Homer's Octopus and the Experience of Literature
A Review of "Why Literature Still Matters: Beauty After the Apocalypse" by Dr. Jason Baxter. Cassiodorus Press, 2024
Why Literature Still Matters: Beauty After the Apocalypse by Dr. Jason Baxter is the first book published by the newly-founded Cassiodorus Press. Jason Baxter is a talented Dante scholar and translator as well as a college professor. He currently directs the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College in Kansas, and also teaches an online class for the House of Humane Letters.
The volume itself is slim, clocking in at 83 pages, but it packs a tremendous punch in my opinion. For our present 21st century times, it may well be our Abolition of Man. In keeping with the times, it also offers hyperlinked footnotes for the visuals and the music that he highlights which can be found on his Substack.
Baxter opens with a short preface entitled “The Story of Two Islands” which will be two personal stories that illustrate his point about the experience of literature and why it matters more than ever amidst the malaise of the modern world: the digital apocalypse that has destroyed our imaginative landscapes and replaced our natural metaphors with machine and marketing metaphors and filled our thought lives with propaganda and talking points rather than real thought. It is uncomfortable, but all too real.
The first chapter is titled “Apocalypse of the Imagination: How to Become a Human Emoji.” This chapter opens with an analysis of the open letter by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla to their daugher Max, and why it is such an eerie and strange letter even to our modern ears. While it is full of all the “correct” parental sentiments, Baxter identifies the very pronounced language of marketing and productivity as the imaginative backbone of the letter. Max’s life is conceived of as a kind of linear function, and her future is imagined in terms of productivity. It is a metaphor fundamentally alien to our humanity.
By way of contrast, Baxter brings in W.B. Yeats’ poem “A Prayer for My Daughter” which is filled with grandiose imagery that evokes storms, winds, the sea, and trees, and the natural uneasiness and helplessness of parents in the face of profound uncertainty. It is a jarringly different manner of expression, and one that we have lost as we have become disconnected from the natural world, and fooled ourselves into thinking we are the engineers of our own mechanized lives.
But now in our modern world, Baxter says, we are so used to conceiving of ourselves as machines, and machines that we can control. If something doesn’t work, we just find a “hack” or replace a part. We conceive of the world around us in terms of productivity charts, and our lives as linear functions, and find ourselves empty despite our constant lust to optimize ourselves and our environments.
We consume media on FaceBook where our reactions have been limited to 6 possible reactions, and our daily vocabulary is largely defined by computer and machine language (pg. 16ff), and we are bombarded every day with endless streams of marketing and propaganda.
Baxter analyzes the lyrics of the popular OneRepublic song “Sunshine” as one of the anthems of our times because of the way it glorifies our lives of endless consumption. It exemplifies our desire to create lives that are perfectly “smooth,” with no resistance and no inconvenience and no difficulties. Our modern mindset is one of seeking the one true “life hack” that smooth out all roughness and create a culture of infinitive positivity. He brings in the South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han who writes about the philosophy of beauty and how we can access it. Han says here that we are obsessed with creating a life of “infinite positivity” and all it leaves us with is emptiness.
Chapter 1 leaves one feeling rather convicted of participating in the dramatic cheapening of our “interior lives” by means of the 6 reaction emojis on FaceBook. It lays out the beginning of the problem very well.
But Chapter 2 takes us to a different landscape, and it is entitled “How to Die in Sardinia” wherein he tells the vivid and harrowing (but also humorous) tale of taking a hike on the coast of Sardinia he was not fully prepared for, narrowly escaping death, and emerging from the experience with a new insight into the nature of literature and our interact with the natural world around us, and how those worlds collide.
When we encounter natural beauty, there is often a deep longing to become the beautiful thing we see, and often a sense of sorrow that we are still separate from it. Baxter quotes from Lewis’ sermon The Weight of Glory: “We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
Literature is one avenue that enables us to experience beauty at a radical level. Baxter here brings in the story of Glaucus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a wonderful illustration of the tactile nature of literature, and how sensual an experience it can be.
Baxter also quotes from Homer’s Odyssey to illustrate how these great poets “close the gap” between us and the experience of the story.
Baxter’s use of Homer’s Odyssey was especially striking as he brings in the curious little details about Odysseus’ arrival on the island of the Phaeacians, where he is compared to an octopus clinging to a rock, which is an extremely vivid and effective image for drawing us into the narrative. When he finally makes it to shore, Odysseus lays down in a heap of rushes and kisses the soil. Before going to sleep, he covers himself with a heap of leaves under a wild olive tree. These details immerse us into the story and allow us to feel as Odysseus does in this story.
