As part of MacDonald Month, David interviewed Dr. Amanda Vernon about the George MacDonald’s relationship with music.
S7E35: “MacDonald Month: George’s Music” (Download)
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Show Notes
Introduction
Quote-of-the-week
As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows.
George MacDonald, Phantastes
Chit-Chat
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Biographical Information
Dr. Amanda Vernon completed an MA in English Literary Studies at the University of Exeter, a Diploma in Theological Studies at the University of Oxford, and a BA in English Literature at the University of Buckingham. She completed her PhD at the University of Lancaster. Her thesis was entitled “Reading with the Trinity” and looked at the relationship between theology and literary form in the work of George MacDonald, examining the relationship between nineteenth-century religious and literary culture, while also demonstrating how MacDonald’s theological approach to literary criticism made him a distinctive contributor to this emergent field.
Toast
- Matt chose a can of Best Day Brewing White Belgian Style Wheat Beer.
- Dr. Vernon had a cup o’ Joe.
Discussion
01. “Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer”
Q. Tell us about your upcoming transitional period. Also, what has your career been like, and where does your interest in literature, theory, and George MacDonald come from?
- Dr. Vernon will be moving to Germany in the coming months. Her general focus is on the 19th century, with a special focus on theology.
02. “Encountering MacDonald”
Q. When did you first discover MacDonald, and when did he become an area of study?
- She had a distinct memory of reading “The Princess and the Goblin” as a child.
- Dr. Vernon’s dissertation was on “Alice in Wonderland”, but while researching Victorian literature, she rediscovered MacDonald in Stephen Prickett’s “Victorian Fantasy”. Her attention turned towards him for her master’s dissertation.
- An interesting publication from MacDonald is his book of essays called “A Dish of Orts: Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare”.
03. “Themes in theological fiction”
Q. When you were doing your dissertations, what were the topics and themes that came up in your examination?
Taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing into a heavenly creature or a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.
C. S. Lewis
A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.
George MacDonald
- David explained that as he has read through MacDonald’s works, he’s begun to see echos of MacDonald in Lewis’ tales, such as “Prince Caspian”, “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader”, “The Last Battle“ and “Till We Have Faces“.
I have never concealed the fact that I regarded [MacDonald] as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.
C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology
04. “MacDonald and Music”
Q. What was MacDonald’s relationship with music? Was he musical himself? Did he come from a family of musicians?
- Many of his fictional works, such as “Phantastes”, have songs interspersed throughout.
- MacDonald grew up around a few severe Calvinist family members who regarded music with suspicion, particularly his grandmother. She was depicted in his novel “Robert Falconer”, where a violin is intentionally set ablaze by the main character’s grandmother, just as MacDonald’s own grandmother burned his uncle’s fiddle. Robin Phillips wrote a short essay explaining the connection.
One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—-Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—-if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them.
George MacDonald, Letter to his father
- George was increadibly well-connected, personally acquainted with Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain.
- He had a love of Ludwig van Beethoven, describing him as the “prince of musicians”.
05. “Music and Literature intersect”
Q. Your work has focused on MacDonald as a literary scholar. Where do music and literature meet?
- Some of Dr. Vernon’s work has focused on Alfred, Lord Tennyson, an English poet who was a very “musical” poet.
[Tennyson] had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest.
W. H. Auden
- MacDonald characterised God as the first of artists, and nature as His artwork.
- “The Arabian Nights” was one of the first imaginative pieces that young George got his hands on.
- C. S. Lewis’ big contention with Owen Barfield was on the role of the imagination in Christianity.
06. “Philosophy of the Fairytale”
Q. MacDonald is, arguably, most famous for his fairytales and fantasy novels, such as “The Golden Key” and “Phantastes”. What was the role of music in fantasy, and for MacDonald in particular?
- George gave his theory of the fairytale in his essay “The Fantastic Imagination”, where he compares them to music.
The true fairytale is, to my mind, very like the sonata. We all know that a sonata means something; and where there is the faculty of talking with suitable vagueness, and choosing metaphor sufficiently loose, mind may approach mind, in the interpretation of a sonata, with the result of a more or less contenting consciousness of sympathy.
George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination
Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.
George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination
If a writer’s aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.
George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination
One can think of it as a short tale without context, though with association, like a dream; a poem which is bare of euphonious and beautiful words, but also lacking all sense and context, at most some intelligible stanzas, like fragments from the most varied things. These true poems can have, at most, an allegorical sense in the whole, and an indirect effect, like music. That is why nature is so purely poetic, like the parlor of a magician, of a physicist, ….
A maerchen is like a dream’s picture without context. An ensemble of wonderful objects and happenings, for example a musical fantasy, the harmonic result of an aeolic mode, nature itself …
Novalis, George MacDonald, Phantastes
- MacDonald is difficult to analogise and interpret. It is better to let it wash over you and think about the impressions the work left. This theory reminded David of Lewis’ essay “The Kappa Element in Romance”, as well as the “Planet Narnia” hypothesis that the books represent the planets and seven heavens.
- Dr. Vernon described a scene from “The Princess and Curdie”, where Curdie’s great-great-grandmother asks Curdie if he can understand the language of her spinning wheel, which is playing a sort of divine music. The delight that Curdie experienced while listening to the spinning wheel was his response and understanding.
Wrap-Up
More Information
- Dr. Amanda Vernon’s Instagram
- Dr. Vernon’s dissertation, “Reading with the Trinity”.
- Unsaying the Commonplace: George MacDonald and the Critique of Victorian Convention, a recently-published book which she co-edited and to which she contributed.
Concluding Thoughts
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