Not Representing Jesus: Fictional Approximations of Jesus in Contemporary Literature

Not Representing Jesus: Fictional Approximations of Jesus in Contemporary Literature John Mark Derbyshire Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English August 2015 ii The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of LeeDs anD John Mark Derbyshire The right of John Mark Derbyshire to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 iii AcknowleDgements A project like this thesis depends on the support, input, patience and encouragement of a large group of people, and because the subject matter involves knowledge acquired since childhood, and from many different sources and locations, the best place to start to acknowledge my debts is right at the beginning. My thanks firstly to my parents, who taught me to read, love and respect the Bible, and who encouraged me to ask questions. Secondly to Don Gillman, who started to tease out more questions by challenging everything I thought I knew, and taught me to read and re-read and keep on reading; the sudden loss of his life during the early stages of this thesis robbed me of a close friend, important conversation partner and Bible teacher extraordinaire, but his dedication to searching the scriptures continues to inspire my own unending re-reading. I want to thank my friends in Taiwan: Carol Peng for unwavering support and Wu Jiabao for invaluable conversations. I am grateful to Bobby, Ben, David Tai, David Wang, Estella, Eugenia, JJ, Sunny, Pastor Hsiao, Tony and Yang Dje, Thomas, and Zoe – for exploring the Bible together and financial support over the years. Thanks also to my friends at ORTV whose generosity has sustained us so often, especially Dr Doris Brougham, Jessie, Patty, Angela, Maria, Michelle, Arnold, Jason, Jacob, Janet, Lillian, Sean, Moses, Angus, and Milton. It is hard to eXpress my full gratitude to my closest friends Patrick Hellberg and Marlow Ramsay for continuing to encourage me, when I was stubbornly reluctant, to get a degree, and for reminding me to stay focused, their friendship continues to edify me. Bästa vänner, närmare än bröder! I am grateful to Roger Simpson for encouraging me to consider coming to England, and thank the University of Leeds English Department for accepting me iv for undergraduate study. I especially want to acknowledge Tracy Hargreaves for being instrumental in helping me start my doctoral work. I have been inspired to continue my academic journey by the conversations I shared with the faculty at Leeds, especially Fiona Becket, Fiona Douglas, Sam Durrant, Denis Flannery, Chris Homewood, Bonnie Latimer, David Lindley, Stuart Murray, Judith Nordby, Simon Swift and Andrew Warnes. Special thanks also to Maya Parmar for being an inspiring mentor. It is impossible to eXpress how much I am indebted to my supervisors, Stuart Murray and Simon Swift, for being willing to take on this project, for encouraging and helping me to get started, and for not losing hope and patience along the way. They are eXemplary academics without whose guidance, energy and sustained effort I know (and they do too) that I would never have managed to find my way to a workable thesis. Stuart and Simon have shown how hard work and dedication to eXcellent academic standards can co-exist with creativity, flexibility and, most significantly, kindness and patience. Their intellectually stimulating prodding, challenging and questioning will continue to inspire me for years. Thanks are due to Andrew Brower Latz and Jonathan Rodgers for reading some early drafts of chapters and providing helpful feedback. Thanks also to my conversation partners Joshua Cockayne, Gareth Frank, James Bailey, Hui Ling Michelle Chiang and Ryan Topper, and to Quilting Points reading group for wonderful textual explorations. I am grateful to Agatha Bielik-Robson for generously sending me her book on Harold Bloom. I am thankful to Arthur Rose for his friendship, genuine interest, and intellectual integrity. The conversations we have had over the years have always been stimulating, and often found a direct way into my writing; I look forward to many more years of continuing die dialoog. v I am grateful to John Maclennan whose unimaginable generosity allowed me to focus on my studies. His unceasing and unconditional support, his creative poetry, and our discussions on the meaning of Scripture, continue to inspire me to keep reading, writing and thinking. Finally, my deepest felt gratitude is due to my wife and children who have been patiently enduring my intellectual pursuits: they have kept me grounded, and energised me to ‘get it done’. Without the understanding of our boys I would not have been able to work, but the greatest debt remains to my