The Novel as Church: Preaching to Readers in Contemporary Fiction

6. Words: Poison in the Ear, a Game with Language, or Naming Truth?

103 s Poison in the Ear, a Game with Language, or Naming Truth? words 6 Fictional sermons stand out prominently from their surrounding contexts on the page not only by their presentation within speech marks, in italics, or some other visual cue but also by their use of differentiated language in the form of direct address, specialist vocabulary , or other indications of orality. This examination of the nature of the language employed in fictional sermons, using those in A. S. Byatt’s Frederica quartet1 and later those in an overlooked American novel by William H. Gass, asks whether a clear distinction between the fictional sermons and their contexts is necessary. Must fictional sermons leap out of the novel in such a jarring way? In debates with others, suggesting that an argument is “playing with semantics” or calling the dispute “mere words” is often taken as a rude dismissal of the argument as being without substance or integrity. Yet, the only one of four clergymen occupying the imagined world of byatt’s Frederica novels to be present throughout the series dismisses preaching as “words, words” (47). Readers encountering this opinion so early in the first book, The Virgin in the Garden, take this to be a seriously damning and troubling verdict on preaching, especially when it challenges the high expectations the author assumes of preaching within the rest of the books and especially when the speaker is the only clergyman never to preach in them. The Frederica novels, written and published over a period of twenty-five years, compose a sustained meditation on metaphor, in which byatt’s principal 104 The Novel as Church s concerns are the nature of language and truth. The clergyman concerned is Daniel Orton, whose vocation to the priesthood had been aroused by the skillful oratory of an unnamed member of a highAnglican religious community preaching to schoolboys at a Civics Week in Sheffield. Daniel’s career path in the novels takes him out of conventional parochial ministry into practical ministry as a Listener in a fictionalized version of the Samaritans, the telephone hotline for the suicidal and desperate staffed by volunteers throughout Britain. His sustained presence, throughout the decades chronicled in the novels, means that his unconventional ministry is conducted across several eras of theological and ecclesiastical trends. Mainly because byatt uses the preaching of the other clerics in the series to locate them theologically , spiritually, or ecclesiastically within these trends, both the absence from the novels of any record of Orton’s preaching and his low opinion of sermons are highly significant. He resists classification, and his views on preaching expressed within the novel trouble the way byatt uses the others’ sermons to classify them. The other clerics in the novels are Mr. Ellenby, Daniel’s first vicar when he is a curate, whose appointment is taken up by Gideon Farrar in the second volume of the quartet, Still Life; Canon Adelbert Holly, who participates with a religious community that Gideon Farrar establishes; and Joshua Lamb, known also as Joshua ramsden, a religious leader who emerges within the community exercising a priestly role though not ordained. As a lay member with a charismatic personality, he rivals Gideon Farrar for effective leadership of the Joyful Companions, a religious community with sect-like characteristics that emerges as the focus of the last book in the series. Although byatt resists this reductive description of her work, the Frederica novels do chronicle the 1950s and 1960s, which in political, sociological and religious terms were turbulent times of great change.2 Clashing convictions and sociological upheaval made these decades times of interesting and heated debates. not least among these debates were theological discussions about radical understandings of God, ways of reading the bible that opened its pages to fresh insights, and the nature of religious language. These clashes troubled some religious believers; academic theologians did not support the people in the pews in their beliefs as they wanted. Dissonances heard in the language of s Words 105 these debates are the context for the sermons in byatt’s novels.3 Giving primary emphasis to the nature of the language in the fictional sermons in byatt’s Frederica novels sheds light on this problem and leads toward an understanding of the nature of religious language as a possible subset of ordinary human language. TheVirgin in the Garden includes three sermons, preceded by an earlier allusion (39) to a...