“I recognize in your writing, and especially in your letter, how close your way of thinking is to my own.”
—Roger Scruton, author of The Soul of the World, in a letter to the author in 2017
“Alan Griesinger takes the reader on an enchanting voyage of literary rediscovery, restoring comedy to its high Chaucerian and Shakespearean vocation as a vision of lost unity. A Comic Vision elegantly shows that comedy is no laughing matter but, on the contrary, that it challenges us to give local habitation and a name to life’s most engaging mysteries.”
—Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of The New Criterion, endorsing A Comic Vision of Great Constancy in 2014
“A lifetime of teaching and examining Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s great comic works has given Alan Griesinger a wonderful comic vision of his own. This book is a lyrical and profound exploration of the nature and vision of comedy, a pleasure to read.”
—Brooke Allen, author of Moral Minority, Artistic License, and Twentieth-Century Attitudes, endorsing A Comic Vision of Great Constancy in 2014
Dear Reader,
For a number of years, I wanted to fix some of the problems in A Comic Vision of Great Constancy, but I was moved to do a second edition for another reason. Once I completed my third book, I went back and studied the other two. I was struck with how the three together can be read as chapters of one work, an inquiry spanning fifteen years that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. To communicate briefly my sense of the series as a whole, I have written an “Afterword” for the second edition of Great Constancy. In addition to that essay, which I have posted on my blog, I’m posting here a brief summary of my pilgrim’s progress through the three phases of my inquiry.
In the first book, A Comic Vision of Great Constancy, I explored how the stories and the poetry of Chaucer and Shakespeare unlock the wisdom that’s immanent in all human experiences, but especially in disappointment. These experiences are the basis for true self-government, for they imprint on minds and bodies lifesaving insights and muscle memories that our literature personifies as Wisdom.
In the second book, A Comic Vision of Self Government, I explored how everyday interpersonal experiences (that are Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s subject) provide a basis for political philosophies, as in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. These authors, I maintain, derive their political theories from the commonsense insights of Chaucer and Shakespeare, our two greatest authors, along with other seminal texts in our literature. Like the poetry of Chaucer and Shakespeare, English common law represents the collective wisdom of a people living in a particular place. In the common law, justice has to do with the rights and duties of specific individuals, not with abstract, universal concepts like liberté, égalité, and fraternité. A government based on this French foundation, Burke argued, is unstable, for these concepts ignore the unspoken, unlegislated obligations that govern our behaviors every day; social order, he believed, grows out of these obligations. Since society “is a contract between the dead, the living, and the unborn,” Burke maintained that the revolutionary French ship of state would flounder due to an exclusive focus on the present generation. Left to itself, that generation would waste its inheritance on itself and disinherit its children. In addition, others after Burke have pointed out that it’s impossible to reconcile liberty with equality, for the goal of equality results in a zero-sum game where one person’s gain of freedom is another person’s loss of freedom.
In the third book, A Comic Vision of Sacred Kingship, I moved from questions about government to questions about reality and how we know reality. Roger Scruton, whom I discovered in 2016, got me going on the project. I argue in the book that Scruton, C.S. Lewis, Goethe, and Plato are poets and storytellers as well as philosophers. Like the common law, their philosophies emerge from concrete experiences and the literature of people living together in a particular place. For example, C.S. Lewis would persuade us that the allegories of love he has studied, a literary form practiced for centuries by pagan and Christian writers, have for centuries given readers in the West a motive to do what Architrenius, a character in a twelfth-century Medieval poem of the same name by Johannes de Hauvilla, decides:
This must I do—go exiled through the world
And seek for Nature till far hence I find
Her secret dwelling place; there drag to light
The hidden cause of quarrel, and reknit,
Haply reknit, the long-divided Love.
Architrenius is determined to resolve the problems that arise from living with other people. Like the character of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose head is transformed into that of an ass, Architrenius, like Bottom, will need an entirely new head to reknit the long-divided Love. This is the kind of change the writers in my book outline for us in my commentaries. As I have done here, the writers I discuss make their case with a philosophy grounded in common sense along with stories and poetry that draw on experiences and images from everyday life.
Before closing, a word about a letter I received from Roger Scruton back in 2017. After I had been reading his books for a number of months, I was accepted to attend the first annual Scrutopia Summer School at Roger’s farm in Wiltshire, but I had to withdraw some weeks later due to family obligations. In my place, I sent him my first two books along with a cover letter. Some weeks later he wrote me an email to acknowledge the gift, which I readily admit was less a gift than a bit of world class presumption on my part. Roger had graciously devoted some time to looking through my work, and near the end of the email he concluded, “I recognize in your writing, and especially in your letter, how close your way of thinking is to my own.” My way of thinking was adequate for the life I had lived up to that point. I can only hope that a like-mindedness with Roger’s thinking will lead to further insights and understanding.
Once I got going, my book on The Soul of the World seemed almost to write itself. It gave me wonderful days and nights as I engaged the question, “What does it mean to be a living soul?” From day to day, I would read Roger’s text, and my own words, images, and ideas would come out of nowhere. Right in the middle of the process, though, I learned that Roger had died. For a moment it felt like the rug had been pulled out from under the whole project, even though my relationship with the man himself was so slight. As naturally as I breathe to live, though, the relationship and a creative response continued.
This response to a death, I have discovered, is at the heart of Roger’s message to his readers. Like T. S. Eliot before him, he saw that Science (personified) and a culture based on scientific thought give us no satisfaction concerning the end of life. What’s the point? What’s the meaning of it? Infinite space won’t tell us, and a black hole cannot say. Without a satisfactory answer, Eliot wrote, Life is a wasteland. Without the comfort religion used to provide, Life and Death, like Liberty and Equality, is an impossible contradiction.
Dear Reader, more than any other contemporary writer Scruton’s work has given me some satisfaction concerning this contradiction at the heart of human experience. He has gone on a journey to find Nature’s secret dwelling place in order “to reknit, happily reknit, the long-divided Love.” I have gratefully followed the path he opened up.
Sincerely,
Alan Griesinger