Northrop Frye and literary criticism

Northrop Frye's 1964 article 'Criticism, Visible and Invisible' contains much wisdom that a couple of generations of postmodern theory has alas greatly erased. He starts with the Platonic distinction between nous, or knowlegde of things, and dianoia, knowledge about them. The problem for the teacher of literature and the critic is that they are limited to teaching about literature - if there is some principle that can link the knower and the known in an essential relation is indedmonstrable. It is only to be accepted as an act of faith, or something like it. There is also much wisdom for theology here: especially vis a vis the parlous state of biblical criticism...

A person who is absorbed whilly by knowledge about something is what ordinarily mean by a pedant. Beyond this is the experience of literature itself, and the goal of this is somthing that we call vaguely the cultivated man, the person for whom literature is a possession, a possession that cannot be directly transmitted, and yet not private, for it belongs in a community.

Criticims cannot make this act of possession for the student; what it can do is weaken those tendencies which within criticism that keep the literary work objective and separated. Criticism, in order to point beyond itself, must be more than merely aware of its limitations: it needs to be actively iconoclastic about itself.

The end of criticism and teaching...is not an aesthetic but an ethical and participating end: for it, ultimately, works of literation are not things to be contemplated but powers to be absorbed.

The piling up of commentary around the major writers of literature may in itself simply be another way of barricading those writers from us.

All poet or critic can do is to hope that somehow, somewhere, and for someone, the struggle to unify and to relate, because it is an honest struggle and not because of any success in what it does, may be touched with a radiance not its own.

Rorty on literary criticism

The recently deceased pragmatist liberal Richard Rorty, in his key text Contigency Irony and Solidarity makes the fascinating observation that for 'ironists' - by which he means people who deny that there is any metaphysical referent to our language and that we ought always be aware of that as we use grand sounding words - for ironists, literary critics are 'moral advisors', not metaphysicians.

As he writes:

literary criticism does for ironists what the search for universal moral principles is supposed to do for metaphysicians. p. 80

Literary critics, you see, engage in the placing of books into traditions of books. Their business is not absolute claims, but relative ones: relating books to other books. Literary critics have basically read alot, and so are less likely to get sucked in by any one book. The critic's job goes well beyond the bounds of mere literary criticism, of course:

...the critic is now expected to facilitate moral reflection by suggesting revisions in the cann of moral exemplars and advisers, and suggesting ways in which the tensions within this canon may be eased - or, where necessary, sharpened. p. 82

Words, for preachers

That's my brother, Lt David Jensen, 2RAR, setting the East Timorese straight. He's not a gorilla by the way.

With speech, humanity is a bit like a gorilla with a loaded pistol: the explosive weapon is in the hands of someone who has an uncertain control of it. While on the one hand we know that our words have immense power to harm or to do good, we are not always masters of what we say. The connection between words and things has become slippery: not because of some philosophical problem but because those who wield them are deceitful and prone, not just to experience human limitations, but to mistakes.

However, God chooses to use human words in his salvation of the world: not overcoming their creaturely limits, but sanctifying them for his purposes. The paradigm is the calling of the prophet Isaiah (in Isaiah 6): terrified by his vision of God’s glory and holiness, he is rightly a reluctant prophet. As he says: ‘I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell among a people of unclean lips’. But an angel brings a burning coal to touch his mouth. God in calling him purifies his speech so that he can use it to address his people.

It ought not to be surprising then, that with the pouring out of the Holy Spirit after the ascension of Jesus, God enables people to talk about him with their limited human words. In fact, more than just talk about him: it ought not be a surprise that God uses the words of human beings to bring about his mighty purposes – to advance the redemption of the world and to give life to the dead. Pentecost is a miracle of redeemed human speech, a reversal of the divisions of Babel. The gospel of Jesus is a word of new creation with its own new grammar: it is a whole new language to learn.

Rowan Williams on 'Poetic and Religious Imagination'

In this 1976 essay Williams writes:

The return to language requires an act of faith; and an acceptance of the probability of failure. It is, as such, an exercise in radical humility and an expression of the hope of 'grace', communication surviving the perils of words.

