Professor Lew Archer: May He Rest in Peace

I arrived at Whitworth College in the fall of 1974.  I'm happy to say that I was an absolutely motivated student.  I might have been the least jaded and the most open to ideas and intellectual possibilities that I've ever been in my entire life.  Every once in a while I still feel the rush of excitement about reading and ideas I did when I was 19/20 years old, but never with the same naive intensity. 

The frequent experience I had in the fall of 1974 of my head exploding reached a peak I had never known before when Wheaton College professor, Beatrice Batson, visited the college to give a series of Staley Lectures, a program designed to bring Christian intellectuals to college campuses (and maybe other locations, too....).

During her visit, Batson did something I'd never heard anyone do before:  she, as a Christian, articulated a vision of the world, of reality itself, from the perspective of existentialism and did so not to argue against this way of seeing things, as many Christians do, but as a framework of what the world is really like and that it is living in this world of uncertainty, emptiness, dread, and absurdity that makes living the Christian life so essential. 

I went to every talk she gave and every presentation she gave.  She unfolded the plight of King Lear to me in an existential way and explained how in the midst of the absurd world he roamed, he came to grips with his own emptiness and, by the end of his life, as he carries his hanged daughter Cordelia on to the stage, he had become fully human.  His tragedy was not only that he died, but that he died ripe, fully himself, "every inch a king"; had he died earlier, we would not have lost a King Lear we so deeply admired.  She saw King Lear as a parable of a character becoming fully and spiritually alive in an existential world that was without pattern, empty of inherent meaning, defined by its chaos.

At another presentation, she gave a close reading of Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find".   In the world of O'Connor's story, all is grotesque because the world of the story is fallen, in need of redemption.  It's an existential world.  Grace enters this world in the Grandmother's last moments, when her head clears and she sees the Misfit as one of her own.  She shoots her.  Batson introduced to me an idea I'd never considered, never thought of:  the violent intrusion of grace.  In a world so blind to grace, so grotesquely oblivious to grace, Batson explained, O'Connor writes stories in which grace can only be experienced, metaphorically, in some violent, shocking, rudely awakening way.

The Beatrice Batson visit connected me to Professor Lew Archer when I attended a presentation she gave on C. S. Lewis.  My guess is that she reflected upon either the Chronicles of Narnia or The Space Trilogy.  In that small gathering in the South Warren Hall lounge, Beatrice Batson talked about Lewis' writings as myth and that we ought not to think of myths as lies or as ways of not telling the truth.  No, she explained, myths tell the deepest truths.  They are stories that explore the deepest and most common elements of all human life.  Myths help us sort out the patterns human life found as a means of showing us the way in a world that we might experience as formless, absurd, meaningless -- in short, as existential.

Some time, not long after Beatrice Batson left campus, the offerings for January term came out and to my astonishment, Lew Archer was giving a course in Mythology and Literature.

I could hardly wait.

It's funny.  Maybe it was because he was bald and maybe it was his beard, which may have been graying in January, 1975, but Lew Archer always seemed old to me, in an old wise man way.

I know now that when I walked into his Mythology and Literature course, that Lew Archer was thirty-nine years old.  My sense of him as older than he was got reinforced in the Mythology and Literature course.

We read Joseph Campbell's book, Hero with a Thousand Faces, a book of deep wisdom along with Campbell's encyclopedic knowledge of myths from countless cultures around the world.

I was riveted to the wisdom of Campbell and Lew Archer, as Lew Archer explained to us the idea of the monomythical hero's journey, the idea that cultures around the world, at different times in world history, none of whom had had contact with each other, told hero-centered stories that were organized around a common pattern of the hero leaving home, going out into the world and being initiated into the world's chaotic dangers, passing through an experience of deep darkness (I like when it's called the belly of the whale) and emerges again, stronger, learned, and returns home a fully individuated hero.  It's the passage from life to death to resurrection to renewed life or from autumn to winter to summer to spring.

