MobileRead Book Club December 2017 Discussion: Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll (spoilers)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by issybird

There's a version of Christianity in the US that says that God rewards prayers with material prosperity.

Would that be the Church of the Material Wealth or would that be Televangelism?

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Would that be the Church of the Material Wealth or would that be Televangelism?

Joel Osteen was the first one to spring to mind for me. You know, the guy who preaches that God rewards "good Christian living" with material prosperity but who had to be shamed into opening his church for the poor hurricane victims in Texas.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by issybird

There's a version of Christianity in the US that says that God rewards prayers with material prosperity. On the one hand, that seems an extreme example of what Carroll deplores, doing good in the expectation of reward. At the same time, he's careful to put no limitations on God or the efficacy of prayer. However, people of religious bent have to be comfortable with paradox and Carroll is manifestly even more so than most. I thought him unnecessarily hard on Eric, who lives an upright life and even saves Bruno, where the believers were impotent. Clearly Carroll was no fan of secular humanism.

I was in my first year at university when I had a religious friend tell me that it didn't matter how good a person was, or how "correctly" they lived their life, if they didn't believe in God then they were damned. So Carroll's view of the world doesn't surprise me.

Excluding Eric on the grounds of lacking belief does seem harsh to me, but it is not unrealistic, then or now (although being excessively realistic is not something Carroll is too concerned about). But it does make the text more difficult to approach, and the moral positioning more obscure, unless you share that view.

Originally Posted by issybird

I thought that Carroll signaled that at the very beginning, when the Lord Chancellor seemed to address Mister Sir directly, although Mister Sir immediately became incorporeal subsequently. Or, one thought that was with me, why not assume that others were shifting between worlds as well, so anyone's seemingly irrelevant remark might be addressed to yet another world equally real or unreal. Once you have more than one universe, there's no reason not to infer multitudes.

I actually thought it may come out to be more direct than that. A number of times I thought I was seeing links between the Outland characters and the contemporary world characters, that there may actually be others shifting in and out to the same Outland, if not at the same time ... indeed I got the feeling that, early on, Carroll may even have considered this. I think it might have made the book more interesting if he had done so.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Joel Osteen was the first one to spring to mind for me. You know, the guy who preaches that God rewards "good Christian living" with material prosperity but who had to be shamed into opening his church for the poor hurricane victims in Texas.

Osteen always seems rather smarmy to me and he's proven himself to be so.

[CRussel]

Careful, folks. We really don't want to force issybird to turn all Greenie on us.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Would that be the Church of the Material Wealth or would that be Televangelism?

Both, IMO. It's been labeled "Prosperity Theology."

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by gmw

I actually thought it may come out to be more direct than that. A number of times I thought I was seeing links between the Outland characters and the contemporary world characters, that there may actually be others shifting in and out to the same Outland, if not at the same time ... indeed I got the feeling that, early on, Carroll may even have considered this. I think it might have made the book more interesting if he had done so.

Yes, there was Mein Herr, who seemed to the narrator to be familiar, and who was perhaps another version of The Professor. That aspect is a bit reminiscent of the characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Yes, there was Mein Herr, who seemed to the narrator to be familiar, and who was perhaps another version of The Professor. That aspect is a bit reminiscent of the characters in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

And of course Mein Herr's appellation evokes "Mister Sir," another indication of intersecting and overlapping worlds, even interplanetary ones, and visitors both corporeal and evanescent.

[gmw]

Well, I finally finished S & B Concluded

The preface again gets rather carried away - as if there weren't enough sermons in the story itself. It does, however, disclaim the author's ownership of at least some of the opinions expressed by his characters. He's explicit about some, but that still leaves a lot open to interpretation. One aspect he is explicit about is Clergymen jesting about religion, and he says:

To the believing hearer it brings the danger of loss of reverence for holy things, by the mere act of listening to, and enjoying, such jests; and also the temptation to retail them for the amusement of others. To the unbelieving hearer it brings a welcome confirmation of his theory that religion is a fable, in the spectacle of its accredited champions thus betraying their trust.

I find it a strange contradiction to hear a Christian speak of "holy things". Since when have any "things" been holy? I thought that's what the commandment about graven images was about. Anyway, to this unbeliever, hearing religious people jest is to believe they are human. (Perhaps the problem with that, from Carroll's perspective, is that it also admits their fallibility.) The view also seems at odds with Carroll's use of farce and humour in his work.


In this second-half of the story we have lost that dream-like quality which was, for me, one of the best parts of the first half. Instead of so subtly moving from one perspective to another that it sometimes caught you by surprise, now it's told explicitly: "I'm feeling 'eerie' ... Hi kids." I guess I can understand that, why shouldn't the narrator be developing more familiarity with the change? But it's not replaced by anything as attractive.

