Bechtel, Paul M.

English

Asbury Theological Seminary

THE MODERN TEMPERIN LITERATUREPaul M. BechtelTheological students and clergymen, like other professionalpeople, are increasingly aware of the proliferation of knowledge.When they think seriously about it, they are astonished or bewildered by the masses of information to be assimilated and broughtunder some measure of intellectual control. The natural sciencesdouble the information within their fields every few years. Thebehavioral studies like social science, psychology, and anthropologyare amassing descriptive data and research information at a similarrate.Phenomenal development is evidenced as well in other disciplines like theology, history, philosophy, and the arts. Specialization, much as we deplore the narrowed horizon it imposes, hasbeen for many modern men the only possible response to the knowledge explosion. But not everyone should be a specialist alone�certainly teachers and theologians ought not limit themselves to theprovince of their special competence.Most churchmen are aware of theology's current lively interestin contemporary literature. Seminary courses in theology and modernliterature, conferences addressing themselves to the renewal ofdialogue between the church and the arts, scores of books and articles on the subject, are witness to the apparent discovery ofrelated concerns. The theologian finds in modern writing a validdescription of contemporary men�the needy ones to whom he ispledged to bring the redemptive message. Concrete human situationsmade vivid and urgent in the novel and drama may often lay bare thebasic self better than the philosopher's abstractions and the sociologist's statistics. To be seriously interested in literature is to beseriously interested in life.If modern literature is to serve any useful purpose it must beapproached on its own premises. The once didactic literature of thenineteenth century, the genteel tradition, has given way under theimpact of two great wars to literature of a different order. Most modern writers do not regard their work as a force for moral uprightnessand cultural stability, as the Victorians commonly did. They preachno absolutes, seek no anchorage in tradition, plead for no fixedThe Modern Temper in Literature 13moral code or rigid discipline of self. Old patterns of thought inpolitics, economics, and general culture apparently must be routed.'The establishment" has broken down under new cultural burdens.The stiffness of the past is as anachronistic as the Gothic cathedralon a modern city street.Down a twisted and rutted road contemporary man gropes hisway with neither pole star to guide him nor echoing heavens to comfort him. Alienated and alone, an outsider, he is filled with anguishand dread, tormented ceaselessly from the depths of the subconscious. This is the vision of disillusioned man, who has forfeited,or never known, his identity as a unique creature. He is the rootlesswanderer who moves through the pages of Sartre, Camus, Beckett,lonesco. Genet, Bellow, Mailer, and a host of other writers.These writers find it hard to acknowledge an external superintending force. Hence they engage in a ceaseless effort to createGod in their own image, to lock eternity into time. They sketch aworld which may make it on its own by setting realizable morallimits. In breaking off metaphor from belief, they would claim, theyare not acknowledging loss of faith but a search for new reality.The novel is quickly responsive to every intense concern�existentialism, the new morality, civil rights, homosexuality, the lossof identity, economic reform, the threat of nuclear war. Existentialism has had its most striking expression in French works likeSartre's Nausea and Camus' The Stranger and The Plague. Althoughthere has been no American existentialist school, there are characters in pursuit of existential values in Ralph Ellison's The InvisibleMan and Saul Bellow's Herzog. Ellison and Bellow are concernedwith identity in the modern world, with meaning in a world withoutGod, with the source of values when transcendence and ultimacyhave been denied. Many critics now regard Bellow�after the passingof Faulkner and Hemingway�as the foremost living American novelist. It is of the nature of the times, unhappily, that he could notgive any kind of positive answer to the question, "Why am I here?"The negro novelists have championed the cause of their ownpeople in words of angry protest. Most of these writers are astuteenough to realize that they must choose between literature as artand literature as protest. For the time being at least, they havechosen the latter. Art can wait until the territory of conscience hasbeen invaded. Richard Wright's Native Son, Ralph Ellison's TheInvisible Man, and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and AnotherCountry are all strongly denunciatory of a society which imposesnumerous indignities upon a large number of its citizenry. Most ofthese books are violent, although there is a substantial structure oftruth in them. Another Country, praised by some competent critics,is inexcusably debased in language and situation; it lacks bothtaste and art.14 The Asbury SeminarianFlannery O'Connor, at the time of her early death in 1964, waswinning a growing acclaim. Hers is essentially a Christian worldview, although it is often difficult for readers to recognize such avision in the midst of the violence Miss O'Connor thought it necessary to use in order to gain attention in an age of violence. JohnUpdike continues to be warmly championed by the critics as a superbstylist, but his limited