Here is already a theme pervasive in Williams' thought: that so much is fraught about language, but that we are compelled to speak in any case, and so, have to do so in hope. Having surrendered our right to speak to God, we receive back the possibility that our words might actually bring about something new. Poets - even the agnostic ones - show us that this is the case. They of all people are masters of language, and yet they know better than anyone the limitations of language, having traipsed around its boundaries. He goes on:

Beyond silence lies, not childlike directness, but the irony of a recommitment to the world, a discovery of the cost of speech; beyond irony, the discovery of the promise of reconciliation with the present by means of some unimaginable future, and so, the assurance that the return to words is not simply a pointless and disastrous martyrdom, but is itself obscurely redemptive.

The more I read of Williams the more I think he is best seen as poet and mystic more than theologian (though he is that): but this explains why it is so hard to get a handle on his theology, which resists such 'handling' of its own subject...

Is Shakespeare an Australian Author?

I had a lovely and lively discussion about this with an English English student who wanted to defend his nation's proprietorial rights to the bard. Surely geographical location counts for something, he said; surely he is more English than anything else?

But as an Australian, my culture and language are unthinkable without Billy the Shake. My education was saturated with Shakespeare; his influence was tremendous on the politics and culture of my country. After all, nations are not places, but ideas. We have every right - even a duty - to study him as one of our own. Shakespeare, we might say, came out on the First Fleet.

I think Shakespeare is more Australian than French: though he knew the French and the Italians, and no doubt he has had enormous influence there and even in Russia. But something is carried in the language itself that means it is not even deliberate for us to own him. He is part of our cultural DNA.

Of course, putting the boot on the other foot, we might say that the England that was Shakespeare's - the 'sceptred isle' - is no more, and has not been for centuries. That notion has long gone. He was not English as we think of English now...

Review published in Studies in Christian Ethics

My review of -

Elizabeth A. Castelli, Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). xvii + 335 pp. £26 (hb), ISBN 0–231–12986–6.

has been published in Studies of Christian Ethics 20.1 (2007) p. 125f.

Les Murray's Collected Poems

[Yes, English readers: there are Australian poets who write about subjects other than sport...]

It's a body-prayer, a shower: you're
In touch all over, renewing, enfolded in a wing – (p.501)

I really think you should read some of Les Murray's poetry. Les Murray is arguably Australia's best regarded poet, both in Australia and internationally. The collecting of forty years of his work in a single volume shows just how impressive his achievement is. His unique accent – which he says is part of the soil up Bunyah way – and his extraordinary, prodigious gift of language combine in poetry that is at once chatty-colloquial and demanding. He doodles with words in the same way Shakespeare did. He writes with a mordant humour and a laughing sadness that is distinctively Australian and shows that a distinctively Australian poetry doesn't have to be of the bush-ballad variety.

I found at first, reading Murray, that his work was prickly, difficult and unyielding. What helped me was finding that a couple of common threads are wound into his work: the great Australian barbecue stoppers: politics and religion. Firstly, Murray has a fiercely independent vision of Australia and of the world. He sees himself articulating the languauge the common man against the elitism of the city-bound latte set. This slight paranoia is aimed at the urban media and academic castes who patronize the rural less-privileged – people like Murray himself.

…It's called Big Shame, my poison-brother fellow
says, this feeling abashed by proper people.
Before Racist and Beaut Authentic, we were Low…(p.480)

When Sydney and the Bush meet now
There is no common ground. (p.124)

He speaks the accent of the Aussie outsider, the "battler" of popular legend. For example, he rails against the Australian tendency to savage well-known females like Hanson, Lawrence, Chamberlain and Kernot:

In Australia, a lone woman
Is being crucified by the Press
At any given moment

With no unedited right
of reply, she is cast out
into Aboriginal space. (p.466)

This political no-woman's land is shared by the dirt farmers and the aborigines, adrift from privilege and the language of "rights". One of Murray's pet hates is the way in which (white) academics and bureaucrats have turned the language of Aboriginal rights against country people, as if their rural cousins are to blame for their bad conscience. The perhaps surprising affinity between rural whites and their aboriginal neighbours he captures in an early poem entitled "Thinking About Aboriginal Land Rights, I Visit the Farm I Will Not Inherit":
Murray is a deeply religious poet and writes deeply religious poetry, in defiance of the secularism of the intelligentsia: "Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can" (p.432).

