Experiments in Criticism

In a world filled with distractions, cynicism, and skepticism, it’s easy to forget the simple wisdom we learned as children. G.K. Chesterton reminds us of the truth we learned from fairy tales.

The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. . . . Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticized elfland, but elfland that criticized the earth.

The traditional stories we learned as children give us access to a rich tradition of shared wisdom and understanding replete with the truth about God. When we revisit and appreciate these stories, we strengthen our connections with one another and preserve the wisdom that transcends our particular time and culture.

In subsequent posts, I will explore the covenantal truths of God, man, law, sanctions, and time explored in these simple stories.

J.R.R. Tolkien, the brilliant mind behind The Lord of the Rings series, was an advocate for the subtlety and depth of literature. He believed in the power of stories to shape our understanding of the world around us, while also granting readers the freedom to draw their own conclusions.

In the preface to The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien wrote,

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

This distinction highlights the importance of allowing readers to interpret stories uniquely without being constrained by the author’s intended meaning.

We find one way to exercise the freedom Tolkien gives us when we read this passage about the hobbits.

They forgot or ignored what little they had ever known of the Guardians, and of the labours of those that made possible the long peace of the Shire. They were, in fact, sheltered, but they had ceased to remember it.

Tolkien does not intend for us to find the real-world referent for this hobbit shelteredness. Rather, he leaves it to our application.

This passage serves as a reminder of how easy it is for people to forget our connections to the past, to the people and events that have silently shaped our lives. When we focus solely on our present circumstances, we fail to acknowledge the efforts and sacrifices of others that have made our current environment possible.

As we engage with literature, we can learn to appreciate the complexity of our shared human experience and find connections that deepen our understanding of ourselves and others. In a world where context is often forgotten, literature is a powerful reminder of the forces that have shaped our lives and an invitation to apply its insights anew.

The new covenant of communion established by Christ emphasizes the deep bond formed when people break bread together. In literature, authors often use meals to cement connections and explore the complexities of human relationships. Here are three examples from works I teach to my freshmen every semester.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

In The Road, a post-apocalyptic novel, the scarcity and preciousness of food shape the father and son’s journey. When they discover a bunker filled with food, they thank the now-absent individuals for sharing their meal. The conflict between the man and the boy stems from the boy’s desire to share food with strangers. McCarthy depicts the brokenness of this world by showing the novel’s villains consuming human flesh and blood, a grotesque distortion of holy communion. The boy offers food to others, signifying divine compassion.

Shakespeare’s Macbeth:

The Scottish tragedy presents a twisted parody of communion when Banquo’s bloody body appears at Macbeth’s dinner party. The bloody apparition demonstrates the consequences of breaking covenant relationships and is a haunting reminder of Macbeth’s treacherous descent.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s “This Blessed House”:

n the 1999 short story “This Blessed House,” a newlywed Indian-American couple, Sanjeev and Twinkle, navigate their new life together while discovering Christian artifacts in their home. The story culminates in a dinner party, where the couple’s friends gather to celebrate their marriage and home. As the guests bond with Twinkle over Indian food and a scavenger hunt for religious objects, the couple’s marriage reaches a breaking point. Despite his aversion to it, Sanjeev must admit that the bust of Christ Twinkle finds is beautiful. The story ends with insights into the couple’s covenant with each other and connection to the spiritual dimension of life.

Drawing on the biblical theme of communion and Christ’s new covenant, authors such as Cormac McCarthy, William Shakespeare, and Jhumpa Lahiri use shared meals to explore human relationships’ complexities and food’s power to unite or divide us. These literary works remind us of the significance of breaking bread in strengthening connections and understanding what it means to be made in God’s image.

In The Content Trap, Bharat Anand reveals that innovation thrives not on the content itself but on the connections that content fosters between consumers, products, and spaces.

For educators like myself, the book serves as a wake-up call. It challenges the belief that providing deeper insight into the subject matter is the key to enhancing our lessons. This, according to Anand, is the content trap.