canvasses lack wide popular appeal. He hasyet to show the breadth and depth and intensity of a major novelist.J. D. Salinger's saga of the curiously erratic Glass family seemsabout played out. The prolific James Gould Cozzins, whom many feltwould be a major talent, appears to have fallen short of the promise.Critical preoccupation with novelists who reflect the raw and jaggededges of a broken world, who subscribe to the naturalistic assumptions, leaves little room to acclaim quality novels like Shelly Mydans'Thomas (the story of Thomas a Beckett), Zoe Oldenbourg's Destinyof Fire (about the Albigensian persecution), and Conrad Richter'swholesomely pleasant novels of American pioneering days.Modern drama had its beginning with Ibsen and the "socialproblem play" (A Doll's House. Ghosts, An Enemy of the People).The emphasis was continued in Shaw (Mrs. Warren's Profession,Major Barbara) and Galsworthy {Justice). More recent drama, likeother art forms, has been vigorously alive and abrasive. It has setforth the climate of our times, recognized the doubts and confusionof the age, explored the darkrecesses of the human heart. In AmericaTennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, working in reasonably conventional forms, continue to be the leading playwrights, often mirroring inner deterioration and that fear of meaninglessness whichTillich has designated as the special dread of contemporary man.Other dramatists worthy of attention are O'Neil (generally thoughtto be the greatest of the Americans), Synge, O'Casey, Anouilh,Pirandello, Brecht, Lorca, and Wilder.Abroad the theater of the absurd, one of the radical experimentsin drama, has attracted substantive attention with its ideas andinnovations. The absurdists have appropriated the underlying philosophic assumptions of existentialism. They see man trapped in aworld he did not make and cannot alter, wandering without significance and identity toward the doom of death, which frustratesreasonable expectations for long life, happy marriage, and modestsecurity. This structure of ideas draws together such writers asCamus, Sartre, Beckett, lonesco. Genet, and Adamov. They are mostconcerned with thematic ideas. Commonly they make no distinctionbetween farce and tragedy, for in a world of absurdity and impotenceour emotions can easily be reversed to make us laugh at the pitifuland cry over the ludricrous.Eugene lonesco's The Bold Soprano introduces the Smiths andthe Martins, who can no longer talk lucidly to each other becausethey can no longer think or feel passions. They have lost theirThe Modem Temper in Literature 15identity as unique beings; they could become as interchangable asbits of standard machinery. What lonesco deplores is the unrelievedconformity, the loss of individuality, the easy acceptance of shibboleths by the multitudes which transforms them into robots. Theworld has lost its philosophic sensibility, its sense of mystery.Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot has been the most strikingof the absurdist plays. At the beginning of Act I two tramps are s< enon a country road by a single tree. The play ends as it begins withthese two engaged in directionless dialogue, waiting in vain forGodot, whose name clearly suggests God. Without ever saying itdirectly, the drama's mood implies an absurd world in which God isdistantly known as a name but is nowhere engaged in the humanventure. When asked what Waiting for Godot means, Beckett responded: "If I knew, I would have said so in the play."Modern poetry has been less bitter than the novel and drama,yet the poet too shares much of the uncertainty of the other artsabout ultimate things. Except for figures like Frost and Sandburg,modern poets have a quite limited audience, chiefly because thegeneral reader finds the language and metaphor difficult. It shouldbe remembered, however, that the poet has sought to do somethingreally difficult in trying to suggest through his work all the complexity of our time in images that match the disarray of experience.He compounds the reader's difficulty by substituting for the pro-positional statement of nineteenth century poetry new symbols,images, and discontinuities of thought. In addition to Eliot, Auden,Thomas, Spender, MacNeice, the Sitwells and Larkin have beenmuch praised. Of the more recent American poets Lowell, Roethke,Eberhart, and Wilbur have been particularly commended. No recentpoet has been quite so much publicized as the young Russian,Yevgeny Yevtushenko, who in his flamboyant verse has spokenout with what seems like a surprising measure of freedom.Human destiny, sketched in somber hues, has won serious attention in modern art because so many people have thought there isso much in the world today to authenticate the picture. If the visionwere merely a ludicrc s caricature of experience, no one would giveit serious attention. Strongly fixed as the image of man in alienationis in the contemporary consciousness, the view does not go unchallenged. Man as a unique creation fashioned in the image of Godhas its defenders too.T. S. Eliot was by far the most influential of modern Christianwriters. He gave light and leading to many and showed that moraland religious standards in literature are something more than aPuritan anachronism. Impressive also have been figures like C. S.Lewis, Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, Joyce Cary, GrahamGreene, W. H. Auden, Paul Claudel, and Francois Mauriac. Theyhave kept open a meaningful and attractive alternative to alienationand nihilism. They have helped also to excite significant dialogue16 The Asbury