Theology Today - Vol 41, No.2 - July 1984 - BOOK REVIEW - Laughter in a Genevan Gown: The Works of Frederick Buechner 1970-1980

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Laughter in a Genevan Gown: The Works of Frederick Buechner 1970-1980

By Marie-Hélène Davies

Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1983. 196 Pp. $5.95.

For those of us who count ourselves as devoted "fans" of the American novelist and theological writer Frederick Buechner-an apparently small circle but one whose members seem to pop up everywhere in the most delightfully unexpected places-it is gratifying to see him begin to receive during the past few years the attention he so richly deserves. Predictably, that attention is coming from the Christian literary and theological world in which he has long had his most appreciative audience. Thus it is fitting that this first book on Buechner (there have been at least two doctoral dissertations on his work) should be strongly informed by theological interests and published by Eerdmans.

It was with both keen anticipation and a certain chagrin, I confess, that I accepted the opportunity to review Marie-Hélène Davies' book. As a lover of Buechner's later fiction and his theological writings I was eager to read the book, and amid the constraints of a very hectic academic year a reviewer's deadline would make me read it sooner rather than later. The chagrin arose from the fact that in 1981 I had approached Eerdmans with an idea for a book on Buechner. After their initial strong encouragement and request for a prospectus, they completely ignored me despite repeated letters over the year that followed. With the publication of Davies' book I am at least relieved to see that Eerdmans did not ignore everyone on the subject of Frederick Buechner! I relate this experience only because I want to lay my reviewer's hand on the table and honestly state that I approach Davies' book as one who had

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a plan for a book of his own on the same subject and did some of the writing on it.

Davies, who is senior French teacher at the Hun School of Princeton, has organized her study of Buechner's writings around main influences and themes. She deals first with theological influences on Buechner and with his theological writings. In the larger part of the book she treats his later novels: first as embodiments of his theological themes, then as expressions of the influence of existentialist philosophy, and finally as creations of literary art. The time period indicated in the sub-title of the book, 1970-1980, is puzzlingly misleading. Davies discusses not only the novels of the 1970's (The Entrance to Porlock, the Leo Bebb tetralogy, and Godric), but also with equal attention The Final Beast, published in 1965. She also deals with Buechner's theological writings beginning with his two books of sermons from the 1960s, The Magnificent Defeat and The Hungering Dark.

Davies, whose admiration for and indebtedness to Buechner clearly shine through her study, acknowledges at one point (p. 60) that she might have organized the book chronologically instead of thematically. There are also few biographical details in her book. Yet central to Buechner's own vision of his work, I believe, is his statement at the beginning of The Alphabet of Grace (1970) that "at its heart most theology, like most fiction, is essentially autobiography." Consistent with this fully "incarnational" approach to both theology and fiction, his theological works are artistic and personal; his novels reflect his own maturing experience and faith; and three of his books are spiritual autobiographies: The Alphabet of Grace and his two recent volumes of autobiographical reflection, The Sacred Journey (1982) and Now and Then (1983). Perhaps Davies felt that it was precisely because Buechner himself had told his story that she did not need to take a developmental approach to his fiction and theological writings, which is understandable. But the completely thematic approach she has put in its place results in what I can only call a kind of "boxing up" or "pigeonholing" of Buechner which finally distorts the incarnate process that is the living and unifying heart of both his theological and his fictional creations.

Davies is at her best as a literary critic. She has a rich background in classical French and English literature and also in twentieth-century European and American fiction. The finest chapters in the book are the last two, "The Rhetoric of Fiction and Truth" and "The Craftsman." There she presents a broad and varied literary analysis of Buechner's fiction which will deepen and enhance it for those who have read his later novels or begun to read them. Of special interest are Davies' illumination of his links with Renaissance and seventeenth-century literature, and her careful attention to the influence of his love of films on his fiction. For Buechner readers, I believe that these chapters are worth the price of the book. As a philosopher and theologian who is an amateur literary critic, I must say with admiration that I simply could

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not have explored the literary dimension of Buechner's fiction as knowledgeably or extensively.

It is in those parts of the book where she discusses theological influences and themes that Davies' grasp is much less sure and her thematic approach to Buechner most clearly reveals its distorting and deadening tendencies. She writes on theological issues and thinkers as one who is much less at home than she is with literary-critical issues. The result is, for the most part, ponderous, overcategorized, repetitious, and sometimes inaccurate. While Davies says some of the right things about Buechner as theological writer, these observations are buried in a formidable structure that is completely alien to the spirit of Buechner himself. He is relentlessly squeezed into theological and doctrinal molds: as "Tillichian" or "Barthian," "Protestant rather than "Catholic, one -who-prefers "word" to "sacrament." We are even assured that he is Trinitarian and believes in angels. Theological themes which in Buechner's own writings are expressed with lyrical freshness and imagination, with personal depth and open-ended subtlety, and with marvelous wit and a fine sense of the ambiguity of experience, have the juice squeezed out of them as they are subsumed under doctrinal categories and various theological "masters" of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same sort of approach-although a bit less ponderously characterizes the chapter on modern philosophical influences on Buechner.

What I believe Davies has acknowledged but not taken with sufficient seriousness in interpreting Buechner's theology is that he is first and last an artist. He began as a non-Christian artist and after his conversion, theological education, and ordination became a Christian artist. Buechner's theological writings, although certainly different from his novels, are, like them, artistic creations, largely lyrical and narrative in character. That is what makes Buechner exciting as a theologian, precisely that he writes theology as art, as story, incarnationally-which like both biblical narrative and modern fiction is unsysternatically closer to the hopelessly muddled grace and craziness of human life than is systematic theology. I suspect that Davies' and my differences on approaching Buechner theologically are nicely exemplified in her preference for his Beecher Lectures, Telling the Truth (1977), which is Buechner's most "formal" theological work; while I consider The Alphabet of Grace, his most lyrical and elusive theological writing, to be one of the small gems of recent theological literature.

Like most studies of theologians and novelists, Davies' book will chiefly be of interest and value to those who are already readers of Buechner's books. It is unfortunate that someone so well qualified to write illuminatingly and interestingly as a literary critic with theological interests-which she does in the final chapters-has chosen to spend a good bit of the book awkwardly squeezing Buechner's works into the theological and philosophical agendas of twentieth-century neo-orthodoxy and existentialism. The curious thing is that the theological themes in Buechner-the surprisingness of grace and renewal, the "peculiar"

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human treasures through whom the divine works, the "great laughter" at the inmost heart of this tragicomic world-are all there in those fine last chapters, much more gracefully and naturally expressed in the course of literary exposition.

A final and perhaps simply cranky note: I was dismayed to find a woman writer who, from time to time gives a slight nod of recognition to what has been going on among women for the past fifteen years, using the most relentlessly non-inclusive language I have encountered in a long time. Human beings are almost always "men," and an individual "a man." Particularly hard to swallow, in an age when the number of women clergy and seminarians is dramatically increasing, was the typical reference to ministers as "men of the cloth" or "men of God." Perhaps it is not coincidental that Davies also tries to make Buechner an exponent of the view that sin includes women not fulfilling their "natural role" as wife and mother (pp. 76-77). While Buechner could certainly not be called a feminist, this sort of reading of his novels seems to me special pleading and a certain missing of the point.

JAMES WOELFEL

University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas