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: 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.

Literature: Not so Pomo

A brief preview of the David Foster Wallace collection at the University of Texas Harry Ransom Center (Newsweek, 11/29) shows that Wallace was not actually the “purely pomo author” that he might seem.  The collection contains notes and files for his unfinished and forthcoming Pale King, described as a “novel about IRS agents trying to make moral sense of bureacratized life,” and show that he did extensive research for the novel – taking accounting classes and sending off detailed questions to tax lawyers.

David Foster Wallace – the last of the realists?

Literature: Signature and Style

In a long and penetrating review of Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow in a recent issue of TNR (July 22).  It’s more a review of Amis’s entire career and corpus, and along the way William Deresiewicz borrows a distinction from Michael Wood between “style” and “signature” to isolate what is wrong with much of Amis’s fiction.

“Signature announces the author’s presence.  Style, Wood says, ‘is something more secretive . . . a reflection of luck or grace, or of a moment when signature overcomes or forgets itself.’  With style, ‘we think about the writing before we think about who wrote it.’”  Deresiewicz adds, “Amis’s style, in his most characteristic works, as glorious as it often is, is all signature, is always signature.  Signature is the whole point of it.  Look at me, it says.  Look at me, me, me. . . . Whatever else [Amis's] bravura exhibitions do – these image-riffs and diction-dances, these sound-tricks and pun-stunts – they never let you forget about the person who is performing them.”

Deresiewicz thinks this is related to the “aggressive, even punitive” attitude that Amis takes toward his characters: “Before they are betrayed or beaten or bankrupted, before their beds or their kids are defiled, their souls soiled and trashed, his protagonists are roughed up by the language that handles them: sneered at and snarked on, battered with bathos, baited like bears in a pit.  Amis never picks a fair fight. . . . He doesn’t sympathize with his characters, those lowlifes and tough guys, he has contempt for them.  He’s Martin fucking Amis, after all, and who the hell are they?”

Deresiewicz’s point is trenchant despite the ironic fact that the review indulges a good bit of Deresiewicz’s own signature.”

Literature: In Defense of Negativism

In the October 14 issue of TNR, Leon Wieseltier gives a curmudgeonly defense of publishing negative reviews, specifically of the negative review of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom published in the same issue.

It’s bracing: “A shabby treatment of a consequential subject or a significant form is a corruption, and it is the mark of a reviewer’s depth of conviction, and of her knowledge, to treat it as such, to fight it.  An opinion about a book is an opinion about the world.  Anger at the false and the fake – as long as the labor of persuasion is done: a curse is not an act of criticism – is an admirable anger, because it is the heat of a cause, and our causes are the spurs of our culture.  No culture, no literature, ever advanced by niceness.”

Literature is “a proposal, or an infinity of proposals, for an emendation, or a transformation, of consciousness.  It commends ideals of thinking, and even ideals of living; and no such instructions should be exempt from strenuous and unsentimental judgment, from the foul tempers of thoughtful people, or else nothing will weigh anything and we will be only compilations of the trends of our times.”

He is not complimentary to contemporary literary culture:

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Literature: Shylock and Comedy

Stephen Greenblatt has an interesting piece on Merchant of Venice in the latest New York Review of Books.  His most important insight is the isolation of the comic moment in the play. Merchant is all about Shylock’s hatred, and in the court scene “Portia . . . has devised a test to see how much Shylock hates Antonio, and the answer is: not enough.  Not enough to go ahead and plunge the knife into his enemies heart, which he can do at this very moment, in the sight of all those who have mocked and despised him, provided he is willing to die for it.  Faced with the demand of such absolute hatred, Shylock flinches.”  The play is a comedy because “Shylock refuses to be a suicide bomber . . . at his . . . decisive moment, the Jew Shylock seems to hear the words of Deuteronomy: ‘Therefore choose life.’”

Greenblatt’s comparison of Shylock with Iago is illuminating: In Iago, Shakespeare gives us a suicide bomber, a man so thoroughly committed to his hatred that he doesn’t care if it consumes him too: “Hatred as intense and single-minded as his is finally indifferent to his very survival.”  Iago even refuses to give a reason for his hatred, and there is “no comic potential” after that: “In the face of a limitless, absolute, wordless hatred lodged in an ordinary human being, the bystanders are reduced to incoherence.”

Merchant is reassuring: Shylock converts, becomes one of us, and disappears into the crowd.  Iago gives no assurance: “honest Iago’s hatred has no limits, and he is already one of us.”

Literature: Metaphor within a Simile

A line from Dickinson: “the nerves sit ceremonious like tombs.”  This is an extremely complex literary device, or set of devices.

