From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

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: Shakespeare was Shakespeare

Ralph Smith sent me a copy of John Gross’ Commentary review of James Shapiro’s Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? Shapiro argues that the search for an alternative author to Will Shakespeare arises from the clash between the sublime poetic achievement and the humdrum, even rather distasteful, life.  For post-Romantics, an extraordinary poet had to be an extraordinary man:

“It was partly, as Shapiro argues, a product of the clash between two different ways of looking at Shakespeare. While the poet was increasingly regarded as a demigod—and even more so after the rise of the Romantics, with their messianic view of the value and importance of poetry itself—the biographical facts of Shakespeare’s life that were being brought to light by researchers seemed meager and mundane.  Where, in the humdrum life lived from 1564 to 1616, could scholars and critics locate the source of all that greatness? To decide that the plays and poems must have been written by someone else, someone more obviously extraordinary, was one way of resolving the discrepancy.”

Even so, denying Shakespeare authorship was a fairly radical solution.  But discovering alternative authors was in the air:

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Literature: Post-secular novels

Novels arise with secularism.  Citing Lukacs, Rowan William says that novels appear “when it is no longer possible to plot the significance of human lives against the unquestioned backdrop of what is agreed to be the one universal narrative,” which leads writers “to create ordered narratives for individual imagined lives.”

Dostoevsky radicalizes the secularity of the novel by dissolving “the tidy endings and the unitary personalities that were once the currencey of the novel.”  But Dostoevsky’s radical attack on tidy secular eschatology opens the possibility for a post-secular novel: ”the novel ought to be a stout defender of the independence of eschatology in its most robust sense – that is a defender of the apparently obvious but actually quite vulnerable conviction that the present does not possess the future.  Whether or not we say, as earlier believers in eschatology would have done, that God is in possession of the future, the one thing we can agree on is that we are not.  The open, ambiguous, unresolved narrative insists on this, which is why novels are never popular with ideologues and do not flourish in climates where eschatology is excessively realized.  You do not fund fundamentalist novelists.”

Literature: Dissociation of sensibility

In the December 2009 issue of Poetry, DH Tracy explores the difficulty that contemporary poets have in combining moral passion with aesthetic/sensual interest.  Quotations from poems by Frederick Seidel and Robert Hass lead to this observation: “sensuous experiences run up and down them both, and I think it is fair to say that the aesthetic is their dominant mode, by volume.  Both of them are in some doubt, though, as to whether pleasure is fundamentally meaningful, and so the moral intermittently surfaces, with desultory effects.  Seidel’s transition from architectural appreciation to Fascism is jumpy, because there is nothing else it can be; he has no continuous way of getting from A to B.  Hass too has problems turning one mode into the other . . . . With limited means of making the aesthetic relevant, it seems the only possible operating relationship between the two is ironical – a regretful and alienating irony in Hass, an aggressive and burlesque one in Seidel.  The poets are left making statements that large portions of their beings somehow cannot or do not bear on.”

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Literature: Two Loves, Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities fits snugly into several contexts.  It is an historical novel about a major event of the (then) recent past.  Published in 1859, the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of the fall of the Bastille, it depicted an event that was still a touchstone of history and politics for Dickens’s contemporaries.  In the years between the Revolution and Dickens’s book, France and the rest of the Continent had been rocked by other revolutions, notably in 1830 and 1848, the year of revolution.  English politicians and thinkers had been reflecting on the significance of these upheavals for the better part of a century before Dickens took up his pen.

Creative writers had contributed to the national debate on the issues thrown up by the Revolution.  Romantic poets in the main were supportive of the Revolution, viewing it as a blow on behalf of universal liberty.  In his “France: An Ode,” Coleridge recorded his initial enthusiasm for the revolution.  Even when France went to war with England in 1793, he says that despite his love for England, he still “sang defeat/To all that braved the tyrant-quelling lance” and “blessed the paeans of delivered France, and hung my head and wept at Britain’s name.”  Horrified as he was by the Terror, he still hoped that France shall “compel the nations to be free/Till Love and Joy look round, and call the Earth their own.” When France invaded Switzerland in 1798, Coleridge shifted gears, lamenting that he had betrayed Liberty in praising France.

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Literature: Axe at root

Another student, Jesse Sumpter, summarized an article by one Kathryn Walls on the axe in Sir Gawain.  She connects the axe with the words of John the Baptist in Matthew 3: The axe is already laid at the foot of the trees.  That fits the setting of the Green Knight’s first appearance – during the Christmas season, when not only the coming of Jesus but the coming of John would be celebrated.

Walls also points to Augustine’s interpretation of Matthew 3 in the light of Jesus’ words about fruit in Matthew 12.  Not every tree is cut down immediately; the axe is announced, the threat proclaimed, and then Israel is given time to produce fruit and escape burning.  So too Gawain, who has a year for penitence before the axe of the Green Knight “nirks” his neck.

