New Testaments: Cognition, Closure, and the Figural Logic of the Sequel, 1660–1740 by Michael Austin (review)

Michael Austin’s book on sequels began, he explains in the acknowledgements, when he became fascinated by the relationship between the two parts of Pilgrim’s Progress. In the first part (1678), Christian leaves his wife and family to travel the narrow way to the gate of the Celestial City. He enters with his friend, Hopeful, only to look back and see their former companion, Ignorance, picked up by angels, airlifted back to the bottom of the Hill, and thrown through a door to hell. That is the grim end of part one. The second part (1684) is gentler. Christian’s wife, Christiana, after reading the story of her husband, decides to set out with her children for the Celestial City. They gather a friendly group of travelers around them as they go, find the way much easier to travel since Christian’s passing, and arrive together at the suburbs of the Celestial City, where some of the younger members of the company settle down, while others, at their appointed time, make the solemn procession across the river of death into life eternal.

As Austin thought about the way scholars have described the differences between the two parts of Pilgrim’s Progress—”harsh versus compassionate, uncompromising versus forgiving, legalistic versus communitarian”—it occurred to him that these were the “same oppositions that have historically been used to describe the differences between the Old and the New Testaments of the Christian Bible” (vii). If it works to describe the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress as an Old Testament and the second part as a New Testament, how far could one go in explaining other sequels from the period as New Testaments? This book is Austin’s attempt to answer that question, with chapters focused on John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel (1681), John Bunyan’s Second Part of the Pilgrim’s Progress (1684), John Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671), Daniel Defoe’s The Farther Adventures (1719) and Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720), and Samuel Richardson’s third and fourth volume of Pamela (1741).

Austin’s fascination with sequels, his determination to read second parts as complexly related to first parts, generates some good insights in each chapter. However, his title idea of “New Testaments” never convincingly illumines “the logic of the sequel,” mainly because he treats so superficially the relationship between the Jewish and Christian Bibles. Too often the OT and NT are made to stand for whatever differences between sequel and original Austin happens to be talking about at the moment. His book is better where it strays from the main path of its argument.

Chapter one describes what cognitive science has to say about why we tell stories the way we do. It is an odd chapter to begin with, full of references to foundational literary works from around the world. By starting this way, Austin implies that the logic of the sequel is rooted not in the Bible so much as in a more basic set of human desires evident in all our great stories: the desire to find closure, resist closure, and resolve contradictions.

Austin returns to this idea of basic cognitive desires in chapter two, “God’s Sequel,” where he discusses at length Erich Auerbach’s important essay “Figura” (1944). Auerbach distinguishes allegorical from figural or typological readings of the OT. In allegorical readings, OT details get lifted from their narrative context and placed into predetermined moral or theological schemes derived from the NT. But in figural readings, OT and NT events stay on the same plane of historical reality. The sacrifice of Isaac and crucifixion of Jesus are classic examples, where meaning is sought not in an ethical or ontological realm separable from biblical narrative but in the interplay between the two narrated events. Auerbach says this practice of figural interpretation flourished alongside allegorical interpretation and kept it grounded, from antiquity through the middle ages.

Several things...