Baxter writes, “By these metaphors and images, we get as close as possible to a total immersion into the mytically perilous sea and the reassuring stability of earth. Indeed, in this sense, we find the master of archaic poetry weaving the weft of the human heart into the warp of the universe. Homer has closed the gap.” (pg. 35).
Chapter 3 is entitled “Down the Rabbit Hole” and puts more flesh onto the idea that our minds have been gradually more accustomed to reach for machine metaphors rather than natural ones. We have started to assume that the “latest” and the “newest” is somehow better than the old. Our “world picture” has changed and become mechanized, whereas residents of centuries past had a more “natural” world-picture of the supernatural ordering of the elements and vast celestial bodies creating music and singing in the seasons, rather than gears and the whirr and hum of machines, perfectly engineered and perfectly controlled.
Baxter interacts with Foucault as one of the fathers of our modern surveillance state as the French philosopher developed the idea of creating a perfect state in which everyone knows they are being watched, but without seeing the watchers. The implications of this are of course perfectly obvious to us now, horrifying as it seems in writing. It is our present reality in the form of things like CCTV and self-check stands.
The new hero of modernity, as Baxter argues, is Phileas Fogg from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. Fogg is perfectly in control of the machines of the world around him; he is the consummate engineer. Baxter also touches upon how the world of art and painting feeds into this modern mindset, especially by looking at the “very American” paintings of Roy Lichtenstein who lived in a world of increasing speed, glitz, and “machismo” (pg. 59). After some analysis of Lichtenstein’s paintings and our responses to them, Baxter concludes that if he is correct, we have lost our own ability to appreciate older forms of art that present us with less “comfortable” or less “smooth” surfaces.
It is “100% you,” (a recurring phrase throughout the book) as Baxter characterizes this artwork, which is designed to make us comfortable and to appeal to our modern sensibilities for speed and control and strength, but it evokes no deeper response except self-recognition.
Chapter 4 is the second “island story” he tells, this time on frozen Iceland. He experienced the sublime beauty of the geisers and waterfalls, and describes in gorgeous detail what he saw in Iceland. And then he records a tragic story that is all too common in our selfie-culture. Baxter then turns to reflect on what our selfie culture has done to us: we “domesticate” these wild experiences to our own personal limits rather than subordinating our own self to the greater experience. It’s not about natural beauty but about us. He brings in Byung-Chul Han here again, who refers to our selfie addiction as a “disease” and how it points to our “inner emptiness.”
For this reason, we’ve lost our ability to “see” landscapes because all we can see is ourselves in the landscape. “I starve my inner heart, while consuming outer experiences. The whole world becomes nothing but a series of changing backgrounds for my face, experiences I purchase in order to engance my social value in the currency of likes. And, in this way, we’re losing our landscapes.” (pg. 73).
The epilogue is titled “Franny Contra New York” taken from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zoey, in which the epynomous Franny has learned to “wear the mask of the vapid, overly emotional co-ed” and eventually has a nervous breakdown because she can no longer live with the contradictions. But this story encapsulates the point of this whole short volume: we are utterly starved for “spiritual nutrition” and are consuming the “empty calories” of nonstop internet content. There is a sense of urgency and hope at the same time that what we need is a literary life; we need that experience of beauty and that sense of being reunited with the world that we inhabit.
This book is very compellingly and beautifully written. One of Baxter’s particular talents as an author and a speaker is that he knows how to use exactly the right metaphor for the subject at hand and he is excellent at creating vivid word pictures. While the book is laden with quotes from all over the literary world from Homer to contemporary songs, it is all presented very accessibly and each quote fits well with the point he is making. He has an impressive command of the literary tradition and interacts with this tradition in a unique way. He also brings in a lot of quotes from lesser-known authors, or references lesser-known artists and composers, and interacts with them in a unique way.
Baxter also demonstrates command of the contemporary philosophical and cultural landscape, which is often a failing of many cultural commentators who tend to have very little real knowledge of what’s going on in broader society except those extreme situations that they wish to excoriate. Baxter does not have this problem, but is well-situated to address cultural problems with compassion and accuracy, and more importantly with hope.
This book is not a “life hack.” It is not a handbook to optimizing your intellectual life, nor is it going to teach you “how to read a book.” Still less is it handing us a moral imperative to “read more books” for self-improvement.
No, it is a reminder that beauty is real, and it is powerful, and it is an expression of “the eternal within the temporal” (as he states on his substack introduction). He is pointing us to the very thing that can satisfy our deep longing for something more than our social media lives can give us. When we hear that whispering voice telling us that we are made for more and that there are real adventures to be had and a real, rich interior life to be built, we are better off listening to it.
I will conclude with his own words: “Our response to the whispering voice is the inner core of the literary life.” (pg. 83).
If you’re interested in ordering it, Cassiodorus Press’ web store is available here: https://cassiodoruspress.com/