Recent Readings

Though it can sometimes be distracting, I've found recently that reading more than one book at once (and not merely out of academic necessity) is a great way to keep interest and focus. I often find a book langourously overstaying its welcome in my life. However, if I can take a break, so to speak, from it and pick up another, I can return refreshed and excited to regain its narrative or argument, as the case may be. It's generally a good idea to make additional books in one's reading cycle different genres. Fiction, non-fiction, poetry are the usual categories for me...For me, these three have been Story & Promise, Snow, and The Winged Energy of Delight.

Robert Jenson's Story & Promise

Recently, I've been reading Robert Jenson's Story & Promise. This is a book my internship supervisor encouraged me to read, as he has fond memories of reading it with Jenson himself, back in the mid-eighties, when my supervisor was a student of Jenson's at Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary. That they read it jointly with my teacher David Yeago, also a student at the time, intruiges and amuses me. I'm often try to imagine their conversations as I read.

It's one of his earlier theology books, and seems to reflect some of his late sixties and early seventies political convictions. It doesn't seem to bear too much on many of the theoloical arguments that he makes, but it is a bit distracting at times. I can hardly believe that this is a thinker I first read in First Things.

Those who have read Jenson's Lutheranism, co-authored with his fellow Gettysburg professor Eric Gritsch, know the basic terrain here. Jenson crafts an argument about the basic form of the gospel by focusing on its linguistic construction. Though this gospel has basic content-- namely, the narrative about Jesus of Nazareth-- Jenson analyzes the gospel in terms of its communicative aspects; he looks at it as a statement that performs certain functions in the world. A brief rundown on the first chapter:

The gospel is specific, has the character of a promise, and has a history.

The first statement refers to the historical specificity of the gospel narrative-- that Jesus, for example, lived as a member of first-century Israel. This keeps us from (mis) identifying Jesus as a "wandering therapist" or a "universal social teacher." His historical (and Jenson adds that whether our "history" is critical or credulous is unessential) location clues us in to the fact that Jesus was an eschatological Jewish teacher, and could not possibly be either of the above.

The second statement is the foundation of the book's main argument. Jenson-- building on the work of J.L. Austin, I assume-- says that the statements we make rarely communicate simply information about the world. We do not simply "transfer information" in speaking; most statements modify the world of the hearer or addressee [Jenson's examples: "shut the door," "praise the Lord," "damn it."] We intervene in the lives of those we speak to. Promises always "[modify] our meaningful world, in some way [posing] a future " (6). Jenson writes further that outside of promises, our communications "shares one common character: it poses a future not as gift, but as obligation" (7).

By saying that the gospel has a history, Jenson means the telling of the gospel has a particular development. But what we might otherwise call Church history seems to not be of essential importance to Jenson. Here are some of Jenson's own statements about the history of the gospel:
"precisely to be itself, the gospel is never told the same way twice...[and] In all its changes,
the gospel remains itself. But it remains historically itself, as a person remains himself
through the changes of his life-- or rather, changes precisely in order to remain himself, and
loses himself if he stops and clings to what he was" (11).

I find Jenson's first thesis indispensible. His second, I am willing to entertain. I like Jenson's focus on the gospel as spoken event. I think a linguistic focus on the gospel qua spoken event is important, especially in light of recent philosophy. But even J.L. Austin himself, who was the first to really make the distinction between what we might call mere "fact-mediating" sentences and "performative utterances," saw that the two were more intertwined than we might think. Thus, even promises have to make reference to substances that already exist and do not merely create something utterly new, destroying what existed in its place before. Jenson seems to take the gospel as sheerly performative.

This is probably what leads him to downplay the history of the gospel-speaking. This is unfortunate, because I think that we always must make reference to the "great cloud of witnesses" who have gone before us. Just as early Christianity fit into the narrative of Israel, so we early-twenty-first century Christians must somehow fit into the history of the Church, where the Holy Spirit has been concretely at work over the millenia.

I am nearly certain that Jenson has shifted his position on the latter thesis, and am interested to read more of his later work when I finish Story & Promise.

Orhan Pamuk's Snow

Funny that I picked this up to read it Thursday night as the winter's first real snow here in Boone began to fall (two or three inches, highs of nine on Friday morning!). Pamuk is a Turkish author who is obviously quite enthralled with Western literature. At least, this is my assumption, given the epigraphs: Browning, Stendahl, Conrad, and Dostoevsky. Concerning the latter, anyone who would quote from the notebooks of Dostoevsky has my immediate respect; here's the quote: "Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people."

