How is genre ‘theological’? A Milbankian account

II

I should like, however, to make a claim beyond this about the genres of texts. The claim is that genres are theological entities. Literary critic John Frow makes the claim is that genre is extremely powerful as the conveyor of an implicit reality, even ‘ontological domains’.[1] As we have seen, genres are deeply embedded cultural patterns that shape not simply the expectations of readers but also the composition of texts. They do this because they have a normative force which operates on the most profound questions that shape human being. What can I expect from the universe? What am I in the light of my death? What is the good life, and am I living it, and how will I be rewarded for it (if at all)? It will be the task of subsequent chapters of this book to show how this is the case with reference to specific genres. However, it is not hard to see how this is the case, even with a quick glance. The tragic, the epic and the comic will have substantially different answers to each of these questions, simply by dint of their shape as narratives.

It is in this sense, i.e. in that these substantial questions are given content in the various genres, that I mean to describe them as theological. They each have sense of what is (to use Paul Tillich’s phrase) of ‘ultimate concern’. There is in each case an ‘horizon of significance’[2] against which human life is to be lived – an ultimate, transcendent frame of reference that makes the passage of human experience meaningful. By presenting imagined worlds – or by attempting to imitate this one – literary genres transmit entire ‘ontological domains’.[3] Charles Bazerman writes: ‘Genres are not just forms. Genres are forms of life, ways of being’.[4]

We have seen already that contemporary studies of genre have taken the notion away from a simply account of literary classifications and towards the idea of genre as a ‘ecosystem’ or network of textual conventions and expectations. From this more complex account it is not too difficult to see how genres may be freighted with ideology. As Anis Bawarshi writes

Genres are places of articulation. They are ideological configurations that are realized in their articulations, as they are used by writers (and readers).[5]

That is: genres are not simply empty shells, but are ideologically ‘thick’. They saw something about the way the world should be, not simply about how it is. For Bawarshi, genres ‘coordinate the acquisition and production of motives by maintaining specific relations between scene, act, agent, agency, and purpose’.[6] This happens because genres are a mechanism by which human desires are both met and perpetuated. The making of texts is a way that we seek to answer our human needs. Bawarshi cites the example of the elegy, which meets a deeply felt need to give expression to grief. But he also shows from literary history how the writing of elegies became not simply the salve to the problem of human grief, but by giving articulation to the sense of loss at another’s death, actually prompted the writing of further elegies. In this way, writes Bawarshi, ‘genres maintain the desires they help fulfill’.[7]

This ‘thick’ concept of genres can be clarified in relation to the Aristotelian idea of mythos. The notion of mythos was deployed by Aristotle to describe the imitation of human actions in the form of a plot.[8] For his part, Paul Riceour points out that mythos describes the way in which narratives convey meanings in a way that is not simply reducible to a set of abstract values or principles: the mythos is not what is conventionally called the ‘moral’ of a story. Rather, the mythos arises from the logic of the narrative itself as a sequence of events between characters. As Kevin Vanhoozer writes, ‘mythos serves as a cognitive tool to project a sense of the world as an ordered whole’.[9] Mythos is not to be equated with genre; but (my claim is) genres have a particular mythos[10] - in addition to the mythos of a particular instance of the genre. 

Is the appearance of questions of ultimate concern sufficient to meet the conditions of the term ‘theological’? Simply asking questions that can be given a theological answer will certainly not meet the most stringent requirements of the term. It is my contention, however, that the genres certainly do more than this: they describe in each instance a relation between the human actor and the way the world in which they have to act simply is; and they do this by appeal to metaphysical concepts like ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’ or ‘providence’.

Genres embody and perform theological meanings. I am applying here the pattern of thought outlined in John Milbank’s provocative book Theology and Social Theory, a work which has attained something of the status of a theological classic since its publication in 1991.[11] Milbank’s aim in that book was, in the first instance, to expose the implicitly theological underpinnings of allegedly secular social science. Having done that, he presents a reconditioned account of social theory from an explicitly Christian point of view.[12] His claim is, as James K.A. Smith puts it, that ‘secular modernity, despite all its protests and pretensions to the contrary is deeply religious and fundamentally theological’.[13] In Milbank’s own words:

