Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Literature: Hamlet without Hamlet

Margreta de Grazia’s recent book on Hamlet looks to be a beauty.  She claims that modern interpretations (since 1800) have missed the main premise of the play - namely, that Hamlet is dispossessed of his place and realm, and that the entire court agrees with the dispossession.  Only in private, or in antic jest, can he say what really troubles him, since, as Edward Coke said, those who are non compos mentis “cannot be cause of his transformation.”  De Grazia points to persistent links in the play between persons and plots, plots of land that is, and sees the whole play as a series of battles over land.  She ranges widely, arguing that “the onset of the modern epoch was itself imagined as a disembedding or deracination,” and argues that “the play situates the fall of Denmark within both an imperial history of territorial transfer (ancient and modern) and Britain’s own history of conquest in the eleventh century by both Danes and Normans.”

The one initial puzzle is de Grazia’s claim to novelty.  If memory serves, John Dover Wilson’s What Happens in Hamlet brings out the dynastic issue quite clearly.  De Grazia cites Wilson only a handful of times, and never in direct support of her thesis.

Literature: Sanctimony and Resistance

Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll is based on the arguments between Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera concerning the way Czech intellectuals should pursue resistance to Soviet domination.  One exchange in the play draws on a letter that Havel circulated asking Gustav Huzak to release Milan Hubl and others who were jailed for disseminating “provocative printed matter.”  Kundera objected to the letter on the grounds that it was “moral exhibitionism” and “playacting.”  Havel later admitted as much.

Writing about Stoppard’s playin the Weekly Standard, Michael Weiss gives a different angle:

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Literature: Religion of Sex

In a review of several books on Henry Miller for the TLS, Karl Orend highlights Miller’s religiosity and his sense of religious mission.  He “was Buddhist for most of his life,” and considered his task to be a continuation of Whitman’s plant “to write new Bibles for our times.”  Orend writes, “Miller likened his own novel [Tropic of Cancer] to the erotically charged cave temples of India.”

Even his apparently formless literary architecture was religiously motivated: “Miller detested linear narrative, and sought, like Proust and Joyce, to replace linear with spiral.  This conceit links mankind, separated from the rhythms of nature and from the divine, to a world view that was eclipsed by the advent of Puritanism and industrialization, with their emphasis on time and sin.  Christian morality, in Miller’s world view, is immoral.”

Literature: Judas and Oedipus

Medieval legends about Judas appear throughout Europe in many different languages.  The standard story is remarkably similar to the story of Oedipus.  As summarized by Paull Franklin Baum, the medieval Judas story normally was this:

“Judas . . . was the son of Jewish parents living at Jerusalem: his father’s name was Reuben, his mother’s Cyborea. One night Cyborea dreamed that she was about to conceive, and that her child was destined to become the destruction of the whole Jewish race. In great anxiety she related her dream to Reuben, who advised her to pay no attention to such matters-they came from the evil spirit. In due time, however, a son was born; the memory of the dream returned, and in fear lest possibly it might come true, the infant, Judas,was set adrift on the sea in a small chest. Wind and wave brought him to the island of Scariot – whence his name. . . .

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Literature: Gilgamesh and Genesis

Some notes cut from a larger project.

The story of the first books, as Stephen Mitchell explains in the introduction to his recent translation of the poem, is a story of civilizing.  The entire poem is framed by references to the city of Uruk, but the city moves from a state of semi-civilized tyranny to a state of civilized justice as the poem progresses.  At the beginning, Gilgamesh is an admirable and mighty hero, but also a tyrant, who practices his ius primae noctis with some relish and whose people cry out for relief to Anu.  Enkidu is constructed as a foil for Gilgamesh, a beast-man who will balance the arrogance of Gilgamesh.  After Enkidu is formed from the ground, Shamhat tames him sexually and then he becomes Gilgamesh’s best friend after a city-shattering battle.

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Literature: Novelistic language

A few highlights from James Wood’s chapter on language in How Fiction Works.  Early on, he mentions the “old modernist hope” that prose can be “as well written as poetry.”  This will require readers and novelists to develop what Nietzsche called a “third ear”: “We have to read musically, testing the precision and rhythm of a sentence, listening for the almost inaudible rustle of historical association clinging to the hems of modern words, attending to patterns, repetitions, echoes, deciding why a metaphor is successful and another is not, judging how the perfect placement of the right verb or adjective seals a sentence with mathematical finality.”

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Literature: Bad Books

Lewis remarks on the high difficulty of adverse criticism, noting that the difficulty lies partly in the fact that the defects of bad literature are found in good literature: “The novel before you is bad - a transparent compensatory fantasy projected by a poor, plain woman, erotically starving.  Yes, but so is Jane Eyre.  Another bad book is amorphous; but so it Tristram Shandy.  An author betrays a shocking indifference to all the great political, social, and intellectual upheavals of his age; like Jane Austen.”

