The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

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: Tradition or Fashion

Thanks to Ken Myers for passing on the following quotes from Wendell Berry’s essay “The Specialization of Poetry”:

 

“I do not believe that people who have experienced chaos are apt to praise or advocate any degree or variety of it. . . . Formlessness is, after all, neither civilized nor natural. It is a peculiarly human evil, without analogue in nature, caused by the failures of civilization: inattention, irresponsibility, carelessness, ignorance of consequence. It is the result of the misuse of power. It is neither house nor field nor forest, but rather a war or a strip mine, where the balance between stability and change has been overthrown. The reason we need to have our false certainties shaken is so that we may see the possibility of better orders than we have. . . .

 

“If, as I believe, one of the functions of tradition is to convey a sense of our perennial nature and of the necessities and values that are the foundation of our life, then it follows that, without a live tradition, we are necessarily the prey of fashion: we have no choice but to emulate the arts of the ‘practical men’ of commerce and industry whose mode of life is distraction of spirit and whose livelihood is the outdating of fads. . . .

 

“Why is it necessary for poets to believe, like salesmen, that the new inevitably must replace or destroy the old? Why cannot poetry renew itself and advance into new circumstances by adding the new to the old? Why cannot the critical faculty, in poets and critics alike, undertake to see that the best of the new is grafted to the best of the old?”

Literature: By Another Name

Over at the First Things site, David Hart launches out at the Oxfordians, ending with this suggestion: “No Oxfordian has yet convincingly responded to the ‘stylometry’ problem, for instance. If they were really on their game, however, they would argue that this merely exposes another conspiracy hitherto unsuspected, and that the works commonly attributed to Oxford are clearly products of another hand. I propose Francis Bacon. As for the inevitable discovery of similar incompatibilities between Bacon’s style and ‘Oxford’s,’ one need only argue that, of course, ‘Bacon’s’ works were really written by someone else altogether. As for who this might have been, the answer seems obvious: William Shakespeare of Avon, who it turns out was a far more cunning and mysterious figure than any of us ever suspected . . .”

Literature: In defense of Jane

In a 1995 piece in Critical Inquiry, Susan Fraiman defends Austen from the charges directed at her in Edward Said’s famous study of Austen and imperialism.  Fraiman doesn’t think Said is a very careful reader: His “rendering of Austen is . . . enabled, I would argue, by Said’s highly selective materialization of her.  . . . whereas in subsequent sections Aida is lovingly embedded within Verdi’s corpus and Kim within Kipling’s, and notwithstanding Said’s claim that Mansfield Park ’carefully defines the moral and social values informing her other novels’ (C, p. 62), this single text is, in fact, almost completely isolated from the rest of Austen’s work.  Yet had Said placed Sir Thomas Bertram, for example, in line with the deficient fathers who run unrelentingly from Northanger  Abbey through Persuasion,  he might perhaps have paused before assuming that Austen legitimates the master of Mansfield Park. If truth be told, Said’s attention even to his chosen text is cursory: Austen’s references to Antigua (and India) are mentioned without actually being read, though Said stresses elsewhere the importance of close, specific analysis. Maria Bertram is mistakenly referred to as ‘Lydia’ (C, p.  87)  confused, presumably, with Lydia Bennet of Pride and Prejudice.  And these are just a few of the signs that Mansfield Park‘s particular complexity  including what I  see as its moral complexity  has been sacrificed here, so ready is Said to offer Austen as exhibit A in the case for culture’s endorsement of empire.”  Concerned as he is with social location and oppressed minorities, for instance, Said barely notes that Austen is a single woman writer.

Said’s argument depends on his assumption that Austen endorses the order of Mansfield, but Fraiman argues (rightly in my view) that this is far from true: “Mansfeld Park as I read it, then, has little patience with high-handed patriarchs,  their eldest sons, Regency sexual mores, or traditional marital practices, and even England itself is not above criticism. Its irreverence - bearing out Austen’s earliest juvenile sketches, resonating with the other mature novels, and anticipating  the final, unfinished Sanditon suggests to me a less complacent view of power relations, especially gender relations, than Said is prepared to acknowledge.”