To me, Lew Archer was a magus, blending the scholarship of Joseph Campbell with the psychological insights of Carl Jung in literature class at a Christian college, once again deepening my understanding that the life of a Christian and the life of a Christian academic was not devoted to sealing off Christianity from other ways of thinking, like existentialism or mythology, but I admired Lew Archer for illuminating the mythic, heroic story of Jesus.  Whether he taught us this or not, I was able to see that the pattern of the hero's journey illuminated the Jesus story and that it was an external story for my own inward life.

In other words, within myself, on a repeating basis, my life had gone through and would continue to go through initiations into the unknown, descents into darkness and the belly of the whale, many risings out of the darkness, and times of transformation.

Whether Lew Archer ever instructed me in this kind of thinking in his lectures, I can't remember.  I only know what happened and continues to happen as a result of taking this course.

A few months later, during spring semester, I took a four week course from Lew Archer in 20th century drama. The Mythology and Literature course had given me no indication that Lew Archer relished the theater of the absurd.  I was ecstatic.  My professor was an ordained minister, the Reverend Doctor Lewis Archer, and he loved the absurdist, surreal, existential plays of such writers as Stoppard, Beckett, Pinter, and others.

As I look back nearly forty years to that short course, I don't know if Lew Archer intended for me to learn what I did, but I like to think that he wanted us as literature students at a Christian college to confront the absurdist worlds of these plays because it's the world we live in.  The world is fragmented.  Often the connections between language and words and what they purport to speak on behalf of is, at best, tenuous, at worst not there.  Words like "freedom" are used in relation to acts of oppression and "heroism" for acts of butchery.  The absurdists portray the world as empty of inherent meaning and fragmented; time and language is spent on silliness, on received patterns of chatter that we repeat over and over again, rarely connecting with one another.

I like to think that Lew Archer took delight in putting these truths before us and that he was helping us in case the scales of delusion had blinded us into thinking that the world had some inherent meaning apart from how we give it meaning and that if our practice of Christianity was complicit in this delusion, that we needed to confront the existential nature of the world and what it means to be Christian in such a world.

Again, I don't know if Lew Archer ever lectured us about what I just said, but it's what I learned from his course that continues to be at the heart of my philosophical and spiritual life.  By studying those plays, I learned and continue to explore that my  life as a Christian and what I experience as grace and hope and renewal and awakening occurs in a world I find mostly absurd, fragmented, and empty of received or inherent meaning.  If I were to seal myself off from the absurdity and meaninglessness of the world and deny its existence through worship and citations from the Bible and prayer and fellowship, my life as a Christian would be a pretend life.  Lew Archer helped me keep it real.

I paid a lot of attention to Lew Archer when I was a student and even more when we worked together for the two years I served as a full-time temporary faculty member in the English Department at Whitworth.  I paid attention to his deep interest in the dark and existential novels of Russia and to his immersion in the fragmented and enigmatic world of the oceanic wilderness of Moby Dick.  I knew that Lew Archer felt affinity with the Old Testament prophets, prophets who spoke passionately about the brokenness of the world they lived in, who warned of the disconnection between the word and will of Yahweh and the people of Israel, who had keen insight into the existential nature of reality.  When Lew Archer came roaring into the Little Theater as a composite of Amos and Jeremiah, dressed in denim overalls, pointing and swinging a long staff and when he threw a clay pot on the floor and it exploded into a hundred fragments, he was dramatizing the fragmentation of the world, the absurdity of Israel's alienation from Yahweh, and it was one of the most vivid and unforgettable moments of teaching I ever witnessed.

Lastly, when I was a student and when I taught at Whitworth, Lew believed in me.  He believed in me as a student, a writer, and as a teacher.

He expressed his belief in me in a remarkable comment he wrote on my final project in Mythology and Literature, a comment that still sustains me.  When the faculty gave me a good-by party as my two year appointment ended, he said some of the most encouraging things a person has ever said to me.

I'm deeply indebted to Lew Archer for how he helped me think in ways that have lasted for nearly forty years and for helping me come to see how I could live as a Christian in an absurd world without having to deny its brokenness.

It is the gratitude that I and many others feel for Lew Archer's instruction and his goodness that will keep his spirit alive in many of us, even as his mortal self has departed from us.