Nehemiah Blake
restoring England’s Christian literary traditionArchive for fiction
Engendering mystery in fiction
A significant topic of Jason Clark’s blog is how secularism acts as a form of religious system in our society that has a way of privatizing faith “into nothing more than a religious association or club for individuals.” The result, Clark notes is that secularism’s co-religionist consumerism “fragments bodies and communities into individuals, unable to do life together in community.”
One of the impacts of secularism’s power to legislate privatized religious spaces has been the excising of the expression of faith in literature in general, and in the novel specifically. If faith embodies a mystery that cannot be fully comprehended by the human mind, then the impact of removing the open expression of faith in the marketplace has been the loss of that sense of mystery. This impact upon fiction writing can be seen in the general tendencies of writing courses and books to teach a method of effectively and efficiently communicating story. There is much value in such a methodism. Nevertheless, it represses that part of writing which engenders mystery.
Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings.” It is our fortune in this democratic age for it to be a matter for anyone to search out a matter hidden by God. There are many who have discovered deep things about this world in which we live, but one would be hard pushed to find “novels” on our bookshelves today that have a share in that wonderful legacy. W.G. Sebald is one that comes to mind, and his works push the boundaries of the novel into something quite significantly different.
Richard Wasserfall sees his Apocalypse of Jude as the beginning of his own attempt to give over to a writing that engenders mystery in favour of communicative strategies. A sense of puzzlement often overcomes readers who have read this work, perhaps being used to a more communicative approach to telling story than one which states that it is in the writing that the real story lies. The scriptures have this quality of mystery about them, and it is a quality that Nehemiah & Blake believes is needed in our world today in order to overcome the powerful grasp secularism has on fiction, on what it can and cannot talk about. It is thus works with this quality that Nehemiah & Blake seeks to publish, in the hope re-engendering mystery into fiction will help in the process of allowing people to once again live together in community as a community and not as fragmented individuals.
Fiction as “lectio divina”
Karen Armstrong notes in her book The Bible (2007) that lectio divina is the “peaceful, leisurely perusal of the [scriptural] text” in which a reader finds “a quiet place in [the] mind [...] to hear the Word” (128). In lectio divina, scripture is not studied as a historical-linguistic text on the one hand, or as a fundamental proof text on the other, but as a prophetic window upon the here and now. This style of “reading” was developed by monks at the end of the pagan Roman Empire as a means of spiritual formation, whereby the “rhythms, imagery and teaching of the Bible became the substratum of their spirituality, built up incrementally and undramatically day by day, year by year, in silent, regular meditation” (ibid). The purpose of such an inworking was to be able to live as close to the movement of the Spirit as possible, perceiving the Spirit’s words, thoughts, groans and inner desires. The daily liturgy, with its scripture readings and Eucharist became, in Karen Armstrong’s terms, the illiterate “laity’s “lectio divina” (130) by which the lay folk were incrementally and undramatically brought to the knowledge of Christian faith.
Today, illiteracy is again beginning to pervade the lower stratum of UK society. But this illiteracy is also an illiteracy at the story level on the one hand, where the Christ story has all but passed out of knowledge for the vast majority of people in the UK, and at the “reading” level on the other, where liberals and conservatives jockey for media positioning as they joust with their respective historical-linguistic interpretations and fundamental literal proofs of scripture. For neither side is the scriptural text a prophetic breathing into contemporary reality, but a dead text to dig up or eat. As a consequence, the laity have not been nourished with the Christ story. The Bible goes unread, and its interpretation is put back in the hands of religious authority. Yet It was just this authority that the first monks sought to escape when they went into the desert. Karen Armstrong makes the insightful point that the beginning of the monastic tradition coincides roughly with the establishment of the Christian Roman Empire (115). The monks became the new martyrs, not martyrs to death through persecution, but martyrs to state established religion. While the church developed its society-controlling doctrines, the monks lived and breathed the texts that were eventually to form the corpus of the Bible.
If the religious authorities of our day are the liberal and conservative theologians (consider the current Anglican spat over whether to be at Lambeth, or not to be at Lambeth), then who are the monks? Well, if lectio divina is the peaceful, leisurely perusal of a text, what text today but the novel better fits that description? And what community today but the reading group more aptly describes a group of monks reading a text in unison in search of its rhythms, imagery and teaching for internal meditation.
