"Lilith" by George MacDonald, Ch. 6-16
The Literary Life Podcast
Hosts Angelina Stanford and Addison Hornstra continue their deep dive into George MacDonald's novel Lilith, focusing on chapters 6 through 16. They address the common reader experience of disorientation, explaining that MacDonald
Key takeaways
- Angelina and Addison explain that George MacDonald intentionally disorients readers in Lilith to dismantle rational, material-world compass points and reorient them toward spiritual reality.
- The hosts compare MacDonald's episodic, dream-like structure to medieval romances and Lewis Carroll's Alice books, noting both authors use parody to send reasonable characters into illogical fairylands.
Main topics
- Reading strategy for mythic literature
- Intentional disorientation vs. modern allegory
Notable quotes
The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.
Conclusion
Listeners are equipped with a new framework for approaching mythic lit
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:18) This is not just another Book Chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading well. Explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week, we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone, because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever-unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is The Literary Life Podcast. Speaker 2 (1:28) Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. Today we are going to continue on with our series on George MacDonald's Lilith and cover chapters 6 through 16. And I am here with Miss Addison Hornstra. Welcome back, Addison. Speaker 3 (1:44) Yay, I'm back. It feels weird not to have Mr. Banks here with us. That's right, Speaker 2 (1:48) the mysterious Mr. Banks is being extra mysterious. I should say that I'm really sorry that we didn't have a podcast last week. I was struck down with a horrible, fast but intense illness. And then my husband was struck down with it. And that is why he is not here today because I just, I think it was hubris, y'all. I'm going to be honest with you because he was like, I won't catch it. I have a great immune system. And boom, boom, that was hubris, friends. The gods were like, I don't think so. Not today. So he's now down. And we decided that we weren't going to push it two weeks without a podcast. So here we are. Addison and I will do our best. Mr. Banks and I talked a lot about these chapters over the week. And I will do my best to tell you what he would have said. And then we will share the other things for next week because he's been doing some interesting research on George MacDonald and reading what people like W.H. Auden have to say about him. Not surprised at all that Auden is a MacDonald fan. Not at all. I mean, Auden gets the imagination. He just gets it. He was like one of the first really intense supporters of Lord of the Rings when it came out. Speaker 3 (2:55) Oh, that makes so much sense. Speaker 2 (2:57) And he was Tolkien's student. He was Lewis's student. He was in World War II when the Grimm brothers were kind of outlawed because anything German is bad. He wrote a great piece for the New York Times about why the Grimm brothers were important and why we needed them. His point that when we remove all of the symbolic language from ourselves that we're just going to be left with neuroses and other things like that, like that kind of language. We need this language and these ideas to be able to. you know, cope basically. Speaker 2 (3:31) Anyway, I love Odin, so not surprising that he's a big George McDonald fan. But nonetheless, Addison and I will try to carry on without the mysterious Mr. Banks. I will try to carry on without the mysterious Mr. Banks. Doing this podcast without him feels like I've just lost my right arm. I'm at sixes and sevens, completely discombobulated because I don't have my partner sitting next to me. But I'll do my best. I'll do my best. All right, so just a quick reminder before we jump in. I presume if you were here last week, you heard us talk about Mr. Banks' webinar, which he did do and was fantastic. And Addison's upcoming webinar on the prisoners of time, which you've been doing a lot of fun research on. Speaker 3 (4:15) I've been sharing some quotes with you. You Speaker 2 (4:17) have, and I am really, really intrigued. I cannot wait for this ghost stories webinar. This is going to be on October 27th. And last week we announced our conference. for 2027, which will be in January. And that is live on our website now. So you can go to houseofhumaneletters.com. You can click on the conference tab. You can click on the mini class webinar tab, and you can find out more about all the stuff that we've got going on. Mr. Banks and I were kind of laughing this week saying, you know, well. Speaker 2 (4:50) Anybody who was too confused about last week's episode probably isn't going to tune in for today's episode. But maybe if you're somebody who's like, I don't understand what's going on, but I'm just going to keep plugging through this podcast. I hope today's podcast is going to be a help to you. And we'll explain. why that is