origins of narrative: the romantic appropriation of the bible.by stephen prickett

Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible. by Stephen PrickettReview by: Anthony John HardingNineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Sep., 1997), pp. 252-255Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933910 .

Accessed: 08/12/2014 23:58

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toNineteenth-Century Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 23:58:45 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933910?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Reviews

S T E P H E N P R I C K E T T, Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1996. Pp. xvi + 288. $54.95.

The core historical argument of this book is that the Romantics' way of appropriating the Bible rests on the assumption that the biblical narrative can be read as one reads a novel-that is, looking for "character, motivation and plot." This way of reading was not quite new but "like the modern novel itself, no older than the eighteenth century" (p. 264). As the nineteenth century progressed, British novelists, influenced by biblical criticism, " [read] back into the Bible itself the origins of narrative." It is an error, then, to treat the nineteenth-century novel as a secular genre. Behind the overtly secular concerns of a Dickens or Conrad there lie "the almost ineluctably religious tendencies of nineteenth-century literary consciousness" (p. 266). While Christianity-as a body of doctrine, a metaphysic, and a way of life-lost its hold over Europe's intellectual elites, the Bible, reinterpreted according to the recent traditions of a "secular" genre, continued to exercise a powerful if generally unnoticed influ- ence over prose fiction.

As may already be apparent, this is a book of large gestures and often breathtaking generalizations. Its scope is even wider than I have indicated, in fact, since it does not start examining the Romantic move- ment until page 107. The first hundred pages are devoted to a celebra- tion of the ironies attendant upon the fact that "Europe's past is rooted in a translated"-which is to say an appropriated-"book," and that "essentially and in its very origins . .. the Bible is . .. a palimpsest of languages and contexts" (p. 6). Awareness of this now well-known fact did not become general among intellectuals until the late 1700s. Iron- ically, however, it was the KingJames Bible, a profoundly conservative version even for 161 1, that nineteenth-century Britain made the ante- type for its own secularized self-imaging.

252



REVIEWS 253

The style in which this entire argument is conducted suggests a relish for upsetting the complacencies of received opinion more usu- ally associated with the "keynote lecture" genre than with the scholarly monograph. Read as if they were lectures, most of the chapters could be sufficiently described as lively, provocative, wide ranging, and so on. Secularists will be provoked by the assertion that the nineteenth-century novel is "biblical," while those who think of the Bible as fixed in form or meaning will be provoked by the assertion that the nineteenth century started reading the Bible in a new way. This seems to be the effect the book aims for, and it does work, up to a point. The argument about appropriation is not, perhaps, as new or as shocking as Prickett apparently thinks it is (see The Postmodern Bible, by the Bible and Culture Collective [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1995]). Nor will the claim about biblical resonances in the novel be much of a surprise to Victorian literature specialists; indeed Prickett admits that this is hardly a new discovery. In a book with such a wide historical scope- from the early Christian era to the works of Thomas Mann-the critic inevitably has to subsume large tracts of territory opened up by previ- ous scholars. The more urgent question is whether, in the chapters that are more vital to the book's thesis, there is something both new and substantial.

Here the choice of breadth over depth has more serious conse- quences. At times there is the exhilarating sense of seeing an extensive landscape illuminated from a new angle: Pisgah-sights with a promise of fertile ground to be turned over, new relationships to be formed. But such epiphanic moments are not followed up by any dense filling- in of detail. Rather, it turns out that the object is to move airily from one historic "moment" to another, often relying on the sort of far- reaching comparison that once gave "Zeitgeist" studies a bad name, pairing Chateaubriand with Austen, Schleiermacher with Newman.

The discussion of Laurence Sterne is a good example of both the benefits and the failures of this broad-brush approach. Prickett quotes a long passage from one of Sterne's sermons about the story of the Le- vite and his concubine (Judges 18), commenting on the way Sterne's exegesis interweaves several voices: the preacher's own, his hearers', the voices suggested by the text, the voice of an imaginary pious com- mentator, and so on. This is, Prickett claims, a "startlingly modern" approach. Kierkegaard and of course Bakhtin are invoked to support this claim of modernity, which (as such claims go) is fairly unobjectionable, but severe doubts about the real usefulness of the terms Prickett is us- ing creep in when Bunyan's Pilgrim s Progress is discovered to be "a novel



254 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

in spite of itself," so that the "gap between Bunyan and Sterne is much less than might appear at first glance" (p. 125) . Whatever is still left of the original point becomes irretrievably muddied when the style of Sterne's sermon is characterized as "Shandian," and the paragraphs on Sterne end with: "It is hard to say if this is an example of the Bible influ- encing Sterne ... or Sterne rewriting the Bible" (p. 126). This is textual indeterminacy as scholarly method. The cleverness is undeniable, but it does seem as if the temptation to fire off brilliant asides to impress the gallery has distracted the critic from the job of proving his case.

