comparison. I'm reasonably certain that, given his nodding acquaintance with Campbell, Lyden will not validate myth-and-religion according to my notion of "epistemological patterns." But I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a view of the subject that I can respect.

I've now finished the 2003 book, and I can appreciate that its author kept true to his objective, rather making contradictory claims, as did the authors to which I compared him earlier. I strongly disagree with his methodology, but I respect that he stuck to his conceptual guns.

As noted earlier, I approve of Lyden's attempt to steer clear of the reefs of reductionism. Though he provides cogent analyses of an assortment of various religious critical attitudes, such as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Otto, Clifford Geertz is his main guide, though he does tip his hat toward one of the anthropologist's precursors in Chapter 2:

In distinguishing art from religion, [Geertz} accepts Susanne Langer's view that art deals with illusion and appearance, imagining how the world could be, whereas religion claims to represent the world as it really is. But religion also imagines how the world might be, and as Geertz's own theory indicates, religion links together what "is" and what "ought" to be in its ritual structure.

This idea of religion binding "is" and "ought" within a ritual structure is Lyden's sole justification for seeing a wide variety of commercial films as "religious." What Lyden oversimplifies is that when the "is" and "ought" dichotomy appears in actual religious narratives, it's usually to  illustrate a contrast between the phenomenal world that everyone experiences and the noumenal world which underlies the "illusion and appearance" of ordinary life. Lyden eradicates this core aspect of religious narrative so that he can bring under his scrutiny all sorts of films in which some "illusion vs. truth" dichotomy exists. Thus a film like 1989's WHEN HARRY MET SALLY falls within the compass of Lyden's idea of ritualized entertainment, because its narrative opposes one narrative illusion-- a world in which Harry and Sally don't realize their essential rightness for one another-- with a narrative truth, one in which they find one another. 

I notice that though Lyden mentions Susanne Langer to gloss Geertz's theory, Langer's nowhere to be found in the book's bibliography. Had Lyden read Langer, he might have gained some appreciation for the ways in which mythic and religious symbolism can be used to form narratives that are fundamentally distinct from those which are largely about conflicts in the naturalistic world. As I have not read Geertz as yet, it may be that he too is a little too cavalier with the "is/ought" dichotomy.

I don't particularly like downgrading Lyden, whereas I took some pleasure in identifying the foolish fallacies of the authors of the SACRED TIME book. I admire that he's trying to value fiction not for its supposed representations of literal truth, as has been the case with the majority of literary criticism since the days of Classic Greece. Rather, Lyden appreciates that fiction can be used to describe situations that do not exist, and may not ever exist, as a way of considering all possibilities. In this his position resembles mine as I've expressed it in essays like AND THE HALF-TRUTH SHALL SET YOU FREE.

But good intentions are not the only measure of a critical work, and once again, I'll point out that an author like Jung-- whom Lyden rejects-- has been instrumental in pointing out that the human psyche has "many mansions," so to speak. A film like WHEN HARRY MET SALLY has nothing to do with the symbolic correlations one finds in mythic and religious discourse, but it's perfectly valid within the sphere of the dramatic potentiality. Because Lyden tries to extend his definition of religious ritual narrative far beyond its scope, his reviews of various films, whether possessed of mythic content or not, have a bland, all-cats-are-grey sound to them.

It is amusing, though, that a modern scholar champions just the sort of non-mimetic possibilities that used to throw earlier generations into hissy-fits, as one sees with a "critic" like Frederic Wertham, who was so married to representational reality that he picked at a SUPERBOY story because its representation of George Washington at Valley Forge wasn't the way the real history of things went.