in just a minute. But first, see, I was already going to forget the commonplace quotes. See, Speaker 3 (5:12) I Speaker 2 (5:12) told you. Mr. Banks is not here and I'm going to be completely out of my routine. The voice of Speaker 3 (5:15) reason has left us. The Speaker 2 (5:17) voice of reason has left us. This is not a good sign or a Speaker 3 (5:21) bad sign. It's not the Speaker 2 (5:22) point to have lost the voice of reason, guys. Not at all. Not at all. All right, Addison, would Speaker 3 (5:27) you like to share a commonplace quote? Okay, I actually have a very Mr. Banksian commonplace quote. It is short. Oh, Speaker 2 (5:33) this will Speaker 3 (5:33) make Speaker 2 (5:33) me miss him even more. Speaker 3 (5:34) Yeah. Okay, so... It is from a Japanese scholar, Okakuro Kikuzo, and he wrote a very interesting little book in English, actually, called The Book of Tea. And he says, those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others. Speaker 2 (5:52) Oh, that isn't Mr. Banks' quote, but it's also very apropos to the chapters we read. It is. That's very good. Okay, so I'm going to cheat because I had three different quotes, actually four now. Four. I picked up another one this morning. I'm not going to say all of them as my commonplace. I'm going to say one as my commonplace quote, and then I'm going to sprinkle the others throughout this episode because I just kept finding more and more perfect things. And then one of our new fellows, shout out to Alicia, shared a quote from something she was reading from Sir Philip Sidney. I presume this is a quote from A Defensive Posey. And I just thought, my goodness, this is exactly what George McDonald is trying to do. So Philip Sidney in... A defensive pose, he not surprisingly, is giving a defense to people who say there's no value in literature. And he is saying there is a value, but he's pointing out that the value is not the value that you think it is. It has a different kind of value. So I'm going to start kind of at the bottom here of the quote, because it's very long, which you guys will all want it, I'm sure. Poets fulfill for us. that ancient scripture saying, we look not at things which are seen and temporal, but at the things which are not seen and eternal. The poet is forever pressing onward through the superficial, the things that show to the significant, the permanent. the universal truth behind the facts. He is forever ignoring the mere outward shell, giving us instead the inner spirit. For this very reason, the poet's pictured truth is deeper than science and truer than history. Speaker 2 (7:29) That's good, huh? Speaker 3 (7:30) That's so fantastic. It really, really fits this book, too. It fits Speaker 2 (7:34) this book totally because this, and I think this is part of why we feel so bizarre because, and we'll talk about this in just a minute, but while many authors will at least give you a deep grounding in sort of factual, literal, concrete things and then try to show you that there's a hidden spiritual reality behind it. McDonald's like, I'm just going to rip back the veil and show the pure spirit. And I think that is very, that's very disorienting. But I want to go back to what I was saying at the beginning about this episode, and hopefully this will be a help to anybody who's feeling confused. Speaker 2 (8:12) I was thinking over the week about how our Patreon is absolutely killing it with this book. I mean, they are just going to town and I'm so proud of them. But when I thought about why it is, it is because they have listened to everything. They have taken every webinar. They've taken all of your webinars, Addison. They've listened to us talk about how to orient yourself in these books before. And so they came in knowing how to do it. In fact, many of them said to me, This would have been just a completely bizarre, confusing book if I had not already known what to do from all the other teaching. Right. But. One of the things about the podcast is I always have to remember this could literally be someone's first podcast, right? They haven't been following us for the last eight years and have been slowly learning how to read these books. Somebody might have just typed in Lilith in, you know, iTunes. And when we come up and they're like, what are these crazy people talking about? So if you feel confused, we're going to try to break it down and try our best in a small way to condense eight years of teaching. Speaker 3 (9:15) Go back a little bit. Speaker 2 (9:18) Into a few minutes to try to orient you. Speaker 2 (9:22) You know, I thought a lot about what Mr. Banks said last week about how when he reads McDonald, he feels like he doesn't have a compass. Speaker 3 (9:32) And Speaker 2 (9:32) I think that that is 100 % true. This feeling of I don't know how to orient myself. In fact, he said last week, is it true that, or the last episode, is it true that McDonald is trying to misdirect us intentionally? And you and I both yelled, no! But I thought about it later, and I talked to him about this, and while I do not think that he is misdirecting us, I do think it is fair to say he is intentionally