The other difficulty is the temptation to turn criticism into venting.  Instead of displaying the specific badness of a work, the critic uses his criticism as “a blow delivered in a battle.”

Literature: Bible and poetry

Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century.  It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the Middle Ages, and later, in the writings of William Blake and Walt Whitman, the freedom of whose loose-limbed parallelistic verse has an obvious, and acknowledged Biblical background.  In all such examples, the influence of the Bible has been directed to greater freedom, to the breaking down of formal boundaries, to the integration of thought and feeling, to the subjection of aesthetic to moral impulses, and to the promotion of ideas held to be greater ultimately than the writer or his work.”

Literature: Hebraic prose

Fisch again: Hebraic prose is different from the grand style of the sixteenth century, and different too from the pared-down plain style shared by many Puritans and all Baconians.  It is a rhetoric, not an anti-rhetoric, but it is a rhetoric purified by Puritanism, Senecanism, and scientism.  It is biblical in imitating biblical rhythms and parallelism, and in its frequent use of biblical phrasings.

But it’s also Hebraic in its intensity: “this style is inseparable from Hebraic earnestness and sublimity.  Longinus long ago, and Coleridge more recently, have taught us that sublimity is a mark of the Hebrew genius, and sublimity is that quality which so often distinguishes these ‘Hebraic’ prose writers of the mid-seventeenth century from earlier Ciceronians.”

Literature: Jerusalem and Albion

In his 1964 book, Jerusalem and Albion: The Hebraic Factor in Seventeenth-Century Literature, Harold Fisch argues that Blake provides a more insightful and broader account of the seventeenth century’s “dissociation of sensibility” than Eliot, who coined the phrase. For Blake, the great crisis of England was the dissociation of Albion from Jerusalem, the latter being the “city of peace” that “came to mean the undivided unity of flesh and spirit, reason and imagination, fact and symbol, corresponding to an outer realm from which the glory of God (and the terrors of God) have not been banished.”

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Literature: Conrad and empire

William Deresiewicz has an excellent review of a new biography of Joseph Conrad in the June 11 issue of TNR.  One thread of the review has to do with Conrad’s phantasmagorical vision of European imperialism and his related concern for the moral dangers of isolation from well-known social habits and standards.

Conrad’s exposure to empire came from his experience as a seaman.

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Literature: Inverted allusion

Milton describes Satan’s spear as “equal which the tallest Pine / Hewn on Norwegian hills, to be the Mast / of some great Ammiral.”

In his translation of the Iliad, Pope describes the death of Sarpedon: “as some mountain Oak, or Poplar tall / or pine (fit mast for some great Admiral) / Nods to the Ax . . . Thus fell the King.”

So, we get Homer borrowing a line from Milton, who had originally borrowed it from Virgil’s description of Polyphemus (Aeneid 3) and perhaps also from Abraham Cowley’s description of Goliath in his Davideis (”His Spear the Trunk was of a lofty Tree / Which Nature meant some tall Ship’s Mast to be”).

Literature: Joycean echoes

Hollander quotes the final sentence of “The Dead”: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”  The chiasm of “falling faintly” and “faintly falling” makes it feel as if you pass through the sentence twice - as if you walked through a revolving door and came back out, but were not where you started.

Hollander also notes that Joyce inverts the tradition trope of the echo.  Traditionally, the initiating voice is whole, and the responding echo is fragmentary (Herbert’s “Heaven” is one of Hollander’s most accessible examples).  With Joyce, though, the fragmentation often comes first, and is only later (if at all) univocalized.

Literature: Grain of Wheat

The 1967 novel, A Grain of Wheat, by Ngugi wa Thiong’o tells the story of a village as Kenyan independence approaches.  There is a love triangle involving Mumbi and the rivals for her love, the collaborator Karanja and the carpenter Gikonyo, who eventually marries her.  There is the tortured hermit Mugo, regarded as a hero of the Movement for his endurance during detention camp and for rescuing a pregnant woman from a beating.  Hanging over the book is the question of who betrayed Mumbi’s brother Kihika, the vigorous leader of the resistance.

Ngugi’s novel also shows the interplay of biblical, nationalistic, and traditional religious themes in the Kenyan imagination.  At the Uhuru meeting celebrating the independence, the Rev. Morris Kingori opens with a prayer that links European colonialism with Pharaoh and independence with exodus.  Then, “People started singing, led by the youth band with drums, guitars, flutes and tins.  Again they recreated history, giving it life through the words and voices: land alienation, Waiyaki, Harry Thuku, taxation, conscription of labour into the white-man’s land, the break with the missions, and, oh, the terrible thirst and hunger for education.  They sang of Jomo (he came, like a fiery spear among us), his stay in England (Moses sojourned in the land of Pharaoh) and his return (he came riding on a cloud of fire and smoke) to save his children.  He was arrested, sent to Lodwar, and on the third day came home from Maralal.  He cam riding a chariot home.  The gates of hell could not withhold him.  Now angels trembled before him.”