There is some truth to the argument that the novel replaced the Bible as the culture’s central “text” and that the literary canon has since Victorian times been put forward as a surrogate of scripture. Literary theory has been justly unkind to this proposal, and the English canon itself is in as much disrepute as the Biblical text. As such, few today read the Bible, while not many more read the canon. Rather, reading groups have taken fiction into their own hands:
If 500 of this country’s most fervent readers have got it right, the past 25 years have been a golden age for classic fiction, the past 15 years have been even better and the past five years have verged on the platinum.
[...]This perspective will be news to most critics, academics and publishers, although publishers will be grateful for the boost for their newer titles. But it is the firm view of 48 book reading groups across Britain.
The reading laity have become the monks, and the literary authorities, the dogmatics. Freed then from both their roots to scripture as a story stock, and from an authorising canon, today’s novels are read “lectio saecularis” by reading groups. Nevertheless, the rise of reading groups in the UK shows that the novel remains the English culture’s central de-centred “text”, which means that somewhere inside that “text” hide its scriptural traces.
It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish works of fiction, of which Richard Wasserfall’s Apocalypse of Jude is the first, that track these traces back through the canon to the scriptures. This desire is based on the deeper desire to combine lectio saecularis with lectio divina in a way that sees the reading laity mastering both and then passing on those reading skills to the illiterate so that they can join in.
If you have any interest in finding out more about this project, then please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
Fiction as liturgy
What is liturgy but a plot along which a story can be strung. Yet the story being strung is not a mere story. It is a story in the aid of worship, and hence a story of spiritual import to both the individual and the community, for liturgy is, after all, a personal act of worship publicly enacted with others that leads to a communal restatement of belief. The liturgical plot is what governs the pace and drama of the story, both for the individual and the community. By tying its varying movements to the calender, the liturgical plot brings our participation to the story.
Can fiction enact this same liturgical same function? It is towards this ideal that Apocalypse of Jude strives. Its liturgical structure melds together the pagan liturgical calendar with the Church’s, beginning at Easter and ending at Christmas, while taking in Whitsuntide, Spring Equinox, Halloween and Midsummer along the way. On the side of the Church liturgy, Jude and Caul somewhat unknowingly work through a liturgy of the sacraments, thereby bringing the reader into participation with the liturgical story. Furthermore, the biblical texts of Jude and Revelation that are mixed into the overall text will hopefully drive a communal discussion of the fictional use of these texts, which should in turn encourage a collective restatement of belief on the part of readers (the double entendre on restatement is intended, for a restatement is always one made anew). Also present in Apocalypse of Jude, however, is the pagan liturgy of the vegetation ritual in which the reader is invited to participate through reading the integrated text of T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland. Here Paul acts as high priest, not in pagan worship of the god Dionysus however, but rather of himself.
This focus on the self as centre of worship is the travesty of liturgy. This travesty however, Jason Clark notes, is the primary liturgical plot that people in the UK participate in today. Clark calls it the liturgy of consumer culture where “our weeks are organised around the consumer calendar” and our participation driven by a “demand for obedience from our wallets,” all in the service of identity formation through the aesthetic acquisition of ever more desirable goods which will attach to us the mediated attributes of a godlike status. Clark goes on to note that the liturgy most discredited and forgotten in the UK is the Christian liturgy, in which is told the story of Christ in aid of the worship of Christ, a man who eschews everything about consumer culture.
It is odd then, that much Christian spirituality today reflects more the values of the consumer-culture liturgy than its own. And if the consumer-culture spirituality is a new-age spirituality that piggybacks on the pagan liturgical tradition, then much Christian spirituality is mere new-age spirituality. Jason Clark argues however, that Christian spirituality should rather be seeking for a reconnection with a liturgical tradition more closely connected with that of the Book of Common Prayer, and which can act as “the door way to the living out and forming of our lives around the reality of the universe that is the life of [the counter consumer-culture] Jesus.”
English literature began and founded many of its roots in serving a Christian liturgical function for both the individual and the community of believers. If those are the roots of English literature, there is no reason to believe that fiction cannot serve that same function today, and help both the individual and the community of believers reconnect with a life that celebrates love of God and neighbour above self. It is Nehemiah & Blake’s desire to publish such works, of which Apocalypse of Jude is humbly put forward as an imperfect prototype.
If you would like to know more of Nehemiah & Blake’s vision, please email nehemiahandblake@yahoo.co.uk.