disorienting us. Speaker 3 (10:00) And Speaker 2 (10:01) when I told that to Mr. Banks, he said, okay, okay, that's a better word. So Speaker 3 (10:05) I think Mr. Banks was really right because George MacDonald is giving us a compass for a spiritual world, just not this one. And so there is no, it's very true that it is a disorienting book in the sense that it is really not of this world. And it's full of strange and weird things that, and even MacDonald's style is very non-linear. Right. So there's not really a logical progression where you can easily find your way from spot A to spot B. Speaker 2 (10:34) No, that's absolutely true. And would you say it's fair to say that part of the disorientation that's going on is he's saying your orientation points that are rooted in this world and this life are wrong and you need to be oriented to the spiritual. Absolutely. And that Speaker 3 (10:52) is one thing that I actually, I can't remember if we talked about this last week, but we kind of briefly touched on the book in the library, right? The one that's half embedded in the shelf. And one scholar who writes about George MacDonald, I'm not going to drop his name because some of his stuff is very good and some of it I don't recommend reading. But one of the things he does point out is the nature of this book in the sense that only part of it can be seen on this side of the bookshelf or in this world, right? The rest of it, is in the other fairy world and he can't pull it out. And he said that this book really symbolizes the journey Mr. Vane is on to find his spiritual inheritance. Because later in Lilith, we're going to see that he actually does pull the book off the shelf. It's just from the other side of the door. And he's able to read what is in the pages. Speaker 2 (11:38) So that would track with him coming down out of the garret, which I reread the first five chapters and we had talked about last time. that the garret is his mind. So he goes up into the garret. But I was struck when I reread the chapters how explicit MacDonald makes that. He keeps having the guy say, it's my brain. I don't want to go up in my brain. He says, Speaker 3 (11:57) I can't trust my own head. Speaker 2 (11:58) Yeah. I don't Speaker 3 (11:59) know what I'm going to see anymore. Right. So he Speaker 2 (12:01) tries to run away from it. I love the idea that the book is only half in this world. I mean, there's, gosh, that's also an allegory for how to read that ultimately you can't. put both hands on what literature does. You have to go through the mirror and experience it. You have to walk through it. That's fascinating. That also tracks with when he comes down to the garret and he tries to puzzle over the book and he can't grasp it with his rational Speaker 3 (12:25) mind. Which actually, shout out to my mom because she was texting me about that. She said she had read that part in Lilith and it reminded her a lot of The Sword in the Stone. Arthur has to pull the sword out of the stone and that there's a similar imagery going on with Mr. Vane needing to pull this book out to claim his inheritance. Speaker 2 (12:44) Right. So what I want to do in this episode, in addition to talking about the chapters, is back up a little bit and see if we can get those compass points. Speaker 3 (12:52) See Speaker 2 (12:53) if we can figure out how to orient ourselves in this book. Speaker 2 (12:58) And here's where I'm going to use one of my second commonplace quotes. So in the introductory essay by C.S. Lewis, which you can also find in his – the fullness of the essay is in his work on George MacDonald. He has a collection of George MacDonald, and this essay is in there. But he makes the point – and Mr. Bakes and I actually talked a lot about this this week – that – The experience you are having reading McDonald is not the typical literary experience. Okay, I'm not going to say it's not literary because I think that I'm a Northrop Frye girl. Okay, I think every literary experience actually is mythic, which is where we're going to go in a second. But it's not the typical literary experience in the same vein as like, you're not going to just. be blown away by the beautiful poetry or prose here. You're not going to be blown away by the wit and, you know, puns and wordplay. It's not that kind of story. Speaker 2 (13:55) Which isn't to say that the writing is bad. There was an interesting conversation about this over on the Patreon. It doesn't mean it's bad, but it's not trying to be Dante, okay? Where Dante's going to try to say the most beautiful, express the most beautiful thought with the most beautiful language. Like, that's not what he's doing. In fact, it probably works better that it's stripped down. But Mr. Banks and I were talking about how... This is an obstacle for him because I tend to naturally read mythically and he reads much more for the joy of the language. And that is Speaker 3 (14:30) different than me because I think I read so visually. Right. I'm reading, I'm seeing the images. So George MacDonald actually suits that. Speaker 2 (14:37) I can see that. I can see that. And I feel like I'm in between you