Review: Wolf Hall

Themes: History, Reading, Reviews

Wolf Hall (by Hilary Mantel) surprised nobody by taking out the Booker Prize last week. I’ve been reading it over the last month and finally knocked it on the head yesterday. So, I was reading it while the Booker committee deliberated. I like to think that this might have affected them in some small way…
Actually, I was a little surprised to hear that it won the Booker. On my completely unobjective and inattentive survey, it’s the longest novel to get the gong in quite some time. It seems they generally they don’t award literary honours to long books. I guess when you’re a literary critic and you’ve got a whole pile of aspiring fiction in your library-bag the delight of something well-written and not tedious is virtually irresistible. I wonder also, whether long novels inevitably fall under the suspicion that the writer might have enjoyed churning the wheels of authorial invention, may have actually found it relatively easy… That would seriously mess with our visions of tortured genius.

Having said that, I can’t imagine that Wolf Hall was an easy novel to write. On the contrary, it is an incredibly and painstakingly well-researched recreation of an historical character. The novel follows the rise and rise of Thomas Cromwell, the organisational and legal genius behind Henry VIII’s civil and ecclesiastical reforms. (As a side note, there are more Thomases in Wolf Hall than you could reasonably swing a sword at – but that is the fault of Tudor England, not Hilary Mantel. Who would have thought that so many men named ‘Thomas’ would be involved in shaping modern Anglophone society)
Tudor Britain was a society gripped by a series of transformations within which the lineaments of our contemporary world began to take shape. It is the lives and loves of some of the men and women in these pages that effected a legacy of change to which our current global culture continues to be heir. Wolf Hall is a chance to meet these characters and dwell with them in the daily weave of life. It’s a rich experience. You shouldn’t for a moment expect a hagiography though. Mantel leaves us in no doubt that Cromwell was both a ‘Bible Man’ and also a ruthless political operator. Something of a cross between Tony Soprano and the Anglican Church League (I leave you to decide which is which).

Wolf Hall is not just an historical novel, it is a novel about history. It is about the ways in which our paths are directed by choices other people made, the way our lives are intertwined with characters who walked ahead, sometimes out of sight, but whose presence still vibrates in the air as we pass. Mantel achieves this through a series of very daring effects: she situates the reader on the shoulder of Cromwell, not giving us a first person narrative, but free access to his thoughts and feelings. For a while we know Thomas, we live closer to him, than even his beloved wife. It is the most intimate form of ‘indwelling’. This is an opportunity to experience a knowledge of the world given through transmissible experiences rather than directly collated our own nervous encounters. Wolf Hall takes fiction seriously.

But perhaps too seriously? Wolf Hall will never be accused of insulting the reader’s intelligence. I’ve been studying and reading books about this period of history for a few years now, and I honestly think Mantel assumes more Tudor history than she communicates. But this is also the effect which makes Wolf Hall brilliant. Mantel has consciously written a novel in which the tension that drives the narrative doesn’t come from the narrative itself, but what the reader will bring to the narrative.
The secret of Wolf Hall lies in what the book isn’t about: Wolf Hall.

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Murray Bail – The Pages

Themes: Art and Imagination, Reading

Murray Bail makes me fall in love with reading again. I picked up his newest novel, The Pages, yesterday – bought it on the basis of his name and the blurb on the back.
No one writes Australia like Bail, his description of driving along Parramatta road in the first chapter alone is enough reason to read the book. The second chapter is a discussion about why Sydney has produced no great philosophers and has instead become a city of self-obsession, of psychoanalysts. It finishes like this:

It has become the age of the self; confessions in public all over the place, the spillage of the ‘I’, and in private, in a quietly structured structured manner (the therapist has replaced the priest). And who is doing this talk? Not ill, at least not seriously, the self-obsessed personalities have a concentrated, almost technical interested in the self, as if they were specimens. Interest in others tends to be perfunctory, impatient, showy. It is they who have a natural attraction to analysis, where again they can dwell solely on themselves, the problematical ‘I’, and , since this is the very source of their difficulties in the first place, there is a real danger of psychoanalysis not uncovering, but giving shape to, and confirming, a person’s self-obsession. Eight, ten years in analysis is not uncommon. In Sydney parents have been sending their own children, not yet in their teens, into psychoanalysis – ironing out the unformed mind before the unevenness of everyday life could give proportion of self-correction.
Years spent murmuring the endless circling sentence, while the analyst remains almost, though not quite, hidden.
A philosopher would not allow this; but when needed there were none.

There are allusions to Foucault’s History of Sexuality here, and indeed, the second chapter of the novel is a mini-archaeology of the Sydney-self. But Bail’s concern with Sydney, and with the long trip out to the Western Plains, alerts us to the fact that geography rather than history is the more dominant concern: the ways in which our mental geography is moulded to the contours of our physical space. As always, Bail’s dense, brushstroke-like prose is relentlessly external to his characters: we know what his people think, but only in the same way that we know what the dust smells like and how the trees stand. The confessing self is almost totally excluded.

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Reading with Zwingli

Themes: On Knowing God, On Pity, Reading, Reading Scripture

I know for certain that God teaches me, because I have experienced it: and to prevent misunderstanding, this is what I mean when I say that I know for certain that God teaches me. When I was younger, I gave myself overmuch to human teaching, like others of my day, and when about seven or eight years ago I undertook to devote myself entirely to the Scriptures I was always prevented by philosophy and theology. But eventually I came to the point where led by the Word and Spirit of God I saw the need to set aside all these things and to learn the doctrine of God direct from his own word. Then I began to ask God for light and the Scriptures became far clearer to me… than if I had studied many commentators and expositors. Note that it is always a sure sign of God’s leading, for I could never have reached that point by my own feeble understanding. (H. Zwingli, On the Clarity and Certainty or Power of the Word of God)

I’ve been reading Holy Scripture by John Webster with a few guys, in a book group, at College. It is a cracking read.
This quote from Zwingli came in the middle of a chapter entitled ‘Reading in the economy of grace’. The chapter is a theological analysis of how a Christian reads Scripture.
It’s a bombshell – throughout the book Webster essentially denies one of the central presuppositions that undergirds critical Biblical scholarship – and ultimately Modernity itself: that knowledge is, in principle, equally open to any knower.
Crudely put, one of the central philosophical assumptions of our society is that it doesn’t matter who you are, a Fact is a Fact. Certainly there have been endless critiques of this assumption through Post-Modern philosophy, yet they all seem to end with a collapse into solipsism – the knower can only know him or her self. Obviously, this is less than satisfying when applied to a theory of reading Scripture. Indeed, it is downright idolatrous.

Webster manages to dismiss the Modernist assumption while avoiding the barrenness of a Post-Modern alternative.
Starting with any of these notions, according to him, will get your theology all bent out of shape, because, when it comes to knowing God, it really does matter who you are.
I’ve got plenty of questions for Webster – big, meaty ones. I’m suspicious that his answers are just too simple. But I’ve got to love a guy that, today, moved me to want to quit Theological College, and just read the Bible.

For Zwingli, then, the real nature of the interpretative situation is best described as as struggle to replace mastery by teachableness. (Holy Scripture: A Dogmatic Sketch, John Webster)

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History of Sexuality

Themes: Critique, Ethics, On Power, Philosophy, Reading

You may not be one for gazing adoringly at your own belly-button lint…
…but if Philosophy is your thing and you are interested in thinking through how Christians can engage with our culture about sex and sexuality, then its well worth getting to know Michel Foucault.
French, Post-Modern, Gay, Bracingly Bald.

Ready to just reach out and grab ya!!
(is that a giant lipstick he’s holding?)

Yet, strangely enough, here Christians might find an academic ally.

Foucault is known as a theorist of institutions. His major preoccupation was the flow of power through human relationships in society, and in particular how this affected human knowledge.
He was also a historian (although some would debate this) seeking, in his own phrase, to ‘write the history of the present’. On a basic level this means, that Focault sought to understand modern institutions like prisons, schools, and pyschiatric institutions, through the study of their development and the theoretical discourse that surrounded this development. What did people think about punishment, education, madness? And more important, why has the thinking and talking surrounding these institutions changed over time?
For example, why has our attitude to torture as an acceptable form of punishment been reversed over the course of the last three centuries?

Foucault’s major work was the three volume (unfinished)The History of Sexuality. In it he seeks to trace the development of human thinking about sex through the major periods of Western Civilisation.
It is a fascinating study. Foucault takes us from Classical Greece, through Medieval Christendom, and into the English Victorian period. As a work of history, the value of this study is debatable. Foucault was not a classical scholar and has been repeatedly charged with not being completely on top of his sources.

However, the major contribution of this work is not to our understanding of sexual practice through the ages. Rather, Foucault’s work sets out to demonstrates that people’s thinking about sexual behaviour has changed during different historical periods.
According to Foucault, sex within the classical Greek culture was not theorised as a moral problem but ‘dietetic’, how should a responsible citizen engage in sexual behaviour in a ‘healthy’ way.
A average randy Greek was not asking questions about whether Sex is Good or Evil, but is it Healthy? The primary questions being asked in the relevant Greek literature are for the sake of a healthy life, ‘how much sex should I have, with whom, and when?’

This is transformed with the coming of Christianity. Christians, following their Jewish heritage, regard sex as subject to moral demands.
For Christians, sexual practice is not merely regulated by questions of health and hygiene, instead sexual relations are imbued with a significance that points beyond the simple activity to the will and intention of God. Therefore questions about sex are deeply moral questions.

This might seem rather obvious to you, after all, Christianity as a whole introduced completely new ways of thinking into the pagan world. But Foucault goes beyond this, in fact, his work really only gets interesting when he comes to examine the developments in thinking and talking about sex following the Enlightenment, particularly in Victorian England.

You can really take or leave this historical analysis, Foucault’s reason for going here is primarily to show that our thinking about sex is not set in stone. It is subject to external forces. Foucault’s interest in tracing the development of Sexual Discourse is in seeing how these external factors have operated to produce our current beliefs about sex. He’s engaging in a ‘genealogy’.

Foucault’s analysis points out that through a certain historical period, our society moved from talking about ‘sex’ and started a new form of speech revolving around ‘sexuality’.

This is where his thinking has been most influential and provocative. Foucault argues that while we have always had things to say about sex, ‘sexuality’ is a relatively modern phenomenon. Sexuality joins together sexual behaviour and identity. It’s where we get the notion that heterosexual and homosexual are primary categories of identification.

Foucault’s historical analysis demonstrates that there is no indication at earlier points in Western Civilisation that sex and identity were held together in this way. Rather, sexual behaviour was the outcome of an identity grounded completely elsewhere.

Why is it that we now talk about people as ‘Gay’, rather than People who engage in homosexual practice?

that mon cheroot, is the question…

More to come.

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