Ascent toward Meaning

by Professor John Desmond, English

* The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich (Harper Collins Publishers, 2001). In this novel Erdrich takes the epic saga of the Ojibwa people of North Dakota she has recounted in many novels to imaginative new heights. Tracking and back-tracking across the last century, she tells the mysterious story of Father Damien Modeste, a missionary who is actually a woman named Agnes DeWitt disguised as a priest. Dedicating her (his) life to the reservation families, Father Damien encounters numerous challenges: a devastating influenza epidemic, tribal feuds and murders, sexual temptation, the devil, and a crisis of faith as she (he) becomes initiated into the Ojibwa tradition. A lyrical, tragi-comic, and profoundly visionary account of the native American experience.

* Grammars of Creation by George Steiner (Yale University Press, 2001). A brilliant tour-de-force meditation on the concept of creation in Western civilization as manifested in science, literature, music, religion, and philosophy. Ranging authoritatively across the works of figures such as Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Bach, Heidegger, Duchamp, and Kafka, Steiner examines the roots of “beginnings” in our culture and whether a future “grammar of hope” has been extinguished by events of the 20th century. While acknowledging the dominating power of modern technology, Steiner nonetheless affirms that the force of human creativity — the ascent toward meaning in all forms — will prove that “the story out of Genesis” has not ended.

* Opened Ground: Selected Poems by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). One of the finest collections of poetry of the past quarter century, Opened Ground offers selections from 11 volumes of Heaney poems, plus an excerpt from his verse play The Cure at Troy. Heaney’s beautiful, often wrenching, lyrics record his finely-tuned personal responses to nature, family, community, and history. The generous humanity and craftsmanship of these poems earned Heaney the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. The collection also includes his Nobel Prize address, “Crediting Poetry,” an eloquent defense of the value and necessity of poetry in the face of the brutalities of modern history.

* I See Satan Fall Like Lightning by Rene Girard Maryknoll (Orbis Books, 1999). In his latest study of the cultural roots of violence, anthropologist and literary scholar Girard examines how mimetic desire leads inevitably to rivalry, conflict, and scapegoating in human societies. Girard explores how patterns of ritual violence inform cultural myths, as in works like Oedipus Rex and Philostratus’s Life of Apolonius of Tyana, and how the Gospel tradition offers an alternative vision by exposing the demonic roots of the mechanism of violence. Especially insightful are his interpretations of Nazism, of the dynamics of victimization, and of the modern concern for victims.

John Desmond, Mary A. Denny Professor of English