Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists

by Ralph C. Wood

Focusing on specific theological issues in the work of Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries, The Comedy of Redemption boldly unites Christian faith in dialogue with comic fiction. Ralph C. Wood demonstrates that all four writers are comic artists in the theological sense of the term, although their fiction echoes the laughter of the Gospel in radically different ways. Wood explores tragedy and comedy in terms of theological as well as literary categories. After a brief discussion of the tragic vision as it bears on the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, he offers an interpretation of Karl Barth as a theologian of the Christian comedy of redemption. Barth's theology is seen as disclosing what is profoundly comic in God's reconciliation of the world unto himself in Jesus Christ. Barth thus becomes-against the popular view that he is a despiser of culture―the basis for a positive theological estimate of contemporary literature. His theology also serves to reclaim the eschatological gladness of Christian faith amid the gathering despair of the late modern age. In light of these claims, Wood then offers literary interpretations of O'Connor, Percy, Updike, and De Vries. In a variety of ways, and not without ambiguities, there are reverberations of the Gospel to be heard within these four contemporary American writers. Sometimes against their own willful purpose, the rumor of revelation resounds within their fiction. Such literary analogues of the Gospel serve to demonstrate that the ear of faith, having first heard the redeeming comedy in scripture and the church, can also hear its parabolic echo in some of the best comic fiction written in our time.

Genres: Christianity, Literature, Nonfiction

326 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1988

About the author

Ralph C. Wood is a scholar of theology and English literature whose work focuses on Christian writers, particularly J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, George Herbert, and Dorothy Sayers. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from East Texas State College in 1965 and his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1975. After teaching English at North Park College in Chicago, he held academic posts in religion at Wake Forest University, Samford University, Regent College in Vancouver, and Providence College in Rhode Island. In 1998 he became University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, where he continues to teach and write. Wood’s publications include The Gospel According to Tolkien and Tolkien among the Moderns. His awards include the Associated Church Press Award of Excellence (2010) and the Lionel Basney Award (2011). He is recognized as one of the most original Tolkien scholars on the religious dimensions of his work.

Reviews

[Clyde · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm not sure that the opening sections on Niebuhr or Barth were necessary or specifically useful (which is why I gave it 4 vice 5 stars). Read the intro and then go to chapter 5 (the first Flannery O'Connor chapter) and read on from there. Circle back around to the Niebuhr and Barth chapters after you have finished the book if you like. Good material on O'Connor and Walker Percy (though I think he was unecessarily harsh on Percy's later work, some of which I preferred to Moviegoer, which is the only work he finds worth addressing). Also, I can't find enough clarity in his position on O'Connor and race (but perhaps that's because such clarity is not there in her work). The Updike material was all interesting (I knew almost nothing about him or his work); as was the DeVries (whom I knew absolutely nothing abaout). Particularly interesting was Wood's take that DeVries' argument against his Dutch Calvinist heritage and upbringing actually illuminates in a photonegative sort of way Christianity as something to be taken seriously. It is nice symmetry closing with DeVries having started with O'Connor as one sees in the person of DeVries an actual character like Wise Blood's Hazel Motes who while overtly hostile to Christianity "...saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.”

[Clyde · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite good, though suggest picking up from the first chapter on O'Connor and going on through Percy, Updike and DeVries. The first chapters on Neiburh and Barth were good enough, but were relatively unecessery set-ups for the evaluation of the assessment of the works of the 4 fiction writers mentioned above. Particularly interesting to me were the Updike and DeVries chapters, of whom I knew less about or had read less of than either O'Connor or Percy. Bottom line - if you are interested in spiritual/theological sensibilities (defined VERY broadly here) in modern literature, then this is a quite good treatment. I drop 2 stars from it because the initial chapters were not necessary, and Wood doesn't convincingly define the presence of the comic in the 4 writers, which is what he set out to do. Bottom line, forget the title or Wood's purported thesys, and just enjoy his quite good assessment of the meaning in the authors' work.

[Ray · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the English speaking world's best essayists gives unique and insightful reflections on four of the greatest American novelists. In the process he shows that real comedy is a Christian virtue. Only Christians have the basis for celebrating the comedic nature of creation.

There are good reasons why this masterpiece has gone through multiple printings. It is as if Ralph Wood was channeling G K Chesterton, but with sharper theological powers.

A delight from beginning to end, and a devasting rebuke to those Christians, Left and Right, with humorless souls.

[Bryan]

'