The Aspect of Eternity: Essays

by Bruce Bawer

Essays discuss Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, James Baldwin, Willa Cather, Ford Madox Ford, Peter Matthiessen, and Flannery O'Connor

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Theodore Bruce Bawer, who writes under the name Bruce Bawer, is an American writer who has been a resident of Norway since 1999. He is a literary, film, and cultural critic and novelist and poet who has also written about gay rights, Christianity and Islam.

Bawer's writings on literature, gay issues and Islam have all been highly controversial. While championing such authors as William Keepers Maxwell Jr., Flannery O'Connor, and Guy Davenport, he has criticized such authors as Norman Mailer and E. L. Doctorow. A member of the New Formalists, a group of poets who promoted the use of traditional forms, he has assailed such poets as Allen Ginsberg for what he views as their lack of polish and technique.

Bawer was one of the first gay activists to seriously propose same-sex marriage, notably in his 1993 book A Place at the Table, and his 2006 book While Europe Slept was one of the first to skeptically examine the rise of Islam in the Western world. Bawer's work is cited positively by Anders Behring Breivik in his manifesto.

Although he has frequently been described as a conservative, Bawer has often protested that such labels are misleading or meaningless. He has explained his views as follows: "Read A Place at the Table and Stealing Jesus and While Europe Slept and Surrender one after the other and you will see that all four books are motivated by a dedication to individual identity and individual freedom and an opposition to groupthink, oppression, tyranny."

Reviews

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bruce Bawer, author of Diminishing Fictions and The Middle Generation delights the reader with literary essays of the highest order. He is an engaged and stylish critic who addresses readers with intelligence and wit. This collection includes fifteen boldly evaluative and truly humane essays (all collected from "The New Criterion"). He explicates philosophic, religious, mystical, and visionary concerns in a seemingly disparate group of 20th-century writers. The highest accolades go to such novelists as William Maxwell, who, with ``conspicuous humility,'' draws us to everyday wonders. Similarly, Penelope Fitzgerald, with her ``sublime sense of the transcendent,'' portrays characters with ``quiet fortitude'' and ``a sense of duty.'' Bawer also reminds us that Flannery O'Connor's masterly stories were grounded in her traditional faith. Always measuring fiction against a sense of reality, Bawer finds many of the most celebrated writers coming up short: For all his mesmerizing brilliance, John Fowles's ``philosophical promiscuity'' leads to much mystical inanity; a clever naturalist and storyteller, Peter Matthiessen indulges in much bad faith, and considers all primitive cultures closer to God. Bawer rightly ignores the accepted wisdom about Graham Greene, and reveals the psychopathological dimension to Greene's peculiar theology. Despite their relative achievements, Baldwin, Lessing, and Updike (in the later Rabbit novels) sacrifice their narrative strengths for questionable politics and sociology. In her best work, Jean Stafford turns her tragic childhood into objective art; Harold Brodkey, on the other hand, remains mired in his own mythology, mistaking ``lexical flatulence for divine afflatus.'' These are reasoned essays from a self-described ``old-fashioned liberal humanist''. Bawer understands that ideas have consequences--and that the best art aspires to something greater than ideology.