Experiments in Criticism

Julius Caesar: Act 3 Commentary

Act 3 contains the most thrilling scenes in the play: Caesar’s assassination and Brutus’s and Antony’s dueling funeral orations about what that assassination means.

Five comments on the act:

Caesar is never more defiant than just before he dies. He compares the rest of the senators to mutable heavenly bodies and himself to the unchanging Northern Star. What remains of Caesar are his wounds, a testament to his body’s frailty. Antony will display Caesar’s body to get the Roman people to condemn what Brutus and his cohort have done.
Brutus makes clear that his master is Rome. Why did he kill Caesar? “Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.” He then goes so far as to say that he will gladly give his own life should Rome require it of him. He will have ample opportunity to make good that promise. By the time Antony is done, the Romans want Brutus’s head.
Brutus knew the stakes of the assassination in Act 2. It would be perceived as butchery when it was intended as sacrifice. Brutus says he did what he did for Rome. Antony calls it ingratitude. Brutus calls Caesar the traitor. He ambitiously wanted to take away Roman freedom. Antony calls the conspirators traitors. Caesar’s death with “move the stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.”
Brutus assumes that the violence will stop with Caesar’s death, that he and his conspirators can walk through the city streets waving their swords and saying, “Peace, freedom, and liberty” with no additional consequences. Antony shows that’s not possible. He provokes the crowd, and before the act is over, the poet Cinna is torn to shreds because the crowd thinks he was involved. The assassination has let loose the “dogs of war.”
Cassius’s best line in this act concerns the legacy of the assassination.

How many ages hence
Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,
In states unborn and accents yet unknown!

The play demonstrates the line’s truth. What Cassius omits is how this scene will be interpreted. Brutus and Cassius are in the lowest circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno. This play represents Cassius’s motives as much as it celebrates his actions. Ultimately, the conspirators provide no substantive defense of their actions. Antony can display Caesar’s body. They can only invoke Rome.

Julius Caesar: Act 2 Commentary

The most important quotation from Act 1 was Cassius’s comment regarding Caesar: “And this man / Is now become a god.” The first act gives us ample evidence that none of these characters are transcendent, Caesar included.

The most important quotation from Act 2 is a question from Caesar himself: “What can be avoided / Whose end is purposed by the mighty gods?” The question is about human agency. Caesar’s implicit argument is that humans can’t change their fates. Artemidorus says later in the act, “[T]he Fates with traitors do contrive” if Caesar doesn’t get word about the conspiracy against him. Cassius offers another interpretation of human agency when he tells Brutus that the fault is not “in our stars / but in ourselves.” If these views seem muddled, that’s because they are.

These views of fate also reflect political and philosophical worldviews. The republican believes that human action matters. The emperor believes in a totalitarian decree from the gods that must be obeyed.

If my reading of the play is correct, we should expect Act 2 to add more demonstrations that the characters are finite. Act 1 showed the fallibility of the plebeians, emperor, and senators. Act 2 shows the private lives of the play’s male characters –Portia (Brutus’s wife) and Calpurnia (Caesar’s wife) are prominent. The general fallibility of these characters is concentrated into one specific weakness: they don’t know the future. All they can do is project, consciously or unconsciously.

Julius Caesar: Act 1 Commentary

My covenantal argument about The Tragedy of Julius Caesar is that the real god in this play is the Roman state. The fight between the empire and republic obscures their deeper commitment to the state. This is a commitment only a Christian could see.

What evidence would confirm this reading?

First, the play should dramatize the finite and fallible nature of both the imperial and republican characters.

Second, the play should show both sides emphasizing Rome’s transcendence.

Act 1 is mostly about the first point.

Julius Caesar: The Historical Bind

Shakespeare rarely made up his own stories. He frequently adapted historical events from chronicles or fictional tales from various places. He wrote at least eight plays with HISTORY in the title. Every event portrayed in those two tetralogies were over a hundred years old. Consequently, talking about history in a Shakespeare play requires two overlapping conversations: the history portrayed in the play and the history taking place when the play was written.

Everyone who writes about The Tragedy of Julius Caesar addresses why Shakespeare would have told this story of Roman History in 1599. His main source is pretty clearly Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which he would have access to via Thomas North’s translation (Plutarch wrote in Attic Greek, not Latin). Most scholars conclude something that is the opposite of my argument. I argue that Shakespeare exposes Rome’s politics as the state religion. The dominant argument from the last thirty years is that Shakespeare exposes England’s religion as a subtle means of politics. Both interpretations are products of larger worldviews. Most Shakespeare scholars see religion as another form of politics. I see humanist politics as a counterfeit religion.

Caesar’s Rome was supposed to be the “good old days” for citizens of the English Renaissance. It was a dangerous place for poets, Shakespeare observes. Cinna the poet dies because he shares a name with a conspirator. It was no less fraught for rulers and revolutionaries. The good old days weren’t so good.

By making clear the religious commitments of the play’s characters in a way that goes beyond his source text, Shakespeare also draws attention to the religious dimension of pagan political life. Religion and politics are connected. The church and state are parallel institutions each with separate ethical domains. They both receive their power from God, not human beings. So too do the parallel domains of literature and history.

Robinson Crusoe Part 2

Robinson Crusoe is about a man discovering God’s sovereignty during exile. Robinson disobeys his father’s commands by going to sea, receives punishment through shipwreck, and then turns to Christ in his distress. He is both Jonah and the Prodigal Son. Alone on the island, Robinson can contemplate God’s sovereign work in his life.

The first part of the novel is about Robinson’s rebellion. His father tells him to avoid the sea and go into law. Robinson refuses. Robinson even receives grace on the sea and in his first planation in Brazil, yet he still heads back to the sea. He craves human companions but disdains his family. He wants freedom yet participates in a slave-ship enterprise. He’s given rules to follow, and he breaks them.

The second part is about Robinson’s conversion. In his sickness, he dreams that the Lord speaks to Him. This word is confirmed by scripture: Psalm 50:15 says, “And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me.” Here he learns to reinterpret the rest of his life in light of God’s providence. As he discovers how to survive physically, he learns how to thrive spiritually. He’s given provision from the sunk ship that left him wrecked on this deserted island. He finds animals and plants on the island to help sustain him. He has been baptized in the ocean, and now he feeds on miraculous food (“I ought to consider I had been fed even by a miracle”): two symbols of the sacraments.

The third part of the novel is about Robinson’s survival after his conversion. He pledges his life to God and he prospers. He spends more than twenty years cultivating land, farming animals (mostly goats), and establish three homes. Robinson sees cause and effect in his daily actions, and he’s given ingenuity to figure out how to solve common problems if he can exhibit patience. He works on canoes as a means of escaping the island. He harvests corn and conserves various resources like his clothes and gunpowder. This is the part of the book people think about when they think of the book.

The fourth part of the novel recounts Robinson’s encounter with cannibals. They are the Ninevites to Robinson’s Jonah. I’ll pick up here next week.

Genre Criticism

Here’s a truism. Open a book about biblical hermeneutics, and you’ll find a warning about genre. You can’t read Song of Solomon the way you read II Chronicles. They’re not the same genre. Don’t read Genesis the way you read The Psalms. Again, not the same genre. The Gospel According to John is different than the three epistles of John. Same name, different genre.

The books of the Bible are not all the same type of book, and that matters to interpretation. David Chilton argues in his commentary on Revelation that part of the problem with many interpretations of the book is precisely one of genre.

The Book of Revelation is often treated as an example of the “apocalyptic” genre of writings which flourished among the Jews between 200 B.C. and A.D. 100. There is no basis for this opinion whatsoever, and it is unfortunate that the word apocalyptic is used at all to describe this literature. (The writers of “apocalyptic” themselves never used the term in this sense; rather, scholars have stolen the term from St. John, who called his book “The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ.”) There are, in fact, many major differences between the “apocalyptic” writings and the Book of Revelation.
David Chilton, Days of Vengeance

Chilton’s analysis gets at a problem. Critics have a tendency of judging biblical books by non-biblical genres. The Bible contains literary genres that should be definitive.

My hypothesis is that we can read biblical books as redemptive versions of the literary genres they belong to.

Now what this means for a form like the novel, I’m not really sure.

As I put together a handbook of literature, I will need to dig a little deeper here.

Critical Terms: Literary History

This is the fourth of a series of weekly posts on the book Critical Terms for Literary Study.

In his survey of the term “literary history” Lee Patterson poses this question: what exactly is the relationship between literature and history?

His survey shows that in the 19th Century, history was held to be “objective” and literature “subjective.” History provided the “cause” that produced particular pieces of literature as “effects.”

Literary scholars were not happy with this arrangement. Literature was not subject to history. In fact, wasn’t this “cause/effect” stuff too mechanistic? And history was “objective”? Says who?

But the attempt to make literary study more objective (christened the “new criticism”) soon fell into disrepute. “New Historicism,” the critical golden school of the 80s and 90s simply rendered literature and history as overlapping subjective studies. And the critic? Bound by history too. There was no escape.

This leads to Patterson’s concluding paragraph, where he writes:

Literary historians know, perhaps too well, that there is no methodological elixir (least of all “theory”) that will enable them to tell the truth about either literature or history. But they must also not ignore the scrupulousness and inclusiveness that attend a commitment to the theoretically problematic yet ethically indispensable desire to get it right.

That last sentence is a doozy. “Theoretically problematic” vs. “ethically indispensable.” Problematic to who? Ethically necessary why?

And so “literary history” is another critical term that desperately needs, but does not get, examination through a biblical and covenantal perspective.

Biblical Presuppositions: The Covenant

Stories matter to God. He is the grand storyteller. Reality itself is His story. Because we are made in God’s image, people tell stories too. Because stories matter, literature matters. When God revealed himself to us, he didn’t just give us theological treatises, a book of collected sermons.

Covenants are personal agreements that the transcendent God makes with his creation. They always have the same structure.

They begin by asserting God’s TRANSCENDENCE. This means that God is the covenant’s author. It’s his story. We see that this in God’s mighty work of creation, revelation, and redemption.
Next, these covenants set up responsibilities called HIERARCHIES: the proper roles people should have in relationship to God. Hierarchies establish the story’s main characters and their roles. The most important human character, our story’s hero, is Jesus Christ, God in human form, a mediator or go-between for us.
Next, this story operates according to certain RULES or ETHICS. As characters in God’s story, we can follow or disobey those rules. Jesus Christ is the hero of this story because he followed all of God’s rules without making one mistake.
Those rules lead to the next feature of God’s covenants: what we call SANCTIONS or the CONSEQUENCES of obeying or disobeying. You can think of this as cause and effect When we follow the rules God gives us, we receive blessings. When we disobey God’s rules, we receive curses.
Finally, those individual chapters point to God’s work in time: ultimate rewards or ultimate punishment. We call this SUCCESSION. God’s story never ends. He truly has authored a neverending story: eternity. Christ offers eternal life to the people who abide by his covenant. He offers eternal death to those who fail to live by his covenant.

We start here because:

God is reality’s ultimate author.
He has given us symbols that point us to Him: his WORD, the SACRAMENTS that remind us of Christ, and PEOPLE.
He has established rules through the chapters of his covenant that show us how to read his word and interpret the sacraments and people correctly
We are part of God’s story. If we see and glorify and enjoy God, we will receive eternal life. If not, we will receive eternal death. Those are the consequences: eternity itself.
Every human story we read or watch, from Hamlet to Hit and Run or from The Sound and the Fury to Friends, shows human beings trying to figure out God’s bigger story.

So how does the biblical covenant model give us a way of reading literature?

The Reeve’s Tale: A Covenantal Outline

This is the third in a series of posts about Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1390s).

PLOT

TRANSCENDENCE: There is no transcendence in this plot: only the authorial intent of the Reeve (a town official) who wants to get back at the Miller for telling a tale that satirizes carpenters because he is himself a carpenter.
HIERARCHY: This, along with sanctions, is the main dynamic of the story. The miller tries to get one over on everyone he comes across. The local university boys (“clerks”) take it upon themselves to put him in his place.
ETHICS: The miller is unethical in his grain cutting. He always takes part of the cut. When he robs the clerks, they decide enough is enough.
SANCTIONS: The clerks are even more despicable than the miller. They spend the night with their thieving host and sleep with his wife and daughter.
SUCCESSION: No one is getting married. The trysts were based in revenge. The family is scandalized. The miller has been embarrassed.

THEME

HIERARCHY: The world of human revenge is often about hierarchy: who serves whom.
SANCTIONS: Without transcendence, human interaction is nothing but judgment. There is no grace in this story. It’s neither funny nor successful as a story. Its content is unpleasant, as it is aesthetic rendering. The Reeve is a vindictive man, and his tale is mercifully short.