What I'm reading now

A Landscape With Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind by Michael O'Brien has sparked some interesting conversations in our household so I thought I'd write about it. (Unfortunately, I finished it Thursday but didn't get a chance to write up my impressions before we left for Maine on Friday. So things aren't quite as fresh in my mind and these reflections might be a bit briefer than otherwise.)

Dom and I are both in hearty agreement with O'Brien's primary thesis that parents can't be too careful these days about what their children are reading. I also feel very strongly that much of what passes for children's literature nowadays is not suitable for children and is in fact downright poisonous. A recent trip to the local Barnes and Noble found me again shaking my head at the sad state of the children's section and appalled at the teen/young adult section where the majority of the books were either horror/occult or inappropriate romance.

I found O'Brien's classification scheme very helpful. He divides literature into four categories:

1. Material that is entirely good.

2. Material that is fundamentally good but disordered in some details.

3. Material that appears good on the surface but is fundamentally disordered.

4. Material that is blatantly evil, rotten to the core.

I like that O'Brien doesn't fall into the trap of seeing things in black and white. He allows for a very generous gray area. However, the book challenged me when it came to O'Brien's categorization of particular works within this schema and also with his treatment of dragons and what he refers to as inversion of symbolism.

I was taken aback when O'Brien labeled on of my childhood's favorite authors, Madeleine L'Engle as a Christian neo-pagan. He places her in category three, saying many of her details are good but her foundation is fundamentally flawed. I'm not sure I can do justice to his argument since I disagree with it but essentially he points out a number of problematic areas which create a pattern .

First, he argues that the books pose a problem because they are set in our world and the child-heros are likely role models with psychic powers yet "the kinds of things they are involved with in actually spell spiritual disaster." He points out that the angelic powers that help them come in troubling guises, a witch, a medium, a cherubim who they take to be a dragon, a pet snake. O'Brien is troubled at Charles Wallace's "possessing" the bodies of historical figures in A Swiftly Tilting Planet and by Meg's naming of the evil spirits in A Wind in the Door: "A very interesting theology is dramatized in this climax. The suthor appears to believe that if evil spirits are embraced, they will cease to have power; they will be absorbed into oneself or filled with oneself (implying that evil is merely an absence of good, a vacuum, a nonbeing or unbeing). While it is true in one sense that evil is the absence of good, that is not the whole truth, for in reality the evil spirits are more than an absence of light. They are conscious, willfully distorted beings. They are absolutely corrupt angelic persons. To think that one might pacify them is similar to thinking one can tame a hungry shark or an angry scorpion if one loves it enough."

While I can't really argue with O'Brien's objections, he definitely has a point, I think perhaps he is too literalist in his reading. I would be willing to place L'Engle's books into category two, but I think to say they are fundamentally flawed is extremist. At their heart is the struggle between good and evil, undertaken by ordinary people. I am too much in love with these books to condemn them so thoroughly.

And this is what I find troubling... perhaps love has blinded me to their very real flaws. I have a hard time arguing with O'Brien's evaluation, except that my heart says he's overstating his case. As I discussed this book with Dom one thing became clearer to me, though: we grew up in a very different era from the one our Bella will grow up in. Perhaps O'Brien has a point in that what seems mostly harmless to me would be much more harmful in the current cultural climate. After all, when I was in high school I never encountered people who called themselves wiccans or pagans. And yet I know that is much more common now. One of the boys in the confirmation class I taught last year had his "wiccan" friends show up to protest at our church's All Saints concert a couple of years ago. Perhaps I am naive and these questionable elements of the books are more dangerous than I realize.

Dom and I had similar discussion about the dragons of O'Brien's title. He highlights the way in which the dragon which was once in Western culture universally a symbol of evil has more and more frequently been characterized as harmless, friendly, good. Moreover, he contends that

...the meanings of symbols are not merely the capricious choices of a limited culture. We cannot arbitrarily rearrange them like so much furniture in the living room of the psyche. To tamper with these fundamental types is spiritually and psychologically dangerous because they are keystones in the very structure of the mind. They are a language about the nature of good and evil; furthermore, they are points of contact with these two realms. To face evil without the spiritual equipment Christianity has given us is to put oneself in grave danger.

As Dom said, this raises an interesting question. At what point did dragons start to be good rather than evil, pets and friends rather than monsters? But I was certainly raised on a steady diet of such material.I recall a picture book about a princess with a pet dragon that had baby dragons. And of course, the movie, Pete's Dragon was one of my favorites. So I have a hard time seeing his point.

Dom and I both agreed, contra O'Brien, that in the case of Anne McCaffrey's "Pern" stories we're much more concerned about the questionable sexual content than the good dragons. Overall in fact we are much more sensative to issues of morality and sexuality than to what seems to be O'Brien's primary focus of the spiritual valance of symbols used in books. Are we simply too shaped by the steady diet of such fantasy books we read when we were younger?

Perhaps my imagination has been corrupted, as his argument implies. Or perhaps these symbols are not quite so hard wired as O'Brien implies. I'm not quite comfortable with his assertion about the immutability of symbols. But I'm also somehow reluctant to dismiss it out of hand. I'll have to chew on this one a bit, talk to more people. There seems to be a flaw in his argument, but I'm not exactly sure where it is or how to counter it.

Of course, O'Brien concludes, it is up to individual parents to discern what is appropriate for their own children:

A simple rule of thumb is to ask the following questions when assessing a book, video, or film: Does the story reinforce my child's understanding of the moral nature of the universe? Or does it undermine it? Does it do some of both? Do I want that? What precisely is the author saying about the nature of evil? What does he tell the reader (or viewer) about the nature of the war between good and evil?

