Experiments in Criticism

A.S. Byatt’s Possession uses resurrection as a recurring theme. Words contain life. Through language, particularly art, the dead can live again.

In their epistolary romance, Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte argue about Jesus Christ’s divinity. I don’t think Byatt thinks it is a crucial conversation for the novel, merely a resonant example of the book’s significant motifs. Christ is the Word of God who claimed to rise from the dead. But Christ had others write his biography. What if the most critical events in his life escaped the historical record?

The novel distinguishes among poems, tales, biographies, criticism, and diaries. But because it is a novel, it prompts us to wonder if all history contains fiction. Byatt loves language, and her characters discover language’s power exceeds their theoretical sophistication. However, that language becomes an end in itself. Human love does not mirror divine love. Human language does not adumbrate divine revelation. We can only have love in this world, and we make poems for ourselves and generations hence.

The novel contains incredible beauty, but it leaves me melancholy. Byatt is a genius. She possesses divine gifts, but she prefers the gift to its giver. Ethically, this is a grave error. I wish for her, like Christabel, to cling to Christ.

A.S. Byatt’s Possession is one of my favorite novels of the past fifty years. It marries dense and allusive language with a page-turning plot. I’m going to teach it in my literary theory course this spring, so I’m rereading it now to begin preparing my lectures. I’m shocked at how much I’ve missed in my previous readings.

1. Byatt connects private morality and professional work. A character’s ethics gives us a clue to their work’s worth.
2. The book is concerned with The Word of God as much as words. In the novel’s central plot, two nineteenth-century poets exchange letters and debate the historicity and divinity of Christ. They love words, but they know such words reflect The Word.
3. The novel captures how tempting knowledge can be. Its exploration of human finitude resonates with scripture.

I am eager to finish the book in the next few days and begin crafting classes around it.

David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion: Stories includes eight tales about life in the late 20th and early 21st century.

The book’s theme is that the information onslaught of life in the 1990s and 2000s causes us to forget (the root meaning of “oblivion”) not only what is most important but also what is most obvious.

Wallace intensifies the book’s pessimism and bleakness by removing any possibility that God exists.

The characters fear their lives are empty or do not matter. If they have externally successful lives, they fear they are fraudulent. They struggle to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

The Christian God offers answers to these questions. By revealing himself in scripture, He demonstrates language’s power. By creating people in his image, he testifies to their worth. By knowing the universe entirely, he can define objective reality and quell the fears of fraudulence.

Covenantally, the story’s preclude the Transcendent. As a result, characters bear ethical burdens they cannot sustain on their own. By forgetting God—whose reality is all around them—they reap judgment.

Over the next two months, I plan to review the following ten books.

1. Through New Eyes by James Jordan
2. An Experiment in Criticism by CS Lewis
3. Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine
4. Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
5. Literary Approaches to Biblical Interpretation by Tremper Longman III
6. Christianity and Literature: Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice by David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet
7. In the Beginning Was the Word: Language – A God Centered Approach by Vern Poythress
8. Theory of Literature by Austin Warren and Rene Wellek
9. The Biblical Structure of History by Gary North
10. That You May Prosper by Ray Sutton

Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.” captures the grief of losing a friend. More profoundly, it articulates the more significant doubts such grief occasions.

The poem contains many oft-quoted phrases that you probably didn’t know came from this poem.

It was Tennyson who called Nature “red in tooth and claw,” and it was Tennyson who observed, “Better to have loved and lost, / Than never to have loved at all.”

The poem has 133 sections, all elegiac. While reading a selection of them today, my favorite was LI. The number has a biblical significance; Psalm 51 is the famous penitential hymn where David repents of his sin with Bathsheba. Tennyson strikes a note of despondency, a familiar tone in the Psalms, but mourns the world’s brokenness rather than his shortcomings.

Be near me when the sensuous frame
Is rack’d with pangs that conquer trust;
And Time, a maniac scattering dust,
And Life, a Fury slinging flame.

Time and Life are the enemies. They attack Tennyson’s faith by confronting him with mortality (“dust”) and damnation (“flame”). What’s so powerful about Tennyson’s poem is how it captures the doubt we feel when we are emotionally and physically broken.

Covenantally, this poem is about sanctions and succession. Tennyson wants to know why the good suffer and what kind of eternal promise awaits those who serve God. Tennyson knows the answer in his head. In the poem’s prologue, he writes:

Thou wilt not leave us in the dust:
Thou madest man, he knows not why,
He thinks he was not made to die;
And thou hast made him: thou art just.

By the poem’s conclusion, Tennyson takes the proposition that God made man with the implication that man will live eternally and applies it to himself.

Literary criticism takes time. I don’t find the time itself difficult. Instead, I struggle with the best way to spend that time. Herman Rapaport’s The Literary Theory Toolkit gave me an answer.

In the book’s preface, Rapaport lists a literary critic’s necessary skills:

1. Knowledge of an author’s life and times
2. Competence in the author’s spoken/written language
3. Familiarity with the disciplines adjacent to the author’s work (e.g., law or theology)
4. Awareness of the author’s adherence to or flouting of literary conventions and genres and the author’s allusions to culture
5. Identification of figurative language such as metaphor, metonymy, irony, or paradox and insight into how such language can structurally inform a writer’s work
6. Detection of semantic and syntactic levels of meaning unnoticed by the typical reader

These tasks give me concrete ways to spend my time getting to know the literature I’m reading. They are literary criticism’s barriers to entry.  

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself. Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

Proverbs 26:4-5

When I read, I look for the author’s intention. Authorial intention has its opponents, but I think it must inform our initial responses. It’s part of being a good neighbor.

However, I read lots of literature by non-Christians. How do I respond to their intentions? Must I mute my Christianity because I’m seeking their purposes for the work?

I believe Proverbs 26 answers these questions.

First, it is right to offer a Christian reading of a piece of literature with which a non-Christian author would disagree. This response could embrace a truth-filled insight in the work that the author has included unawares.

Second, it is right to show how the author’s intentions are self-defeating, given what happens in the book. That is, it is quite possible to honor the author’s intentions and maintain my Christian witness. I honor the author and take his or her project seriously. I show the consequences of the author’s beliefs.

Both are means of redemptively responding to unbelievers.