Literature: Temperance

Some thoughts on temperance inspired by a student paper on the Faerie Queene, Book 2.  The student cited an article linking Guyon’s story with the developing “modern” view of time as a commodity.  With the new view of time, temperance began to be linked with self-restraint in time.  Instead of a sheathed sword, the hourglass became the new symbol of temperance.

The article argues that Spenser was opposing this development, but I’m not so sure.  And, whatever Spenser thought, the link of time and temperance seems more than linguistic.  Temperance is not inaction or passivity, certainly not for Spenser.  Temperance is instead patience, waiting for the right time to act.  That is, temperance is timeliness.  When Guyon goes into his frenzy and destroys the Bower of Bliss at the end of the poem, he is not being intemperate but perfectly temperate, because the time has come for just this zeal.

Literature: Lying

From Richard Wilbur’s “Lying”:

In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us. . .

Literature: Reading with the Spine

From Nabokov’s lectures on literature, quoted in Smith’s book: “All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over.  Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic relight is between the shoulder blades.  That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science.  Let us worship the spine and its tingle.  Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame.  The brain only continues the spine; the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle.  If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week.  But I think Dickens will prove stronger.”

Literature: Consumerist structuralism

Noel Carroll argues that anti-intentionalist structuralist criticism aims to maximize aesthetic enjoyment, at the expense of all other purposes of art and literature.  This, he argues, “has a very ‘consumerist’ ring to it.  In Buberesque lingo, it reduces our relation to the text to an I/it relationship.”  By contrast, Carroll attempts to “defend the idea that, with art works, we are also interested in an I/Thou relation to the author of the text.”

The irony is fairly thick here: In the name of challenging bourgeois reading habits, structuralists simply replicate those habits at a deeper, theoretical level.

Literature: Finnegans Wake

In case you got bogged down and missed the plot, Thornton Wilder helpfully summarizes what he describes as Joyce’s “Night Book”: “We overhear and oversee [the hero] in bed above his tavern at the edge of Dublin.  His conscience is trying him for some obscure misdemeanors committed – or perhaps only partially envisaged – during the day.  He is in disgrace.  He identifies himself with Lucifer fallen from Heaven, Adam ejected from Paradise, Napoleon defeated at Waterloo, Finnegan of the old ballad laid out for his wake.  It is the Book of Falls, and as the night advances he plunges deeper and relives all the crimes of which man is capable; he stands trial (the very constellations of the night sky are sitting in judgment).  He submits his defense and extenuation.  Finally dawn arrives; the sun climbs through the transom of the Earwickers’ bedroom.  The last chapter is a wonderful sunburst of Handelian rhetoric; all the resurrection myths of the world are recalled along with Pears’ soap advertisements and the passing trains and the milkman.  The phoenix is reborn; Everyman re-awakes.”  All this written in “a language in which all the tongues of the world have coalesced into a pate, the barriers between them having become imperceptible at that level.”

Got it?

Literature: Jane’s fame

Did Jane Austen want people to read and admire her work?  Of course; she was a writer.  Did she like making money from writing?  Yes.   She wasn’t the wispy angel that her family biographers tried to make her out to be.

To this extent Claire Harman (Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World) offers a helpful rebuttal to some portayals of Austen.  But Harman’s book is married by what seems to me a humorless and tone-deaf use of some of her evidence.

When Jane writes to her brother Frank that she has made 250 pounds and adds, “which only makes me long for more,” are we to take that comment at face value?

And what about her comment, also to Frank, that she’s willing to let out the secret of her authorship so long as she gets paid: “I shall rather try to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can make of it.  People shall pay for their Knowledge if I can make them.”  Harman finds that a “remarkably hard-nosed remark,” but I’d guess that Frank laughed at it.

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Literature: George Steiner

James Gardner captures the eccentricity, flaws, and brilliance of George Steiner in a short piece in the June 15 issue of the Weekly Standard.

His weaknesses are manifest – Steiner is “an unapologetic know-it-all and acrobatic show-off” given to “incessant posturings in print.”  Gardner describes his usual modus as one of “hyperventilating conviction, elevated, intellectualized, and incessant.”  I would only add that writing like a know-it-all is easier when you know as much as Steiner does.  He makes an illuminating comparison of Steiner and de Maistre, but notes that Steiner wears his pessimism so lightly and so long that he has become “so comfortable in his lugubrious dissent as to be oddly heartened by it.”

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Literature: Boring atheism

A. N. Wilson has recently returned to Christianity.  He’s asked in an interview, “What’s the worst thing about being faithless?”

“The worst thing about being faithless? When I thought I was an atheist I would listen to the music of Bach and realize that his perception of life was deeper, wiser, more rounded than my own. Ditto when I read the lives of great men and women who were religious.

“Reading Northrop Frye and Blake made me realize that their world-view (above all their ability to see the world in mythological terms) is so much more INTERESTING than some of the alternative ways of looking at life.”

