Quote:
Originally posted by leagleaze
Yeah the whole concept that any time someone sacrifices himself for the greater good he has to be a Christ figure is a bit tiresome. People were sacrificing themselves long before Christ, and the reason profs find Christ figures where the authors didn't intend them is that they read it from a Christian perspective. It's rather irritating actually.
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All but one of my English profs were subtext-thumping atheists, so I don't think Christ figuration is due to some latent Christian-obsessivism in universities. I think it's due to the fact that the novel is a relatively young art form (since the 1730s or so), and the narrative depiction of European middle-class values and individuals required that stories be told that resonated with those values, i.e., Christianity. For the first 200 years of the art form, all novels remained a short putt from their aesthetic forebears (morality plays, confessions and moral tracts) and drew upon deep wells of their readers' narrative expectations: ordinary life laced with foreboding of pain, then profound suffering, then resolution or redemption. That's why it's easier to find Christ figures in 18th and 19th century novels than in Elizabethan plays, which had different audiences and could draw on classical and pre-Christian themes and stories.
Besides, the readers expected prose narrative to be Gospelesque. If you grow up on sitcoms, you expect jokes every fifteen seconds. If you grow up on NPR, you expect a minor narrative resolution every forty-five seconds. If you grow up on the Gospel stories, you expect a central figure to be symbolically crucified and then redeemed in the third reel.
Late 20th century novelists are trying to break away from these roots like each generation of philosophers declares independence from Plato, but they're building on literary traditions that in turn are built on the Gospel mythos. The introduction of non-Western literature is helping to diversify the field, but there's nothing shameful about retelling the prevailing mythos in new and compelling ways, such that even people uninterested in the religion like --- and often fail to recognize --- the basic story structure.
