"Lilith" by George MacDonald, Intro and Ch. 1-5

The Literary Life Podcast

Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks welcome Addison Hornstra to launch a new series exploring George MacDonald's complex novel, Lilith. The t

Key takeaways

• Addison Hornstra serves as a specialized literary guide for this series due to her expertise in Lewis Carroll.
• The protagonist Mr. Vane is an anagram of 'Raven,' highlighting the book's use of symbolic wordplay.

Main topics

• George MacDonald's Lilith
• Literary connections to Lewis Carroll

Notable quotes

To be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality.

Conclusion

This episode sets the stage for a deep, symbolic reading of MacDonald'

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (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 3 (1:28) Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford, and today with me, as always, is the Mr. Vain in my life. V-A-N-E, not V-A-I-N, to be clear. But Speaker 1 (1:39) am I so vain? And do I think this podcast is Speaker 3 (1:43) about you? Wow. All right. We are starting right off with the corniness. That is going to be this kind of series. The first thing Speaker 1 (1:48) I found out about that song that it's about several men. And I like the idea of all of them meeting and getting into an argument about, no, the song is actually about me. And Speaker 3 (1:58) her just laughing and laughing. That would Speaker 1 (1:59) have been great. Genius. Genius. Speaker 3 (2:03) Well, the mysterious Mr. Banks and I are here today to start our podcast series on George McDonald's confusing, puzzling. deeply moving novel, Lilith. And we talk a lot in this podcast about the need to have a literary guide. And for most series, I'm your literary guide, or Mr. Banks is your literary guide. But you know, sometimes the guides need a guide too, right? No literature person can know everything. And so for this series, we brought in a ringer. We pulled her up from the bullpen. Yes, I'm throwing in all the different metaphors. I'm mixing all of them. We brought in a guide. to guide us and guide all of us through this novel. So welcome to the podcast. Welcome back to the podcast. Addison Hornstow. Welcome, Addison. Speaker 2 (2:50) Hello. Wow, that's a lot of pressure. I hope I can do a good job. A Speaker 3 (2:54) lot of pressure. Well, you know, I thought I would start off easy by throwing you in the deep end where it's boiling and there's a giant octopus. But nonetheless, why is Speaker 2 (3:03) a Speaker 3 (3:03) giant snake Speaker 2 (3:04) bursting out of the ground? Speaker 3 (3:05) There you go. Oh, OK. All right. Tease. But anyway. Why is Addison our guide here? Well, so I have never read George MacDonald's Lilith. I have read a lot of other George MacDonald's, and I've always been a bit terrified of Lilith because everyone says, and Addison will talk about this in just a minute, but everyone says it's very confusing. And I thought, oh, okay, okay, I don't know that I'm ready to do that. And Mr. Banks, you've read it before. I Speaker 1 (3:32) have. I felt that it was, again, while I enjoyed the reading of it, I felt it was a book that... required a compass which I did not have. That's well Speaker 3 (3:42) said. Maybe Speaker 1 (3:42) Addison here will be kind of the, you know, the Virgil to my Dante here. Speaker 3 (3:46) And having Speaker 1 (3:47) said that, I realized that was not as humble sounding a metaphor as I meant it to be. Speaker 3 (3:55) The mysterious and Mr. Vane. Mr. Vane. Speaker 1 (3:59) I Speaker 3 (3:59) walked right into that. Speaker 1 (4:01) Why am I even on this show? Speaker 3 (4:03) We need comic relief, dear. But anyway, last year, was it last year or two years ago that you did your Lewis Carroll stuff? Speaker 2 (4:13) I'm in the world of... Last year. Speaker 3 (4:14) Last year, okay. I've entered sacred time. I don't know what's going on. All right. So last year, Addison was working very hard. It's because, you know why I'm confused? Because it was 2024 that you and I started talking about Lewis Carroll. Correct. Speaker 2 (4:27) Yes. So Speaker 3 (4:28) she spent a year preparing for a 2025 webinar on Lewis Carroll. That was so mind-blowing that people wanted more, and you ended up giving a fantastic mini class on the Alice books, both of which I highly recommend and you can find in our store at howtsofhumaneletters.com. They're absolutely fantastic. But when you were explaining through the looking glass, you kept saying George MacDonald adored through the looking glass and wanted to write his own through the looking glass. And that's Lilith. And I thought, OK, this sounds like a podcast that needs to happen. So we put it on the schedule and said, Addison, you're going to have to come do your magic. I figured if you could make sense of the Lewis Carroll books and help me to understand what was going on there, that you were the perfect guide to guide us through the madness. Speaker 2 (5:15) of of this book yeah and you know the ironic thing is i was just thinking about this today i read lilith before i ever