Primordial Sacrifice, Typology and the Theological Vocation of Literature: Extending Gian Balsamo's Interpretation of Joyce and Christian Epic

Extending the new contribution to the Joyce scholarship offered by Gian Balsamo, this essay develops a typological perspective upon literature as a ritualistic repetition of primordial sacrifice. It traces this function of literature from Dante through the Christian epic to Joyce. Poetry, viewed in this perspective, envisions and expresses what makes a culture possible as a whole and from its deepest roots. Such theologically laden types as sacrifice and eucharistie celebration reveal western culture in its development from both Greek and Hebrew antiquity to its ultramodem apotheosis in Joyce as one ongoing negotiation with itself. Culture is a continual reworking and revisioning of traditionary types that ran from the beginning to the end of the history—and back again—becoming the overarching metaphors that connect everything in the universe of human experience together. The figurative powers that pre-dispose poetic language to perform the work of revelation in a sense akin to and even indiscernible from religious revelation are evinced with particular force in the operation of literary and theological types and in the compositional and exegetical methods of typology. Under various names, the type is one of the most classical topics in figurative rhetoric. The recognisability of characters and events as typical—as based on and repeating, as well as estabhshing precedents—is fundamental to literary and symbolic significance, in general. More specifically, typology has been indispensable to biblical interpretation since ancient times and has parallels Literature & Theology © The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press 2006; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: joumals.permissions@oxfordjoumals.org The Author 2006. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.73 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 04:46:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 252 THE THEOLOGICAL VOCATION OF LITERATURE in the methods used for interpreting Homer and other poets in pagan antiquity. Even more primordially, typology is inextricably bound up with the repetitions of religious rite and specifically sacrifice. For the type is inherently a form of repetition, and sacrifice is an archetypal origin that is typically repeated. Typology has taken on a new life in contemporary literary criticism and particularly in a very recent criticism ofjames Joyce. Gian Balsamo is currently applying an innovatively typological method, inspired by biblical typology, in a penetrating reading of Joyce and Christian epic.1 Balsamo shows how primordial sacrifice is repeated by literary representations or types that re-invent and fulfil the primitive motifs that they subsume. This enables us to see literature as fulfilling a unitary purpose from ancient Greek tragedy through the Christian epic to Joyce and the novel: literature, in all these guises, has been discovered as being deeply liturgical in nature and as responding to a theological vocation. Viewed typologically, literature gives an original access to direct, especially sensuous experience of the divine; it even reveals this experience as the origin of human society and consciousness. These are, in fact, perennial ideas concerning the mission and function of poetry that can be traced all the way back to Orphic sources, in which Orpheus is designated as the instituter of the sacrificial rites of Bacchus,2 but they are now being worked out with critical acumen in a perspective that can help us discern a new horizon for the experience of literature and religion. I will elicit from this work on typology aspects that bear particularly on linguistic repetition as a means of theological revelation. Balsamo's work on scriptural poetics and James Joyce, conducts poetry back to its originally theological inspiration by showing how the experience of literature today, that is, in the day of James Joyce, is really not to be understood fully except in terms of the experience of liturgy, and that means an experience of primordial sacrifice. This clears a vista for overviewing the purport of poetry quite generally that extends beyond our customary field of vision, opening a wider panorama in which poetic literature can be seen as responsive to a theological vocation. In former ages, poets made claims to theological inspiration with great frequency, but such claims seem to many to have become virtually unintelligible today. It is striking, then, that out of the midst of the modemist writing of Joyce, Balsamo evokes primordial types or archetypes for envisioning literature—the very existence and inexhaustible concreteness of literature—as theological in its deepest motivations. In Joyce's works, it becomes fully clear that the literary, at the level of seriousness represented by Christian epics, operates fundamentally as a religious rite. This emerges clearly, moreover, as having been at stake in the Christian epic all along. Joyce and the Christian epic tradition taken together show how literature can be understood as the actualisation of religious ritual This content downloaded from 207.46.13.73 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 04:46:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms