Catholic Phoenix

I just finished the funniest book I’ve ever read, and, oddly, it got me thinking about Lent. Forgive me if this ends up feeling like a stretch. But first, the book. On the recommendation of Patrick Kurp (please check out his wonderful blog here), I picked up Charles Portis’s novel Masters of Atlantis. I can’t do the novel justice by summarizing its plot, mostly because it doesn’t really have a plot. So let me give you the gist. Here’s how it starts:

Young Lamar Jimmerson went to France in 1917 with the American Expeditionary Forces, serving first with the Balloon Section, stumbling about in open fields holding one end of a long rope, and then later as a telephone switchboard operator at AEF headquarters in Chaumont. It was there on the banks of the Marne River that he first came to hear of the Gnomon Society.

The Gnomons, as Jimmerson learns, jealously safeguard the lost wisdom of Atlantis, which is contained in the obscure codex pappus. Jimmerson soon becomes the Master of Gnomons and shepherds the society through explosive growth, needless schism, and ultimate failure. What is the secret wisdom of Atlantis? Who knows, but it involves triangles, the Jimmerson Spiral (and later the Jimmerson Lag), a bird named Squanto, a book called Hoosier Wizard, congressional hearings, and an evangelical Gnomon named Austin Popper. If all this sounds absurd, that’s because it is.

Portis, like all great writers, has the knack for using just the right word. But his right word is never the obvious word, and this is what makes him so funny. The English language is unparalleled in its ability to convey shades of meaning. Portis seems to grasp them all. Words are his raw materials, and he forges sentences till they reach a refined state of pure mirth. As the humorist Roy Blount Jr. says, “Charles Portis could be Cormac McCarthy if he wanted to, but he’d rather be funny.” I’m no literary critic (or humorist for that matter), but as one who appreciates McCarthy’s unique contribution to American letters, I think Blount is right. Portis is a breathtaking writer, and he’s also just flat-out funny.

Charles Portis (b. 1933)

But I think I would be selling Portis short if I told you that Masters of Atlantis is nothing more than comical. The book makes deft use of humor to touch on one of the most fundamental mysteries of human existence—man’s innate desire for Truth. Reading that statement, the alert reader will correctly sense the potential for mockery. If the book is so funny, one might ask, does Portis take potshots at us religious types? I don’t think so. And besides, seriousness of purpose is no safeguard against idiocy. You need look no further than the estimable Dan Brown to see what can happen when a self-serious “writer” approaches the complexities of religion. (It bears emphasizing that Dan Brown, in even his wildest dreams, is not fit to sharpen the pencil of a master stylist like Portis.) I do allow for the inevitable commenter who will point out that Dan Brown’s novels are real howlers themselves. I won’t disagree, so I will limit my remarks to intentional humor. The intentional humorist knows how to use mockery to good effect; he also knows how to reserve his mockery while illuminating deeper truths through humor.

Intentional or not, this is what Portis does so well in Masters of Atlantis. He treats the Gnomon Society as absurd, and it is. But he never treats his characters with derision. Indeed, I would say that the end of the book, though comically preposterous, is a picture of human frailty that casts a long shadow on the previous 200 pages’ worth of comedic foibles. Gnomonism is a failure; the society is a shambles. The Gnomon temple has been overrun by tramps (and cockroaches), and its small membership has congregated in west Texas, the Mecca of American cults. Even Gnomonism’s few remaining adherents no longer study the ancient wisdom of Atlantis. In essence, Gnomonism has been reduced to a cultural relic, which binds this group of oddballs out of custom, not conviction. In that sense, it’s not all that different from Catholicism in some parts of the world today.

One could finish Masters of Atlantis, having enjoyed a good laugh, and leave it at that. But I think the book raises issues worth considering. Gnomonism’s great failure was that it could not translate the “wisdom” of Atlantis into a concrete ethic. Think, for example, of the Gnomons’ central symbol of wisdom, the triangle, itself nothing more than a mathematical abstraction. Ultimately, the triangle could not tell the Gnomons anything about existence as such; nor could it tell them anything about how to exist. Indeed, much of the book’s humor stems from the sheer arbitrariness of Gnomonry. Now think about Catholic Christianity’s central religious symbol, the crucifix, a most concrete image of the God-Man’s sacrifice. But even that jarring symbol can be reduced to mere cultural relic. Just consult the recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights for that.

So how do Christians continue to be a sign of contradiction when even our most potent religious symbols have been co-opted as triangle-like abstractions of a bygone era? “You will know them by their fruits,” says our Lord. (Mt. 7:16) We should bear this in mind as we continue this season of Lent, a time when we are asked to engage in spiritual warfare through proxy battles with our physical flesh. This is the time when the practice of Catholicism seems most visible to the world. So let us not “be dismal when [we] fast, like the hypocrites.” (Mt. 6:16) In fact, maybe we should all read some Charles Portis and laugh a little.

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For further reading:

Charles Portis, the man who wrote ‘True Grit’ (Telegraph)

The Elusive Charles Portis (New York Times)

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