Seminarianbetween theology and literature. Others too have joined in the dialogue, and out of the lively interest has come a substantial list ofgood books. Among them might be cited: Christian Faith and theContemporary Arts, edited by Finley Eversole; The Climate of Faithin Modem Literature, edited by Nathan Scott\The Failure of Theologyin Modem Literature, by John Killinger; American Literature andChristian Doctrine, by Randall Stewart; Modem Poetry and theChristian Tradition, by Amos Wilder, and The New Orpheus: EssaysToward a Christian Poetic, edited by Nathan Scott.Writers like Greene, Eliot, and Lewis, while seeing orthodoxreligion as exciting material for the literary imagination, sometimesadd to the substance of belief radical elements drawn from the mostadvanced pronouncements of contemporary culture. C. S. Lewis'space trilogy�Oz/f of the Silent Planet, Perelandra. That HideousStrength�diavfs frequently upon insights from the new psychology,anthropology, and physics. In these novels Lewis introduces largeand transcendent issues but hardly deals explicitly with them. Hisapproach is through a world of myth. Clyde S. Kilby says of thismyth world: "There is a great, sovereign, uncreated, unconditionedReality at the core of things, and myth is on the one hand a kind ofpicture-making which helps man to understand this Reality and onthe other hand a deep call from that Reality."In the novels of Graham Greene the bearers of God's witnessare people burdened by fallibility and incompetence rather thansaints and heroes. Yet even in these fallen ones Greene sees graceat work in the wounded spirit. His fundamental obsession, that sincalls forth grace, that sanctity follows after sin, may have littleapproval in orthodoxy. Yet it should be noted that here is a majornovelist in whom there is still an acknowledgement of transcendence,who believes a real God reigns, has expressed himself in the Word,and actually offers grace, mercy, and peace. The Power and theGlory, The Heart of the Matter, and A Burnt-Out Case are generallythought to set forth the landscape of Greeneland at its best.Greene has frequently acknowledged his indebtedness to Francois Mauriac, who like himself is a Catholic novelist. The morepositive and perceptive note is struck in Mauriac, particularly in AWoman of the Pharisees. Mauriac 's characters are usually pressedhard by some consuming obsession like a desire to manipulate thelives of others, as in A Woman of the Pharisees, or for vengeancein Vipers Tangle. Yet unrighteousness is softened and transformedin Mauriac by a slow process invasion of grace from many directionsrather than through a direct challenge by doctrine.One may note that these Christian writers are predominantlyAnglican and Catholic. Why these should be more productive artistically than other Christian groups is not easy to say. Some havesuggested that within these traditions the commitment to liturgy tosymbol, to sacramentalism, to a theological structure more sensitiveThe Modern Temper in Literature 17to the aesthetic�encourages artistic sensibility and creativity.That theological subjects or theologically related figures canmake successful subjects for drama is shown in John Osborne's recent Luther (hardly an honor to the stalwart of Reformation faith),Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons (about Sir Thomas More), Archibald MacLeish's / B (using, or misusing, basic themes fromJob), and Rolfe Hochhuth's The Deputy (a severe indictment ofPius XII's failure to denounce Hitler's massacre of the Jews). Nodrama in history has evoked so violent a response as Hochhuth's.In a world as complex as our own no one banner draws theallegiance of all. Where there are many loyalties, no generalizationis wholly valid. Ours is both an age of faith and unfaith. But denialhas outpaced affirmation. Therefore Sartre and Camus get a largerpopular following than Eliot and C. S. Lewis. Camus examined theassumptions of Christianity and found them, for him at least, anuntenable option. And there are hosts of intellectuals like him.These people represent God in terms of His absence�the negativeway�the "God-shaped blank." Sartre says he bears the burden ofthe world�an impossible burden because God is silent. This is apreposterous declaration certainly, but one which is made withconviction nonetheless.Some Christians would say in response to Camus and Sartre:"Why bother with these people; they are diseased minds." To respond this way is to make our gravest error. They are artists whorepresent with great power one aspect of the world mind of our time.They brief us not so much on the environment we must denounce asthey unfold for us authentically the area of our opportunity andresponsibility. Here is where estrangement and denial can be responded to only by a reiteration of the Gospel of love in Christ.Rigorous unbelief can be matched by a small but intellectually veryrespectable company of modern Christian writers. Always, too, thereare the great reserves like Augustine, Pascal, and Dostoevsky.Contemporary Christian writing at its best is of a high order.But most modern writing gives back the world's own note. Even so,some close awareness of the natural can keep the church from becoming irrelevant. The sophisticated deniers of God's sovereignty inthe world may well be serving His purposes by reminding us of whatthe world is like when Jesus Christ is denied His Lordship in humanaffairs .

The Modern Temper in Literature

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The Modern Temper in Literature

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