Peace In a Plastic World | Joshua Hren – First Things

Western secular culture is a kind of hothouse growth, Christopher Dawson wrotean artificial culture that shelters us from the direct impact of reality. Neither birth nor death in secular societies occasions confrontation with ultimate realities. Rather, each brings us into closer dependence on the state and its bureaucracy so that every human need can be met by filling in the appropriate form. Evelyn Waughs Love Among the Ruins: A Romance of the Near Future dramatizes this sheltering. In this novella, junior sub-official Miles Plastic does clerical work for the Department of Euthanasia in a dystopian state. Plastic, whose surname epitomizes artificiality and malleability, ensures that those in line for a happy death do not press ahead of their turn, and adjusts the television set for their amusement. Although a faint whiff of cyanide sometimes gave a hint of the mysteries beyond, Plastic is content to empty the waste basket and brew tea for the patients.

Because the services offered by the Department of Euthanasia are essential, Plastic has no feast on Santa Claus Day (December 25). After work he walks to the hospital to visit his lover Clara, who is with child, and finds the hall porter . . . engrossed in the television, which was performing an old obscure folk play which past generations had performed on Santa Claus Day, and was now revived and revised as a matter of historical interest. The porters interest, Plastic supposes, is professional, for the show dealt with maternity services before the days of Welfare. The porter cannot look away from the strange spectacle of an ox and an ass, an old man with a lantern, and a young mother. People here are always complaining, the porter says. They ought to realize what things were like before Progress.

The Nativity, the great fact of christology (Christ descended and passed through utter poverty in order to redeem) ghosts through the television screen. However, these hothouse inhabitants are haunted not by the mystery of Christs humility, but by Mary and Josephs woeful lack of medical conveniences. In the world of the novella, the Story of Christ has been shrunken and sanitized into a museum-like documentary. As Dawson wrote, a completely secularized culture is a world of make believe in which the figures of the cinema and the cartoon-strip appear more real than the figures of the Gospel.

Plastic moves through the hospitals bowels until he finds his beloved in a ward marked Experimental Surgery. There, he inquires after our childbut Clara tells him: that had to go (italics mine). She then says that Santa Claus Day marks the nativity of her new face; her former one, ruined with facial hair, has been replaced by a wonderful new substance, a sort of synthetic rubber that takes grease-paint perfectly. Claras plasticity is more real to her than the child (the that) which has been eliminated by a simple, state-proffered operation. Like a mother who has just given birth, she sits up in bed, joyful and proud, but Plastic cannot countenance the tight, slippery mask, which he experiences as quite inhuman. Instead, he stares at the bedside TV, where further characters had appeared in the obscure folk play: Food Production Workers apparently declare a sudden strike, for they leave their sheep in a frenzy at the bidding of some kind of shop-steward in fantastic dress, accompanied by an old, forgotten ditty: O tidings of comfort and joy.

Through Waughs artfulness, the Nativity has been made strange in Love Among the Ruins. The Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky contended that the purpose of art is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By enstranging objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and laborious. Although the twenty-first-century West does not yet evince the extreme secularity of the dystopian society in Love Among the Ruins, Waugh helps us perceive how our own world, too, is unreal, and how in our day, too, the God who is Love has been relegated to the category of historical and cultural preservation. Waugh pairs Claras plastic joy with the tidings of comfort that break from the machine beside her. This juxtaposition brings Plastic to retch unobtrusively before he exits the surgery ward, baffled.

Waughs novella incubates us in a world that has abandoned God. Though the TV light extracts grace from the Christmas Story, Plastic and the porter watch with rare attention. They are arrested by the foreignness of Gods Incarnation, though they cannot put the fragmented pieces of the Story together. T. S. Eliot captures the disruptiveness of Christs coming in his poem Journey of the Magi. The narrator, one of the three kings, wonders whether he was led all that way for / Birth or Death?

Although he daily helps hasten the happy terminations of unwanted lives, Miles Plastic has been kept conveniently away from the mysteries beyond the door. His first real encounter with death comes through the surgical slaughter of his child. And it makes him miserable. Holy Mother State has anesthetized his consciousness against the pains of reality, but the death of our child on Christs birthday makes him long for another death. By the end of the novella, he has forged a desert in his imagination which he might call peace, a poor surrogate for the Prince of Peace. It's a desert that leaves him, like the Magi, ill at ease.

We inhabit a hothouse in many ways akin to that of Miles Plastic. Who among us can exit the hothouse and enter the enduring chill where the soul encounters the bitter agony and sublimity of Christ's birth? Who among us can craft a crche that will soil our artificiality with the ultimate reality? Who can arrest us until our unease passes into peace, until we dare call the Makers cave-set maternity wardlike his death on Fridaygood?

Joshua Hrenis Assistant Director of the Honors College atBelmontAbbey College and author ofThis Our Exile: Short Stories.

Photo by Eusebius@Commons via Creative Commons. Image cropped.

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Peace In a Plastic World | Joshua Hren - First Things