07 literary-analysis-follow-up

"It reminds me of McDonald's" — Dillard's For the Time Being

Assumption: "it" is the Dillard essay we were just discussing, and you mean something about how it works or what it's about, not the Paris Review page. You didn't say which part, so I've taken the connection that the text supports best and put two weaker ones after it. If you meant something else, the last section covers the other likely readings.

The strongest version: Rome as a franchise, Teilhard as the loyal operator

Dillard gives you the vocabulary in section I, in two lines that are easy to read past:

• The Catholic church is "still the best bet for an arch to God."
• It is "the only international organization that works."

The first line is an arch. The second is a global brand pitch. Read them together and the McDonald's comparison is close to literal. Teilhard defends the institution the way a franchisee would: it isn't perfect, but it is everywhere, it is consistent, and nothing else at that scale delivers.

The rest of the portrait fits the same picture:

• Headquarters approves everything. "Every year he applied to publish his work; every year Rome refused. Every year he applied to return to France. Every year Rome refused." That is a field office filing the same request to corporate and getting the same answer. It runs on a form and a cycle, not on any conversation.
• The product is standardized. Rome allows one of his eighteen books in his lifetime, and it is a short scientific monograph. He may publish "purely scientific articles," which means only the approved menu.
• He is kept out of sight. "The cardinals were pleased to keep his person, also, tucked away." He is a problem to be handled quietly, not an argument to be answered.
• He believes in the system more than it deserves. He declines to leave because that "would betray his Christianity" and would mean "the killing of everything I want to liberate, not destroy." Dillard's aside, "perish the thought," makes the loyalty look partly reflexive. It is a rule he took on, not a choice he reconsiders each time.
• The company later adopts his ideas. "Later Vatican II calmly endorsed most of his ideas." Headquarters eventually ships the item he had been proposing for decades, and it has no reason to notice what the wait cost him.

This is also why the McDonald's lens helps the essay's structure. Section I lets us admire his obedience as heroic. The franchise picture asks who pays for an institution's consistency. Section III answers that Lucile does. She is the customer-facing cost of a system that works. Teilhard's line "Personal success or personal satisfaction are not worth another thought" sounds noble in section I. By section III it also describes how he treats the two people closest to him, himself and Lucile.

Weaker version: the essay's own units repeat

The essay is built from small, uniformly formatted units. Look at the 1923 run: "June, 1923: …", "July, 1923: …", "August, 1923: …", "September, 1923: …". Each one gives a date and a place, then a piece of gear or a landscape, a Teilhard quotation, and an odd fact. Later come "June, 1930" and "Early spring, 1930". The same units show up in every setting (Ordos, Gobi, Zhoukoudian, Peking tea), the way the same menu shows up in every city.

I'd hold this one loosely, because Dillard keeps breaking the template. The lost lighter ("These things happen"), the mole-rat skulls used for dating, the Wanschock family teaching toddlers to ride sheep, and the dog pulling on a towel are specific to one place and time. A McDonald's is designed so that nothing surprising can happen inside it. Dillard picks details that only this trip could have produced. So the repetition sets a pattern and the details keep interrupting it. That tension is arguably the point, since the essay is about a man who wants to "believe invincibly in the world" while working inside a machine that treats him as interchangeable.

Weakest version: convergence and sameness

Teilhard's larger thesis, which Dillard mostly declines to argue, is that evolution moves the world toward greater unity, and the Church is one vehicle for that. Read cynically, that is also what a global chain does to the world: it makes it one thing. I wouldn't lean on this. The essay dismisses that cosmology as "dull and crackpot," and the idea of one unified planet comes from my background knowledge of Teilhard, not from anything in these pages.

Whether the lens is fair

It works well where it points at the Church and obedience (section I and the Lucile ending). It works less well as a comment on Dillard's prose, which is the opposite of standardized. It also risks flattening Teilhard's own account. He says he "stifled for fifty years in this sub-human atmosphere," so he did not think the arrangement worked well for him. He thought it was still the best available. Dillard keeps that ambivalence: "He apparently felt strongly both ways."

One caution for anything you write from this: Dillard never makes this comparison, and the words "arch" and "works" are common enough that the resemblance may be accidental. Present it as your reading of her material, not as what she was doing.

If you meant something else

• The page or interface (the Paris Review layout, the "Suggested Reading" and "You Might Also Like" blocks): that is the site's template, not Dillard's, and I'd leave it out of the literary analysis.
• The tone (breezy, deadpan, "These things happen"): the register is closer to a dry aside than to fast food, so the comparison would need to be about pace and repetition, not flavor.
• The Lucile section (the daily routine: "a walk, tea at five, and he returned … at six"): a fixed schedule is a fair thing to notice, but it reads more like a monastic hour than a drive-through.

If it was one of these, tell me which passage prompted it and I'll redo the analysis around it.