Animals of Faith

Gorgias¹

The Argument

This autobiographical novel sketches just over a decade of academic, social and romantic success, blackened by episodes of spiritual possession and mental illness. The hero wins the love of a young lady studying Chemistry at the University of Manitoba named Barb, a votary of the Grey Nuns, and then slays the dragon, Satan, by the force of language.

The rough-hewn narrative offers a Rosetta stone to the lives of Zeus, William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson, and plucks a comic crown from the brambles of tragedy. Animals of Faith illuminates a steadfast odyssey in faith with intricate connections to British literature, and especially to the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare; it wraps in radiance and everlasting hope all human life, dressing the felix culpa in modern attire. The comment of Jowett in his introduction to Crito obtains: a good life, in other words, a just and honourable life, is alone to be valued.²

¹; ²The magisterial translations of Plato into English by Jowett are now in the public domain; google them at Project Gutenberg.

Proem: Fear and Trembling

A father of Faith once took his trembling son,

urgently upon command of God,

in filial devotion against filial succession

as somber sacrifice upon Mount Moriah;

so sinful Abraham raised the binding knife,

concerted in his saddest piety,

but from the trial God permitted Grace:

the father and the son returned rejoicing;

the almost ended family would have sons.

Much later Michael Kierkegaard cursed God

from high upon a hill on Jutland heath,

and sinned in primal ways with kindred blood

before the binding vows of bride and groom;

the first and last of seven children lived.

The youngest son, Søren, was sacrificed

within a well of deep and caustic thought,

but early, lacking faith, he lost his love –

a sacrifice to keep her from their fate,

but from the trial God permitted Grace:

the son in won posterity rejoices.

So God would sacrifice another son to Fear:

a father’s son, of little sin, possessed,

made deep on insane heaths,

but strengthened in tenacious faith –

like Sæmund with his book upon the seal.

The games of Satan permeate the test,

but true as Job, his virtue turned to love;

the Adversary lost the wager laid,

as he has lost in instances before.

And from the trial God permitted Grace,

the Adversary’s foe is paid with love:

muliebrity enrobed in Light and lace –

a not too common comedy resolved.

Link to British Literature

Things have changed in two thousand years: getting stoned today is an entirely different and more pleasant experience than it was in ancient Jerusalem; given this change, God has warranted a new report, but with some of the old cast of characters known to those inspired Hebrew authors with their priceless gift to humanity in ethical monotheism. The paradigm shift adumbrated here shakes the ancient foundation of religion, an old, lofty space smelling of cedar and incense and shimmering with burnished gold built upon a thousand paths, drawing from the same font of values and pointing to the many masks of a single God unfathomable, adopted in subjective faith, but subject now to common rejection and abuse as so many turn to science, a trade enforced by sense and secular associations like selling hope enslaved.

Muslims today take pride in the modernity of their prophet, as if the more recent surpasses the earlier works on God, and Mohammed granted that Christ would be a person or a feeling, better news than the good news of the New Testament, news only good if you belong to the Christian club - not an easy thing as Kierkegaard expounded. You will find here a religious experience set in the comfortable world we inhabit now, but telling of uncomfortable experiences of a Biblical nature too, an experience rooted in faith, endured with patient grit, and guided by British literature to the crown of joy, the felix culpa.

Harold Bloom has placed the works of William Shakespeare in the centre of the Western canon of literature; Animals of Faith connects most directly, through allusion, to this central body of literature. The timeless words of Shakespeare provided the pitons used to surmount a metaphysical obstacle, huge and daunting, a sheer rock-face he knew well.

The unforgettable experience of spiritual possession by Satan, described in chapters two through four, likely occurred to Zeus, William Shakespeare, and Samuel Johnson; this hypothesis, if valid, offers a unique window into the biographies of these three historical personages. With Zeus, the tendency shown by this account is euhemeristic. In The Comedy of Errors, perhaps Shakespeare’s first play, he refers to his major characters as possess’d (4.4.92); throughout his oeuvre Shakespeare shows profound insight into the mentally ill, whom he characterizes repeatedly with skill and verve. Mental illness appears as a major imagery pattern in Shakespeare. This same experience of spiritual possession likely marked the beginning of Samuel Johnson’s experience with insanity. The connection to Zeus appears in the culmination of the shower of gold to Danaë, after a German Canadian girl identifies the hero as a god.