So, how does this concept apply to the study of covenants?

In covenantal theology, the focus is not solely on the covenant’s content but on the connection between God and those with whom He makes the covenant. The Old and New Testaments emphasize the continuity between covenants and God’s work. Covenantal theology moves beyond the content by highlighting specific people, places, and times where God established unique connections.

The inspiration for this blog’s name comes from C.S. Lewis’s book, which posits that literary criticism should prioritize the reader’s experience rather than the text itself. In his view, we gain more insight by examining the relationships people form with books than by scrutinizing the books alone.

The key takeaway: avoid the content trap.

With this in mind, this blog will concentrate on the connections that literature fosters between people, the Bible, and, most importantly, God. In biblical terms, these connections are known as covenants. By emphasizing relationships over content, we can unlock a richer understanding of our faith and its significance.

An entry in a new series that covers these covenantal categories…

Today, The Great Gatsby (1925).

AUTHOR: F. Scott Fitzgerald was born in 1896. He published The Great Gatsby in 1925. It was his third novel. When he died in 1940, he had four published novels, a novella, and one unfinished novel (The Last Tycoon).

HIERARCHY: Fitzgerald was born in Minnesota, the son of a failed businessman. During Fitzgerald’s time at home, his family maintained its middle-class lifestyle thanks to the inheritance of Fitzgerald’s mother. In addition, Fitzgerald was Catholic and attended parochial schools throughout his life. When he attended Princeton, this Catholicism made him an outsider. Fitzgerald was an enlisted army lieutenant for two years. After he sold his first novel, This Side of Paradise, Fitzgerald had the money to marry his wife Zelda, a Protestant. He lived in Europe with Zelda while he was drafting The Great Gatsby.

The novel The Great Gatsby juxtaposes three kinds of backgrounds. Nick, the narrator, boasts middle-class midwesterners for parents. Tom and Daisy Buchanon belong to the Chicago and New York elite. Jay Gatsby grew up poor and needed a benefactor for any of his education.

CONFESSION OF FAITH: Fitzgerald was shaped by his family’s Catholicism, but he could not be classified as a Catholic novelist. In many ways, he was a lapsed Catholic, someone who knew the truth and regretted that he had turned away from it.

Nick alludes to the cardinal virtues in The Great Gatsby before confessing to a virtue that is not one of them (honesty!). Tom challenges Gatsby’s ethical code while he is the greatest of hypocrites. Tom is not a churchgoer but a modern man without a chest who succumbs to reactionary pseudo-science. He is squared off against Gatsby, who knows only desire and the satisfaction of having his desire acknowledged and sated. Nick is the superego, somehow trying to bridge the gap between these two egotistical men who are given to indulging their ids.

CONSEQUENCES: Fitzgerald succumbed to alcoholism, and his life after Gatsby‘s publication was marked by personal and professional tragedy. His writing dried up, and his marriage to Zelda fell apart. He began a relationship with columnist Sheilah Graham in the 1930s and maintained sobriety a year before his death in 1940 from coronary arteriosclerosis.

The novel does not provide a hopeful ending. Daisy and Tom are left together, at best a purgatorial relationship. Gatsby dies at the hands of a bereaved, cuckolded husband. Nick returns home, having lost his relationship with Jordan Baker and earlier ended his relationship with his hometown significant other.

The novel’s elegiac ending refers to the West as the pursuit of hope, a future where the wrongs of the past can be redeemed. The past, however, cannot be outrun. The very thing that would transport us to the future bears us toward our origins. Allegorically, the passage could undoubtedly refer to Adam’s loss of original holiness in Eden. He was the first man borne fully grown, another true son of God like Gatsby. There are consequences for believing that we are capable of creating ourselves. Even when we get what we want, it does not satisfy us. We are in love with our own desire, not its satisfaction.

LEGACY: The book is considered Fitzgerald’s best and one of the candidates for the title of the Great American Nov l. In its exploration of wealth, individual identity, and seemingly boundless desire, the novel has themes that speak to the American identity.

