On Biblicalism, school of literary criticism

A preliminary overview

Jonnie Comet
26 October 2015


Biblicalism is the school of criticism devoted to the study of a work of literature as viewed through its deliberate or incidental relationship to a monotheistic belief system.

The criticism neither advocates nor condemns any particular religion or denomination but seeks to explicate a given literary work from a Bible-based perspective, evaluating examples, both explicit and implied, within the work and drawing conclusions about the effectiveness of the author’s presentation of Biblical themes through the work.

Many public-school and university instructors in literature neglect to consider such a viewpoint even though its relevance-- indeed, often, its primacy-- to the work is obvious. A prime example may be the novel Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, herself the daughter of an Anglican priest. The novel is, by design and in effect, a parable about the power of conscious, Christian virtue in overcoming temptation and in redeeming others. All of Jane’s decisions throughout the book are grounded in her own native faith; the reasons for her sufferings are grounded in the failure of others to observe such precepts as each of them have been taught by his or her own faith-- thus, she can be seen as a Christian martyr. The first-person narrator consistently uses Biblical references both to illustrate and to defend the principal concepts.

It can be contended that, neglecting an examination of conspicuous and vital Biblical principles, especially by instructors unprepared intellectually, prejudiced philosophically, or restricted by a comprehensive school’s repressive, secular agenda, no comprehension of the work as a whole can be fully realised. Further, Biblicalism is an appropriate alternative approach in the study of ostensibly secular works such as those of romanticism, naturalism, postmodernism and the gothic, especially as a means to uncover counter-concepts typically left unexplored in most literature courses as taught at comprehensive secondary schools and at state universities.

Examples

Good examples of English-language literature to which the criticism may be applied include:

• Agnes Grey (Anne Brontë)
• Pamela; or: Virtue Rewarded (Samuel Richardson)
• Pamela; or; Virtue Reclaimed (Jonnie Comet)
• Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
• Oroonoko; or The Royal Slave (Aphra Behn)
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
• Maggie; Girl of the Streets (Stephen Crane)
• ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ (Edgar Allan Poe)
• The Italian (Anne Radcliffe)
• Romeo and Juliet (William Shakespeare)
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (JK Rowling)
• The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (CS Lewis)
• The Lord of The Ring, series (JRR Tolkien)

For further reading, see

The Absolutist, online here

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The Initiation of Janine

After a long wait (both by me and by some readers), this series is properly launched.  The novella The Initiaion of Janine is, if not the first ever, the first of the ‘A Tale of Two Paradises’ tales to be offered in both e-book and printed-book form.  It’s set in the fanciful world of the British Paradise Islands, a ‘long-forgotten arm of the British Empire’, somewhere in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean (west of the Galapagos, north of Easter Island, east of Tahiti, south of Hawaii.  You figure it out).

Janine is a sweet little girl, indubitably cute and rather ordinary except for a few standout attributes which she will tell you about in her narration.  She is young– only second form, at the start– but is appreciably intellectual and tends to be a little more mature than most of her friends, who really are the embodiment of ‘normal’ girls in the BPI at this time.  They giggle and tease each other, play on swings (though they are ‘too big’), visit the beach, shop, and look at or dream about boys.  They are also sweetly affectionate with each other, and– at least to (too) many Western minds– extraordinarily ladylike, even prudish.

Janine’s story is about how, by degrees, she gradually comes to balance her own native prudishness with the desires and needs of the mature young lady she is, perhaps too rapidly, becoming.  It’s worth noting that part of the magic of the Paradise Islands is that the standards for maturity are younger and more comprehensive than they are in England or in the ’States.  As it says in the Foreword:

As a vestige of the formerly indigenous Polynesian culture, the age of majority for most milestones is young; at fifteen a Paradisian citizen may marry, enter into labour or tenant contracts, leave school, or engage in consensual sexual relations.  Though precocious, this right of young people to initiate and conduct their natural lives on their own is inextricably conjoined to the unwavering sense of propriety as established and regulated by the British– for example, education and job training are comprehensive, there is little public-assistance for the able-bodied, and judicial penalties for abuse of decency statutes tend to be harsh and an adequate deterrent to transgression.  Therefore it is vital to not judge too quickly on appearances; or, if one does, he had best assume all is much saner, safer, more modest and more dignified than it seems at first glance.

For those who have read more of my work, the theme of the eager ingenue embarking, not entirely by choice, on a course of social enlightenment will seem familiar.  It’s a favourite because it reminds us of the sad inevitability that all innocence is fleeting; that, once lost, some degree of innocence is lost forever; that it is true that you can’t un-ring a bell so we'd better appreciate what we were like before we knew what it sounded like.  But there is also a great opportunity, even for the one undergoing such profound and irrevocable change, to consciously retain the most important elements of virtue.  Growing older does not mean losing all goodness; it merely means one must develop an independent sense of what’s wrong and what’s right and to conduct oneself with a responsibility to one’s self and to those who matter.  Janine’s story is the story of one who, having realised she may have flung herself ahead rather earlier than she may have liked, regains her self-control and self-respect and learns to conduct her own behaviour on her own (eminently respectable) terms.