reread the alice books so actually lilith really informed a lot of my thoughts on alice interesting Speaker 3 (5:31) and of course that is how the world of literature works it doesn't have which door you go through right they're all correct leading you to the same center cathedral Yeah, so I'm really excited to have Addison here. And before we jump into our official conversation, remember that this is a free podcast available to you through the generous sponsorship of our Patreon. Shout out to you guys, our favorite place on the internet. This is an ad-free podcast. It's very important to me that when we're in the middle of talking about transcendent icons and symbols that we not stop to say... Have you thought about changing your cell phone provider? So there will be no ads. But we do have a day job and we do need to earn money to keep this podcast on the air. And so our day job is the House of Humane Letters where we are all three teachers. Speaker 3 (6:19) I wanted to let you guys know some things we've got going on there. We've got a bunch of fun webinars coming up. And the webinars are a great entry point if you've been thinking about going deeper but you're not sure because they're only $18. And Addison and I definitely go for three hours or more. We usually go until our voices run out. I'm trying to do better Speaker 2 (6:36) about that. You Speaker 3 (6:37) get a lot of. punch for your book in a webinar my edgar allen poe webinar was well over three hours and i charged 18 it was basically a mini glass so it was fantastic Speaker 2 (6:49) i sat there knitting just listening away i Speaker 3 (6:52) saw a lot of edgar allen poe in this so i'll be i'll be bringing that up in these chapters but anyway so we've got some fun stuff coming up for you We've got the people doing the fun stuff right here in this room. So September 30th. And again, everything we do is live or later. So if you can't make the live event, you own the recording and you can watch it. They say lifetime access, but I don't know whose lifetime. But we'll just leave it out there. Someone's lifetime. But you get it and you can watch it over and over. So on September 30th, Mr. Banks, you are giving us a webinar called Bunyan's Progress. The Life and Genius of an English Puritan. Tell us about that. Speaker 1 (7:29) Yeah, I wanted to do something about Bunyan for a while, and it had been coming up. And, you know, one of those authors that since we do not, we have not had him on this podcast, we do not teach him in our classes, we felt that this is kind of a major landmark in the English literary landscape that had been overlooked too long. So I want to introduce him as not even like one of the great. spiritual writers, which is what he's often presented as, but one of the great adventure writers. I think one of the great imaginative authors of his century, maybe the greatest. That's a tall order, I know, but I hope to justify it. And Speaker 3 (8:07) I should say, as your wife, that you spent all summer reading stuff on Bunyan for fun and sharing with me all the things you were learning. And I said, you know what? This needs to be a webinar because you learned so much. So, you know, if you're ever wondering, like, how we approach things, everything we do really is a labor of love. Just the Lewis Carroll thing started with just an interesting hyper-focus for us. Like, I wonder what this means. And then the next, it was that Northrop Frye said that the Alice books were... the key to understanding all of literature. And we were like, we don't know what he's talking about, but we need to know. And so we literally fell down the rabbit hole of Lewis Carroll. But that's how things happen here. We don't have a marketing team saying this is what the market wants. Like, we just love this stuff and we are excited about learning it ourselves and we share it with you guys as we can. So that's our September webinar. In October, Ms. Addison is going to be leading us through something I'm also very excited about. On October 29th, This is going to be our Halloween webinar. Addison is doing a webinar, which you have been talking to me about this for a long time, and we finally got it on the book, so I'm really excited about this. This is another thing that just came from a natural conversation, and you were throwing all your theories out at me, but I love the title you picked out for this. Prisoners of Time, Why Reading Ghost Stories Matter. All right, Addison. Speaker 2 (9:25) Yes, I am very excited to give this webinar as you just said. I think this is something I have been talking to you about since we first started talking years and years and years ago. It's been a delightful reading habit of mine for a long time to be reading ghost stories. And so in this webinar, I hope to... talk a little bit about the history of the English ghost story and why we have such a thing as a ghost story. What is actually going on here and why is this so much of a literary genre, not just in the West, but also in the East? They must be trying to tell us something. So one of my pet theories is that the ghost story is