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Forms of Religious Dialogue in Twentieth Century English Literature (II)

Faith in Drama and Fiction
LECTURE TEN The Modernist Sacramental Ecriture , in T. S. Eliots Play
Murder in the Cathedral and the Postmodernist Inscriptions of Alienation
in Ted Hughess Crow Poems and John Fowless The French Lieutenants
Woman, chapter 48

THE MODERNIST SACRAMENTAL ECRITURE

The strong, ritual plot: confronting, in the conflict/plot, sacramental (religious) with
mundane (political) motivations. The solid, classical construction of Eliots play
with the chorus, whose function is like that of a commentator (uniting modern stage
directions and props as structural elements of stage literatuyre, drama) and the
symmetrical distribution of characters in the two parts and with the sermonic
interlude answered by the knights defences which are actually indictments.
-Character construction and dramatic progress investing in characters the
demonstration of how Thomas Becket distances himself from worldly attitudes
throughout Part I (three priests, four tempters) symmetrically answered in Part II by
three priests and four knights
In Eliots sacramental play, irony is *sublimated (see *sublimation): it becomes
mutual mirroring, confrontation of two irreconcilable worlds: the metaphysical
world, which lies beyond the ordinary looking glass and is served by the saints
determination for martyrdom and the ordinary historical and political and everyday,
mundane life. The will to imitate Christ brings about martyrdom in the ideal
character who turns ordinary life and fate into an imitatio Christi life ready for death
caused by friends and foes alike.
-The classification of characters in Eliots sacramental play: the low-mimetic
humanity worth to be ironically treated and the high-mimetic world, modeled after
the divine pattern which can ritually save the world
The chorus as low-mimetic humanity + with its old function in antiquity dramas:

CHORUS
Here let us stand, close by the cathedral. Here let us wait.
Are we drawn by danger? Is it the knowledge of safety, that draws our feet
Towards the cathedral? What danger can be
For us, the poor, the poor women of Canterbury? what tribulation
With which we are not already familiar? There is no danger
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For us, and there is no safety in the cathedral. Somepresage of an act
Which our eyes are compelled to witness, has forced our feet
Towards the cathedral. We are forced to bear witness.
Since golden October declined into sombre November
And the apples were gathered and
stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of
water and mud,
The New Year waits, breathes, waits, whispers in darkness.
While the labourer kicks of amuddy boot and stretches his hand to the fire,
The New Year waits, destiny waits for the coming.
NB - The function of the chorus is to express natural synchronization, which is
different from the ritual and sacramental synchronization with the seasons of the
divine dispensation which the saint points to the time above nature, Christian time
which is divine.

-The objective correlatives of the wheel and the cathedral (the integration and
sublimation of the wheel in the cathedral through the ministration of the martyr).
The objective correlative as a local, modernist symbol which merges two old
archetypal symbols: the wheel of fate and the dogmatic cathedral to grant them a
new life) is an example of experimental modernist ecriture, just as the one of the
cryptograms studied before.

THIRD PRIESTFor good or ill, let the wheel turn.

The wheel has been still, these seven years, and no good.
For ill or good, let the wheel turn.
For who knows the end of good or evil?
Until the grinders cease
And the door shall be shut in the street,
And all the daughters of music shall be brought low.

Postmodernist Encounters with Faith and the Ironic Mode Literature

Ted Hughes sequence From the Life and Songs of the Crow, published in 1970, after
two dire episodes with the feminine companions of his life who committed suicides,
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is a very good radiograph of the unbearable twisting of religious belief like a knife in
the wound in the literature composed under the sign of the ironic mode
Crows First Lesson

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.

Love, said God. Say, Love.
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.
No, no, said God. Say Love. Now try it. Love.
Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito
Zoomed out and down
To their sundry flesh-pots.
A final try, said God. Now, Love.
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Mans bodiless prodigious head
Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest
And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And womans vulva dropped over mans neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept

Crow flew guiltily off.

Notice the casual voice of the black humourist and the writer of absurdist drama
which drags down into slime ultimate, sublime significances. Notice the parodic
intertextuality with the Bible typical for postmodernist tongue-in-cheek rewritings of
celebrated, here the tongue in cheek rewriting of sacramental, texts.
Crow Blacker than ever
When God, disgusted with man,
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Turned towards heaven.
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing Heaven and earth together So man cried, but with God's voice.
And God bled, but with man's blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: 'This is my Creation,'
Flying the black flag of himself.

