257 - Belief and Disbelief In American Literature

Belief and Disbelief In American Literature
By Howard Mumford Jones
153 pp. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1967. $5.00.

To appreciate Professor Jones' latest book, one must appreciate the kind of critic he is and the insights his criticism offers. Professor Jones writes literary history, a genre which fell into disrepute during the era of New Criticism but now is emerging again. Following Bacon's view of literary history, Jones sees it as "the record of literature as communalized experience" (The Theory of American Literature, Cornell University Press, 1948, p. 14). The work of the literary historian appeals not only to the specialist interested in the cultural aspects of a period, but also to the common reader who, as Jones says, -reads "for direct pleasure, for simple statement," and who finds the complexities of the New Critics recondite and tiresome. The literary historian, seeing literature as communalized experience, is not interested in the subtleties of symbol and myth, but in what literature tells us about a period and what that period lends to an interpretation of the literature.

Belief and Disbelief in American Literature has, accordingly, a direct purpose which is more historical than strictly literary: to see "what a reading of some representative American literary classics reveals about the religious faith or lack of faith of those who write them" (p. 3). This program is carried out on Paine, Irving, Bryant, Cooper, Emerson, Whitman, Twain, and Frost-not of course, through literary exegesis of their writings, but through exploration of biographical and historical data and comparison of the ideas in their works with traditional Christian ones. The choices are interesting for there is unanimity among them, not of belief but of temperament. Neither Twain's pessimism nor Frost's loneliness qualifies us to put either with those darker spirits-Poe, Melville, and Faulkner.

The upshot of this little book (which is based on six lectures and has the limitations of its beginning) is that American writers are intrinsically "religious," though not necessarily Christian: they are concerned with the great themes of religion-God, man, and the universe-but in a fashion influenced as much by upbringing, current philosophy, and political

258 - Belief and Disbelief In American Literature

events, as by the Christian faith. This conclusion does not really come as news to most of us, and one wonders perhaps about the value of a book such as this. It is not important literary criticism nor is it astute theology. No, the value of this book lies in the perspective it offers on American letters. As a man whose life work has been the entire sweep of American letters, Jones can and does make statements which would not occur to either a literary critic or to a theologian, yet are relevant to the concerns of both. When be mentions in relation to Cooper the long tradition of melancholy in American literature, or the irenic ecumenical tendency of American Protestantism supremely evident in Whitman, he is making the kind of statement which would not occur to most literary critics, bent on studying the individual work, nor to most theologians, focused on religious texts.

This book does one more thing which, while I am in principle against it, is, in this case, surprisingly illuminating. Jones sets his representative American writers directly and self-consciously over against Christian doctrine, defining their beliefs in terms of distance from accepted Christian faith. So often such a practice is tedious, and with younger, contemporary writers simply unfair, because most are no longer children of the great Christian tradition. But all American writers prior to this century (as well as some of this century) were conditioned by this tradition; what is a gimmick in the hands of a theological critic dealing with contemporary literature is an appropriate tool for a literary historian concerned with the beliefs of writers in the American past. Literary history has, I believe, a license to speak somewhat blatantly about the beliefs of a writer (in contrast to the "belief" in a particular work of art) in a way that literary criticism could not and would not.

Even though Jones' volume is hardly the last word either on the beliefs of these writers or on the problem of belief in literature, it does have a kind of integrity which is lacking in some discussions of belief. For the down-to-earth comments about an author's beliefs made in the total context of the known influences upon him ring true in a way that theological criticism which finds a "religious dimension" in every work of art does not. If one really cares to know what a writer believes-though this is less important than experiencing the poem be wrote-then the place to go is probably literary history.

Sallie TeSelle
Editor of Soundings
New Haven, Connecticut