 

Literature: What To Do?

In The Gift, Nabokov recounts this legend about Chernyshevsky’s What To Do? (Or, What Is To Be Done?).  Chernyshevsky wrote the novel in prison and gave proofs of each section to his friend Nekrasov.  But “Nekrasov, on his way home (corner of Liteynaya and Basseynaya streets) in a hackney sleigh, lost the pink-paper package containing two manuscripts, each threaded through at the corners and entitled What To Do? While remembering with the lucidity of despair the whole of his route, he did not recall the fact than when nearing his house he had laid the package beside him in order to take out his purse – and just then the sleigh had turned . . . a crunch as it skidded . . . and What To Do? rolled off unnoticed: this was the attempt of the mysterious force – in this case centrifugal – to confiscate the book whose success was destined to have such a disastrous effect upon the fate of its author.  But the attempt failed: on the snow near the Maryinski Hospital the pink package was picked up by a poor clerk burdened with a large family.  Having plodded home, he donned his spectacles and examined his find . . . he saw that it was the beginning of some kind of literary work and without a tremor, and not burning his sluggish fingers, he put it aside.  ’Destroy it!’ begged a hopeless voice: in vain.  A notice of its loss was printed in the Saint Petersburg Police Gazette.  The clerk carried the package to the indicated address, for which he received the promised reward: fifty silver rubles.”

Literature: Deconstructing Classics

Not classics deconstructed by postmodern theorists, but the classics themselves deconstructing inherited materials.  There is a deconstructive element in much of our great fiction and drama.  So argues John Gardner in his classic The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers:

Shakespeare does it: “The genre is by nature righteous and self-confident, authoritarian: There is no doubt that vengeance is the hero’s duty, and our pleasure as we watch is in seeing justice done, however painful the experience. Shakespeare’s Hamlet deconstructs all this. Despite Horatio’s certainty, we become increasingly doubtful of the ghost’s authority as the play progresses, so that we become more and more concerned with Hamlet’s tests of people and of himself; and even if we choose to believe that the ghost’s story was true, we become increasingly unclear about whether Hamlet would be right to kill the king who usurped his father’s throne—at any rate, Claudius becomes less and less the stock villain, and Hamlet, as he proceeds through the play, becomes more and more guilty himself.”

Homer too, and lots of others.  ”All great literature has, to some extent, a deconstructive impulse,” Gardner asserts.  ”This is of course only natural: If the business of the first man is to create, the business of the second is at least partly to correct.”

Literature Philosophy: Post-Structural Humanism

Richard Wolin has an extended review of several books by Tzvetan Todorov in a recent issue of TNR that provides a neat window into the workings of French theory in the middle of the twentieth century.    Todorov came to Paris from Bulgaria in 1963 at the age of 24, already trained in Slavic theory by his reading of Shklovsky, Jakobson, and Propp.  He was told at the Sorbonne that nobody in Franch was doing literary study of the kind Todorov suggested, but within a few years structuralism had exploded onto the scene.  Todorov played a crucial role by publishing Theorie de la litterature, an anthology of Eastern European theorists, in 1965.

For Todorov, literary theory was a safe zone of escape from the politicized academic world of communist Bulgaria, and he saw structuralist formalism as an apolitical mode of literary study.    After an encounter at Oxford with Isaiah Berlin, however, Todorov saw that his attempt to escape history was irresponsible, and he turned from the atemporal formalist criticism to Bakhtin, who, in his view, introduces a necessary “diachronic” element into theory.  Bakhtin moves him from structuralism to liberal humanism, driven by what Wolin calls “a keen sense of the vulnerability of other people” that “is quite explicitly a consequence of his coming-of-age in a totalitarian society.”  Wolin quotes a long passage from On Human Diversity:

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Literature: Naipaul

There are plenty of reasons to dislike VS Naipaul, his talent notwithstanding.  Now this: Asked whether or not any woman writer was his match, he predictably answered No, and then put in a gratuitous swipe at Austen:

I “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world,” he said.

