Tower of Babble

The following is an excerpt from an email from Will to Art on 3 September 2014. 

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder

I guess there's an ironic dual effect of Arthur as a pillar saint.

On the one hand, he becomes a spiritual totem of sorts; a healing presence; a living amalgation of every literary and visual form we've been able to imagine baptized to Catholic ends and still more; someone beyond our understanding and therefore pushed to the outskirts of a world that has written his kind out of its grand narratives; a healing figure, a cautionary figure, a prophet, a man truly of his time and seeming out of joint with his time. And at the same time, he is Art on a pedestal. In the end, he's our Art.

What Art sits amid, I suppose, is the family legacy: cement, the neglected church of his youth, dead industry, the defeat of the dream of progress, modernism, the self-made man, etc. But the pillar is a throne; all these things were the Tower of Babel and Arthur's existence hastened their fall. We end up with the Gestalt effect: one view makes Arthur the figure of God's triumph sitting victorious on the battlefield; another makes him a colossal failure.

The determining factor is our gaze: are we viewing as Americans or as the saints militant?

A cue toward interpretation is Will, who is a penitent of some sort. Will has abandoned the rubble for something better, and that something better appears lower depending on our gaze. We get that squirminess Chesterton achieves in The Man Who Was Thursday, in which what seems like anarchy, chaos, and collapse serves a higher order even the faithful can't comprehend and only poets can hope to glimpse.

Somehow, the farcical ends of Steffi and Farthington fit well with the seriousness of this pillar image. The apocalypse they experience is a "Tower of Babble" collapse of postmodern popular culture, not the Final Judgment. They are two glimpses of postmodernism; Will and Arthur are foils. Arthur is a prophet and Farthington is a Pharisee. And it makes sense that Will and Steffi have an awkward union: Steffi is the nightmarish face of Will's dream. He mythologized his own father too much to see the truth about his father's misguided approach to life. Plus his dad is a loveable and admirable guy in many ways even if he ends up a citizen of hell. He's a tragic figure, where Steffi is more of a witch in a world that has deconstructed the witch concept into an empowered feminist.

I would not mind an allusion or two to Ariana Huffington!