Leaving behind the Free Kirk Presbyterianism of his upbringing, Murray found in Catholicism the religious counterpart to his calling as a poet:

Prose is protestant-agnostic,
Story, discussion, significance,
but poetry is Catholic;
poetry is presence. (p.341)

He writes in his collection of prose The Quality of Sprawl that "in the Free Church service of my childhood, with its emphasis on the sermon, there wasn't enough receptive silence; there was no sense of ceremony deepened to the point where human activity briefly fell away and God was present." It is this "presence" that Murray tries to capture in his poetry. After all, as he writes in "Poetry and Religion" (p.265), "Religions are poems." What he means is that true religion is a "dreaming", an act of the imagination. Just as you can't pray a lie, so "you can't poe one either." God is "the poetry caught in any religion, caught, not imprisoned."

It is this "presence" which fills Murray's luminescent nature poetry. The series of animal poems, entitled sure enough "Presence: Translations from the Natural World" (p.355-378), serve to illustrate. "Bat's Ultrasound" ends with this remarkable coda:

Ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
Ere your raw row) we air our array,
Err, yaw, row wry – aura our orrery,
Our eerie u our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh. (p.355)

Murray's eye captures the glint of God in the creation in a way that Gerard Manley Hopkins did a century ago; and as with Hopkins, the beauty and playfulness of his language mirrors what he sees in nature. It is a sublime tuning of the gift of language to the divine key. Murray's ear is also "rare". I am reminded in these poems of the playful and yet awe-some animal poems of the Bible, whose point is to draw glory to the creator from contemplation of the creatures: Job 38-39 and Psalm 104.

Murray has much to say in prose and poetry about the "religion" of Australia. He recognizes that the spiritual energy of Australians is more and more absorbed by the quest for "national and communal identity". The Anzac myth is not as sacred as we think:

In the dream, Clarrie Dunn
Sits naked with many thousands
In the muddy trench. He is saying
The true god gives his flesh and blood.
Idols demand yours off you. (p.554)

Australia is in a drift away from traditional Christianity, but has not found an adequate replacement; and so we have become a nation of unsatisfied spiritual longings which are only met by the shallowest of new-age mumblings. He urges Australian Christians not to "be tempted to see ourselves as a team that has to win for God; He is not helpless – and anyway His idea of a win is the Cross, which may be the place where the truly irresoluble contradictions, by which out life in the world is torn but also perhaps powered, meet and get the only resolution they can obtain, that is a living continuous one which we've agreed to take part in after all" (The Quality of Sprawl, p.47).

There is of course a great deal more to his poetry than politics and religion I would hasten to add. The Collected Poems contains poems that will never leave me for their wit, their beauty and their sadness. Read his poetry alongside the excellent biography by Sydney Anglican Peter Alexander.

Narrative Logic: sequence vs pattern

Temptation is part of the ‘narrative logic’ of martyrdom.

What do I mean by 'narrative logic'? ‘Narrative logic’ indicates the ‘patterns of order which are proper to story rather than to discursive reasoning’ Richard B. Hays, "The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1-4:11" (Thesis (Ph. D.), Scholars Press, Emory University, 1981., 1983), p. 223

Stories are composed of actions and events order to one another by reference to time. To view the story as a unity, each subsequent event must be intelligible in relation to what preceded it. It can be surprising; or the intelligibility may not be obvious immediately; but the events must show some kind of fitness. Ricoeur’s way of putting this is to say that narrative conclusions must be, rather than deducible, acceptable. The follow a ‘particular directedness’ that propels them forward to a conclusion – though of course we need to follow it to the conclusion because it is only from that point of view that we can ultimately judge the acceptability of the sequence. Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," Semeia no 13 1978 (1978): p. 182

That is not to say that there isn’t a ‘logic’ to the way stories proceed, of course. Rather, it is almost a truism to say that successful narratives do possess an explanatory power that resonates – profoundly so – with the human experience of events.

Ricoeur goes on to develop his analysis of the logic of narratives by claiming that all narratives combine two aspects, one of which is chronological and one of which is non-chronological. The first he calls the ‘episodic dimension’, by which he means to indicate the way in which narratives throw up the question of ‘and then’? – that is, ‘what happened next’? Simultaneously, however, telling a story is also about construing ‘significant wholes out of scattered events’, attempting to grasp the series of events as a unity – its ‘configurational dimension’, as Ricoeur labels it. Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," p. 183-4 Ricoeur observes then that narratives combine both sequence and pattern – though, it must be said that these two elements exist somewhat in tension with one another:

‘this structure is so paradoxical that every narrative may be seen as a competition between its episodic and its configurational dimensions, between its sequence and its pattern.’