Literature: Shakespeare and his plays

In his recent biography of Shakespeare, Bill Bryson quotes an anti-Stratfordian comment that contemporary documents never describe Shakespeare as an author.  Bryson responds: “That is not even close to being so.  In the Master of the Revels’ accounts for 1604-1605 - that is, the record of plays performed before the king, about as official a record as a record can be - Shakespeare is named seven times as the author of plays performed before James I.  He is identified on the title pages of the sonnets and the dedications of the poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis.  He is named as author on several quarto editions of his plays, by Francis Mere in Palladis Tamia, and (allusively but unmistakably) by Robert Greene in the Groat’s-Worth of Wit.  John Webster identifies him as one of the great playwrights of the age in his preface to The White Devil.”

Bryson’s conclusion: “The only absence among contemporary records is not of documents connecting Shakespeare to his works but of documents connecting any other human being to them.”

Literature: Austen and Islam

Dale Dykema of Covenant Home Curriculum writes: “I have just finished reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali Moslem woman converted to Dutch Humanism.  Her efforts to expose the violence of Islam, especially its oppression of women is noteworthy.  Of particular interest to me was how this woman discovered another way of life.  As a young girl, living in Kenya, Ethiopia and other Moslem countries, she was able to teach herself enough English to read all of Jane Austen and other similar novels.  In them she discovered the Western, or Christian status of women.  Though not given the insight to see Christ in this, she nonetheless saw much more than most people do of the influence of Christendom expressed there.  This was her only contact with the outside world.”

Literature: Coming of Age

Tom Perrotta has written some popular coming of age novels, not quite innocence-to-experience (since no one is quite innocent even at the beginning) but from experience to greater experience, from adolescent confusions to greater clarity.  Everyone seems wiser and calmer at the end.  But the comic trajectory is cheaply bought.  There is no recognition of prior wrongs, and characters tend to get off way too easily.  If you extrapolate a decade ahead, it’s hard to see that the characters have put their youthful follies to rest.

Literature: Election

Tom Perrotta creates a background buzz of sexuality in his 1998 novel Election.  It’s appropriate to the story’s setting - an election for Winwood High’s student body president.  What’s remarkable is how deftly he achieves this - mostly by gesturing and leaving a great deal unstated.  We don’t know exactly what Lisa and Tammy are doing when they’re alone, and Perrotta’s hints make for a far more charged-up atmosphere than something more explicit.

Literature: Shakespeare’s portrait

Bill Bryson’s recent Shakespeare bio begins with some delightful descriptions of extant portraits of the bard. The Droeshout engraving, Bryson writes, “is an arrestingly - we might almost say magnificently - mediocre piece of work.  Nearly everything about it is flawed.  One eye is bigger than the other.  The mouth is curiously mispositioned.  The hair is longer on one side of the subject’s head than the other, and the head itself is out of proportion to the body and seems to float off the shoulders, like a balloon.  Worst of all, the subject looks diffident, apologetic, almost frightened.”

And of the painted statue in Holy Trinity Church: The artist, Gheerart Janssen “may well have seen Shakespeare in life - though one rather hopes not, as the Shakespeare he portrays s a puffy-faced, self-satisfied figure, with (as MarkTwain memorably put it) the ‘deep, deep, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder.’”

Literature: Satan’s party?

In her introduction to a new edition of Paradise Lost (Blackwell), Barbara Lewalski notes the oddness of Milton’s epic protagonists and setting.  Citing the Proem to Book 9, she writes that Milton “has indeed given over the traditional epic subject, wars and empire, and the tradition epic hero as the epitome of courage and battle prowess.  His protagonists are a domestic pair, the scene of their action is a pastoral garden, and their primary challenge is, ‘under long obedience tried,’ to make themselves, their marital relationship, and their garden - the nucleus of the human world - ever more perfect.”

Meanwhile, he describes Satan “in terms of constant allusions to the greatest heroes - Achilles, Odysseus, Aeneas, Prometheus, and others - in regard to the usual epic traits: physical prowess, battle courage, anger, fortitude, determination, endurance, leadership and aristeia or battle glory.”  Milton this “engages readers in a poem-long exploration and redefinition of heroes and heroism, often by inviting them to discover how Satan in some ways exemplifies but in essence perverts these classical models.”

Milton’s aim in both of these respects is to encourage “readers to measure all other versions of the heroic against the self-sacrificing love of the Son of God, the moral courage of Abdiel, and the ‘better fortitude’ of several biblical heroes of faith.”

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