A formal link to the works of Shakespeare, the mixing of comic and tragic elements, appears in chapter three; following the vivid and horrific description of spiritual possession, the naïve mind-set of the ill-starred protagonist is characterized by his demand for a phone call to Prime Minister Trudeau. The darker, sardonic and ironic end of this humour occurs, for example, at the end of chapter four, with a laconic expression: Perspective is such a funny thing.

The first, principal allusion appears in chapter five, when the narrator notes, in reference to a slight shaving wound: It was neither as wide as a church door, nor as deep as a well. This connects to Mercutio’s morbid jesting in Romeo and Juliet (3.1.95-96).The inclusion of a very broad spectrum of humanity represents another formal connection to Shakespeare, and to other major British writers; this tendency is evident by chapter five.

The first of the most sustained series of allusions occurs towards the end of chapter six where suicidal Paul appears to have lacked the conviction or imagination for a more permanent quietus; this connects in spirit and through the rare word quietus with the most famous soliloquy of Hamlet (3.1.76). The conscious reliance on this masterpiece is such that Animals of Faith may be understood as a modern version of Hamlet.

In chapter seven the reference to Mark and Kevin as twin lambs that frisked in the sun when they were children connects to a passage in The Winter’s Tale where Polixenes says of Leontes, We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun (1.2.67). In this case, a great deal of the original poetry has been shorn in the modern prose, but the context, proved ironic by later narrative events in both texts, creates frustrated foreshadowing.

The extended poetic passage towards the end of chapter seven makes another formal relationship with the works of Shakespeare, the integration of poetry and prose. While such poetry often echoes British poetry, it aims to sound modern, and employs modern syntax, with occasional archaic, irregular or traditionally poetic diction, which often makes the link explicit to the earlier roots of British poetry.

British writers, including Shakespeare, have developed the facility of characterizing diverse personages by the use of class or profession appropriate language, a link to this formal element of British literature appears in the dialogue of Dr. White in chapter eight. Of course Mark Twain does the same in his great novels; he also haven taken some measure of these British bedrock texts.

The unusual word scrannel appears in chapter nine to characterize the unmusical voice of the broken monster; John Milton uses this word in Lycidas (124), a sombre poem about the tragic, early death of a promising friend and poet. The use of this word sets up, through allusion, a correlation to the tragic subject matter of Lycidas; while sometimes the surface structure appears happy and humorous in Animals of Faith, the deeper structure of seriousness and a tragic dimension should never leave the reader. In this creative autobiography, the profoundly serious experience of spiritual possession, outlined first in the early part of the book, produces a marked gravity and sadly tragic counterpoint to the ostensible and real appearance of academic, romantic and social success.

As the novel form requires a narrator, a possible avenue into the consciousness of the writer which drama does not permit, a self-conscious narrative technique has been used. The use of a self-conscious narrator traces back to the narrative poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer, where this form of narration helps cast rays of humour on the sometimes dark writing. An early example of this self-conscious narrator occurs in the following passage of chapter nine: The glory of insane conversations is that they are easily forgotten. They seem to attach but poorly to the regular fabric of the mind, and fall off like scabs with the recovery of health. Little profit comes from reconstructing them either.

A meaningful and esoteric allusion to the sonnets of Shakespeare occurs in chapter ten when the hero says, Love is too young to know what conscience is, but who does not know that conscience is born of love. This line occurs, without the benefit of the context provided in this novel which helps clarify its meaning, in sonnet 151 (1-2). A few, key allusions to the sonnets anchor the odyssey of the novel protagonist to that deep reef, rich in colour, variety and life; the sonnets provide passionate and sharp direction to a handsome and self-indulgent young man to pursue immortality through sexual reproduction.