One wonders when he last cast an eye over one of Austen’s novels.

Literature: Real Men and Austen

A friend sent me a link to a Wall Street Journal column by William Deresiewicz describing how studying Jane Austen taught him the meaning of manhood.  Reading about Elizabeth Bennet’s failures and her resulting humiliating, Deresiewicz learned what real manhood, and real education, was all about: “Humiliation, I realized, was exactly what I needed, too. Our egos, Austen was teaching me, prevent us from owning up to our many errors and shortcomings, and so our egos must be broken down. ‘Humiliation,’ after all, comes from ‘humility.’ It humbles us, makes us properly humble.

“I had come to graduate school with a very different idea about what it means to get an education. Growing up, I had learned to equate being educated with knowing things, knowing facts. And the purpose of knowing things, in a strangely circular way, was simply to ‘be’ educated, to be able to pride yourself on being a ‘man of culture’ (and feel superior to those who weren’t).

“Knowledge, culture, ego: That was pretty much the formula. But now I was learning a new idea—about education, but also about being a man. You didn’t have to be certain, Austen taught me, to be strong, and you didn’t have to dominate people to earn their respect. Real men were not afraid to admit that they still had things to learn—even from a woman.”

 

Bible - NT - Revelation Literature: Bottom’s Apocalypse

“I see a voice,” says Bottom the Weaver.  And we all laugh.

John on Patmos hears a trumpet voice, and turns “to see the voice” (Revelation 1:12).

We know Bottom is a seer from his later garbled use of Pauline visionary language.  Bottom is Paul the seer, and John the seer, seeing things normally hidden from view.  He sees quite to the bottom of things when he sees that man is an ass fondled by fairies.

Literature: Literary Icon

William Leatherbarrow makes the intriguing suggestion that Dostoevsky’s “non-Euclidian” response to the Inan’s Grand Inquisitor poem in the “Russian Monk” is part of “Dostoevsky’s professed desire to show his readers the way to the Church is shipwrecked on the inadequacy of the realistic novel as a vehicle for religious or moral persuasion.  The strength of this genre lies in the subjecting of experience to analysis.  The affirmation of faith and the presentation of the ideal require something quite different: the synthesis afforded by the poetic image.”  The Russian Monk is thus an “artistic picture.”

In response to Ivan, Dostoevsky gives us not a competing argument, nor even a competing narrative, but an icon.

Literature: Fathers-Sons-Fathers

From the Russian mystic Nikolay Fydorov: “The task of the fathers, the parents, ends with the upbringing of the children; then begins the task of the sons, who restore life.  In giving birth to and raising their children, the parents give life to them, while the task of resurrection belongs wih the returning of life to the parents.”

Because God is triune.

Hence too Freud and Dostoevsky are right: Parricide is the story of humanity.

Literature: Double Bind

RD Laing offers a trenchant analysis of the letter that Raskolnikov’s mother sends him, and its effects on Raskolnikov.  She is informing Raskolnikov that his sister Dunya has agreed to marry, and tells him he should be grateful and happy.  If he is unhappy, he will make his mother and sister unhappy.

At the same time, the letter gives all sorts of reasons for Raskolnikov to be unhappy with the arrangement: It’s clear that Dunya does not love her finance, and that she is engaged in a kind of prostitution for her brother’s benefit.  It’s clear that Luzhin, her finance, doesn’t have much time for Dunya either, as he reveals later to Raskolnikov when he tells him that he has been looking for a beautiful, intelligent, and utterly dependent woman to marry.