These are indeed the important questions. Would my answers always agree with O'Brien's? Probably not. But he's definitely given me some meat to chew on. I might just have to reexamine some of my prejudices to see if what I've enjoyed and accepted for myself is really what I want to pass on to my children.

I found this book hard to put down. It sparked a series of interesting conversations with Dom and will be the food for many more with other people whose literary opinions I value. Definitely a book with some good meat. I might have to add it to my library in the future.

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I ound your post quite interesting. With a 5 month old it is definately a topic my husband and I have in mind.

One thing that would concern me would be taking a conception I have based on symbolism and applying it to something my children know only in innocence. IOW, just because western civilization used to consider the dragon as a symbol for evil, the simple fact it isn't always regarded that way would incline me not to corrupt her innocent enjoyment of Pete's Dragon or Puff the Magic Dragon or Disney's Mulan? Symbolism always goes deeper than innocent irst perception. I would think teaching children about symbolism and what such things as dragons can or usually but not always symbolize once they are old enough to understand it would educate them without forming B&W absolute representations in their minds from the beginning.

sorry about the missing Fs. My F key is fussy

I think Brown's assertion that evil is not an absence of good is premature. The nature of evil of either a deprivation or a "thing" is not settled Church doctrine and I have seen many debates among philosophers and theologians on the nature of evil.

Also, does O'Brien provide proof that in Western, i.e. Judeo-Christian, culture, dragons have always been bad? Yes, in Revelations 12 we read about the great red dragon waiting to devour the child of the woman clothed with the sun, but where does the dragon as evil originate? What is the root?

Are symbols always immutable? The Christmas tree began as a pagan symbol which was baptized by Christians and approved by the Church, but approval came after use. There are many other pagan symbols that were baptized.

Many pagan religions worshipped bulls. Should we never have stories in which bulls are good characters?

I'm sympathetic to O'Brien's thesis, but I wonder if it's a little extreme. Certainly C.S Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien baptized many pagan elements such as satyrs and wizards and nyads (the Ents?) and dryads (characters in the Silmarillion) and so on.

First, Dragons are not universally seen as evil symbols (see Far-Eastern examples in Japanese and Chinese mythology).

Second, shouldn't context be a key indicator in discovering the meaning of symbols? Certainly, symbols import meaning. But what meaning? Thus context is very important. What may have been a matter-of-fact about dragons in biblical times does not hold the same for today's context. We have a different understanding of nature and the universe, more scientific so-to-speak. While superstition and ignorance continue to some degree, what a dragon meant to a Christian in the 1st century will mean something different for a Christian in the 21st century. Thus, our moral context is quite different and it is not so easy to transfer the meaning of a symbol from two thousand years ago to today.

A good example from Christianity concerns the symbols of the sheep and shepherd. For today's modern age of technology and suburban life, most people have no contact with sheep or shepherds unless they visit a petting zoo. The meaning of the symbols of sheep and shepherd are not all lost because of our historical continuity and the great writings of the past. But these symbols no longer have the impact they may once have had to Galilean ears of two thousand years ago.

This brings me to my last point - original intent. I have not read O'Brien's book, but it seems that he holds a view that the original intent of the symbol should dominate its' meaning. Such a view is naive if everything I have said so far makes sense. There is no way to recapture that original intent of the symbol. Our moral context is different from those times. We have only fragments of those moral climates.

Thus, we should have no problem "baptizing" symbols that are not Christian in order to use them for Christian purposes. A great example of using the symbol of a dragon is The Voyage of the Dawn Treader from the The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Lewis makes a stunning and beautiful symbolic representation of the cleansing away of selfishness through grace and baptism, and the restoration of a new life through the imagery of the dragon and scales and so forth.

I finish this post on a question - what other symbols that are evil does O'Brien consider?

First, Dragons are not universally seen as evil symbols (see Far-Eastern examples in Japanese and Chinese mythology).

To be fair, I think O'Brien would respond that he's thinking of the symbols within a Judeo-Christian context, because he's talking about raising Catholic kids.

On your other points, I think they are valid and bear thinking about.

I like O'Brien's categories as you've described them, but I think he misreads the books you've mentioned. (It's possible to have problems with L'Engle? Seriously? Whoa.)

For example, "naming" evil doesn't imply a mere absence of good--an absence can't have a name attached to it. Recognizing evil for it is--calling a spade a spade, if you will--and refusing to be decieved by it can be quite a powerful tool against evil.

And symbolism in literature depends on context. Symbols are not immutable. If memory serves, St. Augustine discusses this re: the Bible in his On Christian Teaching. We always have to look at the symbol as it's being used. Friendly dragons are not necessarily a subversion. The Pern dragons, for example, are still quite dangerous, and they must be related to in the proper way or the frail human becomes toast. And it's been forever since I watched Pete's Dragon, but doesn't Eliot breathe fire?

My reply gre to be too long for this space. I'll post it as a new blog entry. I hope this interesting discussion continues.

I think that the issue of "baptizing" symbols needs some clarifying. Is there anything that was considered evil by pagans that the Church baptized into a good symbol? I can't think of any.

The dragon in the Dawn Treader was not a symbol of good. It was a symbol of greed and selfishness. Lewis wasn't trying to change the symbolism of dragons, he was using it in its known context.

The issue of wizards, etc. in Tolkien is equally as clear. From reading the Silmarillion, the "wizards" were angels and the various other mythical creatures were never used out of their historic context of good and evil. Orcs are bad. Goblins are bad. Dragons are bad. Magic in the hands of humans is bad.

I would also submit that our current culture's ignorance of symbolic history is no reason to assume that the alteration of the status of ancient symbols is acceptable.