Secular discourse does not just ‘borrow’ inherently inappropriate modes of expression as the only discourse to hand…but is actually constituted in its secularity by ‘heresy’ in relation to orthodox Christianity, or else a rejection of Christianity that is more ‘neo-pagan’ than simply anti-religious.[14]

That is: at the very origin of the notion of the ‘secular’ lies an avowedly theological claim – and not simply a neutral, non-religious one. In the emergence of the secular notion of sociality there have been specifically religious or theological determinations that, as Smith puts it, ‘informed a new ontology and account of human nature’.[15]

Supposedly secular theories of society are supported by ‘simply another mythos’; they appeal, however tacitly, to founding mythological narratives, which, like theological claims, can only be accessed by faith. As Milbank puts it:

…theology encounters in sociology only a theology, and indeed a church in disguise, but a theology and a church dedicated to promoting a certain secular consensus.[16]

Milbank’s rather cheeky strategy is to turn the postmodern mode of genealogical enquiry back on itself. He exposes the confidence trick at the heart of secular politics – namely, its pretense at a form of neutral rationality.

The transfer of this Milbankian thought to the realm of literary studies, and in particular to the study of genre, is not exact. There is not a determination to be ‘secular’ in the same way; there is not quite the same degree of hostility between two realms. However, like political theories, literary genres are culturally embedded concepts that capture and convey theological ideas. For example, the sense in which a narrative is propelled by an inner necessity that is not simply the result of the agency of the characters in the story itself is a theological claim about the way events in ‘real life’ are likewise patterned. A narrative in which this patterning is explicitly repudiated is itself doing so as an act of anti-theology, not simply neutrality.

We can test this claim briefly (the task of this book is to unpack it) by noting how literary genres carry within them an appeal to a transcendental notion such as ‘justice’. Roald Dahl’s extraordinary children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory[17] in terms of genre combines the conventions of children’s fiction with a medieval morality play, in which obvious cases of vice are punished and virtue rewarded. The plot of the novel is principally engineered by the fantastical Willy Wonka, chocolatier extraordinaire and owner of the chocolate factory. It is he who runs a world-wide competition to discover one of five Golden Tickets concealed in Wonka chocolate bars, with the aim (so we discover) of finding a worthy recipient of his factory and his fortune. That the central motif of the novel involves food, and confectionary at that, orders the moral universe of the narrative around the ability to control one’s desires and to distinguish between genuine needs and simple wants. But such virtue is rare. Only one of the children who discovers a Golden Ticket is virtuous enough to qualify: Charlie Bucket, who lives in poverty and near-starvation with his parents and grandparents. The other children are comical instances of various vices of excess: among them the greedy Augustus Gloop, the TV-addicted Mike Teevee and the spoilt Verruca Salt. A Greek chorus of Oompa-Loompas, the tiny race of people who work in Wonka’s factory, deliver a moral judgment on the action throughout.

Dahl does not have to establish his moral universe. It comes to him ready made in the generic conditions of children’s literature that were established long before and in the vices pilloried in morality plays. Even Willy Wonka, who seems to be the controlling agent of the action of the novel and always a step ahead of everyone else, can rely on the universe that he inhabits acting to sift out virtue from vice. It is a metaphysical mechanism that exists outside of Willy Wonka’s design to bring the deserving Charlie to him and which acts to prevent the grasping of the other children from succeeding. Charlie discovers by chance a coin which enables him to buy an extra bar of chocolate when his birthday bar of chocolate proves ticket-less. Of course, it is not ‘chance’ at all; his discovery of the coin is utterly unsurprising and indeed predestined by the narrative logic of the world in which his author has placed him.

There is between reader and author an implicit agreement about what justice looks like when it takes place in a chocolate factory. The punishments visited on the naughty children are comically satisfying to the reader. They match the vices of each child; and we are reassured by Wonka that there is no lasting harm done to them – or at least, that they have learned their lesson, and that they are also to be amply rewarded with a life-time supply of chocolate. They have no grounds for complaint. But the imbalance at the opening of the novel, in which the unaffected goodness of Charlie is unnoticed and unrewarded, is corrected in quite a conventional way because, for all his originality, Dahl narrates him into a conventional moral universe in which we fully expect that it will be so. This is a world in which metaphysical principles like ‘justice’, ‘reward’ and ‘punishment’ are implicitly but ubiquitously present. Without them, the narrative simply doesn’t work. What’s more, there’s a secret guiding force propelling the narrative towards these outcomes – one that isn’t simply the author’s creation, but is carried along like a genetic code in the genres he performs in his text.

