The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists by

Ralph C. Wood
Review by: Nelvin L. Vos
The Journal of Religion, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Oct., 1990), pp. 681-682
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1204393 .
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 Book Reviews
WOOD, RALPHC. The Comedyof Redemption:Christian Faith and Comic Vision in
Four American Novelists. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1988. 320 pp. $32.95 (cloth).

The presupposition implicit in Ralph Wood's book, The Comedyof Redemption,is

that the essence of tragedy and comedy is, first of all, neither social nor philo-
sophical, nor even narrowly literary, but rather religious. Indeed, the assump-
tion that the central question of tragedy and comedy is a religious question
underlies the major studies of tragic and comic theory for the last several dec-
ades. Both tragedy and comedy seek to delineate a broad and inclusive meaning
in human experience, to open up panoramic perspectives by which to discrimi-
nate and understand it.
Ralph Wood, who teaches religious studies at Wake Forest University, agrees
with G. K. Chesterton that "gaiety can serve as the means of grace because it is
supernaturally surprising" (p. 3). Wood acknowledges that Reinhold Niebuhr
has delineated the relationship of tragedy and the Christian faith with clarity and
accuracy. For Niebuhr, Christianity lies beyondtragedy. Wood summarizes: "Bib-
lical faith denies, in Niebuhr's opinion, the tragic assumption that evil is necessar-
ily entailed in all free acts" (p. 7). Niebuhr, according to Wood, falls short of
seeing beyond the cross to the resurrection of Christ.
Surprise of surprises, Wood turns to Karl Barth, "a theologian of the Divine
Comedy" (p. 34). Rejecting the common view that Barth is an anticultural theolo-
gian, Wood contends that Barth's "evangelical theology enables him vigorously
to embrace the world of human creation. He is free to celebrate culture because
he regards it as the arena rather than the vehicle of salvation. Especially in its
comic expression, culture can provide surprising parables of our divine redemp-
tion" (p. 2).
The major part of the book explicates the writing of four American novelists:
Flannery O'Connor as both a satirist of the negative way and a comedian of posi-
tive grace, Walter Perry as a Catholic existentialist, John Updike as an ironist of
the spiritual life, and Peter DeVries as a humanist of backslidden belief who pre-
sents the comedy of unconditional election and irresistible grace. Wood works
inductively with the fiction of these writers and buttresses his observations with
biographical insights and references to secondary sources. The chapter on the
moral progress of Harry ("Rabbit") Angstrom, the protagonist in Updike's three
major novels, is particularly incisive.
Wood is careful not to baptize these writers into the faith. Rather, what he
finds "most salutary in these four writers is that they do not make their art into a
pseudosalvific means to either belief or doubt" (p. 282).
Voltaire, according to Wood, called God "the comedian whose audience is
afraid to laugh" (p. 33). Wood agrees that the world on its own terms does appear
to be a botched job, the work of a comic bungler. The argument of Wood's vol-
ume is that, "seen from the perspective of Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the
world is the arena of God's redemptive activity. And God himself is the comedian
who wants his audience to laugh-to rejoice in and thus to be transformed by the
Good News" (p. 33).
I must admit that I was initially skeptical of a book that juxtaposed Niebuhr
and Barth with four novelists. But my doubts were allayed as I observed the care-
ful and sensitive ways in which Wood approached the complex issues of theology
and literature implicit in his undertaking.
At the opening of the book, Wood cites an incident involving a DeVries char-

681

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The Journal of Religion
acter named Dr. Didisheim: after Didisheim presented a lecture on comedy, a lis-
tener responded by slapping him in the face with a recipe for custard pie. Per-
haps Wood achieves the balance needed in relating comedy and the Christian
faith because he has a healthy sense of his own presumptuousness in writing a
long and serious work on comedy.
NELVINL. Vos, Muhlenberg College.

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