I wrote in The Absolutist: ‘Absence of commission or experience is not equal to virtue, which is the responsible and deliberate exercise and restraint of free will. ’  (http://jonniecometsabsolutist.blogspot.com/p/the-tenets-precepts-belonging-to-neo.html)

I always seem to come back to virtue as a principal theme in all my work.

For the curious, a preview is available.  This excerpt represents the first chapter of a ten-chapter work, somewhere about 11% of the total.  This should be sufficient to give an idea of the novel’s pacing, plot and character development, style and substance, as well as to introduce the unique story setting.  The paperback version of the book contains an addenda, edited by Colin and me, including footnotes for local ‘lingo’ and specific terms that won’t be familiar to people who don’t live in the BPI (which, if you think about it, is everyone in the real world!).

This is from someone else's book but it's funny.

A preview is available here– https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1175206

The paperback will be available shortly (mid-August-?).  The novella edition contains the glossed terms and the manga-styled artwork.

A ‘deluxe compilation’ is coming out as well; this contains The Initiation of Janine and also the next three episodes in Janine’s story, with addenda including glossed terms, maps, other documents and the artwork.  This shall be the model for further stories within the JOP and other ‘T2P’ story arcs: about 250-270 pages, amounting to four, five, maybe six separate but sequential episodes, with interesting add-ons such as maps, diagrams, lingo terms and cool (almost-saucy) artwork.

The Kindle e-text is available now–  http://www.amazon.com/Initiation-Janine-Paradise-Form-20010107-ebook/dp/B002JCT1NE/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8  This contains endnotes (not glossed in the body of the text; you have to scroll back and forth, the only way Kindle allows one to publish it) but no maps and no artwork.

  

As ever I appreciate all relevant and considerate comments and look forward to seeing this get popular.  Now it’s all up to you! 

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On writing cross-gender narrative

from Yahoo! Answers Canada:

Open Question

 

Help with a short story question..?

I read 'The Groom Service' by Michael Dorris but there is one question that I'm stumped on.  It asks: 

'What impact does a male author have on the content of the story?'

The short story is basically about a Native boy in a society where woman rule and ultimately in order to marry his prospective wife he needs to do things like hunt in order to see that he is worthy.

The author of this short story is male but I'm not sure how he would have any impact on this woman-dominated society. Any ideas?

First answer (still-open question)

Jonnie Comet

I think it is vital for any author to develop a sense of himself, or herself, OUTSIDE that of the characters he or she writes. In other words, the author must not automatically identify himself or herself with characters, even the principal ones-- and especially when it comes to gender.
 
I have always written fiction, since I was 15. This is a very long time now. For the first 20 years I tended to write in the first person, when telling a story with a male protagonist, and in the third-person omniscient when it came to stories about other principal characters. The male narrators were easy-- they were like myself. I now view this as essentially immature for a writer; but in those days I was immature as a writer and it was all I knew. In writing with female main characters, I was essentially an outsider, an observer of female points of view but not an actor of them. (I mean, how could I have been otherwise? I am male-- always have been.) Even when I got married, my wife was still a separate person from me.
 
Then two things happened-- I got America OnLine in the 1990s, and I raised two daughters (no sons). I learned female points of view by observing them much more closely, and I developed a few online novels in which I posted the mentality of a female character and allowed readers to interact with it (in today's terms we would call this a 'blog'). I learned how other men, other than myself, treat women, almost as though I were in the place of the women, and was able to incorporate that into my work. The prime result was my epistolary (first-person, in journals or letters) novel Pamela; or Virtue Reclaimed. 
 
Virtue Reclaimed was modelled on the 1740 epistolary novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded, an epistolary novel by then-53-year-old Samuel Richardson who drew on his experience as a teen reading novels to girls in sewing circles (and hearing all their chatter and gossip) and his later experience in writing etiquette guides. From reading his Virtue Rewarded I learned not only that a male writer can depict a female POV credibly (the book was a best-seller in the 1740s and the first novel printed in America) but that it just may appeal to female writers all the more. Everyone who read bits of my Virtue Reclaimed has adored it-- their most common question being, 'However did you get that young girl's POV so perfectly?' 
 
Currently I am promoting Deirdre, the Wanderer, a series about a teenaged runaway who hitchhikes the world on a shoestring. All the reviews have praised the accuracy of details and the believability of the character herself. Deirdre is as real an ordinary teenaged girl as ever there was in literature-- 'modest, lovably imperfect Deirdre, who may well be one of modern literature's most engaging protagonists' (from the publisher's press release for the second instalment of the series).
 