Literature: Hitting the Micro-target

Christensen quotes this stunning paragraph from Phillips, where a character muses on the dice-roll of artistic success: “Two months ago, she was raw and unblended; tonight she was reasonably effective; someday very soon she would be in danger of marbling over into a slick cast impression of herself. The target was only microns wide, and history’s great singers may simply have been those who happened to make a record in the brief time between learning and forgetting how to manage their power.”

Literature: Dickens’ baptismal allegory

 

In a 1994 article in the South Atlantic Review, John Cunningham proposes to read Great Expectations as a baptismal allegory.  In the first half of the novel, baptismal imagery is inverted, but as the book progresses everything turns rightside up:

“Great Expectations attains a comic resolution as the perverted figures of baptism discussed hitherto are metamorphosed into true ones and as regenerations open onto new lives. Despite the almost pervasive presence of death in the novel, evidence of life nevertheless persists; but the life present in death must be freed, usually by the discipline of suffering that characterizes most comedy. Pip calls the night on which Magwitch comes to his London chambers ‘the turning point of my life’ (318). That night is characterized both by figures of rain and flood (typologically associated with baptism) and by figures of destruction, of apocalypse (also typologically associated with baptism [Danielou 75-85]). These images reach their symbolic completion in death-by-water when Magwitch, Compeyson, and Pip suffers shipwreck and descending into the Thames. . . . 

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Literature: Melville the Metaphysical

FO Matthiessen notes the influence of the metaphysical style “of being ‘totus in illo’” both in individual lines (blubber burning “smells like the left wing of the day of judgment”; Ishmael working on nets imagines it all as “the Loom of Time” and himself as “a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates”) and in longer passages like Father Mapple’s sermon.

Matthiessen also recognizes that Melville’s ability (in Coleridge’s words about Thomas Browne) to metamorphose “everything, be it what it may, into the subject under consideration” comes from his life experience: “The range of sensations possible to an author in Donne’s time had narrowed with the nineteenth-century’s division of labor.  The most learned Victorian author was not a man who had also been a bricklayer, had fought in the Low Countries, and had narrowly escaped the gallows for killing an actor in a duel, while all the time he was amassing the kind of knowledge that enabled him to approximate the most polished Roman poets and also to shape the plot of The Alchemist.”  Melville, “coming to literature from rough life, relived rapidly the earlier experience of the race.”

 

Literature: Narcissus

Melville, simplistically, claimed that the myth of Narcissus was the key to Moby Dick: “still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned.  But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans.  It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”

Literature: Melville and American Adam

I’ve summarized some of David W. Noble’s analysis of Moby Dick (The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden) in the past, but the notes below highlight Noble’s take on the religio-political themes of Melville’s novel.

Ishmael, he notes, begins the novel looking for redemption in the sea.  Not only does this suggest a hope for quasi-baptismal renewal, but it also represents an attempt to “to recapitulate the exodus of his ancestors from the crowded cities of Europe, across the purifying waters of the ocean, to a promised land in the west where death . . . would no longer haunt mankind.”  His wish has a political/national dimension since his need for redemption arises from his sense of the corruption of American civilization; America is no longer the unspoiled Edenic frontier, but a land of cities, and Ishmael represents the American desire for renewal.

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Literature: The flight of the Spirit

Ian McEwan’s NYRB remembrance of Updike is the best obit I’ve read.  He gets the dynamic of Updike right, locating the “seriousness and dark humor” in a “tension between intellectual reach and metaphysical dread.”  He understands the centrality of Updike’s Lutheranism and of the cinema.  He gets the sex right: “It was there from the beginning, in his writing, that celebrated or infamus capacity for fastidious, clinical, visually intense, painfully and uproariously honest descriptions of men and women making love.”

He captures all this in a summary of a scene from Bech Noir when Jewish novelist Henry Bech, dressed in cape and mask and accompanied by his lover in a catsuit, climbs into the apartment of critic Orlando Cohen to murder Cohen for refusing “to grant Bch a place, even a minor place, in the canon.”  Cohen has emphysema, and before Bech murders him, he gasps out his critique of Bech, which is that Bech didn’t understand America because he didn’t understand that America is fundamentally Protestant.

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Literature: Poetry’s Uphill Climb

I have had conversations with several people recently about the state of poetry, and I’ve seen other signs that there is a growing interest among Christians in reviving poetry.   That’s great; the Bible’s written in poetry, and our un-poetic sensibilities have been one reason for our un-imaginative and inaccurate reading of the Bible.  

But I tend to throw a wet blanket on efforts to revive poetry, because I think the sociological and cultural factors stacked against poetry are vast.  To revive poetry, we’d have to have a major overhaul not only in reading habits and expectations, but also in the technology and education.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic, but here are some of my reasons:

1) Poetry is mainly an oral and aural art. It depends on hearing, and isn’t really written to be read on a page. (Some is; ee cummings wrote pattern poetry that depends on typesetting; earlier, Herbert did some too; but generally speaking poets write for the ear.) But most of our reading these days is silent reading. We listen to music and bands, but not to poetry.

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