Laing writes, “While being given grounds for hatred, resentment, bitterness, shame, guilt, humiliation, impotence, at the same time he is told that he should be happy. . . . He ought to be a Christian.  But if he is a Christian, he would be evil to endorse such a godless plan for gaining money and social status in the world.  He could endorse this plan i he were godless, but if he were godless he would be evil.”  Dostoevsky knows that demands for gratitude can be oppressive: Raskolnikov is “stifled by the obligation to be grateful for this unsolicited sacrifice.”

It’s a brilliant piece of maternal manipulation.

Literature: Can A Crime Be Committed?

Think of Milbank’s question, Can a Gift Be Given?  Derrida says no, because the purity of the gift is always polluted by expectations of return.

Dostoevsky asks, Can a Crime Be Committed?  And he returns something like Derrida’s answer, though ironically.  Raskolnikov claims in his confession to Sonya that he “wanted to murder . . . without casuistry, to murder for my own sake, for myself alone!”  His confession is a confession of failure to do what he wants, because in the end he kept introducing “casuistry.”  He killed to help his family; he killed to right the wrongs of society; he killed to rid society of a blood-sucking little spider.  The purity of his crime is polluted by motivations, human motivations.

Raskolnikov at least cannot commit a crime, because with each impurity and each act of casuistry, he proves himself still flesh, still a member of the human race that he wanted to transcend.  In spite of himself, he finds another law warring in his members, a divine logic that his will cannot control.

Literature: & Punishment

Dostoevsky wrote about crime, but not only crime: He also wrote about punishment.  As Wasoliek suggests, Raskolnikov doesn’t flee the crime, or try to cover it.  He seems instead to flee toward it, regularly leaving clues, nearly confessing, reviving Porfiry’s investigation when it is flagging.

Is this masochism?  Is it repentance?  Wasoliek argues that Rasknikov needs to fail in order to succeed.  He murders to prove himself a bronze man, a Napoleon who transcends the normal rules.  With that motivation, he needs society as a foil; he needs society to oppose him, or else there is nothing to which he can prove himself superior.  But if he gets away with it, then he loses that contrast.  The criminal needs society, the very society whose norms he violates.

Wasoliek puts it this way: “He provokes pursuit so as to show his strength in bearing the punishment, but he also provokes it – and this is perhaps more important – so that they will be the pursuers and he, the pursued; they, the victimizers, and he the victimized; they, the oppressors, and he, the oppressed.  By its pursuit of him, society confirms what Raskolnikov has made of it.  If he can sustain the image of society against which he has revolted, he can sustain his believe in the rightness of his crime.  By failing he makes the kind of world and the kind of Raskolnikov he wants.”

Literature: Dostoevsky and Crime

Edward Wasiolek argues that from the time Dostoevsky wrote Notes from Underground, he had worked out a metaphysical outlook that centered on the dialectics of human freedom, free will and society, and nihilism.  What he lacked was a plot to go with his metaphysic, but he found the plot by focusing on crime:

“What is a criminal for Dostoevsky?  He is someone who has broken a law and thus put himself outside of society.  Every society draws a narrow circle of what is permitted, and every human being carries within him the impulses and dreams of acts that pass the pale of the permitted.  Crime is this ‘might be’ which the forces of law, convention, and tradition hold at bay.  It lies in the undefined regions beyond the clear line that society has drawn about us.  In those regions man’s nature is unrealized, undefined, and undared. . . .

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Literature: Dostoevsky’s artistry

Dostoevsky is sometimes accused of being an indifferent artist.  As long as it sprawls, it must be good.  Several essays in Richard Peace’s collection, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: A Casebook (Casebooks in Criticism), prove the opposite.  I give only a few highlights.

Several point to the parallels between Raskolnikov’s visits to the pawnbroker who will be his victim and his later visits to Sonya, the young prostitute with whom he is in love.  In both cases, he makes two visits, one to test the waters and the second to carry out his plan.  The visits to Sonya, which culminate in his confession, begin to undo the murder.  The two women also represent two sides of Raskolnikov.

