Like any good Christian I find myself apologizing for reality. Reality is good, solid, noble and pure. The real is faithful, generous, hopeful, chaste, courageous, well-behaved and kind. Reality is virtuous. It thinks of others, speaks cheerfully to them, helps out with the dishes and tire-changing. The real has no complaints.
When I say I am a good Christian I am not real. So my familial brothers and sisters might say I ought to get real—I’m not a good Christian. In other words, tell the truth if you want to be real. Here, just here, I can get real, tell the truth: I am not a good Christian. Never have been. Have no plans to.... Maybe I have been good, minutely—a few times very briefly—jumping in being good on the instant. But again, plans?... Not sure I can do that.
I apologize for reality. I do not apologize for unreality.
Real is what I’ve described above in the first paragraph, leaving out the lie about me being a good Christian. Based on criteria above, my literary sisters and brothers would say I am not a good realist, that I ought to get real. “There’s little realism in you stories.” “People aren't like that,” they might say.
Our literary brothers and sisters have been busy for the last 175 years trying to convince readers that reality is banal, selfishly introspective, rude, perverted and manipulative.
That it is low and knocks people about, or that it is objective, “advanced,” and that we need their literary help to understand this. Even beautiful speculative forms like Magic Realism posit this view of reality. Qualities described at the top of this essay are absent in literary fictional characters because, deemed artificial or sentimental, these qualities are not in ourselves.
Therefore, make your stories and characters real via that traditional literary device: “warts and all.” (Some characters are nothing but warts, bagsful of literary warts.)
However, as shown, this apologetic piece is in disagreement with academic critical realism/ naturalism. It’s not saying that there is no death for us (“you surely shall not die”) — un-really described by the unreal serpent in Eden. Perhaps I should say the unreal devil. Was the devil real? Of course not. The devil is never real. But the presence of evil in the Lord Jesus Christ’s verifying story is accurate. So it is fine, even true, to put evil in a story. Yet, in assertion of my argument, I posit the devil and his destructiveness are truly unreal.
Again, I do not apologize for unreality. Owing to literature’s current unreal claims on what it calls reality, I make many of my characters real—if I’m able—but not without said apology. In such of C.S. Lewis’s stories some characters are simply shoddy: lying, abusive, cruel, and generally harmful. Like those characters waiting in line for a bus to Heaven in Lewis’s story The Great Divorce. This fantasy displays the contrast between real and unreal in crystalline fashion. To see what I’m getting at, read his book.
I claim to be real and unreal, but mostly the latter. In fact, I’m not sure I can claim the former in any way. So perhaps I am one of those self-righteous unreal big old ladies in O’Connor’s powerful single-stratagem stories. However, when it comes to writing characters, I strive for reality wherever possible. Since I’m so unreal I want my mind and imagination to dwell in hope on the real.
I am not sorry for reality; I’m making an argument, offering a vindication. A real academic would put the definition of apology at the head of this article. I’m actual enough to admit being a rather sloppy creative writer (if wise to the craft). This is the informal explicative apology for writing real characters in an age of unreality.
Which brings us back to The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis, a Christian apologist. Now this man could apologize like nobody’s business. I’m not sure... I may have gotten the idea that the devil’s not real from him, say, from the incredible Screwtape. The Screwtape Letters.
If the devil is so unreal, what’s with all the pain and suffering? Am I going to say that’s not real? No. It’s real because the only real person experienced it.
But, again, I'm not the one to explicate, apologize for it.
What I’m briefly saying is, the devil is not solid. Not crystalline. Not pure, not true. We make a big mistake putting our hopes in one not real. I must caution that his plan is to seem real. But reality is God. And God is all those things in the first paragraph, including the good Christian, the Lord Jesus Christ.
There’s where to put your hopes for reality. At the moment, the whole world is morally unreal. But you knew that. I’m just asking you to notice.
Reality, a Person. But even unreality—at the moment—is also a person. (Poor non-thing.) But the unreal has only an appearance, sometimes convincing. Don’t believe him. He’s unreal, does not deserve your belief and will be gone... perhaps quickly.
I don’t want to be gone. Do you? ...Not if I can know Reality. Not if somehow I can make a Christian’s Progress. —Attend.
...Work out of Christ’s faith by grace, even in trembling, in fear.
At this time, every one of God’s characters on earth are unreal, insubstantial. The characters in parts of C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy are sub-creatively substantial, real, as are those in the heavenly part of The Great Divorce. From Earth unreal characters come in contact with the real in both these books. So, it's demonstrated —alt-worlds while claiming no reality can contain the very real.
Reading Karen Swallow Prior’s book on reading well to discover virtue, we find twelve virtues exemplified through her experience with primarily twelve good books, many classics of English literature. These virtues make us real.
Maybe not surprisingly her engagement is often with what is not virtuous in these books. The characters often are not real because of their lack of virtue, or the presence of lust, lust in its older meaning: not just disordered sexual desire, but disordered desires of any kind.
Faithfulness, Temperance, Prudence, Courage and Justice; Faith, Hope, Love; Kindness, Chastity, Patience, Humility and Diligence—each of these virtues is explored largely through individual books, good books read well;
including Pilgrim's Progress and novels by Fielding, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Twain, Tolstoy, Austen, and others. These virtues—Cardinal, Theological. and Heavenly virtues according to category—are real. Moving to end my piece I’m going to spotlight diligence. Being an imperfect Christian, and a reader lacking diligence, I recall scarcely finishing Pilgrim's Progress decades ago in our first house. Each of the characters in John Bunyan’s book is named for traits possessed—or what the good types, as imagined by the religiously imprisoned sectarian author, have become through Action, Grace and Will. The non-good types are, of course, Unreal. Allegory, says Prior, not only combines symbols, “it is wholly symbolical.” Unless one is unreal, one cannot misapply its symbols. They are crystalline, eternal. (Except the for unreal symbolical types.)
Also in Dr. Prior’s book, one of the unreal is to be found in Flannery O’Connor’s “Revelation.” This, to me, is O’Connor’s best—for the redemption at its end. The strongest character this author can do, her greatest most hard-core and unreal type, is found across her oeuvre. Also presented in the self-righteous culturally correct son of such in “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” In stories I’ve read, O’Connor's energetic type absorbs/expresses all the writerly energy she has to give. Other characters may lack a fullness, the attentive crafting she gives her vain proud righteous “little old ladies.” These come to life. Extra-textually they might cry out, “Miss O’Connor, why did you make me so?!”
I could be one of her self-righteous characters. I was so even when young and semi-attractive, long long long ago. And let me tell you how mad I am at Flannery O’Connor! Well actually, I can’t tell you —not without a great deal more bombastic self-righteousness. ....Every time I read O’Connor, I want to “dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.” So, suffice to say, in “Revelation” the proud main character, acknowledging herself so made by God, and so mad about it! —just here, in this story, we imaginatively experience that even our virtues will be burned off in the purifying fires of God. Himself. He trusts no one else to cleanse us. Dare I say, “Thank you Jesus!”? (Shudder.)
(I’m not confusing facts with the literary category of fiction in this piece.) Fact: Reality is in the first paragraph. Except for the part about me being a good Christian. Lacking diligence, I don't even have a plan.