Despite some small successes in the remaining chapters, such as the discussion of typology in Mansfield Park, good paragraphs on Fried- rich Schlegel's Athenaeum Fragments, and a section on Charles Kings- ley's Hypatia that traces Kingsley's projection of a postromantic sense of self-consciousness onto a fifth-century setting, the main argument about the interrelatedness of novel and biblical narrative continues to be sketched rather than substantiated. There are also some enor- mously damaging gaps in the argument. The book takes it for granted that nineteenth-century novelists knew biblical criticism, but it is never explained what biblical critics they knew and how they learned about them. The idea of "the Bible as metatype" is central, but Northrop Frye's work is never mentioned, much less engaged with. One would expect some consideration of Coleridge in a work on this subject by Stephen Prickett, but there are only dismissive (and misleading) asides, such as the statement that in reading Eichhorn, Coleridge was "alien- ated by what he saw as the sheer crudeness of [Eichhorn's] yardstick for historical veracity" (pp. 116-17). There is no hint here that vol- ume 2 of the Marginalia in the Princeton-Routledge Collected Coleridge, which appeared in 1984, contains 152 pages of Coleridge's marginalia on Eichhorn, or that this and subsequent Marginalia volumes also contain extensive notes on many other biblical critics and translators, from Luther to Paulus. Coleridge's Notebooks are cited in the bibliog- raphy (albeit incorrectly), but if one looks for an indication of their relevance to the overall topic of the book one finds only a footnote reference to chapter 2 of Prickett's Romanticism and Religion: The Tra- dition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976), which is mainly devoted to under- mining Coleridge's credibility as a biblical critic. Even if Prickett sees no reason to revise his views of over twenty years ago, one would think that, since Coleridge more than anyone else would be likely to regis- ter the shift of "literary consciousness" that Prickett is tracing, some reexamination of the evidence would be called for. Unfortunately, however, this book is not at its best in dealing with either Coleridge or



REVIEWS 255

the Germano-Coleridgeans. There is much more to be found in Rosemary Ashton's The German Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980) and N. Merrill Distad's biography ofJulius Charles Hare, Guessing at Truth (Shepherdstown, W. Va.: Patmos Press, 1979), nei- ther of which is cited.

This is a book that makes a few points very well, with refreshing wit and audacity. However, that is hardly sufficient justification for a three-hundred-page book these days, and given that its omissions are so many and so damaging even to its already very broad argument, it cannot be unequivocally recommended.

ANTHONYJOHN HARDING University of Saskatchewan

SIMON BAINB RIDGE, Napoleon and English Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + 259- $49.95.

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that this book is the first full-length treatment of a subject that every- one has known about for almost two centuries. Napoleon might be said to be the central figure, even when absent, that everywhere haunts the lives, thoughts, and works of the English Romantics, and it is to Simon Bainbridge's credit that he methodically covers most of the expected terrain (omitting only any extended treatment of Keats and Shelley, the first of whom mentions Napoleon in his letters but not in the po- etry and the second of whom refers to him in "The Triumph of Life").

Beginning with Richard Whately's mock-skeptical Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Bonaparte ( 1819), Bainbridge discusses the ways in which Napoleon appears as both a real historical figure and a "fab- rication or imaginary" one (p. 4); such fabricating helped to define or maintain political and cultural interests. For all of the major Ro- mantics, Napoleon became "a site of cultural contestation" (p. 6). He was routinely elevated and diminished, deified (as Theresa Kelley has demonstrated) as a colossus or caricatured as "little Boney." In whatever other ways Napoleon might have tempted, bewildered, angered, or inspired the various writers with whom Bainbridge deals, it becomes clear during the course of the book that his main interest is mythic instead of simply political: "The contest over Napoleon is a battle for the imagination, a battle in which these writers feel them- selves to be fully engaged" (p. 1 1). Ultimately, although Bainbridge



origins of narrative: the romantic appropriation of the bible.by stephen prickett

Documents