actually the second part of the detective story genre and that the two of them fit together. These are not stories we're telling to scare ourselves, but to give ourselves courage. So in the webinar, I will be exploring why that is and what vision these stories give us of what it means to be human. Speaker 3 (10:16) Oh, I love that. I love that. It really reminds me so much of my research for Edgar Allan Poe for the webinar I did last Halloween. Because people think that Poe and ghost stories are there. to give you some kind of sensation, some kind of boo, right? And that we were showing, no, that's actually not what's going on here. There's a deeper meaning. So I'm really, really excited about that. Speaker 1 (10:38) You mentioned that the ghost story and the detective story are in some ways reverse sides of the same coin. And it is interesting. They kind of come into their own at pretty much the same time. in the later 19th century. Oh, interesting. It's when you have Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe sort of debuting the detective story as we know it, but also W.W. Jacobs and Algernon Blackwood and M.R. James and the great sort of classic practitioners of the ghost story. But this is all in your province, so. Speaker 2 (11:09) No, no, no, that's an excellent point. And I'm going to argue that that is something we see in Speaker 3 (11:14) the Speaker 2 (11:15) East as Speaker 3 (11:15) well. Speaker 2 (11:15) In fact, that's what kind of first put me onto it is detective stories and ghost stories always go together. Speaker 3 (11:21) No, this is going to be brilliant. And I'm very, very pumped up for this. Okay, something else we've got going on. I'm happy to announce the ninth annual Literary Life Online Conference is happening. And we've got our speakers secured. We've got our schedule up. And we've got our title. And I'm going to tell you it. today. It may or may not be on the website live when this airs, but nonetheless, it's coming. This year's conference will once again be in January. We moved it last year to January after a lot of requests, and I think it went just smashing at that time. After you're just sort of coming down from Christmas and maybe you're approaching the February blues and you need a little bit of a literary jolt to get you through those dark winter nights, I felt like it was just a great way to start off the year. And so we're doing that again. So the conference will run January 22nd through January 29th. We've got five speakers for the same low, low price. I'm emphasizing that because last year when I bumped up the speakers, a lot of people just assumed the price was going to go up too. No, no, I'm just a glutton and just want to listen to all these speakers. So I just keep inviting people and not raising the price. So it's the same low price, five speakers, plus our student panel is coming back. And this year's keynote speaker is Dr. Michael Drought. bestselling author of his new book, The Tower and the Ruin, Tolkien's creation. That book is winning awards. It's selling out. It's such a smash. And he is such an amazing speaker. Don't let the doctor, the PhD, intimidate you because this guy teaches classes for us at the House of Humane Letters. And there are literally, I'm not even kidding, literally students from 12 to 76 in that class and just loving it all. And he is that kind of speaker who can just make everything exciting. and accessible. But I'm going to read to you the title in the description, and you'll see why Dr. Drought was the obvious choice as the keynote speaker. So the conference title is The Tower and the Ruin, Rebuilding the Literary Life. Once upon a time, a man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of which had been an old hall. He took some of the stones and built a tower. But his friends, without bothering to even climb the steps of the tower, became obsessed with the stones. So they pushed the tower over and began to root around in the rubble, forming various theories about the meaning of the stones. And in their search for meaning, they even forgot the stones altogether. Finally, they concluded that the man was odd and silly and had built a nonsensical tower. But they never discovered that from the top of the tower, the man could see the sea. Tolkien wrote the above paraphrased allegory to explain the errors of modern approaches to reading and how to correct them. Join us January 22nd to 29th for the 9th Annual Literary Life Conference as we explore the concept of the tower and the ruin. We will examine everything from the tower itself to the men who tore it all down and created the ruin to what it means and how to reconstruct the tower so that we might see the sea. Speaker 3 (14:37) I'm excited Speaker 2 (14:37) about that. That sounds wonderful. I'm very excited about that. Yeah, Speaker 3 (14:41) I'm pumped. This is going to be a great conference. Yeah. So join us. Get your ticket and join us for a little over a week. It'll be a session a night. And immerse yourself in these ideas with us. All right. Mr. Banks, would you like to go first with your commonplace