First, personification: The nerves “sit” like people, and sit in a particular way, ceremoniously.

Second, the personification spreads out to evoke a scene.  Ceremonious sitting takes place in church, at weddings, or, as in this poem, at funerals.

Third, the personification itself is encompassed and somewhat canceled by another device, the concluding simile.  The whole scene of nerves-sitting-ceremoniously is compared to “tombs.”

Fourth, this creates a scene change: The ceremoniously sitting nerves are now tombstones in a cemetery.

In sum: Nerves are people.  But the people are like tombstones.  So nerves are people who are tombstones.

And all in six words.

Literature Theology - Liturgical: Dickinson’s baptism

A student, Heather Denigan, is working on Emily Dickinson, and pointed me to this remarkable poem about baptism:

Literature: Waugh’s Fourth Century

Evelyn Waugh’s Helena (Loyola Classics) doesn’t get Constantine quite right, but he has some very sharp observations on other fourth-century personalities and events.  His description of the effect of Constantine’s conversion on Lactantius captures the euphoria of the moment: “in that unique springtide there was no escape from change, not even in Treves, most polite of cities, not even for Helena, most excluded of women.  The huge boredom, which from its dead center in Diocletian’s heart had saddened and demented the world, had passed like the plague.  New green life was pricking and unfolding and entwining everywhere among the masonry and the ruts.  In that dawn, reflected Lactantius, to be old was very heaven; to have lived in a hope that defied reason; that existed, rather, only in the reason and in the affections, quite unattached to common experience or calculation; to see that hope take substantial and homely form near at hand and on all sides, as a fog, lifting, may suddenly reveal to a ship’s company that, through no skill of theirs, they have silently drifted into safe anchorage; to catch a glimpse of simply unity in a life that had seemed all vicissitude – this, thought Lactantius, was something to match the exuberance of Pentecost; something indeed in which Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost had their royal celebration. . . .

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Literature: Irony

Yale’s David Gelernter reviews Martin Amis’ Pregnant Widow in the current issue of The Weekly Standard, and uses the occasion for reflections on the state of culture.  A few money quotes:

“This postmodern era is the Age of Irony. Irony implies detachment. Detachment is invaluable, up to a point. But when irony tyrannizes your thinking, you are in danger of being detached from everything—of being a barge adrift, with nothing to tug or push you forward. You are going nowhere (nothing moves you) and are passionate about nothing (nothing moves you). You have shot the albatross; you are dead in the water. Self-love and self-hate are the only emotions that thrive. That is postmodernism, the age of irony: going nowhere, moved by nothing.”

Where did this irony come from? he asks.  And his answer:

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Literature: Dostoevsky, Comedian

Dostoevsky is not usually thought of as a comic writer, but he was a great comedian and satirist.  When Grandma shows up unexpectedly at the casino in The Gambler, the novel takes a sudden Woodhousean turn.  Feodor Karamzov is disgusting, but hilariously so.  His greatest comic creation was perhaps Karmazinov in Demons, a satire on Turgenev.

Dostoevsky’s narrator describes the egoism at the heart of Karmazinov’s writing, his tendency to ignore the victims of suffering and concentrate instead on the horrors he has to endure: “A year before, I had read an article of his in a review, written with an immense affectation of naive poetry, and psychology too. He described the wreck of some steamer on the English coast, of which he had been the witness, and how he had seen the drowning people saved, and the dead bodies brought ashore. All this rather long and verbose article was written solely with the object of self-display. One seemed to read between the lines: ‘Concentrate yourselves on me. Behold what I was like at those moments. What are the sea, the storm, the rocks, the splinters of wrecked ships to you? I have described all that sufficiently to you with my mighty pen. Why look at that drowned woman with the dead child in her dead arms? Look rather at me, see how I was unable to bear that sight and turned away from it. Here I stood with my back to it; here I was horrified and could not bring myself to look; I blinked my eyes—isn’t that interesting?’” Dostoevsky didn’t have the word, but if he had, he would have called this kitsch – which, as Milan Kundera has noted, is not the tear shed for the suffering or the beautiful, but the second tear shed for the feelings one feels when one is a witness to suffering or beauty.

When Karmazinov gives what he claims is his final public reading before he lays down his pen, Dostoevsky pulls out all the stops.