Pamuk obviously has much skill in crafting a narrative. Within the first few paragraphs of omniscient thrid-person narrative, the narrator steps back: "Let us take advantage of this lull to whisper a few biographical details..."(3). The subsequent brief overview of Ka, the protagonist of the narrative, ends with "That's all we have time for at present...But I don't wish to deceive you. I'm an old friend of Ka's, and I begin this story knowing everything that will happen to him during his time in Kars [the fictional Turkish city he travels to from Frankfurt, where he has been in political exile]" (5). Such narrative sleights-of-hand remind me of the most masterful practioner of them, Cervantes, who uses them to hilarious effect in Don Quixote.

Ka, a poet borrowing a press pass from a journalist friend, embarks to Kars with the supposed purpose of investigating recent elections, along with a string of suicides commited by young Islamic women who are forbidden from wearing their headcoverings in school. The headcovers are considered politically disruptive, I suppose.

As he begins his investigations, Ka hears the morbid stories of grieving families, and begins to re-acquint himself with the city of his childhood. He also gets to know Serdar Bey, a "local correspondent" with the newspaper Ka is reporting for. Bey becomes something of an informer, sending "police protection" for Ka, who also trail him, Ka learns. Bey's presence is alternately charming and subtly threatening, as he is one of the sole "media outlets" in Kars, publishing the news a day ahead of time with the advantage provided by his political connections.

All the while, snow falls on the city, enchanting Ka with its tranquility, and we learn the true reason Ka came to Kars: he want to seek out Ipek, a beautiful (and recently divorced) woman from his university days.

Snow is engaging not only for its narrative execution, but also for its pertient questions about the relationship between the Islamic East and the Secular (?) West (n.b. I can't quite figure out yet how Pamuk envisions the precise tension here). This is particularly on my mind after Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address and his recent visit to Turkey, not to mention the foibles Pamuk himself has been involved in related to the Islamism of his home State. More than simply a political tension, there is an emerging philosophical tension in this book between Islam and the West.

Pamuk seems skilled in weaving these threads into a credible and absorping narrative, without losing sight of the overarching themes. He is also witty in a somewhat "postmodern" way regarding the "narrated" quality of the story and the plays with our usual suspicions of the omniscient narrator and his/her questionable reliability.

Bly's Translations of International Poetry

I'm also dipping into Robert Bly's collection of translations The Winged Energy of Delight. Bly has long been both frustrating and indispensible for me. He brought to my attention a number of poets widely neglected on the American scene, poets like the Swedish Tomas Transtromer, and the medieval Persian Rumi. He also brought into a more dynamic English poets like Rainer Maria Rilke and Pablo Neruda, who sometimes suffer in stilted and archaic language.

Bly is famous for being involved in "the men's movement," which intended to bring suburban and effeminate men into contact with a more "mythopoetic" consciousness. As much as I admire him for his attention to the importance of initiation rituals, myths, etc. in forming meaningful community, some of his ideas seem preposterous. He is famous for books of criticism like "Leaping Poetry" in which he talks about the three "sections" of the brain-- the reptile brain, the mammal brain, and the new brain. [cue twilight zone music].

However, his contribution to poetry is indisputable. He is really trying, in such formulations as those above, to introduce the associative intelligence and holistic connection between the "conscious" and the "unconscious" which modernity has falsely bifurcated. He writes that poets ought to 'leap' from objects "soaked in unconscious substance to an object or idea soaked in conscious psychic substance."

Only Bly could introduce a poet by saying that "his poetry is as nourishing as an old apple that a goat has found in an abandoned orchard" (on Harry Martinson).

In reading this collection, I have discovered a poet I'd only really heard about before-- Georg Trakl. An Austrian who suffered greatly due to his service in WWI, and the suicide of his sister, he wrote haunting poems. He attended to lush landscapes much as the late Romantics did, but one finds them nearly empty of human habitation, save for ghostly figures and violent episodes viewed from a distance. While British poets like Wilfred Owen and A.E. Houseman were writing realistic poems in mostly strict form, Trakl wrote of natural scenes that, outwardly, are placid and beautiful, but are disturbing for the uneasiness projected onto them. There is a weird detachment here, one that seems oddly enough, fitting for someone who has suffered from so much death and grief. Trakl seem like a proper poet to bring the consciousness of Dickinson into the twentieth century.


...In the shadows thrown
By the broken pine trees
A mountain stream turns dark in the green light;
A little town
That piously dies away into brown pictures...

The autumn night comes down so coolly.
With her white habit glittering like the stars
Over the broken human bodies
The convent nurse is silent.

(From "The Mood of Depression").