quote? Speaker 1 (14:59) Yes. Yeah. So mine is. From one of Lytton Strakey's books of essays. Lytton Strakey is one Speaker 2 (15:07) of Speaker 1 (15:07) my favorite sort of feline satirical authors. He was mainly a biographer and a historian, but he's also wonderfully funny. And here he is describing the 18th century classical scholar Richard Bentley. He says, quote, he treated his opponents as if they had been corrupt readings in an old manuscript. Speaker 2 (15:32) Yeah, Speaker 1 (15:32) that sounds like the kind of mean person I would like to know right there. It's Speaker 3 (15:35) like a description of me, to be honest. I don't know if I feel seen or judged right now. Speaker 1 (15:40) Maybe both. Speaker 3 (15:42) All right, Addison, do you have a less snarky and pointed and offensive commonplace quote? Speaker 2 (15:49) Okay, so my quote, like myself, is long-winded, and it comes from George MacDonald's novel Thomas Wingfold. It's quoted by Greville in the biography he wrote of his father, which we'll talk about in just a minute. All about us is earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach. There is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in a daisy. now in a wind draft, a cloud, a sunset, a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us, inside the spirit, outside the word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us. When they meet, then the sign without and the longing within become one light, and the man no more walketh in darkness, but knoweth whither he goeth. Speaker 3 (16:41) Nice. I also have a long-winded commonplace quote. Speaker 3 (16:48) I will be actually quoting from several different essays as we go through this series. But Malcolm Gite, who we had on the podcast, and I highly recommend you go listen to that interview we did. He is a fascinating thinker and definitely a kindred spirit of George MacDonald. And he wrote an introduction to Lilith. And I kind of want to read the whole thing, but I won't. So maybe I'll just give you quotes here and there as we go through the book. But it's fantastic. And I felt like it really gave me the compass points I needed to use Mr. Banks's earlier. image. But here's just a little section that I thought would help us to think about how to think about the book, particularly that it's not an easy read. It is asking something of you. It is asking you to go deeper than the surface because this book absolutely will not allow for a surface reading. If you just read it on its surface, it's just going to be confusing and madness and nonsensical. But I was delighted in the first few chapters to see how much he is explicitly telling us, stop looking at the surface. You have to look under the surface. But more about that later. But anyway, here's a little something from Malcolm Gite about the rewards that come from putting effort into reading this book. This process of rediscovery and renewal is framed within the novel itself. For Mr. Vane must cross and recross the same landscapes many times, from the sextant's cottage through the evil wood, the bad burrow over the dry water courses to the desolate city. At first he travels in all his shallow self-assurance, then growing humility and insight, each time the terrain yielding a little more of its meaning for him and for the reader until at last, with real repentance, which in that world is metamorphosis, He can see even the worst of human experience transfigured and redeemed. And so it is with the reader. This is not a book to skim and discard, but the companion of a lifetime. And on each rereading, as we cross and recross its strange terrain with Mr. Vane, as we relive its adventures and transformations, we find, as does its hero, deeper and deeper layers of meaning. The book is always an open door. Speaker 2 (18:53) That is fantastic. No, Speaker 3 (18:55) so good. So good. And I see you grinning. So let's jump in. Should we start with the title? He's got a little epigraph here to tell you where it comes from. But I kind of wondered, and you can tell me since you're going to be guiding us. I wondered if the title's meaning would become apparent the more we read. What do you think? The Speaker 2 (19:15) title's meaning 100 % will become more apparent. So should Speaker 3 (19:19) we? So should we wait to discuss it? I Speaker 2 (19:22) almost was wondering about that just now. If maybe we wait until we've actually met Lilith. Okay, so she is going to be a character. Further in the pages of the book, she is. Okay. Speaker 3 (19:32) Okay, well, I guess we can say that he's got an epigraph here off Lilith. So he does expect us to know the myth of Lilith. So maybe let's wait until we meet Lilith. Speaker 2 (19:44) Yes, I think that would be good. I think a further explanation of exactly who she is and why she's in this story would come up naturally, maybe even in the next episode. Speaker 3 (19:53) And of course, if our listeners are thinking, well, the only other time I've heard Lilith mentioned in the story is The Magician's Nephew, you would say... Speaker 2 (19:59) Oh, I would say this book is The Magician's