We get discourses on right and wrong from Arthur. I liked him better as the shy, tongue-tied man - the wuss was less annoying than the moralising know-it-all, with everyone pandering to his every word. We have a very long couple of chapters in which the mysterious Mein Herr tries to point out the ridiculousness of certain things by reciting stories from a society that took them to extremes. If such argument was valid we would conclude that drinking water was ridiculous - after all, drinking too much can kill you.


It seemed to me that it was in this second half of the story that the fragmentary beginnings of the story really show themselves. The potential that built in the first half withers away into simple disconnectedness. The farce of the Vice-Warden/Emperor, and his wife and son, is wrapped up in such a straight-forward manner that the earlier farce now seems out of place. Uggug is written off as "loveless" - as if that is somehow his fault. Arthur and Eric ... well, I wasn't surprised. The most consistent parts of the book were Bruno (the consistently annoying) and Sylvie (the consistently bland), neither of who appeared to learn anything, nor teach anything.

I find myself asking: What was the point? Did Carroll mean anything by any of it (other than his prefaces)? In Alice in Wonderland there was a pervasive feeling of joy and freedom, it felt to me like a celebration of many things. There is no such feeling in Sylvie and Bruno, if anything it is almost the reverse (and there's that annoying equivocation, "almost", that invades all my thoughts about this book.). In the preface to Sylvie and Bruno, Carroll said he wanted to do something different, well he was successful in that - if little else.

issybird summarised it as:

Originally Posted by issybird

What a mess. A glorious mess, in parts, but ultimately a failure, much as I loved some of it. [...]

And I think that says it well. There were some wonderful moments in there, but it all fades away into nothing much of anything.

[Bookpossum]

My feeling was that Carroll got caught up with the drama he was creating in apparently killing off Arthur, and suddenly remembered he ought to do something about the Outland story. It had that feeling of being pushed in at the last minute in an "Oh well, that will do" fashion.

I felt sorry for Uggug. He reminded me of a dog I have come across at the off-leash park. Its owner is obviously clueless about any idea of training on recall, not jumping on people, or anything else, so the dog is an absolute pest. But it isn't the dog's fault that it doesn't know how to behave.

It's a very strange book indeed. Had he not been famous for the Alice books, I doubt that it would have been published.

[gmw]

I definitely agree with the "last minute" feel to the resolution of the Outland story. I was getting the feeling even in the first half that Carroll was leaving the Outland farce behind because he couldn't meld that properly into the serious side that was developing. The tacked on conclusion seems to confirm that.

And Uggug. He struck me as the least culpable of the "villains", so why pick him to get the short end of the stick? It makes no sense - to my morality, nor to Carroll's I would have thought (especially given one of the lectures Arthur gave) - to forgive those that should have known better, but to reject the one that never really had a chance.

You mentioned earlier that you thought the illustrations were lovely. They were very well done, even to the extent that Bruno looks like the little smart-ah ... person that I was picturing in my mind. But there is something a little too womanly (as opposed to young girl) about Sylvie that doesn't quite meet with what I was picturing.

[latepaul]

Originally Posted by gmw

I find it a strange contradiction to hear a Christian speak of "holy things". Since when have any "things" been holy? I thought that's what the commandment about graven images was about.

I think the "things" in this context are ideas not so much objects. As in that book title, "If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things".

That said there definitely are are holy objects in some Christian traditions. "Holy" means something like "kept separate and dedicated for God's (/religious) use." So the cup used for Communion is holy because it's use only for that and it won't turn up on the priest's dinner table during an ordinary meal.

The commandment against graven images is about not making objects the subject of worship but holy doesn't mean "to be worshipped". Though it is true that because of their special status Christian that believe in "holy things" tend to treat them with at least care and often reverence. This can lead to charges of idolatry from other Christians from more "puritan" traditions. Especially when it comes to objects like icons or statues or relics.

But as I say, from what you quoted I suspect that's not what Carroll was referring to.

[gmw]

latepaul, I have no doubt that your interpretation/explanation is accurate ... and I'd better leave it there, since anything further I have to say on the subject doesn't belong on this thread. Suffice to say that I still have that feeling of "strange contradiction", but that's my problem.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

My feeling was that Carroll got caught up with the drama he was creating in apparently killing off Arthur, and suddenly remembered he ought to do something about the Outland story. It had that feeling of being pushed in at the last minute in an "Oh well, that will do" fashion.

I felt sorry for Uggug. He reminded me of a dog I have come across at the off-leash park. Its owner is obviously clueless about any idea of training on recall, not jumping on people, or anything else, so the dog is an absolute pest. But it isn't the dog's fault that it doesn't know how to behave.

It's a very strange book indeed. Had he not been famous for the Alice books, I doubt that it would have been published.

Uggug reminds me of Dudley Dursley.

[Bookpossum]

Well, he had awful parents too!