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Chapter 48 of The French Lieutenants as the fictional (and longer) version of Philip
Larkins poem Church Going
Though doubtful and hesitant, the modern agnostic may find the sense of existence
spelt out in letters as large as life in the church, whence he may just come out
enlightened.
Agnosticism
Deep in his heart Charles did not wish to be an agnostic. Because he had never needed faith, he had quie
happily learnt to do without it; and his reason, his knowledge of Lyell and Darwin, had told him he was
right to do without its dogma. Yet here he was, not weeping for Sarah, but for his own inability to speak to
God. He knew, in that dark church, that the wires were down. No communication was possible.
Love is the true nature of the relationship that grows between Sarah Woodruff
and Charles Smithson to trouble then end the relationship nearly fully
established and sanctioned in matrimony between Charles and Ernestina ;
this deep human relationship reveals its full meaning in the church; it is not,
however, only as absolute and unique love that it is made manifest, but as
polyvalent love, aware of its possible shortcomings (namely, it is modern,
even postmodern love); also, the crude, realistic truth that there is hardly any
symmetry in love, but rather fateful circularity is revealed.
My friend, perhaps there is one thing she loves more than you. And what you do not understand is that
because she truly loves you she must give you the thing she loves more. I will tell you why she weeps:
because you lack the courage to give her back her gift.
This passage about Sarah and what the fulfillment of love had endowed her
with is continued with the passage where Charles addresses Sarah and invokes the
injunction to but render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars, followed by the
addition that Sarah had rendered unto him what he himself had rendered unto
Ernestina in the stream of love which connected the three of them and which is
acknowledged at the foot of Christs cross:
And unto me? Is this your tribute? These nails you hammer through my palms?
With the greatest respect Ernestina also has palms.
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The series of weighty things understood under the exceptional circumstances

that bring the agnostic Charles to church refer to life as a whole, in the Victorian age
or at any later moment, metaphorically seen from the angle of the biblical text.
My poor Charles, search your heart you thought when you came to this city, did you not, to prove to
yourself you were not yet in the prison of your future. But escape is not one act, my friend. It is no more
achieved by that than you could reach Jerusalem from here by one small step. Each day, Charles, each
hour, it has to be taken again. Each minute the nail waits to be hammered in. You know your choice. You
stay in prison, what your time calls duty, honour, self-respect, and you are comfortably safe. Or you are
free and crucified. Your only companions the stones, the thorns, the turning backs; the silence of cities
and their hate.

For all the fact of the novel as a whole is a postmodernist rewriting of

Victorian domestic history in the ironic mode, when regarding the book from
the point of view of the religious dialogue of the twentieth century, chapter
48 can be seen to introduce the low mimetic treatment of the Imitatio Christi
theme/motif. It is possible to understand more fully and more realistically
ones own position from the altitude and profundity of the Christian story (not
through dogmatic knowledge as in the catechism, through precepts or
prejudices)
The last words of the previous quotation sound very much like the complaint,
in Journey of the Magi, the first part, of Eliots dramatic monologuist retracing his
steps in hardship:
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
But the most important moment in this chapter is the one when truth,
Charles Smithsons own truth at that crucial moment, dawns on him:
To uncrucify!
In a sudden flash of illumination Charles saw the right puprpose of Christianity; it was not to
celebrate this barbarous image, not to maintain it on high because there was a useful profit the
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redemption of sins to be derived from so doing, but to bring about a world in which the hanging man
could be descended, could be seen not with the rictus of agony on his face, but the smiling peace of a
victory brought about by, and in, living men and women.
It is significant for Chapter 48, as a sequel to the tie-break ending of Church
Going, that Charles does take the suffering figure at the altar seriously and decides
to aim at changing the sense of life from one which ends in sufferance and the
scandal of Christs Crucifixion to one which avoids continuous, universal torment.
Charles own decision, at the time, and the immediate aim of his life, was
practically helped by the fiftieth poem from Tennysons In Memoriam sequence,
whose wariness for the dead Charles ended up repudiating.
There must be wisdom with great Death; the dead shall look me thro and thro. Charless whole
being rose up against those two foul propositions; against this macabre desire to go backwards into the
future, mesmerized eyes on ones dead fathers instead of on ones unborn sons. It was as if his previous
belief in the ghostly presence of the past had condemned him, without his ever realizing it, to a life in the
grave.
This final judgment recalls the rejection of Christianity as a religion of
gibbeted gods as it was understood by the speaker of a late Victorian agnostics
dramatic monologue, Hymn to Proserpine, by Algernon Charles Swinburne.
Without going into details, the same commonplace condemnation of death as the
crux of the Christian matter of faith is proved reductive in Swinburnes poem. That
poem makes clear that agnostics ignore the promise of eternal life and its effects of
replenishing the present one as it is extended to man in the wake of Christs
sacrifice.
The low mimetic renderings of faith put together doubt, hesitation and
estrangement and come up with their own interesting, contemporary
understanding of faith. Because they are not sermons but free imaginative
utterances constitutive for speech genres with their own laws, there are a lot of
things left unsaid in the contemporary low-mimetic contact with faith in literature;
but the effect of reducing the distance to the numinous and the sacred is always
beneficial, as proved at the end of Journey of the Magi, Church Going, The
Magi and in the chapter of fiction just analysed.
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Sublimation: A psychoanalytical mechanism of diverting unpleasant tension,

usually sexual in origin, and investing it in superior (or sublime) creative processes.
Sublimation is a useful defence mechanism which restores balance to the psyche.