It all comes down to the writer's skill, not only with words and writing but in his or her empathy for the human condition. For example, in my series, Deirdre isn't described in terms of her hair colour, height, lips texture or bra size, like many physically-minded men might have done. In fact that stuff is never even mentioned at all. That's too subjective and irrelevant anywhere. If I called her blonde and shapely, slender brunettes might not want to relate. The more important point is that Deirdre is any girl, anywhere, suffering the same stuff as any girl would in the same situations-- and you fill in the details about what she looks like with your own impressions.
 
If I have to say so myself (which I don't), I am apparently pretty good at this. I lay it down to my inherent and intuitive respect for all girls and women everywhere. And I believe it's this kind of consideration that can make any writer ascend to some higher level in being an observer of human interaction-- as Jane Austen always claimed one must be.
 
'If you can do it, do it.' --from Love Me Do, by Jonnie Comet (that's me!).


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On narrative quirks

As much as I enjoy the telling of a story, especially through copious use of dialogue and characters' internal monologue, I have a personal peeve about using sentence fragments in the narrative of a novel.  I fear it looks amateurish-- having seen plenty of eighth-year writing like that-- and believe that a narrative should stand as universal, as the one constant of the story, and as such it should be respectably and even formally presented.

Now I know there are exceptions of this rule.  One is when the narrative style is set up from the start to be a kind of internal monologue by a character.  This character does not have to be one in the story; the narrator, even a detached third-person one, can be a kind of character for the telling of the story.  Even Jonathan Swift, that proponent of a strict 'language police', has done this and with good effect.

Another exception, of course, is when the narrator is an active character in the book, such as in my own Deirdre series and in countless other works.  In such examples the narrator's discussion style can either make or break the whole story.  (I will boast that the one consistent observation of especially female readers is about how 'right' I seem to have got the heroine's thought processes.  So, it works.)  But a narrator with charisma and, even more important, something of merit to say, will win over the readership every time.

A very personable narrator, even a detached one, can be effected by the use of narrative and even grammatical devices. In Deirdre the first-person narrator is essentially articulate and perhaps of above-average education for her age, and she does use some fragments but certainly not to any excess. The story is about events and information, not about her personal reactions to what happens (those come through in her actions and words themselves) and so frags like 'Maybe not.' and 'In my face.' do not occur as a rule.

In dialogue the matter is quite different.  Few people speak habitually in absolutely-correct SWEE (Standard Written and Edited English)  and the use of fragments, unfinished thoughts, interjections such as 'um' and 'uh', verbal quirks and other shortcomings in usage and grammar can be very deftly used to reinforce the uniqueness of the characters.  But the rule here must be one of consistency.  Many writers make the error of making all their characters talk the same way, with the same (the author's, usually) idiom, grammar and vocabulary.  Keeping character's speech patterns distinctive can also help in eliminating the too frequent repetitions of 'he said' and 'she said', as the separate speaking styles of the characters will differentiate them from each other.

Sadly, as with dialogue, it is all too easy for an author to fall into his own verbal style when writing the narrative.  It's too easily overlooked or taken for granted; and the all-too-common post-romantic self-focus deludes many writers into believing that how they use the language as individuals is how best to communicate a novel's story to the world at large.  This is akin to constructing a house with poor foundation and framework-- no matter how prettily you dress it up inside and out, and no matter how workable the form and function of the design, no-one will be able to long ignore the inadequacies of the fundamental structure because they will affect every other part of the visit.

I believe the story should have its own 'character', sort of like I said above.  The whole 'feel' and 'mood' of a novel comes across by how the narrative is presented.  For my part I choose to hold the narrative itself somewhat elevated from the dialogue, insisting on SWEE as well as it can be done.  One of my projects (still long in the future) is a series of 1740s novels of manners in which the narrative is given in 20th/21st-C English, to ensure accessibility to modern readers, but lines of dialogue appear in the mid-18th-C English of Johnson, both to be historically accurate and to illuminate readers as to how people really talked then.  This is almost the opposite of what I did in a book like Love Me Do, in which the narrative is in the same reliable Queen's English but the dialogue appears very much in 1970s middle-class American vernacular.

Of course there are as many approaches to narrative as there are authors.  For what I write, I do not have value for too conversational a style.  I view a novel as much more sacrosanct than that; and, for most novel-length endeavours, writing like a comprehensive-school eighth-year with slang, jargon, abbreviations and numerals, phonetic spelling, grammatical imperfections and sentence fragments will not do.  This is not just an academic point to be read and disregarded over time.  I would make the entirely unequivocal submission that in such inadequate writing the whole point of the story itself can become lost.  And, if anything, the prime directive of all writing should be to not irritate and disinterest an otherwise eager reader through an  author's misuse of the language.  After all, an author is writing to be read and to be published; and to have his work to die a premature death due to poor editing and preparation with regard to basic grammar and usage has got to be the worst way to go. --and the most easily avoided.

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