Quote:
Originally posted by Atticus Grinch
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.
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Yeah, but just because there weren't any novels doesn't mean there weren't stories. When few people read books, and all of those people were pretty scholarly, books tended to be scholarly items. Then printing became cheaper and easier, and more and more people became literate, and instead of a bard going around telling stories (or people gathering in the pub or what have you) you started having stories written down for popular consumption.
Christ is but one example of a self-sacrificing etc. etc. figure. It seems like it's already clear that in order to have what many of y'all are calling a Christ figure, you don't have to have resurrection, you don't have to have a gospel-y style, you don't have to have any number of biblical stylistic elements. But when you take all that away, it sounds much more like a general self-sacrificing etc. etc. figure.
I just think that having "Christ-like" as the standard and parallels being drawn only to the Bible is a limited viewpoint; there's more construct than there needs to be and that ideal didn't originate with Christ so there's no reason to have his stuff be the checklist.