An entry in a new series that covers these covenantal categories…

Today, The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

AUTHOR: Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in 1821. He published The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, the year before his death.

HIERARCHY: Dostoevsky was the son of a middle-class doctor who studied to be an engineer. His father was killed by serfs, and Dostoevsky’s literary reputation was connected early on to his insight into Russia’s social problems. Following his arrest, imprisonment, and service in Siberia, Dostoevsky’s social views changed considerably. While his novels gained prominence, he remained an outside, the product of his gambling addiction and poor health.

The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s final novel and represents the culmination of one of his great themes: faith vs. reason. In its subject matter and scope, the novel is the fitting culmination of a great literary career.

CONFESSION OF FAITH: Dostoevsky converted to Christianity while in prison. He only had access to the New Testament there and left with a profound sense of faith’s necessity in a world of scientific rationalism. This verse from Matthew begins his novel and adorns his tombstone: “Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed.” Dostoevsky’s basic conviction that suffering (the straight and narrow) led to redemption.

The Brothers Karamazov illustrates what that suffering looks like. The father is murdered and the eldest son (who, incidentally, is innocent) gets convicted of the crime. The middle son knows the truth but has a mental collapse so that his testimony is not believed. The youngest son, a devoted monk, nearly loses his faith when his beloved elder’s body decomposes immediately after death.

Yet the novel affirms faith in the face of skepticism and good in the face of evil.

CONSEQUENCES: Dostoevsky read his own radicalism as the source of his suffering in the early 1850s. He remained a morally conflicted man; he gambled recklessly and had affairs. He also experienced great heartache. His youngest son Alyosha died in the years just before Brothers K was published. He suffered epileptic seizures for most of his life and died before he was 60. Dostoevsky did suffer, in ways that were both attributable to moral failings and in ways that were incommensurate with any personal sin.

The novel gives a particularly striking argument against Christianity by illustrating the suffering of children. The skeptic of the family, Ivan, adds to this intolerable suffering the fact that the church is hopelessly corrupt.

Yet the novel finds ways of supporting belief in God and ends with a new generation gathered in hope around the youngest and most spiritual Karamazov, Alyosha (named for Dostoevsky’s son). Unaided reason can offer a calculation that seems convincing and excludes God. But the truth can never be captured by reason alone, and the terror of unaided reason is a worse hell than any the skeptics blame Christians for creating.

LEGACY: The book is considered one of the greatest novels ever written. The list of luminaries who admire it is odd: Einstein on the one hand and Joseph Stalin on the other. It is a great book that reads you as much as you read it. As a Christian, I see the immensity of its faith and how Dostoevsky testifies about Christ and the hope his resurrection provides. I can also see why, taken on its own, something like the famous “Grand Inquisitor” sequence could be read as the greatest of fictional anti-church screeds.

An entry in a new series that covers these covenantal categories…

Today, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999)

AUTHOR: JK Rowling was born in 1965 in Southwest Britain. She published Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in 1997 and the book’s two follow-ups in 1998 and 1999, respectively.

HIERARCHY: Rowling was a divorced single-parent when her blockbuster novel came out. She had spent time in government housing and various teaching jobs before her first novel hit it big. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a lab tech who died in 1990 from multiple sclerosis. Rowling does not write from the “inside” of society but as an outsider.

This third novel in the Harry Potter series showed Rowling’s maturity as a writer. Its subject matter is darker and more complex, and Harry, Ron, and Hermione enter puberty. The film adaptation of the novel is often considered the best of the film series.

CONFESSION OF FAITH: Rowling despises people who misuse their power and abuse loyalty. She prizes love and sacrifice as virtues. The books make this clear. This particular novel is about revenge. For the first time, Harry meets someone who (supposedly) betrayed his parents. He must confront his own unexpected anger and quell his internal desire to punish the Judas figure himself.