The pawnbroker is also linked with Svidrigaylov.  Raskolnikov has his first encounter with Svidrigaylov immediately after he wakes from a dream where he has unsuccessfully tried to carry out the murder.  When he first sees Svidrigaylov, he’s not sure whether he has stopped dreaming or not: In a sense, he hasn’t, and Svidrigaylov represents, in a more ruthless form, the bid for superman status that Raskolnikov aimed for in the murder.  Svidrigaylov takes over the place of the pawnbroker, serving as a second foil to Sonya: Raskolnikov must choose between these two paths.  It’s no accident that when Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya, Svidrigaylov, who lives next door, has his ear pressed to the wall listening.  Raskolnikov cannot confess to Sonya without simultaneously invoking his Svidrigaylov side.  Raskolnikov is able finally to make the choice to follow the way of wisdom (Sophia/Sonya) after Svidrigaylov commits suicide with the gun that Raskolnikov’s sister had earlier used when Svidrigaylov attacked her.

Literature: Raskolnikov

It’s all in the name.  Raskolnikov is from the Russian raskol’nik,which I’ve seen glossed as meaning “divided” or “separated.”  It’s the word for schismatic or heretic.

And it is Raskolnikov: A double personality who is alienated and split off from everyone, including the church, and whose crime is to split open the heads of two innocent women.

But raskol’nik is also “Old Believer,” and thus the name is a sign of Raskolnikov’s eventual return to his old Christian roots.

Literature: Autobiography and invention

Commenting on the “models” that Dostoevsky used for Stavrogin, Girard says “Knowledge of oneself is perpetually mediated by knowledge of others.  The distinction between the ‘autobiographical’ characters and those that are not is thus superficial; it grasps only the superficial works, those that succeed neither in revealing the preexisting mediations between the Other and the Self nor in making themselves the vehicle of new mediations.  If the work is profound, one can no more speak of ‘autobiography’ than of ‘invention’ or ‘imagination’ in the usual sense of these terms.”

Literature: Chaos

From Notes from Underground: “Man loves creating and the making of roads, that is indisputable.  But why does he so passionately love destruction and chaos as well?  Tell me that!  . . . Can it be that he has such a love of destruction and chaos . . . because he is instinctively afraid of achieving the goal and completing the edifice he is creating?  How do you know, maybe he likes the edifice only from far off, and by no means up close; maybe he only likes creating it, and not living in  it, leaving it afterwards aux animaux domestiques, such as ants, sheep, and so on and so forth.  Now, ants have totally different tastes.  They have a remarkable edifice of the same word, forever indestructible – the anthill.”

Literature: Austen, ethicist

Joyce Kerr Tarpley’s Constancy and the Ethics of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park is not only an excellent study of Austen’s deepest and most important novel, but also a thorough vindication of the thesis that Austen was no mere spinner of fluffy romances but a thinker of the first rank.  Following up on a suggestion of Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, she compares Mansfield Park to Dante’s Purgatorio:

Like Purgatorio, Mansfield Park is a study of “a variety of disordered loves in the principal characters.  The Purgatorio divides these loves into three categories: perverted love, defective love, and excessive love.  Pride, envy, and wrath are perverted loves, and to various degrees, Sir Thomas, but especially Maria, Julia, Henry and Mary represent these vices.  By her sloth, Lady Bertram represents defective love.  Hers is a will to weak or lazy to pursue the good.  Excessive love includes avarice, prodigality, gluttony, and lust.  Mrs. Norris has an excessive love of money, or avarice, while Tom’s wasteful spending and dissipation demonstrate his prodigality.   Furthermore, Maria’s adultery with Henry, which continues for an extended period of time after their initial flight, reveals the way in which perverted loves of pride, envy and wrath can so affect the will that it loses the power to curb wrong desires; they then become excessive desires such as lust.”

Like Dante, Austen knows that the “primal will or innate taste for beauty” is unreliable, and that the imagination must be trained so that the right beauties are pursued.

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