The use of the word bifid in chapter eleven illustrates an elaborate use of language to make a veiled allusion: The sufferings he had met led him to understand his fate as bifid, as bifid as the cloven hoof that Othello shunned to consider. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines the adjective bifid as follows: divided by a deep cleft into two parts; in the novel, bifid modifies the noun fate. One might recall Othello’s reply to the unmasked Iago: I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable (Othello 5.2.294).

Another episode of spiritual possession appears luckily in chapter thirteen; the narration and later the dialogue compare to the language and context of King Lear mad upon the heath. Note, for example, the following: The broad, cold sky seemed dark and pitiless, but the disposition of the world could not rival his internal torment. A more direct allusion to Lear soon follows: Nothing will come of nothing (1.4.130-131).

The discussion on our habituation to sin which begins chapter fourteen relates to the use of this theme in Elizabethan drama by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Shakespeare portrays this as well, but often with more subtlety and less overtly than his peers. Despite the discussion here about the capacity of people to lie to themselves, the narrator in Animals of Faith has something of the psychological and emotional honesty which usually attaches to our appreciation of Shakespeare, who gave us ourselves on stage, if not our situation. Ibsen would give us both.

Ironically, the hero who whichever way he flew found hell through this allusion is related to Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost (4.18-23). Milton, of course, borrowed the lines from Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which adds another layer of sediment, a fossil bed, to this foundation of allusion.

With the reply: It is I, Hamlet the Dane in chapter fifteen, the protagonist in the novel consciously dons the sable mantle of the manic-depressive Danish Prince in Shakespeare’s masterpiece (5.1.257-258). With regards to the intimate connections between these texts, we should note not only what allusions visibly connect them, but also what allusions may obtain, although unstated. Although never stated, the hero certainly shares Hamlet’s sad recognition: The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! (1.5.189-190). The later calculated misogynistic outburst which includes the well-known passage: Get thee to a nunn’ry (3.1.122), also absents itself from the novel, yet, when at the comic heart of the novel, when the hero wins his hundred-thousand wives housed in such nunneries, this untold connection supplies an opportunity of cosmic irony and profound poetic justice. It turns out that There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them as we will (5.2.10-11).

Calling man the paragon of the mammals alludes to Hamlet’s dazzling characterization of man as the paragon of animals (2.2.308). The ensuing personalities introduced in the novel reveal some people who can suitably assume the high qualifications about which Hamlet muses. In chapter fifteen, the lovely, amorous blonde haired virgin’s potential lover is referred to as a votary; this relatively rare usage aims to remind one of Shakespeare’s erotic, final sonnet (154), where the fairest votary refers to a maiden in the process of losing her virginity to the little Love-god.

In chapter sixteen, describing Derek as having the imagination of a capon may remind one of the usage by Hamlet: I eat the air, promise-cramm’d. You cannot feed capons so (3.2.92-93). This link immediately ushers in another, more urgent: I would account myself the king of infinite space, if it were not that I have bad dreams. The original in Hamlet reads: O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams (2.2.255-257).

In the following line: suicide is the specious carrot Fate waves outside our cage, we have a speculation on suicide, common to Hamlet; the cage metaphor may recall Hamlet’s retort: Denmark’s a prison (2.2.244). The cage, prison or trellis motif in this novel also recalls Plato’s metaphor about the soul being a bird in a cage, where we have no authority to open the cage prematurely and liberate the bird. Most spiritual people, institutions or texts repudiate suicide; an exception in the Hebrew Bible occurs when King Saul commits suicide to avoid torture from the Philistines. A passage in chapter sixteen later sustains this metaphor.

After describing the root of his sorrow in a ruined romance, the main character adds: The consideration of such possibilities leads one to madness, and I have searched the four corners of that dungeon. This not only caps the prison motif, but may recall the Boy in Titus Andronicus: For I have heard my grandsire say full oft, Extremity of griefs would make men mad, And I have read that Hecuba of Troy Ran mad for sorrow (4.1.18-21).

Towards the end of chapter sixteen, we find the sentence: The fruits have turned to ash in my mouth, and I suffer irrespective. This alludes to the passage in Milton’s