All of this is worked out without organized religion. There is no god in the Harry Potter world. All this power? Human-focused. That’s why the temptation to take revenge is strong. You can’t count on God to do it for you. If the judicial system has messed up, there’s only you to make it right. Harry, however, resists the temptation.

Rowling attend a Church of Scotland congregation and had her daughter baptized into that body.

CONSEQUENCES: Rowling’s broken marriage hasn’t come up in the series yet. Even the execrable Petunia and Vernon are still married. The headmasters at Hogwarts are alone, however. Minerva, Albus, Hagrid, and Snape are represented as single, rather than married or divorced. Their positions (apparently) demand they care for many children rather than their own families. They choose to devote themselves to others through education.

However, the broken trust of her divorced husband is all over the book. The theme of loyalty is central in the book. James Potter was the only one of his close-knit friends to get married (and, thus, have a child). As a result, friendship is what these men have, and one of these friends is a Judas (it’s just not the one everyone thinks it is).

It’s essential that Snape, whose backstory receives more development here, is someone torn by revenge. He can’t hate Potter completely because James saved his life, but he gives himself reasons why Potter is still worth hating to give him plausible deniability for hating his son.

Harry’s generation bears the weight of its predecessors.

LEGACY: The book is considered one of the best in the series. A 2012 poll from The School Library Journal ranked it as the twelfth best chapter book for children. Only Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone ranked higher (#3), and only one other book series made a list (Goblet of Fire at #98). JK Rowling’s legacy has taken a hit over the past couple of years.

In the posts that follow over the next couple of months, I’ll post short entries on a host of authors and works. The information and analysis I provide will use the covenant model to cover the following topics.

AUTHOR: When was the author alive, and when was the work written?

HIERARCHY: Where did the author contextually place him/herself in society, and where does this particular stand when placed in the context of the author’s other works?

CONFESSION OF FAITH: What was the author’s ethical code? Does the work correspond or clash with that code, and how?

CONSEQUENCES: What kind of consequences did the author’s ethical code have on his/her life? How do the concluding emotions/actions of the work reinforce or correspond to the work’s ethical code?

LEGACY: What is the cultural legacy of the author, and what effect has the work had in the world since its publication?

You can learn a lot by reading how the editors of anthologies decide what to include or leave out. The editors of the Norton World Masterpieces Anthology argue that the Western World is founded on the texts from three peoples: the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans. (Incidentally, they contend that St. Augustine is the figure that best combines these three strands).

They select four passages from the OT for inclusion: the story of the fall, Joseph’s narrative, excerpts from Job, and the “suffering servant” passages from Isaiah.

The Genesis passages present a before and after: free people choosing to rebel against God and a godly man triumphing in earthly terms despite trials and tribulations. According to the editors, the story of Job complicates the victory Joseph achieves. We get Job’s thoughts in a way we never get inside Joseph, and we’re left with as many questions as answers at the end of the book. Finally, the messianic passages from Isaiah portray a servant who not only suffers on behalf of others (the archetypal scapegoat) but, in taking on that punishment despite having done nothing wrong, provides a model of sacrificial love.

Three observations:

1. The editors choose these passages for typological reasons: their narrative patterns (suffering) are repeated and complicated.
2. The editors clearly do not believe in the historical veracity of these stories. Adam, Eve, Joseph, and Job are all fictional characters.
3. The editors rightly point to the incarnate Son of God as the culmination of this sequence. They read these narratives as part of a larger story and Christ as that story’s culmination.

In The Everlasting Man, G.K. Chesterton addresses the question of repeated myths in human culture. His metaphor is an interesting one. While the soil might be the same for the oak tree and the chrysanthemum, this does invalidate the unique qualities of each plant.

I would undertake to find something like a bunch of flowers figuring again and again from the fatal bouquet of Becky Sharpe to the spray of roses sent by the Princess of Ruritania. But though these flowers may spring from the same soil, it is not the same faded flower that is flung from hand to hand. Those flowers are always fresh.

G.K. Chesterton

The literary critic does well to investigate the soil but should forget a description of each work’s unique fragrance.