What this example shows is that genres transmit theological assumptions of the kind needed to make a meaningful and satisfying story. An analogy may be found in the world of computing - an analogy which is inviting because of the way in which contemporary software very blatantly uses a set of symbolic systems which are quickly learnt by users. Computers use various operating systems: Windows, etc. The operating systems are completely unexciting at one level (at least to the average user). We are not usually even conscious of them after a while, though they may dictate the appearance and arrangement of the items on our computer’s ‘desktop’. Our focus is on the programmes. That is where we do most of our interacting with our computers. But without the operating system, the programmes simply cannot run. They may be able to operate on several operating systems, but they cannot run on none. It is the operating system provides a ‘grammar’ (a further analogy) for our computer usage. And it is not simply neutral in doing so, as computer users discover. 

In this way we can see how genres may make implicit theological claims without ever becoming religions. Of course, a number of the classic genres have had explicitly religious origins, and in their earliest forms were directly involved in making theological and religious claims. But that is not the same as being what we call a ‘religion’.[18] This is an important consideration for my purposes here, because it is not simply the case that I am undertaking a study in comparative religion in order to demonstrate that such systems are idolatrous or false.

But we need to be careful here and distinguish between the genre and its theology, and the individual text and its theology. The two are not synonymous. Indeed, genres are not ever found in ideal form, or represented by single literary works. This would be an extraordinary situation, because the notion of a genre or class of literary works implies that the class has its boundaries set not by a single work but by the resemblance of several works to one another. The notion of a genre is thus not accessed simply by reference to a well-known instance of it. Genre is something else other than its textual expression: it is found in the relation between literary works and not entire in literary works themselves. Thus it is perfectly possible that a text might make theological claims that are at variance with the theological claims implicit in the genre in which it operates.[19]

My interest here, however, is not simply on the theological claims inherent in various genres. I want to move beyond this to try to understand how genres, read with their various theological assumptions in mind, make specifically anthropological claims. That is, the theological frameworks transmitted in literary genres also put the human being in a certain context. They say things about the meaning and purpose of human life; about what the ideal human life is; about how human beings can flourish or wither; and so on. If there are claims about ‘the gods’, or ‘chance’, or ‘fate’, then there will also be inferences about what life under the rule of the gods or chance or fate looks like. They present theo-anthropologies: descriptions not of human being according to obvious physical faculties or simply as a creature composed of certain biological systems, but as an actor on a stage. Theo-anthropologies are those accounts of human being that evoke some transcendent force, whether explicitly or not.

It might readily be observed that most, if not all, anthropologies are in reality theo-anthropologies. Even a purely evolutionary, scientistic account, such as Edmund O. Wilson’s On Human Being, has a mythos. It has story to tell. The human individual is portrayed as a character under certain conditions; he or she is an agent who has to respond to the givens of a particular historical context. He or she has to live in relation to the force – evolution – which gives shape to his or her life.

This is why an investigation of how literary genres cast human beings is not simply a gourmet exercise for the theologian. Working with literary narratives rather than simply with more abstract accounts actually deals directly with the way that human beings actually attempt to live their lives in such time and space as they find allotted to them. The analysis of literary works has been a feature of the work of US philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who argues that this is not simply an exercise in dilettantism and an avoidance of more difficult abstract thinking but is actually a superior way of engaging with the truth of human existence. Certain aspects of the human condition can, in her words, ‘only be accurately stated in the language and forms characteristic of the narrative artist.’ (Love’s Knowledge, p. 5) Furthermore, specifically practical wisdom, the wisdom human beings need to live in the everyday, is best conveyed and discussed in the form of narratives.

The complaint might arise at this juncture that ‘practical wisdom’, that which we know traditionally as ‘ethics’, is a distinct discipline from the business of theo-anthropology. What has ontology to do with ethics? What have being and doing to with one another? Are they not separate questions entirely? One important consideration here is that fact that we cannot deal with humankind in abstract in any case. We always have to confront our being as those who are called upon in some way to act. We are always those in media res. Narrative genres – which take there cue from the actual experiences of human beings and in turn make meanings available for those experiences – show us how the questions of who we are and what we are to do are simply and habitually conjoined. The openly moralistic Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for example, casts its actors as creatures of desire. They are called upon to master their appetites and will, it seems, be rewarded by lavishly for their successes and punished quite cruelly for their failures.