and Mr. Banks. This is not my preferred thing. I actually like my images to be just a little bit more displaced. But I mean, I can handle it. It's not my preferred thing. But, you know, I was I was asking him because, you know, this really is just a real struggle for him. It's not his natural kind of book. And I want to I'm working so hard to help him get his feet under him. And and so that he can because he's a fantastic reader. I think he just doesn't know how he's supposed to think about this book. And so I said, but you like Lewis Carroll. You liked Through the Looking Glass. And this book is kind of doing the same thing. And he said, yes, because Lewis Carroll is witty. Speaker 3 (15:15) And I was like, OK, Speaker 2 (15:17) and George MacDonald is not witty. Right, exactly. Speaker 3 (15:21) So Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald are doing much the same thing, but from two very different methods of working. Speaker 2 (15:27) Right. Well, let me let me. Speaker 3 (15:29) Yeah. Speaker 2 (15:29) OK, let me let me go ahead and finish the littlest quote. All of that was the preface to say if it's not literary, then what is it? So Lewis says what MacDonald is trying to do is write mythically. And he defines that as. The repeated pattern of images. Okay. And you can tell Northrop Frye was C.S. Lewis's student in that sentence, right? So that means what you are supposed to be doing when you're reading is not looking at the beautiful prose or what a witty turn of phrase, which I enjoy a witty turn of phrase too. But that's not what this experience is about. This is almost pure myth. And so what you need to be seeing is that you're going to be walking through a series of images and there's going to be repeated patterns. And that is the experience that you are having. Having said that, though. Speaker 2 (16:23) That doesn't mean it's an allegory in the sense that most people think that means. So I feel like we have to just kind of break through a lot of weeds here. Speaker 1 (16:35) So Speaker 2 (16:35) when you hear Lewis saying it's mythic and it's a repeated series of images, mine might automatically go to, well, it's an allegory. And it is if you're using the medieval definition Speaker 1 (16:45) of Speaker 2 (16:45) allegory. It's not if you're using the modern definition of allegory. So it's not going to be a one-to-one thing. Again, Mr. Banks, you're going to hear me say this a lot because I'm trying to include him in the episode even though he's not here. We were talking about this and I said, it's not Pilgrim's Progress. It's not like I'm on a journey and this is obviously what's happening. And he agreed with me and said, oh, absolutely. It's much more like Dante than it is Speaker 3 (17:09) Pilgrim's Progress. And that is quite an important note, actually, because there's a wonderful scholar whose name I'm forgetting at the moment, who said the same thing of Lewis Carroll, that Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are really more Dante or Piers Plowman than they are. Pilgrim's Progress, right? And we tend to like to think, oh, well, we can make an allegory out of Alice in Wonderland, and we might want to do the same thing with Lilith, even though it's nearly impossible. But both of us care. I love that he's trying to Speaker 2 (17:35) make it impossible. Yeah, Speaker 3 (17:37) he really is trying intentionally to make it impossible. Speaker 3 (17:41) Both Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald were very heavily inspired and steeped in not only Dante, but the Italian medieval romances, right, that are moving on an episodic structure. They're moving on this sort of medieval jewel bright imagery in the words of this scholar. Right. And that is what they're trying to set down in these books. And, yeah. Oh, this excites me because I wrote Speaker 2 (18:05) this in the margin that this is this is episodic. It's more medieval. Speaker 2 (18:11) You were, you said you had a quote about George MacDonald not trying to line everything up one by one? Speaker 3 (18:16) Oh, uh, yes. So there's a scholar named John Dougherty and he writes that, uh, As much as you might try to make an allegory out of Lilith, it's absolutely impossible because it's quite slippery and it just seems to never stay quite consistent. We even see like the Raven has about seven different identities by the time you get through chapter six, right? That, you know, we've seen him as a librarian. We've seen him as a sexton. We've seen him as the companion of Sir Upward. We've seen him as Adam, as we're going to continue to see. So George MacDonald is not trying to give us this one-to-one equal sign of an equation of this figure equals this and therefore you have a formula and can figure out the story. Instead, his goal is to take you as the reader in the same way that Mr. Vane is on this journey through a series of images to gain in the end, hopefully a grand vision of a greater story. But until you've read the whole book... it's not going to quite make any sense. Speaker 2 (19:14) Right. And so if you're trying to get oriented by figuring out the secret code of