beautiful wife Grace: it is impossible to list all the ways in which she has been a support to me but she is, quite simply, amazing. vi Abstract In this thesis I begin by showing that historical, theological and fictional representations of Jesus are often based on reductive readings of the Gospel narrative and can lead to dogmatic statements about who Jesus was. I argue that some authors of contemporary fiction approach the biblical teXt in a more imaginative way, and that by misreading the Gospels they are able to approXimate the teachings of Jesus, without depending on the creation of explicit Christ-figures. I have called these narratives fictional approXimations of Jesus. I use Harold Bloom’s theory of misreading, George Steiner and Valentine Cunningham’s notions of heresy, and Frank Kermode, Geoffrey Hartman, and Terry Wright’s use of Midrash as a way to set out a methodology for reading contemporary fictions by Marilynne Robinson, Denis Johnson, Tim Winton and J. M. Coetzee in conjunction with the Gospel narratives. I show how they misread and rewrite the biblical text, eXplore the way in which they approXimate Jesus’s teachings about forgiveness, love, grace, and hope, and how such misreadings allow for a fresh appreciation of the Bible. In the Introduction I show how Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is a contemporary eXample of a reductive way of reading the Gospels and contrast that with the way the fictional approximations of Jesus misread the biblical narrative. In Chapter One I set out in more detail the parameters of the fictional approXimation as a method of misreading that moves towards, but never arrives at, a complete identification with the source. In Chapters Two to Five I show how the fictional approXimations of Jesus respond to the Gospel narratives by close-reading Robinson’s Gilead and Home, Johnson’s Angels and Jesus’ Son, Winton’s Cloudstreet, and Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus in parallel with relevant passages from the Bible. vii Table of Contents AcknowleDgements iii Abstract vi Table of Contents vii IntroDuction 1 Chapter I: Categorically TowarD: Fictional Approximation as Disseminative Hermeneutic 38 The Heresy of Explanation 41 The Heresy of Misreading 65 Chapter II: MisreaDing the ProDigal Son in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead anD Home 83 Novelistic Theology or Fictional Augmentation 85 Rewriting the Parable of the Prodigal Son 92 Transgressive Openness and the Naming of Love 99 Resisting the Politicising of Jesus 112 The Posture of Grace, Humility, Heresy and Hypocrisy 119 Chapter III: Fragments of the Gospels anD Glimpses of Grace in Denis Johnson’s Angels anD Jesus’ Son 136 Angels: Freedom in Captivity 146 Jesus’ Son: The Graceful movement of Water 165 Acts and Acting 194 The Great Banquet of Outsiders: The Progression of Johnson’s Universalism of Brokenness in Angels and Jesus’ Son 201 Chapter IV: Rewriting the Gospel of John: Tim Winton’s Congregation of Heretics 206 The Gospel of John in Cloudstreet 221 The Problem With Fish 230 It’s not a Miracle, It’s the Greatest Miracle: The Importance of Reconciliation 243 Chapter V: J. M. Coetzee’s Heresy of Hope: Opening TowarDs the Possibility of the Impossible 266 Challenging the System 273 Childlike Resistance to Reason 276 Hoping for the Unseen 289 ConcluDing Remarks 294 Bibliography 300 1 IntroDuction And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. Ecclesiastes 12:12 Jesus sells books. Ubiquitous and pliable, Jesus continues to make headlines, cause protest and division, creates online and global controversies, appears in sit-coms and films, is the topic of talk-shows, theatre productions, art exhibitions, theological disagreements, historical arguments and is endlessly parodied, appropriated and politicized. Jesus draws crowds; Jesus sells tickets, trinkets, and kitsch. Jesus is Marxist, Capitalist, CEO and peasant, one of them and one of us. If this seems an unfair assessment of Jesus it is important to understand that the grammatical subject in the opening sentence is a commodity, iconic and tenuously linked to a historical person through a frightening and ever-expanding array of diverse theories and conspiracies, but a commodity nonetheless. Jesus has become a sure sell in a market that improbably seems to resist saturation. Improbably because the study of Jesus depends on a small group of texts, none of which were written by Jesus himself. There is, however, something peculiarly problematic with much that is written about Jesus in general, and specifically in the way that some historians, theologians and authors of fictional teXts make use of the four canonical Gospels.

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