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Literature: Hamlet and the Altars

Elizabeth Watson reads Hamlet through the lens of Eamon Duffy’s classic “stripping of the altars” thesis.  In the play, altars are replaced by tables, the arras, the bed, and the stage spectacle takes the place of Catholic liturgical spectacle: “it is not the specific theology but the way in which change is negotiated that matters in Hamlet. Prince Hamlet must negotiate between the old and the new in many ways, religion being only one of them, and verbal playfulness is a part of this back-and-forth movement. Shakespeare deftly suggests a number of religious positions without really endorsing any of them; yet what is not clear is whether secularization is being embraced or questioned in the play. In the urban spaces outside the playhouses, secular ritual, decorative structures, and national myths shaped Lon don’s open-air ceremonials. While the religious establishment’s iconoclasm was being countered by the civic establishment’s determined secularization of ritual, the stage served as an unofficial and unsanctioned site for the same process. The movement from Roman Catholic religious spectacle to Elizabethan theatrical spectacle was another form of iconoclastic displacement necessary to the effective functioning of Protestant religious practice, which also resembles the shifts and suppressions.”

There is a parody of the Catholic ritual in some scenes, she thinks, but the parody may express the longing of Protestant England for its traditional Catholic rites, now maimed by Reformation:

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Literature: Intentional Fallacy

In 1881, Edward Payson Vining wrote an innovative book that promised to unravel The Mystery of Hamlet.  When Vining had weighed all the evidence, he came to the only reasonable conclusion: Hamlet was a woman.

Not, mind you, that Shakespeare conceived of a female prince: “It is not even claimed that Shakespeare ever fully intended to represent Hamlet as indeed a woman.  It is claimed that in the gradual evolution of the feminine element in Hamlet’s character the time arrived when it occurred to the dramatist that so a woman might act and feel, if educated from infancy to play a prince’s part.”

This is taking suspicion of the intentional fallacy a bit far.

Literature: He Murdered Us

When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern play questions with Hamlet in Tom Stoppard’s inversion of Hamlet, Rosencrantz says that the score was “Twenty-seven-three.” “He murdered us,” he adds, and then says it again for good measure.

As Marjorie Garber notes in her Shakespeare and Modern Culture, Stoppard wants us to remember the original play, twice.  ”Twenty-seven-three” is precisely the score in the question game in Shakespeare’s play (Act 2, scene 2, when R&G first show up).  Stoppard counted.

Plus, that “He murdered us” plays a dual role.  Hamlet trounces them in questions, but then he also murdered them.  The past tense is important for Stoppard’s play, obsessed as it is with stage death.  Rosencrantz doesn’t say that Hamlet will murder, but that he has murdered.  So he has, in the just previous performance of Hamlet, and in the one before that, and in the one before that, back to the first performance.

Literature: Hamlet, Ritual, Modernity

De Grazia still, summarizing Lacan’s claim that Hamlet is about mourning: “‘I know of no commentator who has ever taken the trouble to make this remark . . . from one end of Hamlet to the other, all anyone talks about is mourning.’  It is no coincidence that Hamlet’s problem is also that of ‘modern society.’  The truncated and furtive rites of mourning in the play (the death of King Hamlet without final unction, Polonius’ ‘hugger-mugger’ burial, Ophelia’s abbreviated service) all gesture toward the present abandonment of the rites and ceremonies by which loss was once compensated.  Death, when not repair by rituals, leaves a gap or ‘hole in the real’ that activates the ‘scar of castration,’ the primary oedipal loss of the phallus.  The mourner tries in vain to patch the loss with imaginary projections or mirages (signifiers, images, symbols, embodiments), but it can never make good.”

Literature: Barbaric Shakespeare

In her ‘Hamlet’ without Hamlet, Margreta de Grazia shows that Hamlet was not always considered a harbinger of modern subjectivity.   On the contrary, Restoration critics and playwrights considered Shakespeare and Hamlet to be retrograde and rude:

“In the ‘refined age’ of the Restoration, Hamlet, like all Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, belonged to the cruder previous period or ‘last age’ before the great interregnal divide separating Charles I from Charles II.  English letters during this period were deemed backward or even barbarous, as Samuel Johnson noted: ‘The English nation, in the time of Shakespeare, was yet struggling to emerge from barbarity.’  Shakespeare, according to David Hume, was the product of such benighted times: ‘born in a rude age, and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction, either from the world or books.’”

Restoration writers considered Elizabethans backward because “the English stage had largely lacked the civilizing canons of Aristotle, Horace and their sixteenth-century Italian and seventeenth-century French redactors.”  Without these models, Elizabethan playwrights were “gothic.”  Plus, Shakespeare was writing plays for the masses, instead of refined poetry for the courtly elites.  Some believed Shakespeare could have written a classical Hamlet, had he not been driven by a base desire to satisfy popular tastes.

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