the allegory, you're only going to get more confused. And honestly, it makes sense why Lewis was such a fan of McDonald because Lewis in an essay he wrote on the Fairy Queen. by Edmund Spencer, makes the exact same point. He says, if you try to read the Fairy Queen and line everything up one-to-one allegory, you will make yourself crazy. You'll only be confused. It doesn't work like that. It will feel contradictory to you that that's not how medieval allegory works. He says, instead, you just read the Fairy Queen. You walk through it. You let it wash over you. And the image is sort of... But basically what we're getting at here is you're not trying to rationally comprehend this. You're trying to imaginatively apprehend it. Speaker 3 (19:59) Right. And I think that's the encouragement for readers who are maybe listening to this podcast and thinking, man, this is a strange book. I can't pin anything down. It's OK. He doesn't mean for you to be Speaker 2 (20:08) able Speaker 3 (20:08) to pin anything down. That's exactly right. Speaker 2 (20:10) That's exactly right. And that's not meant to confuse you. It's meant to sort of, you know, liberate you. Yeah, to liberate you. Or orient you to a different fixed point, not the fixed point that you think you are. So by definition, medieval romances are very episodic. Speaker 3 (20:24) They Speaker 2 (20:25) don't have a linear narrative like a novel does. So it's going to be deliberately nonlinear. And we saw that in these chapters where he's. actually walking over the same bit of ground over and over. And each time it just looks different for him because he's obviously on a journey from spiritual blindness to spiritual sight. So things are looking different. He's... This is like going to the optometrist and having them put all the different lenses on your eyes to figure out, can you see now? Can you see now? Can you see now? It's like that. That's what's happening. And sometimes it's blurry and out of focus, but we know he's short-sighted from the beginning of the chapters, right? So it's just like, if you think about the whole journey as he's trying on these different lenses and can I see now? And just like when you go to the optometrist, you're like, well, I can see a little bit better out of this eye. Now it's too big. Now it's too small. It's like that, which is an image. actually he has in Fantasties as well. Do you remember the Speaker 3 (21:18) image there when Speaker 2 (21:19) he's in front of the mirror? It's like a funhouse mirror and some of the mirrors he's too big and distorted and some he's too small. Speaker 3 (21:25) So actually, John Dougherty writes that he thinks Lilith is kind of a continuation of Fantasties. Fantasties was part one and Lilith is part two. Speaker 2 (21:34) From a much, Speaker 3 (21:35) much older McDonald. Speaker 2 (21:38) So if it's not a linear narrative, This is what struck me as reading. Because like Mr. Banks, I am also trying to get my footing. I would not say that this is my natural milieu. My natural milieu is much more like a displaced romance in a detective novel where I'm like, oh, yes, the detective is a knight errant and I can see it now and here's all this stuff. But I like it to be somewhat rooted in this world. This is just pure undisplaced imagery, which we're going to let you talk about in a minute. But it did strike me, though. that it's wrong to try to look for a linear narrative, that it's much more like a medieval dream vision book. It really is. And Speaker 3 (22:13) I thought Speaker 2 (22:13) it's super interesting to me that your guy connected it to Pierce Plowman because that's a medieval dream vision, right? So it's I fell asleep and just like dreams are nonlinear. I mean, this is what we're getting at. Dreams are nonlinear, right? You're just like bombarded with all these things and then you wake up Speaker 3 (22:27) and you're like, ah. You're going to find out actually that the dream is. possibly playing a bigger part in Lilith than we know at this point. Okay. Well, this means I'm tracking. It does mean you're tracking. And of course, the dreams play a huge role in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass as well. Speaker 2 (22:43) So why don't you talk a little bit more about this? Because, you know, you and I have gone through the rounds with Lewis Carroll. And so for us to say, oh, it's so Alice, like we know what we mean Speaker 3 (22:53) by Speaker 2 (22:53) that. We know the people who took the Alice class know what we mean by that. But for somebody who's brand new. What do you mean when you say it's just like Alice and why does that matter and what should that be telling me? You know, Speaker 3 (23:04) I've been thinking about that since the last podcast we recorded. I thought, man, I've just been saying it's like Alice the whole time and what if no one has taken... the webinar or the mini class, and then it just sounds like, man, she's off her rock or what. Because it sounds like to somebody Speaker 2 (23:18) who's new, they might be like, yeah, I thought Lookingglass was insane, and this book's insane too, so is this what you're saying? Right,