THE TRANSCENDENT MR. DARCY
Why does the highly eroticized present-day self delight in the unerotic?
This first full week of March has been a turning point here in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The daffodils along our front fence have broken through the ground. Buds are now clearly visible on the trees. I alternate between having the space heater on in my home office (which is not as well insulated as the rest of the house) and the desire to open a window. It’s not quite spring, but the moist earth is poised to explode with new green and fresh colors. Laetare Sunday this Sunday, March 10. The midpoint of Lent.
I begin this week with a new feature: a round-up of interesting things seen, heard, and read which I call…
McINERNY’S MUSINGS
The Controllers of our Technopoly (see Neil Postman’s Technopoly via C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man) would love to see us all addicted to distraction—as Ted Gioia trenchantly argues in his recent “The State of the Culture, 2024,” a post that has been getting a lot of attention around the internet. For artists, there is only way to reach such a distracted audience, as I argue in my post, “Loving Art to Distraction.”
Here is a moving tribute to my father, Ralph McInerny (1929-2010), and even moreso, to my father’s intellectual mentor, St. Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274), by one of my father’s students, Dr. Christopher Kaczor, chair of the philosophy department at Loyola Marymount University. This past Thursday, March 7, we celebrated the 750th anniversary of Aquinas’s death.
Speaking of Aquinas, I’ve been learning a lot recently from a slim volume by Rev. Thomas Gilby called Poetic Experience, first published in 1934. Father Gilby (1902-1975) was an English Dominican best known for editing the Blackfriars edition and translation of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae. I’m only about halfway through Poetic Experience, but already I can see that it anticipates many of the themes in Iain McGilchrist’s work, the neuroscientist-philosopher whose work I have had occasion to mention here on The Comic Muse, as for example in “The Tyranny of Left-Hemisphere Thinking” and “How Intuition Freshens the World.” No doubt you will hear more from me on both Gilby and McGilchrist.
Here was a find. Bonnie Lander Johnson’s and Julia Meszaros’s piece from First Things: “Lost Women Novelists,” about several neglected Catholic women novelists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Many good suggestions for reading! Though hard to believe that Muriel Spark (1918-2006), one of my faves, is among the neglected!
And here’s another provocative and challenging argument from Jane Friedman, on why “Substack Is Both Great and Terrible for Authors.” Friedman encourages Substack authors not to give up the advantage of a completely free newsletter, but in any event not to skimp on “providing value or entertainment or something that’s desirable to your target reader.” When it comes to Friedman’s advice, I’ve been attempting to have my cake both ways. Though I have gone to paid with The Comic Muse since the turn of the year, not every post is behind the paywall. I’m also working hard on providing good value and entertainment. Please let me know whether or not my efforts are working for you in that regard!
And while we’re on the subject of FREE. If you’re not a paid subscriber and not (yet!) interested in becoming a paid subscriber, but you would like to read the post for paid subscribers just below, “The Transcendent Mr. Darcy,” do not fear! Substack has a new feature called “Teaser Posts,” which allows free subscribers, at least, the opportunity to enjoy one teaser post for free. Just scroll down to claim your free post. Details here.
On the news that the PBS Masterpiece show, Miss Scarlet & The Duke, was dropping the Duke, I opined the following on Instagram: “I’ve enjoyed this show [though far less so than the All Creatures Great and Small reboot], but the danger in losing the Duke is that he was the chief way in which Eliza’s character remained likable. Too often her character veers toward insensitivity and egoism. The Duke saw those flaws in her. But if left to herself, without a stiff challenge from another….” My sister Mary was less forgiving. Upon hearing that Stuart Martin, the actor who played the Duke, wanted Eliza Scarlet’s character, played by Kate Phillips, “to explore new stories and challenges,” Mary said: “Well, I’m off to new challenges and time to explore a new show to watch. Goodbye to this one!!!” Ha Ha!
I’m always reading several books at once. On Wednesday Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity, arrived in the mail, and I’ve already plunged in. In it Newport describes the philosopher as a “knowledge worker.” For those of you who know Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, you will understand how this description will irk. I may write on this theme soon. But overall I’m a big fan of Newport’s work.
For both literary and scholarly reasons I’m also in the middle of a deep dive into Tolkien scholarship. Working my way through two illuminating books at present: Verlyn Flieger’s Interrupted Music: The Making of Tolkien’s Mythology and Alison Milbank’s Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians.
In the sporting news, I’m much anticipating two Premier League football matches this Sunday: Aston Villa (my underdog team this year) v. Tottenham, and the really big one, Liverpool v. Manchester City.
Finally, I’m grateful for the latest 5-Star Amazon Reviews of my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair:
Bought this for my wife…and she’s an avid reader. So it was a gamble for me. She’s a discriminating reader. And lo and behold, she loved the book! Loved it. My daughter-in-law saw, ordered it, read it…and loved it. All is well.
—Michael E.
How does an avid reader of good fiction respond to a "good read"? Through a three-step process:
1) By turning pages almost faster than the mental process of retainment allows.
2) By becoming, through a surreptitious alchemy of the author, a de facto character in the storyline
who is constantly straining to "sleuth" his way to a satisfactory outcome.
3) By chattering about the the author's ability to frame his characters via the dialogue they share,
which makes them fully creditable to the story's time-frame.
This process is thoroughly experienced in Mr. Daniel McInerny's new book, "The Good Death of Kate Montclair", and if you agree with its premise, then you must get his book and find out for yourselves if it holds water...without splashing!
—Timothy Bratt
In case you’re unfamiliar with my novel, here’s the trailer…
PICK UP YOUR OWN COPY of The Good Death of Kate Montclair.
And when you’re done, there is also a prequel short story available: “Pursuit Among the Ruins.”
The following is the iconic climax from the 1995 BBC television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth playing the roles of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy. I’ll bet you know it well, but watch it again, then try your hand at the question that follows.
QUESTION: How do you explain the enormous popularity of this scene (and this movie/novel in general)? Especially when you consider that human sexuality is, as Walker Percy puts it, “a unique trait of the present-day self…occupying an absolutely central locus in the consciousness particularly as it relates to other sexual beings, of an order and magnitude of power incommensurate with other “drives” and also specified by the very structure of the present-day self as its very core and as its prime avenue of intercourse with others?”[1]
Put simply, sex for the present-day self is kind of a big deal. More essential to the sense of self than even the self’s intellectual or religious/spiritual life. Heck, we can’t even sell soap without eroticizing it. We live, as Percy says, in “the most eroticized society in history.”[2]
In light of which, the popularity of this scene from Pride and Prejudice is puzzling. Notice that even after Elizabeth accepts Darcy’s proposal, there is no physical contact between them whatsoever. Nothing so much as a handshake. The last shot is of them walking down the lane rather stiffly, arms at their sides, like two 8th graders walking into their first Sadie Hawkins Dance.
Why does the highly eroticized present-day self delight in such an unerotic scene?