My aim is in the first instance to expose the theological roots of the great genres of literature. This exposé then allows an analysis and an evaluation of the various theological claims thereby revealed. As a Christian theologian, I have in mind a particular norm for theological understanding against which such theological ideas can be evaluated – that is, the Christian revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Of course, this proposal leads us in the direction of further literary analysis because the Christ of orthodox Christianity is an enscripturated man – he is God revealed by the book. Jesus sits amidst a matrix of meaning communicated in the text of Holy Scripture; and asks to be identified by a reading of that text.[20]

But the reading is not simply intended to go all one way. As theology, each genre is not simply to be held as a pagan alterative (and thus wrong) to be corrected by Christian orthodoxy (thus, always right). I am not hereby giving up my conviction about the authority of Holy Scripture. However, we will need to recognize that, at least in the West, the literary genres have been in close contact with the Bible for almost two millennia. That is: if as we have already said, genre is a way of pointing to the intertextual nature of reading and writing text, it is quite an obvious thing to say that very prominent among these texts is what was for very many authors and readers the text of texts – the Bible.[21] Thus the theological claims concealed in literary genres are not always simply or by definition different from the theological claims of Christian orthodoxy. A Christian theology may indeed find itself confirmed and corrected by the theology implicit in genre, as much as contrasted.

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[1] Frow, p. 16.

[2] Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, Mass ; London: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 38.

[3] Frow, p. 16.

[4] Charles Bazerman, "The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom," in Genre and Writing : Issues, Arguments, Alternatives, ed. Wendy Bishop and Hans A. Ostrom(Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook : Heinemann, 1997), p. 19.

[5] Bawarshi, p. 9.

[6] Ibid., p. 16.

[7] Ibid., p. 24.

[8] Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Remythologizing Theology : Divine Action, Passion, and Authorship (Cambridge, UK ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 6.

[9] Ibid., p. 7.

[10] The notion of genre is theoretically inclusive of all literary text-types, whether narrative or non-narrative in form. The traditional triumvirate of drama, epic and lyric establishes a non-narrative form alongside the others. However, the supremacy of narrative forms in the discussion of genre is noteworthy. Lyrics themselves evoke situations, which implies narration: an elegy, for example, speaks of a sequence of events leading to a death. For the analysis of genre in literary texts, narrative can serve as the controlling paradigm. 

[11] John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory : Beyond Secular Reason, Signposts in Theology (Oxford, UK ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: B. Blackwell, 1991).

[12] James K. A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy : Mapping a Post-Secular Theology (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004), p. 146.

[13] Ibid., p. 127.

[14] Milbank, p. 3.

[15] Smith, p. 129.

[16] Milbank, p. 4.

[17] Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ([London]: Viking, 1995).

[18] William Cavanaugh provides a compelling analysis of the difficulty of defining the term ‘religion’. William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence : Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Nevertheless, while a genre may convey or assume meanings that overlap with what are usually thought to be ‘religious’ ideas, it does not have adherents in the way a ‘religion’ does, even if ‘religion’ is given the broadest definition. I am certainly is arguing that ‘genres’ ought to be included under the heading of ‘religion’.

[19] Taylor. See the Secular Age. Homer’s great works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are of course held to be the sublime instances of ‘epic’, and their influence on subsequent work has been extraordinary. Three latter day examples of works that converse directly with The Odyssey are Joyce’s Ulysses, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and the Coen brothers’ film O Brother Where Art Thou? And yet Homer himself clearly wrote according to some pre-existing conventions for lengthy works of poetry. He conversed with works unknown and unseen to us, no doubt; perhaps they were not even written down. ‘Epic’, therefore, is not simply what Homer made of it, though it is transmitted to us by him in his texts. But here there is need for another caveat; for it is not simply the case that Homer laid down the epic form that was then copied by those who followed him. It was these followers who decided which features of Homeric epic constituted this (potential) genre called ‘Homeric epic’. It was the manner of their imitation of him that was decisive.

[20] Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ

[21] Northrop Frye, The Great Code : The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).